18:
When I asked my friend and her boyfriend, who were coming for dinner, was there anything that they didn’t eat, I am sure they weren’t expecting me to feed them what I did:
Swedish Cabbage Soup
Tante Malka’s Potato Kugel Deluxe
Vegetables Remoulade
This is part of a suggested menu in the ECB, I already had half a banana cake in the fridge so I rewarmed that and served it with fresh whipped cream and strawberry and banana slices.
The soup, in my opinion is only Swedish because of the addition of caraway seeds. I cannot see a difference from this soup and other cabbage soups that I have made. It turns out that one of my guests wasn’t such a fan of cabbage but assured me that it was the best cabbage soup she had ever eaten. My husband wasn’t so shy and asked that we never eat it again. The nice thing about the soup was that it was really easy to make; saute some onions, add cabbage and the remaining seasons and boil! It is also very cheap to make so if things get tough, T’s request will be denied.
The Vegetables Remoulade has oh about a 1000 ingredients and it is divine. It is a three layer salad: a bed of spinach, carrots, peppers, cucumber and celery that have been marinated in a dressing. The lush creamy dressing includes ingredients such as mayonnaise, tarragon, Dijon and sweet pickle. The final layer is fresh cut tomatoes, boiled eggs and pieces of cheese.
I don’t want to turn this into a big advertisement but if you buy this book for any reason alone – then this dish is it. I made one change to the dish: I used piccalilli instead of sweet pickle and it tasted really good (couldn’t find sweet pickle in the supermarket).
The Kugel sounded really good when I first read the recipe. It is actually grated potatoes, onions and mushrooms covered in eggs and sour cream with a bit of wheatgerm stirred through. Then it is baked in the oven for 1.25 hours. I used creme fraiche instead of sour cream and I made the dish and refrigerated it in advance so that I could serve it right from the oven. It came out of the oven perfectly golden brown on the outside and decadently soft but still firm on the inside.
I could taste the wheatgerm. It was good but it tasted healthy.
We had loads of leftovers, this meal could easily have fed 6 of us maybe even seven! Our guests seemed to enjoy the meal but I think it might have stretched their limits a little bit. Also, we ate a huge amout of food that night and I felt full but I didn’t feel gross. My husbands response? Welcome to vegetarianism.
17:
I’m interrupting my cook book writing to give you an update on the breastfeeding. I am getting caught up and there are loads of articles ahead!
My daughter’s teeth came in when she was three months old which was a month ago and today for the first time she bit me.
I was curled up in bed with her all and we were both warm and sleepy. She had started to sleep and was intermittently comfort suckling. All of a sudden I felt her twitch and then her jaw clamped shut and I screamed.
It only hurt for twenty minutes. Ugh
*I don’t know if this is the correct strategy but I yelled ouch, took away my breast and kept holding her.
16:
Please excuse the shocking photography but it was a moment that I needed to capture.
This was Stella when I first put her down, I then turned around to do something on my laptop for a minute and then . . .
She has only just learnt to roll over! I am fairly sure she isn’t crawling yet and I have no idea how she got so far. I do know that my moments of freedom might be over forever . . . da da da! 
13:
In the spirit of Julie and Julia (see film and book), I have been making my way through a cookbook. I do love Julia Child and I would, maybe, one day like to make my way through her recipe book but I gave birth three months ago and lets face it: something that is going to make me fatter isn’t a good idea right now. I was really inspired by the book (haven’t actually seen the film yet) and while I realise that my idea is unoriginal, I still think its a great one. So there.
The other inspiration for this adventure was a conversation with my husband about bowel cancer and eating too much meat. We realised that between us we had been eating meat twice a day for the past year and that’ds foul both for our bodies and for the environment.
My mother gifted her copies of Moosewood and the ECB to me years ago and I have always loved reading the recipes although I have never cooked most of them. They are written with a lot of love and thoughts by the author who allows you to be courageous but the descriptions are so easy to follow that you never get too lost. I lost the Moosewood cookbook to a disingenuous friend several years ago and its on my list to re-purchase but in the meantime I’m learning about vegetarian food through the ECB.
Also, Mollie Katzen is my personal hero for her opinions on health and nutrition. This quote alone makes the world a better place:
“I don’t like a numerical nutritional analysis at the end of a recipe. I feel that that’s a fad and I think a lot of people don’t really know how to interpret it … Anyone with a medical concern, yes. Everybody else needs to just calm down and move away from it. Get some therapy and go out and feed the hungry. Stop counting your little grams of this and that. If you’re a normal weight person without a heart condition, without diabetes, just calm down.”
See more about that here.
I wasn’t sure that I would be able to undertake such a project or even stick to it but actually I have already completed about 15 recipes and it’s amazing. I’ve been twittering away about it, if you want to know what’s happening in real time you can follow me here and in the meantime I will try to catch the blog up as well.
A couple of notes
- I am not a vegetarian. I think I have a responsibility to eat my share of sustainably farmed meat
- I am not trying to complete the cookbook in any length of time
- I am not cooking in any particular order (although Tofu might come all at once).
I try to follow one of the suggested menu’s where possible and the first meal I cooked was a ‘Memorable Indian Meal’ of Potato, Panir and Pea Curry, Indian Eggplant Salad and Carrot-Cashew Curry. I served the menu with a wild & plain rice mix and a selection of Indian breads (naan, chapatti, etc).
Potato, Panir and Pea Curry
Panir (or paneer) is a Persian cheese similar to queso blanco or feta (see more here) but large curd cottage cheese is called for as the panir. I couldn’t actually find cottage cheese with large curds so I just bought the regular kind. This recipe blends traditional curry ingredients such as mustard seeds, caraway seeds, sesame, cumin, turmeric, cloves, garlic and thyme with peas potatoes and cottage cheese.*
I was trying to cook in advance so that everything could just be reheated and thrown on the table but this isnt really the point of this recipe where everything needs to be served ‘just cooked’ for a lovely combination of textures. Also, I accidentally added freshly grated ginger to the Potato, Panir and Pea curry because I was reading the recipe on the other page. Finally, cayenne is added to taste and I used a full teaspoon.
I did taste the curry when the ingredients were just cooked and I have to say that it improved when the peas were soggy and done. I’m not a fan of raw peas, not one bit! The added ginger was good and the full teaspoon of cayenne was an extra spicy addition.
I would definitely make this curry again and maybe I would try it with a feta instead for a different feel.
Carrot-Cashew Curry
The spice mix in this curry is very similar to the one above except there is the addition of dill weed and no sesame, cloves or thyme. The recipe calls for quite a lot of orange juice to be added to carrots, potatoes, bell peppers and cashews which I found to be a random mix.
Cayenne was discretionary again and again I used a teaspoon.
I didn’t like it much. It tastes as healthy as it sounds and I found it tough to eat. I don’t think that the wild rice mix helped much and maybe it would be better over plain white? My husband, on the other hand, raved about the different textures of carrots and cashews – he liked the other curry but not as much.
Indian Eggplant Salad
This salad is prepared several hours in advance and refrigerated until time to serve. Its aubergines with a similar spice mix combined with onions, chilled. Yoghurt is stirred in just before serving.
I added way too much cayenne to this mix and it made me cry. It was really good though and an excellent addition to the other two curries.
End Notes
This meal felt virtuous and I wanted to gorge myself on chips and hamburgers after even though I was really full. It took about two hours to cook which wasn’t too bad but all the chopping was Hard Work. Stella didn’t seem to mind the curry flavours in her breast milk after though.
07:
Our darling football fanatic!
03:
This is how I made it work for me:
- Go into it with determination. Pre-decide: bottle or breast. Choose and then go for it. The first two or three weeks of breastfeeding for most mothers are very painful but it passes and becomes very pleasurable. If you are on the fence, you will probably disappoint yourself or someone else (and you actually may find it harder).
- As soon as the baby arrives feed as much he or she wants. Don’t try to schedule it or control it, just let it be what it is. Get yourself several good books and put them near all the chairs in the house, find yourself several good cushions (so you can have a hand free) and allow yourself to be stopped for however long the baby needs to suckle.
- After each feed (when you can), put your nipples out in the sun for a minute or two. Presumably you will be wearing a feeding top of sorts to do it discreetly or open a window and get them out! Just a minute or two though until the breast is dry, you don’t want sunburn there!
- After EVERY FEED, smother them in lanolin. This step should not be missed! (obviously do this after the sun as the lanolin will increase your risk of getting burnt)
- Use really good breast pads like Madela. You won’t need to use the expensive ones for long but the better the fabric on the pad, the easier it will feel against your sensitive nipples. You can downgrade to a cheaper brand as soon as you feel more comfortable.
- Use your own feeding strategy. The books say offer both breasts each time but my baby wanted one side at a time so I just alternated. Find out what works for you but be aware:
- Don’t get rock hard for too long. If a breast hasn’t been emptied and is starting to feel sore, either feed baby, get your breast pump out or get in the shower and hand express. Word on the street is that mastitis hurts.
- Expressing is easy and it means Papa (or partner) can have a feed and you can have a night on the town.
- Just go ahead and get them out in public. Don’t even think about it, just do it. You’ll get the hang of it really quickly, soon you will be feeding and no one will even notice. If it makes you feel better – I did get terrible stretch marks and I did show them to the world and it wasn’t fun but it was OK and it got better.
- Let it free you – you don’t have to sterilise bottles in the middle of the night. You can get to your baby before he or she really loses the plot and that way less sleep in lost.
Any different experiences? Comments welcome!
*Apologies for the excessive ‘and’ usage but I’ve got to post otherwise I will never get around to it.
21:
A woman of great.
10:
This is the first in a four part series that I am writing about breastfeeding. I did try to write one article but it became too unwieldy. They are all written in response to this article printed in the Times.
I’ve always had high expectations for myself and I often fail to live up to them. Some of these are the ones I’ve perceived that my parents had for me and internalised. Some of them I created by myself.
In my new role as a mother, I want to do the right thing by my children. The problem with that sentence is figuring out what exactly ‘right’ means. There are so many decisions to make right from the moment that you fall pregnant. To eat soft cheeses like the French or avoid them like the English, to cut out alcohol completely like the Americans or to ration yourself to one a day like the Australians. You can make yourself insane. There is one decision about parenthood that you have to make before you are even twelve weeks pregnant: to breastfeed.
Notice that I didn’t write whether or not to breastfeed but just to breastfeed. The propaganda, the speeches and the rhetoric is overwhelming. Eight weeks into my pregnancy I was presented with a list of thirty different diseases that I would prevent just by breastfeeding for three months and if I would breastfeed for six, the list gets longer. I started to wonder if it were so miraculous that it could save the planet from alien invasion. The health authorities tell you that breastfeeding is the only right and anything else? Wrong.
Jump forward nine months and I’m in a coffee shop on my first outing into the public world with a hungry baby. I have to get my boobs out in public. Get. My. BOOBS. Out.
Go out into the rest of the world and its a different story. “Oh god. Do you see that woman over there? She’s got her tits out and her leech of baby is sucking on them. Gross.” “My god how old is that baby? Is she going to breastfeed forever??” There’s no statutory protection, no social acceptance or even general awareness that boobs might be used for something other then sexual pleasure.
The health authorities say breastfeed, society says bottle feed. Either way, as a mother you are destined to fail. You can never live up to anyone’s expectations. That’s before the cracked nipples, how to latch correctly or early morning sterlising and finding the right teat.
10:
Happy birthday.
06:
“Hold out your right hand”
I did as I was instructed.
“Now you are going to feel a little pinch”
She pushed the needle into the top of my hand and shoved the tube up into my vein. I winced. A little blood spurted out onto my hand. She tapped the piping and pushed the pipe in further. I winced again.
“Its not working. I’m not very good at this. I will go get another midwife who can help.”
It was 1am in the morning and we had been in the hospital for over 18 hours. They had been trying to give me a labour suite for induction since six pm but the hospital was understaffed and overfull. I had heard horrible stories about being induced. I was exhausted and terrified.
She came back ten minutes later with another person. Apparently she was a midwife but she wasn’t dressed in the same uniform so it seemed unlikely. She tore the tubing out of my hand, taking flesh with it. I winced again.
“Now lets see if we can get this thing in, shall we? Hold out your hand and let me see your veins.”
I held out my hands.
“This vein looks good, lets give it a try.”
Again, she pushed the needle into my vein. Last time no blood had entered the tube and my vein had started to bulge. This time a little blood came through and then my vein seemed to disappear.
“I think we should get a doctor to look at this”
Another ten minutes passed. While we were alone, my husband held my hand and we waited in tense silence.
“Right, whats going on here?” Another person in yet another uniform burst officiously into the room. This time she went for my left hand and again my vein disappeared so she tried a second vein and that didnt work either.
“Perhaps we need to get the anesthetist.”
“Oh yes” said my midwife, “That might be a good idea, I will go see if she is available.”
Again my husband and I were alone. My hands were covered in cotton wool and tape and my face in tears.
“I don’t want to do this. I’m scared”
My husband held my hand very gently, wrapped his other arm around my shoulder and kissed me.
“We can go home if you want. I’ll tell them that we want to wait another day and see if you can do this on your own.”
I thought for a minute. If we went home now, I might have a chance of a natural labour and it was tempting, so tempting. On the other hand I had lied about when my waters had broken to avoid induction in the first place and my baby’s risk of infection was high. I knew that he also knew this and the love that he showed me was enough.
“Lets do this now.”
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