Jennifer

Yes, it's my birthday today.  Many thanks to the kind friends who are organized enough to remember such things (I don't know how you do it!) - your timely messages make me smile.

And I'm giving myself a belated birthday present: Joy and I are going North.

Next weekend, from Thursday the 13th to Monday the 17th, we're going to be in various parts of New England.  We'll start out in New Hampshire on Thursday and Friday, and then will go to Massachusetts on Saturday, and will be in Connecticut on Saturday night, departing Monday morning.

So, um, is anybody in the Boston area who's reading this free on Saturday?  Maybe for breakfast or brunch?

And is anyone in the Middletown area (I'd include Manchester in this, by the way) free on Sunday?  (Or, hmmm, possibly for Saturday night dinner?)

Yeah, I should have posted sooner.  You'll notice that I'm not one of those organized birthday people - not even for my own birthday.  Sorry!

Anyway, if you can read this, I'd love to see you, and introduce you to my big one-year-old girl.  If folks could let me know in the comments whether/when they might be free, I'd appreciate it.  And if I miss you, know that I'm thinking of you.

One year ago today, a little girl came along and made me a mother.  Nothing within recent memory has changed my life as profoundly as that act.

So much I want to say about that, but she's done eating now and wants to be up and doing.  So for now I'll just say:

"Happy Birthday, Joy."

Just wanted to let my LJ-community know that I'm taking a short hiatus from blogging altogether, to consider how and where (and whether) it fits into my life right now.  If I continue, it will be elsewhere (given that LJ has not revoked their tagging-by-others policy, as far as I know), but if at all possible I will try to stay connected to my LJ friendslist.

Winter, and the turn of the year, are good times for reflection for me, so I think I will do some, perhaps with old-fashioned pen and paper.  If you are reading this, know that I wish you well.

LJ has been sold.

Yes, that would be me stepping up my plans to leave.

Anyone else?

Over at lj_biz, I just posted the following explanation of why I currently plan to leave LJ over this new tagging-others'-entries policy.  It's philosophical, but at least it served to clarify my thinking.

The search for alternatives continues; my deepest thanks to those friends who have made suggestions.  Can anyone tell me how to back up my journal here?  Oh, what an enormous pain in the patookus this all is.  Stupid conscience.

Anyway, the explanation:

I can accept the self-tagging as a concept, but for me the tagging by others changes the character of the LiveJournal community into something in which I fear I can no longer participate.

I’m willing to bet that my mild-mannered little journal, regulated by my own personal sense of public decorum, would never incur a tag.  Yet I cannot say this policy will not affect me, because it wreaks a profound change on the nature of the LJ community members’ relationships to one another - it restructures who we are for each other in a deeply harmful way.

LJ’s current functions institutionalize benevolent behaviors.  The blog invites us into self-declaration; the friends list invites us into relationship; commenting invites us into dialogue.

The function of tagging others’ entries as “inappropriate” to particular contexts, however, structures us to become not one another’s peers and dialogue partners, but one another’s judges.  Worse, because in this medium we represent ourselves only by what we say, by giving others the power to dictate what we may say to whom, it gives the community power over our very existence in this medium.  You have sanctioned others to have a potentially binding effect over what we get to say to whom, and thus to some extent over who we get to be to whom, on LJ.

You are institutionalizing a community relationship of judgment and existential restriction.  This is not a relationship designed to bring out the grace in human nature, I assure you.  In my opinion, it tends towards things like McCarthyism.  It tends towards things like the USSR before glasnost and Maoist China in the days when the government encouraged “self-criticism.”  It makes possible an online world of being informed on at any time by our neighbors.  I read my 1984 (back when I was 16, by the way), and I know doubleplus ungood when I see it. 

I thought it might interest you to know that this function of tagging others’ journals will cause someone like me, with my mild little posts about my 9-month-old daughter or my solar oven, to take my content elsewhere.  It grieves me deeply to do so, but I cannot in good conscience be a party to this.

Wow.

LJ just announced a new feature: the ability to flag one's content as "adult concepts," or to otherwise indicate that entries might not be suitable for those under 14.  Now, when I first read about this, I thought it was the ability to flag one's own content - and it is - but when I read about it here, as the 11/29 entry in LJ-biz, it seems that the feature also includes the ability to tag other people's content in this way.

You know, I think this might be it for me on LJ.

Now, I don't post any such content, and never intend to, because to me, the internet is a public place, no matter how locked the entry, and I won't say anything in this venue that I'm not comfortable being associated with in front of thousands of people.  And I grant you that LJ's advertised procedure for this "flagging by others" is that you have to be flagged multiple times, and then it gets reviewed by actual human beings before anything happens, which seems to be an attempt to mitigate abuse of this policy.

But this is still way too thought-police-y for me.  I would far rather protect children from censorship and all its potentially thought-maiming, soul-stunting consequences, than protect them into a box built by other people's dictation of what is and is not acceptable to say, or for children to hear.

So, does anyone know of another blogging medium that does not police content in this way?  'Cuz if I can find a good one, I think I'll go there instead.  Maybe this policy will never affect me personally, but I don't intend to be a party to it.

Suggestions?

Before I freecycle my old bike from high school, it occurs to me to ask if anyone local who's reading this might like it.

Here's the description I've written for freecycle:

Grey men's 10-speed Fuji Supreme bicycle, almost 25 years old but perfectly rideable.  Thin wheels, approx. 24" in diameter; I'm 5'2" and rode this bike, so it's not for the very tall.  Detachable front wheel.  Rat trap, gel seat, spare inner tubes of indeterminate age.  Was tuned up in 1999 or so, when it got new brake pads and new black-white-and-grey camouflage tape on the handlebars; chain is in decent condition.  It's been kept indoors most of its life when not ridden.

I don't know how to screen comments (if that can even be done from a free account), so if you want the bike but don't want to comment here, write me at myfirstname.mylastname at yahoo.com (sub in my actual names, of course) and let me know - or comment here if you've a mind.  If I don't hear otherwise by tomorrow, I'll go ahead and freecycle it.

The basement cleanout continues!  (Slowly, slowly, slowly....)

In the way that writers sometimes use story prompts to stimulate their writing, I use recipe prompts to stimulate my cooking.  One of my favorites is: How can I use up X?

This is a particularly fun prompt because it tends to cascade: in planning how to use up X, my solution may yield extra Y, which starts the whole process over again.  This works both for individual ingredients and whole dishes, stimulating new dishes and new menus respectively - and sometimes both at once.

Case in point: two factors influenced this past week's cooking.  First, we had leftover butternut squash and apples from the dish we contributed to Thanksgiving.  (I like this dish because not only is it in season, it's also a crockpot recipe, meaning that it adapts easily to solar oven cooking - which we could have done except that, due to late leaffall this year, we still didn't have enough sun in our oh-so-shady backyard!  Still, we just threw it in the crockpot and let it cook overnight - an easy Thanksgiving contribution, though HUGE, as it turned out.)

Second, over the weekend I'd succumbed to the lure of the bacon in the freezer (baconbaconbaconbacon - death to any hope of my being a full-time vegetarian.  We loves us our bacon in this household!)  Now usually when we freeze bacon, we wrap it as individual slices first, so we only take out what we need for one meal - but this time I had bought nitrate-free bacon from the farmer's market, and it had been sold to me in a pre-frozen package, which I transferred from their freezer straight to ours - all two dozen or so pieces, which couldn't be refrozen and which, because of their relatively preservative-free state, would have to be used fast.  (And even we can't use that much bacon at a sitting, or even two sittings.  We tried.)

So, what would go with butternut squash, that would use bacon, and also use more CSA vegetables I still had knocking about the fridge?  I chose a scalloped cabbage recipe, that not only used CSA cabbage, green pepper, and celery, but also incorporated both the bacon itself and the bacon fat rendered in cooking, which became part of the white sauce.  Voila - add chicken apple sausages, and one has a tidy little winter meal or two.

Or five.  Or six.  Thank goodness for our weekly potluck - after two days of this menu, I took the rest of the squash and the rest of the scalloped cabbage there, for our friends to enjoy (which they did - along with the asian pear pizza I brought for dessert, clearing more  old CSA produce out of our fridge.)  I'm happy to repeat a meal once or even twice if it's good - less cooking for me - but after that I start looking for ways to share or freeze it.)

But of course it was a HUGE cabbage I used, and so we had leftovers of that too - but I only discovered that after I'd boiled the whole thing.  I knew plenty of things I could have used the uncooked cabbage for, but what could I do with already-cooked cabbage?

The answer: potato-cabbage croquettes.  I had enough for a double batch, so I fried them all up and froze the extras - additions to two more future meals.  I didn't have any easy meat ready except for more of this darned bacon, but not enough for a meal if I were going to throw the rest into bean-with-bacon soup as I'd planned.  So I stole a trick from the scalloped cabbage and made bacon gravy - a hint of meat for the meal, bulked up and dressed up the croquettes, and used the last of  the bacon too.  I'd meant to serve it with a side salad, but it was so late by the time I finished that I just opened a can of green beans.  I figured preserved beans would still be in keeping with winter options....

All in all, for my first week of winter-palate cooking, I'm ridiculously pleased with myself.  I look forward to seeing how this evolves.

Now that the CSA has wound up for the year, I have wanted to invent a new game for the winter (and early spring, I guess) that will shape my cooking into both a creative outlet and a learning experience, the way that the CSA does during the rest of the year.

I think I have one now.  But first, a little story.

Through the CSA, I have come into a deeper relationship than I've ever had before with the seasonality of food.  This very simple truth - that in the ordinary course of things, certain foods are harvested and available at certain times, and not at other times - just fascinates me.  I mean, it sounds so obvious, right - but we don't live that way.  Everything's available all the time at supermarkets - if it's not in season here, it is in Chile.  As I've been googling for recipes, I'm consistently struck by the presumption implicit in the ingredients lists, that acorn squash and scallions and tomatoes and green peas (or whatever - this is my best grab at a seasonal mishmosh, but I'm still pretty ignorant) will all be available together.  And yet, how long have they been so?  The last century?  Less?  Greenhouses aside, how much air traffic and trucking and refrigeration does it take to make them available together?

All this was more or less invisible to me before the CSA and the farmer's market.  I had very little idea what grew when.  In my first few CSA boxes, I was shocked when all we had for weeks in mid- and late May was greens, greens, and more greens - I had to go onto the CSA website and confront the harvest calendar in order to find out that the cornucopia of vegetable varieties that I had been expecting would not show up until mid-summer at the very earliest, because they just plain weren't ready until then.

Now, the CSA runs mid-May until late November - about six months.  Over the past two years, I've become pretty darn proficient with all those greens in the spring and all those sweet potatoes in the fall.  But now, I'm curious - what about the other six months of the year?  I've learned the available summer and fall foods in their seasons - but what about the winter?  What about the early spring, before those greens come 'round again?  What's available in the leaner times?

And then I get to dreaming....

I imagine myself back in pioneer days (go on, try it, it's fun) - what would I have done then?  I would have a root cellar, perhaps, with potatoes and sweet potatoes and carrots and parsnips and turnips and rutabagas.  I'd have onions strung on strings and hanging in bunches.  I'd have piles of winter squashes.  I'd have barrels of sugar and cornmeal and flour.  I'd have milk and butter and cheeses.  I'd have preserved meats.  I'd have dried beans.  Would I have cabbages?  Would I have other greens - lettuce, kale, chard, things like we were getting in our CSA boxes as recently as a few weeks ago?

So that's my game now - exploring the bounty of the pioneer winter: soups and stews with squashes and beans.  I'll learn to stretch my meats, to portion foods to last for several sittings, to fill in the corners with salads or with inexpensive starches, and yet never to have it feel like privation.  I'll play the game of thrift in new ways, which always makes me feel clever.  I may cheat a little with green vegetables, just to watch our nutrition, but I'll keep my friendships with greens, and become even better friends with cabbage.  And just to throw in some extra spice, so to speak, I'll start with things that Joy will also be able to eat, and supplement my current supply of frozen purees while hopefully broadening her tastes.

I've already started picking out recipes.  Painting with a winter pioneer palette!  I can hardly wait!

In this, the last CSA box of the year, we got:

• salad greens
• radishes
• fingerling potatoes
• a head of cauliflower
• celery
• carrots
• parsnips
• a rutabaga
• a butternut squash
• a head of garlic
• sweet potatoes
• apples

I traded with our share partners, such that they got the cauliflower and the fingerling potatoes and the butternut squash, and we got the rutabaga and the parsnips and the sweet potatoes, as well as the radishes because they never want the radishes.

We spent the first part of this week finishing up the root vegetable and sausage soup and lima bean risotto from Sunday, adding the salad greens to round things out.  I'm essentially vamping tomorrow, because Thursday is Thanksgiving and Friday is date night - so I'll make the gumbo, finally, with the last of the salad greens as a side dish.  Then I'll make a root vegetable and chicken bake on Saturday, which will use all our root veggies and most of our garlic as well.  Sometime next week, I'll make a shrimp and radish curry.

In the weeks to follow, there'll be borscht, and the fish/cabbage/potato/apple bake, and possibly some stuffed cabbage leaves.  (Hmm, and maybe a black bean soup for the last of the celery and green peppers?)  As for the sweet potatoes, some will be for Joy, and probably some will go in soup, and there may be a pie at some point.  That will be the last of the CSA - and as I look at it, it will last us several weeks more....

I've decided on a new food game for winter, but that will be the subject of another post.

Next Monday will be the last CSA box for the year.  In this next-to-last box, we got:

• Sweet potatoes
• Winter squash (kabocha?)
• Green and red bell peppers
• Radicchio (with the outer leaves)
• Apples
• Parsnips
• Carrots
• Turnips
• Broccoli

Our share partners took the whole broccoli, and we took the whole radicchio.  Also, I swapped them our sweet potato for their share of the squash.  Now they have enough to make sweet potato pie, and we have enough to make squash pie!  It's a win all 'round.

This week I'll do a vegetable quiche with last week's broccoli and cabbage and this week's carrots (plus some mushrooms and scallions).  We'll have that with salad from the radicchio, and either the green pepper (and stuff) or the apple (and stuff (these represent two different salad directions for me, in terms of taste combinations)).  Then later in the week I'll do a carrot, parsnip, turnip, and sausage soup, plus a lima bean risotto with last week's limas.

Since we were caught up on lettuce by this week, and since our bread heel collection in the freezer had reached critical mass, I brought a bread pudding to potluck last night.  This always goes over like gangbusters, which is very gratifying, especially since for me it means taking something that would otherwise have been a waste and making a treat out of it.

I'll miss our CSA when it's over this year.  I turned it into a creative game of menu planning every week, or really several games at once: "What can I make this week that a) will use as many of these vegetables as possible, so we don't get behind, b) will use as few other vegetables as possible, so we make the CSA investment pay off efficiently, c) will minimize/stretch our meat consumption, for health/environmental/budgetary reasons, d) doesn't involve out-of-season vegetables, so we're not supporting the trucking of produce from very far-away places, e) that might be cooked in a solar oven, and f) that will go together and taste good?"

Plus it's a little like playing my own version of Iron Chef every week - what will the mystery ingredients be this week? how will Iron Chef CSA rise to the challenge?  It also guarantees (indeed, demands) some regular culinary exploration: there are very few ruts in my cooking these days, in that I'm consistently cooking with things I would not ordinarily choose, and always searching out and trying new recipes.

And then everything tastes so good because it's so fresh!  I'll never forget the time earlier this year that I threw together some soup out of freezer vegetables, and it just tasted like nothing!  (And I can taste the frozen vegetables at restaurants, too - that's annoying at the same time it's interesting.)

So yes, I'll miss the CSA this winter.  In fact, I'll probably have to substitute the Farmer's Market (which runs all winter) for the CSA, just to keep the fun and freshness and variety in my life!  (Not to mention supporting local agriculture.)

Well, I'd better get cooking....

This past week in our CSA we got:

• Broccoli
• Winter squash (of unknown vintage)
• Cabbage
• White sweet potatoes
• Lima beans (in their pods!)
• Apples – low/no spray
• Green bell peppers and banana peppers
• Kale
• Head lettuce
• Eggplant – bonus from the farmer

Oh, and two weeks ago we got beets, but I forgot to mention them.  Can you tell they're not my favorites?  I mean, I can find ways to eat them, but you'll never find me jumping up and down and exulting "Beets!  We got beets!"

Anyway.

I gave our share partners the eggplant, because we kept the larger sweet potato (and because it simplified my menu planning, honestly).  I also gave them the half head of cabbage from last week or the week before, and kept this whole head for us - we each still net half a cabbage for this week (and cabbage stays good for a while, so their quality shouldn't suffer too much), and it gives me whole cabbage leaves if I want to make stuffed cabbage leaves later.

I still haven't done the casserole with fish, apples, cabbage and potatoes - maybe this week, or next week.  Whenever I do it, I'll use the fish stock from poaching the fish to make some gumbo, and probably the green peppers will go into that.  With cabbage and beets building up to critical mass, there's probably some borscht in our future - though I should ask our share partners how they do their borscht, since it always comes out so well.  It's ostensibly the same Moosewood cookbook recipe, but there must be some trick to it; I think it's in how they cut up the veggies, or something.

So far this week, I made another salad for potluck (using this week's lettuce and that from two weeks ago, so we're just about through our backlog, yay!)  Then I made a squash and apple soup (following xpioti's recipe, though again hers seems to have come out better than mine) using some of our apple stash, our half the squash from this week, and some of our "long-necked pumpkin" (really a huge butternut?) from two weeks ago.  I found a recipe for Zimbabwe greens that used our kale and banana peppers, as well as a tomato from weeks ago that was hanging on by its little tomato-y fingernails, and served the greens with the soup and a 3-pound no-nitrate ham that I got from the farmer's market last week.  All very tasty, though I put too much crushed red pepper in the greens and rendered them too hot for Doug to eat.  Today I'll do a stirfry with last week's broccoli and radishes, which with its bed of romaine lettuce should bring us current on our lettuce, whew!  The rest of the stuff should easily keep until next week, or probably longer.

Alas, both last week's carrot soup and this week's squash soup each got the Horrible Face from Joy.  I froze some carrot-soup ice cubes for her, but I may as well not have; I won't bother saving her any squash soup.  Oh well.

This Monday in our CSA box we got:

• lettuce
• mixed salad greens
• apples
• broccoli
• radishes
• carrots
• parsnips
• turnips
• rutabagas
• celeraic

Of course we're still working through last week's box, since it was a full share, not a half share.  My husband commented unhappily that our fridge was getting rather full.

I tossed the salad mix and our share of the lettuce straight into a salad for our potluck group (along with some celery, apples, raisins, walnuts, and parmesan cheese - very tasty!)  Then I looked at all those root vegetables and thought, slow roast? solar oven?  (That'll use 'em all up and not have them haunt our fridge!)  I found a slow roast recipe involving most of the roots we had (I threw 'em all in for good measure) and a nice hunk of beef in a bbq-type sauce.  I checked the weather - Wednesday we were due for sun all day, though not for a while after that, so it was Wednesday or bust.  I got everything chopped by then, the beef seasoned, and the whole lot in the solar oven by 10:30 am -

- only to discover the wasteland of shade that is our lawn, this time of year.

Most of the leaves are still hanging on, the sun is lower, and as a result I chased a square meter of sun around our backyard until mid-afternoon  when at 3:00 pm, there was no longer any sun anywhere in our yard, front or back.  I cursed, and moved the roast into a warm oven inside.

Sigh.  It's not fair.  It's not even our trees - it's our neighbor's trees, for the most part.  Not that I would touch either our trees or his trees in any case - but it does make the part of me that wants to move ache a little more.  No serious solar agenda is possible where we are.

The other fly in my ointment is that my poor husband continues to languish with his gastro-intestinal woes - a fact that did not fully hit me until I had the roast already cooking.  Doh!  Even if it comes out well, I may still be the only one eating it.  And of course it"s Halloween, so little chance of having friends over to share it tonight.  Well, maybe later.

The one bright side is that the house smells lovely now.

In further bulletins on what our daughter is eating, it seems she is indifferent to the inside parts of a banana.  The outside part, on the other hand...

De gustibus non est disputandum.

Today in our CSA box we got:

• lettuce
• salad mix
• tomatoes
• swiss chard
• collard greens
• bok choi
• a head of broccoli
• apples
• a long-neck pumpkin

Back to the days of greens, greens, and more greens, it seems.  And this is the week where we get two boxes instead of one.  Oy!

Possible recipes for this week:

• greens quiche, to freeze
• salad, for potluck
• stir fry (which will incorporate the bok choi, broccoli, and some red bell peppers from previous weeks, as well as other stuff, no doubt)

We'll also probably do the fish casserole to freeze, as speculated in the last CSA entry.  The pumpkin will keep for a bit.  (Pumpkin pie?  Pumpkin soup?  Pumpkin muffins?  Perhaps we'll freeze the cooked pulp and dole it out as needed - but it might be nicer to use it fresh, of course.)

And then there's still all that thyme.  (People don't usually complain of having too much thyme on their hands, I know, but we're perverse like that.)  Any ideas, she asked the hypothetical cyberspace listeners?

The first week of our fall CSA, we were out of town; the second week, due to a snafu, we got no veggies at all, but are getting double veggies this coming week as recompense.  Also, it seems that we're no longer getting emails re: our produce, so I'll have to stay on top of the veggie record if I want to keep one, because memory is only reliable for so long.

Anyway, this past week we got:

• a cabbage
• an ENORMOUS leek
• a head of broccoli
• apples
• lettuce
• salad greens
• thyme
• kale
• red peppers
• potatoes
• radishes

I traded with our share partners, giving them the lettuce and taking all the radishes.  I steamed the broccoli the very first night, then made a kale and leek pie, with fish (boiled with the thyme), cheese, and white sauce, that would have been even better if October had actually been cool - it's really a cool weather dish.  We ate the salad greens with the pie.  Tonight I made an Indian dish with the potatoes and radishes, as well as half an onion from previous weeks.  I made a dal (recipe courtesy of my Indian vegetarian cookbook) that was very tasty indeed - mung beans with spinach, tomatoes, and various spices - I felt very clever for actually having some homemade ghee on hand as well!

I had meant to make a fish casserole with cabbage, apples, and potatoes (meaning to freeze it, since our freezer stash is getting low), but being sick put me somewhat behind in my cooking.  I'll probably do it this coming week.

The girl continues to go through applesauce as if there's nothing else on the planet.  I picked up some good saucing apples at the farmer's market on Saturday; we'll see how far I get with them.  (I went for zucchini, but the farmer who'd had some before wasn't there, alas!)  There was a new vendor, selling hormone-free beef and pork; I got bacon and beef stew cubes to stick in the freezer for some future date.

Actually, i did do a surprising amount of cooking for someone who felt like death warmed over - just not what I'd originally intended to cook!  But this cold somehow made me ravenous.  On Friday, I made soup - pulled vegetable stock out of the freezer, and threw in fridge and freezer odds and ends - tomato paste, frozen pureed potato that Joy refuses to touch, half a can of lima beans (reserved the other half for the Indian curry), some cabbage, some macaroni, and then frozen corn, peas, and carrots.  The sad conclusion: frozen vegetables have no taste.  Boy, it's been a while since I leaned on them, and you could really tell - this CSA has ruined them for me, I think.  Plus the soup suffered the common deficit of many vegetarian dishes I cook of having no "middle" - this is hard for me to describe, except that sometimes I imagine flavors as musical notes, and apparently meat and butter and other animal products often supply the "lower" notes in a dish (where sour things like lemon juice or vinegar, or certain hot spices like cayenne pepper, or tomato products, often supply "higher" notes for me), and so meatless dishes often run the risk of seeming hollow, of lacking the ballast provided by the heavier, lower flavors - of having no "middle," in other words.  Anyway, the soup had no middle, and not even putting some spicy sausage into it could counter it, so I turned to a tried-and-true solution in such cases: mesquite sauce (the smoky flavor will often supply the missing bottom end).  The end result was a little too mesquite-y (the new bottle of sauce pours really fast!) but was a definite improvement.  That soup has served me well while being sick.

Then on Saturday morning I woke up craving heavy proteins, and so made scrambled eggs and refried beans and corn muffins for breakfast.  Then Saturday night I made gingerbread (which tastes much better now that I can actually smell it!).  So, lots of cooking.  (And lots more to come this week, with a double share of veggies!)

I'm sick today, for the first time since giving birth.  I wonder whether the whole breastfeeding has boosted my immune system somehow; nI kept skating on the edge of things, but this is the first time I've fallen through into full-blown illness.  I don't know whether I have what Doug has, or whether I have what one of the hundreds of people on the National Mall had during the last few days of the Solar Decathlon, which event Joy and attended on Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday.  (I'm glad we finally saw the German house yesterday, because dang, I ain't goin' again feeling like this.  Under other circumstances I might have gone back today to see UMaryland's house, and the few others I'd missed, but now I predict a whole lot of lying down as the highlight of today's agenda.  Whew.)

I wonder if this means we are about to suffer Joy's first illness too?  I can't exactly avoid her, nor she me.  Sigh.

Being a stay-at-home mom has been a great job so far, but one of the very few downsides is that there are no sick days in the benefits package.  Gonna be a long day....

Haha - sweet potato, it seems, is acceptable, if it has enough cinnamon applesauce in it to render it recognizable as Food.  Rice cereal, on the other hand, remains Not Food, even if made with breast milk, even if doctored with blueberry applesauce.  (Alas for the Mystery Rice Cereal, given to us in a hand-labeled jar and thus irreplaceable when it ran out, especially as it may well have originated in Singapore - no other rice cereal has been able to take its place in Joy's heart, or, more to the point, her stomach.  We mourn it still.)

So, one success and one failure - but 4 oz. sweet potato + 1 oz. cinnamon applesauce = Victory, in my book.

And the taste of victory is sweet.....

Applesauce, applesauce, our kid eats applesauce.  Regular applesauce, cinnamon applesauce, peach applesauce, blueberry applesauce.  She's a regular little hoover for suckin' down applesauce.

Other things, not so much.

Little girl, there's a whole culinary world besides applesauce out there waiting for you!  Someday, I hope you find that out.  Someday soon.

Merrily We Roll Along is playing at the Signature Theatre in Arlington, and I'm intrigued - I know about the show but have never seen it, and this production is getting great reviews.  I love Sondheim, and would love to see this with someone else who loves Sondheim; Doug as a rule hates Sondheim, but is happy to support my having an evening out to go myself.

Anyone out there like Sondheim, and want to see this production with me?  It's a pricey ticket (about $60, plus $8 or so surcharge from Ticketmaster), but it should be a high quality musical theater evening.  I'm thinking about Thursday, October 10th at 8:00 pm, but could probably swing a show any day that week (though not that weekend).

If you don't mind declaring yourself publicly, just reply in the comments if you're interested.