domesticana

Na Mele O Kalikimaka

Yesterday, as we watched the Kona Christmas Parade roll by our store, and sang a few carols in shorts, tank tops and flip-flops, I was reminded of the last time I felt hot and sticky during the holidays. It was my first Christmas overseas. I was seven going on eight and we had just moved to New Delhi, India. The smell of burning manure left the inside of my nose black the minute we got off the airplane, and I don't think I could ever forget the hot, heavy air hitting me in the face, reminding me that we weren't in Kansas anymore (incidentally, we really were moving from Kansas).

After something like 22 hours on a PanAm flight, seated in the middle four seats (my parents were either very brave or very masochistic), we were greeted at the airport by the family who we were replacing. I remember looking out the window as they drove us to our new house on Bagwandas Road, seeing all the different cars and colors and so many people out in the streets, peeing on the side of road and honking their horns at everything that moved. To a seven year old from Kansas, it was quite a new world.

It must have been a few weeks later when a group of Indian men in white shalvars came to our door with drums in hand and asked if they could come in and sing us some carols. We invited them inside and they set up in our living room. Seeing this large group of Indian men squatting in a semi circle on our floor, listening as they sang a bastardized version of Jingle Bells, is a treasured memory in our family's Christmas history.

"Jingel-da-bell oh oh, Jingel-da-bell oh oh, Jin-gel all dee way. Oh what a fun, it is to ride in a one horse op-en sleigh."

Transcribing it doesn't do the song justice. It's a classic.

As we sang Mele Kalikimaka on the street yesterday, I felt an ache to be at my parents' house, putting together our beat-up fake tree and pulling out all the dough-art ornaments and ugly tinsel garlands, singing Jingel-da-bells. I don't miss my family very often, and it felt good and, well, kind of made me happy.

Chocolate Nib Bites

Another year with no Christmas tree, no decorations, no holiday cheeriness in our house. It's making me crave the comforts of the season, and it wouldn't be Christmas without cookies. I'm always looking for ways to make something chocolate-y without a lot of sugar, and these bite-size chocolate wonders are a big hit of cocoa goodness.

Ingredients:
4 oz. bittersweet or unsweetened chocolate*
1 stick (8tbsp.) unsalted butter
1/2 cup sucanat, rapadura or brown sugar
3 eggs
3/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1 cup white spelt or all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
1 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 cup cacao nibs

Makes about 40 bite-size cookies.

Preheat the oven to 350° F, and line cookie sheets with parchment paper.

I like to use my standing mixer bowl over a pot of boiling water to melt together  3 oz. of the chocolate and all of the butter. You can do it in a small saucepan over low heat as well. *If you use unsweetened chocolate, add a tablespoon or two of your unrefined sugar of choice. Let cool for about 10 minutes. If using small saucepan, transfer the chocolate mixture to a large mixing bowl. In the meantime, sift together the flour, baking powder and cocoa powder in another bowl, and set aside. Finely chop the reserved chocolate and set aside.

Whisk the eggs into the cooled chocolate mixture, and add the sugar. Mix well. With a wooden spoon, stir in the flour mixture until combined and fold in the cacao nibs, salt and the rest of the chocolate. The batter will be very thick.

Use a teaspoon to make round scoops, and use your hands to form batter into small balls. Place them about one-inch apart on the cookie sheet and put the whole thing in the fridge for about 10 minutes before baking (so they don't spread).

Bake for seven to ten minutes until the tops are just set. Let cool for a minute or two so you don't burn your tongue!

A few notes:
- Use good quality chocolate. I prefer Scharffen Berger, El Rey or Valrhorna. Ghirardelli will work. Specialty stores and Whole Foods often carry blocked chocolate and cocoa powder in bulk.
- Err on the side of raw in the middle--you won't regret it.

Nurturing the Nurturer

Someday Ella is going to make an awesome big sister. There's never been a doubt in my mind. Her whole inner world revolves around nurturing everyone she encounters, regardless of their age or whether they're human or an animal or a toy. She just lives for it. Dolls are frequently in her arms, play-nursing from her up-turned shirt or being lugged around on her hip, and if there's a tiny dog, bunny or kitty in the vicinity she's chasing it down or cuddling it to her chest. At times it's exasperating--the times when she just won't let it go, as in, "Leave the dog alone--he's running away for a reason." or "If she says she doesn't want to sit on your lap/be picked up/give you a hug, please just stop asking"--but it's hard to complain about such a sweetness in her character.

A few weeks ago, Ella got on a weird kick where she was asking all her friends, flat out, "Do you like me?" Talk about giving a four-year old power. Naturally, most of them answered, "No." just because they could, and Ella's feelings were mightily wounded. Her teacher, who I am growing to love more and more with each passing day, spoke to me about it privately after school one day, and during that conversation it occurred to me how to help her. Instead of asking them if they like her, she just needs to tell them that she likes them. Don't give them the power to hurt you--just give them the love in your heart. Her teacher had the insight to give Ella this advice in the form of a story, which is something I just don't pull out of my parenting arsenal often enough.

Allow me to go off on a tangent for just a moment... In Seattle, we had a zoo membership and went often to visit Ella's favorite animals: the gorillas and the lone jaguar. Many of our friends would complain that they never got to see the jaguar when they went, but, and I know this sounds kooky, it seemed like he had a thing for Ella. Every time we visited his habitat, Junior would come right up to the glass next to Ella and almost always curl up on his rock and stare at her. I'm not making this up--one day I brought the camera and sure enough, he came up to say hello. Anyway, when it became a regular occurrence, I made up a bedtime story about a family of jaguars, like one might do about bears or rabbits or some other animal, and I've been mirroring Ella's life in the story of this family ever since.

So, that night I told Ella a story about the baby sister jaguar, Kaya, who comes home and talks to her big brother about her friends who say they don't like her. When I came to the lesson, Ella rolled into me and held me tight, whispering, "Thank you, Mommy." She had tears in her eyes as she listened to the rest of the story. How have I not know about this story as advice technique all this time? As I said, I've been mirroring our lives with the jaguar family, but I've never used story-time specifically to give her advice.  It was remarkable.

Her teacher reported that she walked right in the next day and told all of her friends that she liked them and they all reciprocated in kind, and all was harmonious and easy again at school.

Yesterday, the teacher made a point to tell me that one of the other girls started crying when they went on their walk in the apple orchard that morning, and Ella came to the rescue. She just oozes empathy when someone is genuinely hurting, and apparently she walked right up and said, "Oh C., it's okay. Here let me give you a hug. Just rest your head here right on my chest." Ella's teacher went on to say that for the rest of the day, Ella made it her mission to be C.'s little mama; holding her hand, rubbing her head, putting her arms around her.

In so many pieces of Ella's personality, in her words and expressions and manners and demeanor, I see myself or Matt, but when it comes to this obsessive need to nurture and shower her affection on everyone, I only see her. Sure, Matt and I are loving and affectionate, but she's taken it up to the tippy-toppest notch.

She is absolutely beside herself with the notion that we might, someday, have another baby, and asks me everyday when that day might come. "When are you going to have a new baby in your tummy?" "How will it get inside you?" "Can I watch you and Daddy make it?" She's relentless. She has stopped referring to herself as her baby-dolls' mommy and is now just their big sister. She asks me at least ten times a day if I'd like to hold her baby sister and wouldn't I like to give her some of my milk and could she just watch her baby sister sleep in my arms for a while. It goes on and on.

Part of me is so intensely moved by her desire for a sibling and other parts feel both sorry for myself and wracked with guilt for not giving her something that she so desperately, desperately wants. I feel like I say this every goddamn month, but I'l be fertile and ovulating next week when we get to Kona. So, maybe a little Libra baby brother or sister is in the stars for us. It's hard to get too worked up about it, but Ella certainly never lets me forget for a moment. A blessing and a curse.

Omnivorous

I'm finally reading The Omnivore's Dilemma, and it's rocking me to the core. This huge convoluted mess of our American diet is so much bigger and more insidious than I ever thought possible, and part of me is feeling like there's nothing we can do to make any significant difference. It's just a giant web of interests from the corn farmers to the cattle ranchers to the synthetic foods developers to the legislators to the taxpayers to the poverty stricken. There's certainly not one or two avenues you can point to and say, "If we just fix this, people will stop getting cancer and diabetes and animals will stop being tortured and..." It's like saying, "No more war." Nothing is ever that simple.

The only way I can even imagine our sorry state of affairs will ever improve is if we educate ourselves as to how sorry it really is. Most of us just don't know the half of it, and if we did, well, maybe we'd be able to look to the future and figure out how to fix it.

Perhaps this stuff isn't news to you, but I didn't realize that...

Corn and soybeans are the two super-crops in the processed food industry, and they are in practically everything we eat. Almost all of the synthetic ingredients in our processed foods are derived from corn, and most of the animals we eat are fed predominately corn.

Fertilizers and pesticides are made from fossil fuels, and when we started using them, we essentially changed from an agriculture based on solar power to one based on oil. Simply using the sun's energy, we weren't able to grow nearly the same amount of corn per acre, year after year on the same plot of land.

Between the fossil fuels used to make the pesticides and fertilizers, to harvest and dry the crops, and to drive the tractors and trucks to transport the corn, it takes about 50 gallons of oil per acre of corn.

These fertilizers and pesticides (not to mention Genetically Modified seeds) are enabling farmers to yield up to 220 bushels of corn on one acre of land. In the 1920s (before the advent of all of these things), farmers yielded about 20 bushels per acre.

Add to that the legislation that has essentially forced farmers to plant more and more corn per acre despite the fact that they're going further and further in the hole every year. Naturally, the legislation is backed by major corporations like Cargill (the company who makes almost all of the world's corn derivative chemicals like dextrose, citric and lactic acid, glucose, fructose and maltodextrin, ethanol, sorbitol, mannitol, xanthan gum, modified and unmodified starches, MSG, high fructose corn syrup---WOW--did you know they all come from corn?).

Then on to the beef industry...

Did you know that cows are now hurtled from 80 to 1,100 pounds in a mere 14 to 16 months time? Grass certainly doesn't pack on the pounds that quickly, but when you stuff them full of corn, protein and fat supplements and a ton of drugs, anything is possible.

Cattle can rarely live on the diet they are given in feedlots for more than 150 days. Their bodies are just not made to be eating anything but grasses and legumes. Between 15 to 30 percent of the cows at feedlot slaughterhouses have abscessed livers. Within some feedlot pens, the numbers can be closer to 70%. The list of common ailments in feedlot cows is endless. Drugs are the only thing keeping them alive.

An average steer eats 25 pounds of corn a day (mixed with seven pounds of other junk), to gain about 4 pounds a day. Over the course of his life, he will have consumed the equivalent of 35 gallons of oil, which is almost a full barrel.

The manure from feedlots is so toxic it can't be put back on crops because the wastes contain not only excess nitrogen and phosphorus but also heavy metals and hormone residues that could kill the plants.

This toxic manure covers the ground and fills the air (in the form of dust) where these cattle stand and eat and sleep. Their bodies are covered in it, inside and out, and they certainly aren't given a bath before being slaughtered.

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Pulled directly from Michael Pollan's book, these factoids are just a drop in the bucket of what I've learned so far, and I've only read 100 pages.

Between reading this book and having recently watched An Inconvenient Truth (Al Gore's global warming documentary) and Why We Fight (the film about the military-industrial complex), I'm absolutely overwhelmed, but it feels good to know and understand how these things work and are all tied together. I'm more motivated than ever to just keep learning.

Solo but not for long

One evening during our Thanksgiving visit with my in-laws, Ella's Auntie M. came inside after being lured out in the dark by my glow-stick-loving daughter. Ella desperately wanted to share her neon lights with someone, and convinced my step-sister-in-law to walk around the side of the house with her. After their walk, M. informed me that I have the most thoughtful four-year old she's ever met. It seems Ella forgot to put on her shoes when she went outside, and when they got to the slightly damp stretch next to the side of the house, Ella took off her socks. M. protested saying that Ella's feet would be too cold, but Ella argued, "Well, I don't want my mommy to have to do extra laundry."

Smart girl.

The solo parenting thing has been smooth sailing since we returned from Hawaii a few weeks ago. We quickly jumped back into a routine, something we both desperately need, and I think we're riding on a crest of good behavior right now. I always think of parenting as a six month wave cycle, where everyone is getting along well with firm discipline and consistency; then there's some parental slacking and shortly thereafter some child testing; then it's full blown mayhem for a few days until the hammer comes back down and we're back on top for awhile. Right now it feels like we've been on top for a good long stretch. I've probably been a bit more strict than I would be with Matt around just because I need some firm boundaries right now, but it seems to be working.

In the spirit of positive thinking, I'm doing my damnedest to prepare for and look forward to yet another trip to the Big Island. After the fiasco that was our November trip, I can't imagine it could really be any worse...

Matt was planning to come home next week, but as that day approached he realized he was dreaming. So, we weighed all our options and the finances, and it makes more sense for Ella and I to go to Matt than for him to come home for only a few days. So, we fly out again next Monday (good grief, that seems soon), and then we'll all come back home together before the new year.

Mele Kalikimaka!