Big Batch Cookin'

About three times a month, I turn our kitchen into a crazy mess and knock out huge batches of meals that I freeze for later. Our family is small, so these recipes last us longer than they would otherwise, but all the recipes are easily doubled, or even tripled, if you have the right pots. They're also great if you're single. I cooked the spaghetti sauce and stew when I was single and just put them in smaller freezer containers.

I generally cook and prep from one huge metal bowl (about 8 inches deep and 15 inches wide), one stew pot, one crock pot, and Pyrex for microwaving. I do steam veggies in the microwave without water. I know some people don't like to do that and will roast them in the oven instead, but I've found for some things, it's just easier and makes the house less hot. For example, I'll cut a spaghetti squash in half, microwave each half for 15 minutes, and let the oven roast all the sweet potatoes instead.

Here are the recipes I promised some of my Facebook peeps, with links and suggestions for tweaking. All but one recipe are other people's, but I've used most of them for years (the granola and cookies are an exception). Hope someone gets some good meals out of them!

Soup

"Jewel's Favorite Soup Jill Makes" is a white kidney bean and chicken broth-based soup that we LOVE. I make it with two boxes of chicken broth, three cans of white kidney beans, one big can of diced tomatoes with nothing added, and one container of mire poix from Trader Joe's (you can cut up a cup each of onion, celery, and carrots yourself; I just love a shortcut!). The secret is to add the rind of a parmesan wedge and let it cook for an hour. Take the rind out for serving, but don't forget it. It's frickin' magical. Just dump it all in and walk away. Coddling the veggies beforehand by sautéing doesn't make much difference.

If you like a thicker soup, let the soup cook at a rolling boil for a bit to break apart the beans and let the starch out, but watch it so it doesn't scorch. If you like a thinner, clearer soup, set the simmer to low and don't cook it more than an hour. I like this soup thicker, so it gets a good rowdy roll in the pot and sits there for hours. If I need to leave the house, I turn off the heat and leave the soup until I get back. Then I'll turn the heat back on.

Serve with crusty bread and olive oil. And white wine!

Stew

This beef stew is old school. There's nothing hippie about it, and I haven't tweaked it in 15 years. You just have to accept that some great things are still based on two cans of Campbell's mushroom soup and one packet of Lipton Onion Soup mix. But it's EASY, and there are no real measurements. The cream of mushroom soup doesn't make it "creamy" at all, but it makes a really good gravy. This stew is probably the only red meat we eat inside our home. If you don't care for too much beef, add less. If you go grass-fed, make sure it's decently marbled, because you need it all to get tender.

I don't add potatoes to this because I like to serve it over mashed sweet potatoes, which sounds wrong but is oh so right. You could also serve it over regular potatoes, egg noodles, or nothing.

You can go heavy on the veggies. The stew tolerates them very well.

Here's the general list:

--Some chuck roast, fat-trimmed and silver-skin-trimmed and cubed, or "beef for stew" at the supermarket. We buy ours at Costco right now, and it makes two batches.

--Two cans cream of mushroom soup, low fat is totally fine and is what I use.

--One packet of Lipton onion soup mix.

--One chopped onion.

--One bag baby carrots

--One bag frozen peas (or fresh, but not canned because they'll go mushy)

--Whatever else you want (think leftovers). I've added leftover rice (white, brown, and wild) before; celery; wine; garlic; anything you like.

Spaghetti Sauce with Chicken Sausage and Ground Turkey


I love this sauce. Probably because it's mine. :) It's rich and meaty like other sauces, but the chicken and turkey keep it leaner. I use canned marinara because it's faster, but if you have a recipe you like, use it! Again, put the rind of a parm wedge into it and let it simmer for as long as you have time for. This is great with spaghetti squash.

--One container of mire poix at Trader Joe's (or one cup each carrots, onion, celery)

--One package sweet (or spicy) Italian chicken sausage, casings removed, broken up and cooked in a pan

--One package super-low-fat ground turkey, cooked

--One little can of tomato paste

--Garlic to taste

--Two or three cans of your favorite marinara (I like Trader Joe's, of course, and Rao's is lovely if you've got money to burn)

--Red, green, and/or yellow bell peppers, any kind. You can used fresh, jarred, or frozen (and may want to set your preferences in that order :))

--Leftovers, whatever you like. Zucchini works well.

Add olive oil to stew pot. Let it get hot. Dump in veggies. Let them get hot. Dump in everything else. Set to simmer. Walk away. Come back hungry. DONE.

Cauliflower Puree

Sounds decidedly not awesome, but is. The recipe is here. No tweaks; just eat. Could be good with the stew, but I haven't tried that yet.

Baked Sweet Potatoes

There's obviously not much to this recipe, but I do have some hints that will make it less annoying:

1)  Cook as many as you can cram into your oven, but space them at least two inches apart so they cook evenly. 15 pounds of potatoes (the crate at Costco) fit into my standard oven.

2) Put aluminum foil over your baking sheet. All over it. Sweet potato juice is a nightmare to clean.

3) Oil your foil if you want to retain the skins. If all you want is the delicious inside, then it doesn't matter.

4) Clean off the skins, then place the potatoes on two baking sheets: one for skinny potatoes, one for fat ones.

5) Bake at 400 degrees. One hour  to one hour and fifteen minutes for the skinny ones. An hour and a half for the fats. Make sure a knife runs all the way through each potato, easily and with NO RESISTANCE! If it tugs, the tater ain't done. It's hard to overcook them, so err on that side. Undercooked potatoes taste raw and yucky.

6) Store the insides in Pyrex or Ziploc bags, whichever you prefer. The plastic bags peel away from the frozen potatoes easily, and then you can microwave them from frozen (cook on high until warm, but stir often, about ten minutes depending on chunk size). You can also let them thaw in the fridge, which could seriously take DAYS (though we keep our fridge pretty cold), then cook on the stovetop in a pot.

Granola

My friend Katie makes her own granola because she lives in Northern California and she's a total cliche. But I now I live here, and I want to fit in. So I started making my own granola. I will never go back. It's that good. And like my favorite recipes, you can play with it. Example: I use almonds instead of walnuts.

The recipe calls for baking the granola for one hour at 275. I found this too much. I think the problem isn't the temperature, but the time. Be sure to watch your batch starting at about 45 minutes. My batch is wonderfully edible, but I'll probably take it out at 50 minutes next time. I also recommend almond slices instead of slivers (the little sticks), because the slivers, counter-intuitively, didn't handle the heat as well. I used rolled oats from Trader Joe's because they're FAT. Fat oats are GOOD. There are plenty of other fat oats, but Quaker's are a bit thin.

Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies

Classic Betty Crocker recipe. I doubled the recipe and used my big-ass bowl. Prep took 30 minutes (the recipe says 55 minutes. What??). These are seriously loaded with butter, which can be a good thing and a bad thing. If you're worried about dying instantly from a Western disease, cut the butter by a 1/4, and the sugar by a 1/4 too, or use something like agave instead, though I don't know the amount. The butter isn't great if you like to eat your cookies right out of the oven, but if you're serving them later, the butter makes them delightfully crispy on the outside, and rich, so that if you listen to your body, you won't eat more than two. Because of the insane amount of butter.

I plopped the dough onto six sheets of parchment paper and rolled them up, wrapped them in foil, and put them in the freezer. Thaw and slice (you may have to reassemble broken bits--the oatmeal makes them a little crumbly) and bake, but change the cook time to 14-16 minutes, more if you like crunchy cookies.

Show up at the potluck. Be a hero. :)

The Mamas

Note: Posts like this one don't get written alone, and I don't want anyone thinking it was. I made sure that any Mama about whom I wrote very personal information knew I was going to write it, and they read it and approved it before it ever got here. Motherhood is a deep, deep river, and I could not be more grateful to these women, who all said to me, "Say whatever you want about us. We're open books, and we're okay." This was especially true of Cristina, who told me, "It's okay if you tell them I was contemplating suicide. It won't offend my delicate sensibilities!" I've chosen to leave out a lot of the nitty-gritty, but just trust that it's there, from serious illness (for mother or child) to depression and anxiety to infertility to lost pregnancies, for one or more of us Mamas, and I speak for all of us when I say that if you're feeling alone in any part of motherhood, there are other moms and dads out there who are waiting to say, "It's okay if you don't have anything good to say today. Come sit by me anyway." 

*    *    *

I never joined a sorority. I never had a deb ball, and I’m pretty sure I’d rather saw both my legs off than be in something like Junior League. So after my daughter was born and I could walk again and meaningfully look at a clock, I hauled both of us to the local women’s wellness center to the new moms’ group and thought, “This is going to suck and I am going to hate it.”

It was, I freely admit, a really crappy attitude to have, but I had moved in the middle of my pregnancy, across the country, from a place where I had lots of support every day to a place where I had none but that of my then-boyfriend-now-husband, who spent most of the day at work at his medical residency and wasn’t able to attend any of my prenatal appointments even when my pregnancy became what the chief of OB at Penn called, “Not ‘high-risk,’ but not ‘regular risk’ either.” He followed that with, “We don’t know what to do with you.” It was awesome, and I went to lots of ultrasounds and lay in the dark rooms by myself while radiologists and nephrologists and maternal-fetal medicine people figured out “what to do with me.” Everything turned out fine, but it was pretty lonely, so I should have been psyched to meet all these women, but I wasn’t.

I was afraid it would be a sorority. I envisioned smiling and laughter, cute outfits, cooing, and chanting  “B-R-E-A-S-T-M-I-L-K!!” while we all clapped. Mostly, I was afraid that I would be the only person in the room who loved her baby but thought that making her, and getting her out, and feeding her were all a grueling bad dream from which I couldn’t wait to wake. I thought I’d be the only one who desperately missed her job and wanted to go back.

So when Cristina walked in 40 minutes late, wearing yoga pants, a long-sleeve tee and a fleece vest, with her daughter’s bucket seat hooked over the crook of her elbow and a diaper bag trailing somewhere behind her, I thought, “She looks absolutely awful—like a zombie, but with more anxiety and a kangaroo pouch. We will be best friends.”

I loved her immediately, in direct proportion to the amount of dread that seeped out of her.

Cristina took her place in the circle, where we were all going around, saying our names; our baby’s, or babies’, names; their birthdays; and how much they weighed. This process was how it all started, each one of us in the circle giving the minimum information, and probably adding some bit of info by which the others might start to remember us. It was a little AA-ish. “Hi, I’m So-and-So, and I have inverted nipples. I’ve been using a nipple shield for four weeks now.” Hi, So-and-So-With-The-Nipple-Shield….

I was Ginny, who vaginally delivered a 10-pound baby. It turns out that this is not uncommon among my Mamas, even if it is globally. There was Cristina, who got post-partum depression about twelve minutes after delivering Sofia, and who couldn’t nurse because she had had breast surgery years before. There was Jen, whose daughter Zoey was born on the same day as Ellie, so they became "twins." And Erin, who pushed for three hours then had to have a c-section to deliver Kate, who was born with a fused suture in her skull and needed surgery at six months. Tiffany, who was already in jeans with a real zipper, but whose son wouldn’t latch, so she pumped all day, every day. Alaina, who made it to the group just four weeks after her twin daughters were born. Her uterus didn’t contract after delivery and she bled a lot, so even four weeks later, she was very pale. Liz, whose husband left three-week-old Bailey in her crib alone in the house while he ran down their street to get meds for a peanut butter allergy that we’re not sure he actually has. We think it just makes him really thirsty, and that’s not the same thing. Kristin, whose son Micah was a miracle baby and whose husband Kent would eventually join our group when she went back to work as a teacher and he took a sabbatical from his ministry. Brooke, whose son Brenden was her second child (a rare find in a new mom’s group), and a devoutly Christian woman who never swears nor drinks, a way of motherly life I still don’t think is possible, even now after witnessing three years of Brooke’s wholesome existence.

The group was a revolving door of women, their babies, and their stories; some visited each and every Monday, and some came when they could, until they went back to work at 6 weeks or 12 or 16 or never. For me, it was five months of meetings, listening to each woman talk about whatever she needed help with that week and talking about my own stuff.

Eventually, we all started planning things outside of the meetings: playdates at the park, brunches at someone’s house, and our biggest monthly event, MamaDinner. MamaDinner was a treasure because it was so hard to make happen; each woman had to check with her husband, because he would have to watch the kids (which is not “babysitting”; it’s parenting). It would have to be timed so that breastfeeding moms could feed, then put their kid to bed, then leave, then get back for the next nightfeeding, which meant reservations were made on the late side, around 8 or 8:30. But, man, once we all got there. What a time.

MamaDinner was the first time many of us got a glimpse of what we might have looked like pre-baby. It was a revelation.

We’d say things like, “Are you wearing a DRESS?”

“Yes, I am! It’s from before…I’m pretty sure I’m not fat anymore!”

“Are those your eyelashes?”

“Uh-huh! There’s mascaaaara on them!”

“Oh, GET OUT!”

“And holy crap, you’re gorgeous!”

“Thank you! I dress up more for MamaDinner than I do for my husband!”

That part seemed strange but true. I’m not sure what the other Mamas would say, but I have my own theory. For however much our husbands or partners loved us, and for however much we loved them, there were a lot of ways in which they didn’t—couldn’t, even—help us. We got dressed up and made ourselves beautiful for the people who made us feel really, really good and bright and happy. We wanted each other to see on the outside the way we made each other feel on the inside. It’s cheesy, but all the typical girl talk was paid for in long conversations about cracked nipples and lochia and Kate’s surgery and painful sex and forgetting to buckle the five-point harness because we were so sleep-deprived. MamaDinner was the chance to have a martini and laugh until our mascara ran down our faces and onto our beforetime outfits.

Besides all the talking, we helped each other out. Cristina watched Ellie while I went for a job interview at a community college. I watched Matty when Tiffany and John went to their anniversary dinner. And Ally, who is hands-down the most inspired stay-at-home mom I know, watched everyone, often all at once. Katie took family portraits for me and for Erin, and Brooke photographed Glenna’s family and Michelle’s. I copyedited Glenna’s master’s thesis in sustainable interior design, and she designed a nursery for Tiffany. Jen and I did a “spring cleanse” together—we’d go to the meetings and learn to make sandwich bread out of nothing but spinach and chia seeds and then text each other the next day, “My screeching child won’t let go of my sweatpants or take a nap so I ate a box of Cheez-Its. Don’t rat me out.”

Our lives together started to have a Red Tent kind of quality. In Anita Diamante’s retelling of the biblical story of Leah and Rachel, she focuses sharply on the physical and social red tent—the place where women were to go during menstruation and childbirth, but a place also for childrearing and gossip and bonding. Our playdates and dinners with kids started to have the same feel.

It makes for stupid math, but it’s true just the same: I’d rather go to a museum with all my Mamas and all their kids and know that I’m partly responsible for everyone in the bunch than to go with Ellie alone. It’s easier and more fun. One mom getting her one child through a cafeteria-style lunchline is torture, but nine moms doing that for ten kids is magic. And I was grateful to hear about others’ homelives. Glenna couldn’t understand what was so hard about a putting a dish in a dishwasher, and I felt better knowing that Alaina, who had been married for years and tried very hard to have her girls, had some of the same struggles that I did in my jerry-rigged life.

Life doesn't always let you tie things up in a pretty bow, but stories can, and like many good tales, this one will end with a wedding. 

My jerry-rigged life became a little less jerry-rigged in February of 2010, when Mark and I got tied the knot…um, three times. The last of these was the grand affair with our families, and the first one did make us “legal.” But the middle one was a special one just for our Philadelphia friends, the ones who had helped us day-in and day-out with our first experiences of parenthood. A blizzard rolled over the East Coast that Friday morning, but the Mamas donned their puffer coats, put the babes in sleds and trekked to our favorite indoor playplace—The Little Treehouse—for another ceremony. 

Kristin’s husband Kent officiated, as he had two days earlier in his living room when we signed the papers (after Mark investigated Micah’s butt rash and both babies got diaper changes), but this time there was a bit more ritual. Kent asked all the babies to blow us kisses to wish us luck and happiness. Ellie clapped like a crazy little person when it was her turn to be a part of the ceremony. Katie photographed the day, Erin made the cupcakes, Cristina read Khalil Gibran, and afterward, everyone played on the floor in their socks and drank champagne (or milk). I never expected this, but even the husbands and partners came.

There are lots of people whose heads cock to the side when Mark and I tell them we were married thrice, after a long period of remaining unwed. I just shrug. We had our reasons. And while when I hear the word “wedding,” I go to our June one on the lawn in my mom’s backyard, I’m grateful to have celebrated with the women in the room at the Wellness Center, because I know a little too keenly what might have been had I not had them to lean on for those years. Again, it’s cliché, but those first months were like finding myself in a fog, with a baby, and having a bunch of awesome women call out, “We’re over here! It’s not exactly paradise, but there’s a swingset, and snacks! Hurry!”

So that is, I think, how I joined my first sorority. But we don’t squeal and chant, and they’re not my sisters; they’re so much better than that.

They’re my Mamas.

photo by alex trimm (alextrimmphotography.com)

Saturday Night Lights

Stanford vs. UCLA, October 1st

My old student Tyler wrote to me two weekends ago and offered me three of his player’s tickets to the Stanford-UCLA game this past Saturday. I jumped. I love a good football game and had told his mom a few weeks before that it would be great to go. I knew that seeing Tyler play again after five years was just going to be so fun. We decided to make a weekend of it, since the game didn’t start until 7:30 at night and we live two and a half hours from Palo Alto.

We stayed at the W in Newark, in a very nice and yet reasonably priced suite, and of course, we took full advantage of everything there, including the pool, which thrilled Ellie to bits since our community pool in Davis closed a month ago. She was also amazed at what was, as she put it, its “no car, just walking?” proximity…it nearly confused her. But she had a blast splashing around. The only thing that was a little iffy was that the pool is encircled in sand (outside of a sidewalk-like ring around the lip of the pool itself), so it was out of the water and into the sand. She was pretty much breaded after a minute or two. That wasn’t fun.

This is an old movie theater. The university is open. :)

About a mile from the stadium, we had dinner for free at CPK because they were having a training night! All we had to do was fill out a survey at the end, and our $65 meal was covered by the restaurant. Score!! I’d have paid $65 just for the four distracting crayons they gave Ellie while she waited for her pasta, but to have our own meals and a glass of wine, too? That’s pretty much winning the dinner lottery.

Then we drove the world’s longest mile to the game. It turns out Stanford football gets a lot of love. It took a while to find parking, but I had fun admiring all the gorgeous trees that surround the stadium. They make it look like the South; you could have told me we were going to an Alabama game and between all the fans and the huge, droopy trees, I would have believed you. Thank goodness for the “pin drop” feature on our phones or we never would have found our car again.

The pom-poms were breast-cancer-pink!

The trees really shroud the stadium, so it kind of creeps up like a quiet giant. We made it around to the player’s will call, signed for our tickets and then went through the Special Tunnel, which is what we called the family entrance to the stadium. Mark asked Ellie if she felt like a rock star. She nodded. He said, “Good, you should!” It was very cool. (It’s obviously the little things for us. We're not ashamed.) We sat next to Tyler’s lovely stepsister, her husband, and her in-laws in what is clearly a whole section for players’ families. I can’t think of a more awesome place to be, especially in a stadium that holds 50,000 fans. It reminded me of watching my brother play at Muhlenberg, a tiny college with a handsome, but miniature, stadium. There, everyone was invested in the individual players, not just the outcome of the game, and in section 134 at Stanford Stadium, it was the same way. It was so endearing to see moms and dads and sisters jump up and wave their pom poms, wearing their family names on the backs of jerseys. It made me think of all the journeys it took, for whole families, to get that one player to a school like this. I’m sure there are some really compelling tales.

It probably goes without saying that the seats were amazing too. I could have thrown Ellie’s shoe at a Bruin. But I didn’t.

The girl loves sports. Yay!

Of course, I wasn’t sure at all that Ellie, who isn’t even three, would appreciate all the awesomeness of the evening. I apparently didn’t need to worry, since she had way more fun at the football game than she did even at the pool. She loved the music, the cheering, and the fancy camera they have hovering over the field to catch every play. She told me repeatedly that she wanted the camera and was annoyed when I explained that it didn’t belong to us.

She also clearly understood that we were there to see Tyler. “Mama, where’s Tyler? Oh! Go, Tyler!” “Tyler went away? Good job, Tyler!” She stood on her seat so she could see, and when everyone stood up, blocking her view, she’d yell, “Up, Mama! I can’t SEE!!” She even did the wave, thrice. She really is our daughter.

I'm six feet tall. Just FYI.

She did lean over about two minutes before halftime and say, “Mom, I’m all done with this soccer game…” I told her that that was okay, but that we were going to stay just a little longer. Then the marching bands came out, first UCLA’s, then Stanford’s. She watched with her huge eyes, rapt, took a five-minute rest on a little pillow we brought for her, and made it clapping and cheering to the end of the game. She was even awake when Tyler came out to see everyone.

The next morning, we all slept in until room service came. We figured we had saved our dinner budget, so we might as well have a picnic breakfast on the floor of our hotel room. It was such a memorable family weekend, and I’m so grateful to Tyler and his mom for thinking of us. I’ve always been very proud of him. He’s such a good 6’6”, 300-pound “kid.” J

Crap, I Left my Heart in San Francisco Again.

I love San Francisco. If it weren’t for the land- and life-destroying potential of the Big One, it would just be the perfect city. It’s literate and foodie-y and odd as all get-out in places, and I’m always thrilled to stupidity to be in any part of it, even the weird bits. I personally don’t see anything wrong with deciding it’s a good day to take your television out for a walk on a busy sidewalk and using its power cord as a leash. I’m just sorry I didn’t think of it first.

So when I got a postcard in the mail letting me know that David Molesky, one of my friends from high school and the creator of one of the only “real” pieces of art I have in my home, was having an opening reception for his latest exhibit, I looked at the family schedule, got a babysitter, and called my friend Laura to see if she’d want to go…and let me crash at her place after. It worked, and I got to go!

My absolute favorites of David’s paintings are waterscapes. He doesn't paint the horizon into them, so you’re really invested in the water itself. I think I love them so much because when I swim, before I get in, I’m only looking down at the water. Sailors might care about the horizon, but swimmers don’t. It’s just about the water. David’s paintings make you feel like there’s nothing else in the world but foam and waves, and that that’s a beautiful thing. I just love them, and the gallery they were in, ArtSpace 712, was just perfect…lots of exposed brick, huge old windows, worn wood floors. Plus, there were some old high school friends there too, and wine! What could be better?

Dinner wasn’t really better, but it was pretty close. Laura is lucky enough to live in a part of the Marina where she can walk to a dozen lovely, fun restaurants. Our favorite is Mamacita. Thursday night, we ordered two margaritas, the butter-smooth guac, the mahi fish tacos with pickled red cabbage, and the chicken enchiladas. We also had a side of elote, a spicy, spicy, spicy corn dish that was absolutely worth the burn, and baked chocolate pudding that turned out to be something more like mushy brownie, and let’s face it, either of those is worth eating. It came with dulce de leche ice cream and pralines. Die, die, die.

The next morning, we were scheduled to burn off all our calories at something horrible called The Bar Method, where you can only work out if you wear black stretchy pants below your knee. I’m not joking. But we decided we had had too many calories the night before to tolerate such an elitist, fancy-pants calorie-burning activity, and besides, my yoga pants were navy blue.

So we went to a diner instead. It was awesome. It’s Bechelli’s, and if you’re ever in that part of SF, get the blueberry pancakes and the eggs, which are like the ones my grandma fries up in Kansas. Kansas eggs should be the only way eggs are allowed to be cooked, but I guess it takes all kinds. The coffee at Bechelli’s is only so-so, so-so get a Coke instead and tell Laura you did. She doesn’t believe I sometimes drink Coke in the morning, but she goes to an exercise class that has, like, a pants bouncer at the door, so, there’s that. I won’t be judged.

Before I had to go, we watched one episode of Downton Abbey. It was, and I’m totally serious here, riveting. Laura’s already done with it, and as soon as I’m done writing this, and doing laundry, and cleaning the kitchen, and grocery shopping and cooking dinner, I will be too.

Tomorrow, part two of my Bay Area Weekend Extravaganza… J