Dear Kid,

I have a new favorite dish and its name is Shakshukah.

This is how you make Shakshukah.

Since it’s a tomato based dish, the first thing to do is go outside and see if there are any ripe tomatoes. It turns out there are several that are almost ready but prefer to remain on the vine for a while so you add to your plans a stop at the farmer’s market to get tomatoes.

Once you have tomatoes and have decided that the rest of the ingredients are as assembled as they are ever going to be, you begin.

Boil a pot of water that’s big enough to hold all the tomatoes. Get distracted, forget about the pot, and eventually realize that half the water has boiled off. Sigh. Once you have an actual pot of boiling water, put the tomatoes in and turn off the heat. After some number of minutes (“I think maybe a few more minutes would be good” says Tal), scoop the tomatoes out. Try not to burn yourself. The skins will peel right off. They are even easier to peel when someone else (Tal) peels them.

Chop a couple of cloves of garlic. Better yet, have someone else (Tal) chop several cloves of garlic while you see about cleaning up some of the dishes that have been left in the sink.

Heat some oil in a large pan. Watch Tal add the garlic and stir. After a few minutes, watch her add the tomatoes and mash them up. Add about “that much” from a can of diced tomatoes. Add 2 heaping tablespoons of tomato paste. Watch Tal stir.

Season the mixture with some of the spices that Tal brought. (We added two tablespoons of spice and some salt and pepper. After the whole thing cooked for about 15 minutes we tasted and added more spice. Then we congratulated ourselves on being smart enough to taste before moving on.)

Get out the eggs. Consult about how many eggs are necessary. The recipe said 8 eggs, Tal said 5, and the pan said 6. We went with the pan’s idea. Break each egg into a bowl and gently slide the egg on top of the well-stirred tomato mixture. Cover the pan partway and let the eggs cook about 5 minutes. Check the eggs and decide they definitely need more time than that. Give them another 5 minutes or so and decide they’re done.

Serve with bread. You put the Shakshukah on your plate and then pile it on a piece of bread and YUM!

If you are a very good child, I shall make it for you sometime.

Love, Mom

Dear Kid,

As you may have heard, we’re in the midst of March Madness. This means that instead of walking a plastic bottle over to the recycling bin, Dad now shoots, misses, and yells, “goal tending.” (Score so far: Dad: 0; recycle bin: 5.)

It also means the TV is tuned to basketball a lot. Possibly even more than a lot. And when it’s not basketball, it’s hockey (Frozen Four preliminary games), because apparently there are real life penalties for going sports-free during this season. (Score so far: Dad: much cheering; Booker: napping interrupted with each score).

The TV remote is getting an incredible workout. I’m sure it works for Dad (I think it’s a man-thing), but the constant channel flipping is scrambling my brain a little. It’s like we’ve invented the new game of baske-hockey. The announcers really don’t sound all that different, but the squeaky sneakers are definitely different than hockey skates. (Score so far: shorts: same length for hockey and basketball; broadcasters: closer to a heart attack than seems necessary; bad commentating: he’s not only in the flow, he’s playing swimmingly—could be for basketball or hockey.)

Dad is (unsurprisingly) commenting on the games, the refereeing, and the sportscasting. The only thing I haven’t heard him talk about is fashion statement of the uniforms. (Score so far: Uniforms: un-evaluated; players: not playing up to in-house standards: officials: need you even ask?)

In other sporting news, I’ve been creating chaos in the kitchen, but so far I haven’t burned anything. (Score so far: successes: 1; disasters: 1.)

Spring break has started here. This is good news for Pi who is still healing. Unfortunately, the freezer seems to be warming up along with the weather. (Score so far: crocuses: happily blooming; appliances: negative 5 b’zillion; Booker: doesn’t like walking in the rain.)

No big plans for the week, although I am hoping to have more successes than overt failures in the kitchen. (Score: TBD.)

Love, Mom

Dear Kid,

I’ve started doing Salutations to the Sun (and by “started” I mean I did them Monday morning and then attempted to do them again last evening). Sun Salutations (as they are also known) are a series of yoga poses in a specific order. There are a lot of variations to Sun Salutations but they are all variations on the same theme (kind of like there are lots of variations of chocolate ice cream. Which reminds me….I wonder what’s in the freezer…).

The version I am working on is structured to go something like this.

Mountain pose—stand with your feet on the floor arms by your side. I got this. No problem.

Raised arms pose—hands come up and if you don’t have my back, you might bend backward a bit. But I do have my back (lucky me) so I reach for the sky.

Forward bend—the picture of this shows a person bent in half with her wrists on the floor and her elbows behind her knees. I settle for a gentle nod in the direction of the floor as I bend as far as I can go. Hi there floor. Maybe someday I’ll get closer.

Low Lunge—not walking lunges, just a lunge pose. I teeter. I totter. Booker backs away. In a triumph over gravity, I do not fall.

Plank pose—a push up pose without the pushing.

Locust pose—if you really want to see what this looks like, you’ll have to look it up. As far as I can figure, you put all the parts that bend (knees, toes, elbows) on the floor and everything else in the air.

Cobra pose—legs on the ground, do a sort of push up with the front half of your body. It would probably embarrass most live cobras, but as there are none in the house, I don’t worry.

Downward Facing Dog—I love this pose. Think Booker stretching before a walk. Except he keeps his head up which is Not the Way to Do It. Hands and feet on the floor, butt in the air.

Low lunge—using the other leg. Same teetering. Booker hasn’t come any closer so he seems to feel no immediate threat if I should happen to land sideways on the floor.

Back bend—gracefully return to standing and bend backward. Uh-huh.

Mountain pose—back to where we started.

There are a prescribed number of breaths you are supposed to hold each pose for. Nothing I’ve found says anything about the prescribed number of pants and grunts for each pose so I sort of made it up as I went along. Since I was by myself, no one seemed to mind.

In all honesty, I felt GREAT after I did two salutations Monday morning. I think you’re supposed to do a lot more and hold the poses a lot longer than the 5 seconds I did. But seriously I felt fabulous. I decided I would do them every morning.

Uh-huh.

Tuesday morning Life got in the way, but I don’t remember why. Wednesday morning I brought the yoga mat down to the family room thinking that trying to do the poses on the mat would be better than slipping and sliding around on the rug. Once I’d gotten that far, Life shoved in front of me. I tried yelling “No Cuts” but it didn’t have any effect.

So I thought I would do a set Wednesday after work and before Pi got home.

Let me go on record as saying that you really can’t cook ground turkey and do Sun Salutations at the same time. It is not graceful. It is not invigorating. It is not even safe. It is entertaining if you are a bystander who happens to be standing by and watching. Booker found it all highly enjoyable. Or perhaps he was just hoping some of the turkey would fall on the floor.

Tomorrow I will definitely do Sun Salutations in the morning. I hope.

Love, Mom

Dear Kid,

The first day of September has come and gone. The good news is that we’ll have a Sept 1 again next year. The bad news is that this year’s is past, never to be seen again. Enjoy today because tomorrow will be too late for 9/2/13.

Did you follow all that? I hope so.

Yesterday was a calm but wildly productive day. Got a bunch of cooking and some cleaning done in preparation for Grandma and Grandpa arriving on Wednesday. I love, love, love having them here. I only wish I had elves that worked harder to get the house presentable.

It’s a good thing I don’t live in a time when women are expected to make bread on a regular basis. First of all, you know how I feel about expectations. Secondly, kneading requires Serious Effort, which is why all those women had fabulous triceps. Mine are whining about even having to type this.

As we have long established, Bobby Flay, et al., have nothing to worry about in terms of competition from me. I remembered the raisins for the challah (yay), but we didn’t have enough white flour. Pi and I decided I could use wheat flour so what we can say for sure is that the challahs (or challot if you prefer) are round, raisin filled, and finished. What they taste like remains to be seen.

Et al is the abbreviation for the Latin et alia. Et alia literally means “and others.” It is used as a scholarly way of saying “and all the other dudes of a similar ilk but it would be too inconvenient to list them all here.” You can see why et al is a better option. Not to be confused with El Al which literally translated means “tourists flying to Israel.”

But here’s the Yup-That’s-My-Mom kicker: While the loaves were busy rising, I found the white flour. I knew we had more. I even looked on the shelves in the basement (where I eventually found it) and it Was Not There The First Time I looked. Seriously. Sneaky darn elves. Little guys need to spend more time cleaning and less time moving unsuspecting bags of flour around.

Also got the apple kugel made. Booker thinks apple kugel is much better than challah because random bits of apple falling on the floor are much more to his liking than random fluffs of whole wheat flour puffing into the air and making him sneeze.

Have a great Labor Day!

Love, Mom

Dear Kid,

Well, it’s going to be One of Those Days. It’s barely today and so far I have killed the blender (complete with plastic shrapnel flying all over the kitchen), spilled nail polish on my pants, crashed my computer, and lost a hubcap.

I can hardly wait to see what happens in the next hour.

I have a knack for killing blenders. No one has ever accused me of being a culinary genius and I have had my fair share of kitchen disasters  (usually involving burning the bottom of pots, smoking up the kitchen, or both). But I don’t generally destroy appliances. Except blenders. No idea why that is. Any thoughts?

There are days where the blender dies and the nail polish spills. In the 80s they were generically called Bad Hair Days. It just didn’t matter what you did, your hair was simply not going to follow any part of a plan. It was hair throwing a tantrum. With a lot of hairspray. Which made the Bad Hair Day worse because hair looked shellacked and you inhaled a lot of sticky aerosol fumes. Yum.

I have no what the current equivalent is. One of THOSE Days will just have to do for now.

On the positive side, I recovered the hubcap and it is now riding happily inside the car, taking up space and not doing it’s job. If you’re in the mood to bash something, may I suggest replacing the hubcap as a suitable use for excess energy.

Incidentally, I checked with the Car Talk Dudes about hubcaps. According to Tom and Ray, hubcaps look good (and might prevent mushrooms from growing in the backseat) but they serve no other purpose. I am, however, a great believer in a bit of bling, so back on goes the hubcap.

Hope you have a much better start to your day.

Love, Mom