Cookies - very intense and, I guess, marginally healthy, cribbed from some vegan cookbook at the library
256g/1c peanut butter 1/4 c oil 1 c of some kind of sugar or a mix of kinds (turbinado, evaporated cane juice, brown sugar) 6 T vegan milk 2 t vanilla 2 c whole wheat flour 2 c rolled oats 1 t baking powder 1/2 t salt mix-ins, I did 1/2 c nuts and 1/2 c chocolate chips
Do it muffin style, wets and drys separately then together, then the mix-ins. Make biggish cookies that you'll need to shape and flatten with wet hands. I guess I baked them at 375.
Updated. This recipe might be less reliable than usual.The fake mole the dev team went nuts for.
2 guajillo chiles 4 Ancho chiles 6 cloves garlic 28 oz can whole tomatoes 2-3 tablespoons olive oil 1/2 tsp salt squirt of agave 1/4 c cocoa powder 1 c toasted pumpkin seeds, ground in a food processsor Dash liquid smoke
Cut off the tops and pull most of the seeds out of the chiles. Open them up so they lay flat more or less. Toast in a medium hot frying pan by pressing each side of the chile into the pan with a spatula until it smells good. Toast the garlic cloves in their skins similarly. Soak the chiles in hot water for about 30 mins.
Put the canned tomatoes (not the juice they come in) with the rehydrated chiles and garlic in a blender. Blend until smooth. Add the cocoa powder and blend again. Heat up a medium-large saucepan up as high as it will go. Add the oil and then the sauce. Lower the heat and simmer about 5 minutes to thicken. Add ground pumpkin seeds. Adjust with salt, liquid smoke and agave. I might have put lime juice in it.
I am so exhausted. I'm not tired from getting to work before 6am every morning last week, and not from working all day Friday and then flying home late at night, and not from getting up early this morning to work before I led services.
Last week I made 12 presentations in the newsroom. I wanted to give as many people as possible the opportunity to look me in the eye and ask me questions about this new app. It is potentially a game changer - which means that it is potentially very frightening - which means I owe it to them to talk to them in person.
My poor introverted psyche is utterly battered, not at all comforted by the pizza and alcohol team-building night with the app team or my Millennials who need reassurance and advice.
I need to hide in my house, ride my bike, cook for my family.
I feel numb. After five weeks of asking for metrics and not getting any on my part of this huge project, they came back on Thursday in a vague, secondhand way. What I have been doing has not - as they say - moved the needle. God, I wish I had known this three weeks ago when I first started agitating for the metrics, pointing out that the data they had couldn't possibly be right, hounding the devs into looking into how the client was reporting to GA. I could have been trying other things, making different choices.
There are so many more things that I want to try, but I don't know if I am going to get the chance. They might just say, forget what you are doing. You had five weeks and you have no metrics to show for it.
I hardly slept last night, and tonight I have to take this red-eye that doesn't even leave until 1am. Tomorrow afternoon is a huge meeting where we have to report on what we did to the big bosses and I am going to have to say, I did nothing of value.
I am flying into this ice storm, and maybe we will be on essential staff only at the office tomorrow. Non-essential staff work from home when this happens. I don't want to work from G's house because his little kids will want me to pay attention to them. I don't even pay attention to my own children, I am so obsessed with this work project. I am actually considering going in to the office and just sleeping on the couch in the lounge instead of going to G's, showering in the bike room. I don't feel fit to be around children.
B had a rough several days. He called me at the end of track practice, that desperate quaver in his voice. He'd had $60 stolen from his wallet. "I was going to take it to the bank to deposit it," he said.
"Just come home," I said. "It happens." I wanted to give him $60, but I know that in life, when you lose money you lose it, and your mom is not standing there to make it better.
It does. "I'm not carrying any cash any more ever," he said, and a few days later an envelope from Clipper showed up in the mailbox with his name on it. It's a card to pay for BART and the bus.
Then he came home late from the park. "I've been looking for my headphones for the last two hours!" he said. He has (or had) very nice bluetooth earbuds that everyone in my family pooled money to buy for him for Christmas. They are really, really nice, and he had them in his bag - along with the phones of all the guys he was hanging out with. They kept going in and out of his bag all day long, and somewhere his expensive bluetooth headphones fell out.
I was surprised. All through elementary school, B never lost a jacket or a lunchbox. He's had his iPod Touch for a year and a half and never misplaced it. I had no misgivings about him having these headphones because I had total confidence that he would not lose them.
These headphones are also important because they are our compromise at bedtime. I don't want him to have anything in his room that can connect to the internet, including his iPod. He wants to listen to podcasts as he falls asleep. The compromise is that the iPod stays in the dining room and he can listen on his bluetooth.
Now they are gone. "What did I do wrong?" he asked. He got that crazy, teary look in his eye. "What did I do wrong?"
Many, many, many times I wanted to say, "I'll just buy you more." I am making a ton of money these days, and more bluetooth headphones would not be a big deal. He is so distressed and I could make him feel better so, so easily. But I know that in life, when you lose something, your mom is not right there to buy you another one.
Even more, I know that buying him another one sets up the expectation that there might be someone who will just fix it for you when things don't go your way. There are plenty of young people in our office who act like that. They had parents like me, who had the means to just make it better any time something went wrong. They act entitled to accommodations they don't deserve. They expect everyone else to rearrange for them. Right here, at 14 years old, I see where that comes from and I'm not going to do it. Not even if it would be so easy for me to make B feel so much better with so little effort from me.
I walked in the house this afternoon and said, "I have to--"
"Don't say 'work.'" B said.
"Work," I said.
It's all I've been doing lately, every evening and seven days a week. I have never worked this much before in my life, I don't think. When I was on the desk, at least I had weekends off. Now it's relentless and constant. I don't feel like it's a drag, though, because I have never been this challenged in my life. I'm making program now, thinking about how it can be done in the future, constructing a system that is flexible enough that, when I am done, someone who is a more creative thinker can come in and make it even more beautiful.
"Wait, Ima, how do you crack an egg?" B asked. He was totally serious.
"How do you crack an egg?" I said back, as if he were the stupidest person on the planet. Yesterday I showed him how to make scrambled eggs (a little water, whisk well, super hot pan, have your plate ready, take them out before they are fully cooked) and he wanted to make them for himself today.
"Yeah, I mean, what do you do?" he held the egg in his hand awkwardly.
Right.
If you cook with kids, the thing you have them do after they have mastered dumping and stirring is crack the eggs. B did a lot of cooking with me, graduated to knives and food processors and the stovetop, but never had occasion to crack an egg because I never taught him to cook something he wasn't going to eat.
I showed him with one egg: flat surface, split it open, save the shell to feed back to the chickens. He took the other one and hit it against the counter. I said, "It has to crack more." He hit it again, then turned it so the crack faced up and started to dig his index fingers into the crack. "Wait, no, put your thumbs in and turn it over so it falls into the bowl," I said. He was doing it so wrong, it was comical. It was like he was a feral child, with no idea how society worked, trying to figure out what a flush toilet was for.
*
Both B and R have been asking me how to make an over-easy egg. "You need to ask Grandpa to teach you," I tell them both. The other night when I was frying eggs R asked again, "Can I do the part where you cut the whites?" "No," I said. "If you want to learn to make eggs, you need to talk to Grandpa."
The baby chicks came on Monday. It's been a long time since we've had them, and I had absolutely forgotten how delicate and vulnerable they are. Every part of them is fragile, and I could so easily crush one by just picking her up. We always lose a few, and when they die their bodies seem to collapse as if all of their volume was air.
R gets so worried about the ones who look like they might not make it. I wonder how she thinks about what is going to happen to the ones that live.
A lot of the conflict with B comes at the dinner table because that's the only place where all four of us are present. I don't want to give up on family dinner, even if he makes it miserable, because family dinner has always been the basic touchstone of our family.
B is aggressive about every part of it, including when we start to eat. We used to serve ourselves all of the dishes, then someone would say a blessing, then we all would eat. Now, as soon as everyone has some tiny bit of food on their plate, B spits out the blessing and dives in, even if nobody else is ready to eat.
But ... he says the blessing. He could just start eating, but he doesn't. The blessing is still there, hurried and aggressive, but it does not occur to him to leave it out.
I am going to claim this as a small success of parenting, no matter how small.
Later yesterday afternoon, E said, "I think you are singing tomorrow morning."
"That's next week," I said. We had the rehearsal for the Bat Mitzvah on Wednesday. It wasn't as unpleasant as I was led to believe it might be.
"No, it says right here that you are singing tomorrow, too." E pointed at the calendar.
Usually if I am going to lead on Saturday morning at the synagogue I will practice. If it's a big event, I'll sing all week. If it's a smaller service, I'll just sing it through on Friday. (If I am leading at the havurah, I plan all week because I want to make it special. At the synagogue, I'm just following one of the rabbis so I don't have to be as prepared.)
I should sing it through, I thought, but I was more interested in cooking a nice dinner for our guests and I never got around to it.
I didn't sing particularly well, by which I mean I could tell that my voice was not as clear as it could be. I also fumbled a little of the Hebrew. It was fine. In fact, I felt really good about it, even though I could have done so much better. I was very relaxed on the bima and I felt like the rabbi and I were communicating well.
Also, I guess, I stress out way more when I am less than perfect at the havurah. I care more about the good opinion of that small group, I think, than I do about the people in the bigger congregation. I am more invested there, and I am more concerned about my longterm reputation.
