food

Cooking with Kids

I don’t want to write about Covid City today. Instead I want to brag about my kid. Right before social distancing went into place, my food-loving five-year-old was featured on “Podcast not Podcast with Christopher Burns” where he shared all about cooking for the family. He had recently made a broccoli stew and mashed potatoes with radish for us, and was thrilled that they’d turned out to be actually tasty. Since then, L has gone on to create “delicious sparrow cake,” which did not contain sparrows and was also not a cake but was delicious, as well as a mushroom soup inspired by a Mexican recipe from one of my mom’s old cookbooks.

L has always loved food. At three months, he grabbed a chip out of my hand and tried to eat it. At 18 months, he asked to sniff the different herbs I was using and said, “Mmmmmm,” after smelling the basil. At three years, he suggested adding cinnamon to a curry I was cooking, and he was right. By this point, he can chop up vegetables, select the proper ingredients, and mix them together all on his own. He’s willing to taste anything and genuinely appreciates good food; one of his favorite meals is fresh fish, salad, and broccoli stalks soaked in vinegar. And in the play kitchen in his room, which he refers to as his restaurant, L concocts all kinds of recipes with such earnestness that when the baby crawls over, he says, “No no, baby, the stove is hot right now.”

It’s such a beautiful experience to watch my kid explore and enjoy food in this way, especially considering my own fraught history with food and eating. Even though I had recovered from anorexia nearly eight years before I got pregnant with L, all the research about how eating disorders run in families had me worried that I’d somehow pass it on. Seeing my kid chef work in the kitchen is such a joy on so many levels.

Listen to L’s interview below, and stay tuned for details on his new dinosaur-themed chain of restaurants, coming soon to a city near you (“When I’m an adult, I’m going to be a paleontologist and open my own restaurant”).

“Mashed Potatoes with Radish” – Podcast not Podcast with Christopher Burns

Delicious sparrow cake

Resolution: Relax

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Having two children is next level in every way imaginable: the busyness, the joy, the lack of sleep, the love, the extremely fast and disorienting pace in which it all goes by. M sits up now. L reads (he reads!). The two of them cuddle and stare deeply at one another, full of adoration. Future arguments and fist fights feel far away; I’m sure when they arrive, they will feel too soon. Despite the fact that I spend a good chunk of my day staring at dates on a calendar, moving the logistics of our lives around like a jigsaw puzzle, I can’t believe it’s already 2020. Time has become impossible to comprehend.

The passing of a year has marked me, too. My face and neck are wrinklier, my hair longer and wilder, my nerves a bit more frayed. Yet I am also happier, more focused, more impressed and in awe of myself than ever before. There is no confidence booster like birthing a baby in the backseat of a car; I can do anything now! And somehow, in the middle of this barely-controlled chaos also known as raising two kids, I feel more at peace than ever—or perhaps just more acquiesced, which, I suppose, is a version of peace.

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My mom’s birthday recently came and went, another marker of time that continues to confuse me. She would have been 66 this past Christmas Eve. We ate pinto beans with a ham hock over cornbread, followed by cookies we’d made from her handwritten recipes. She was all around us, happy in our offerings. I like how death and birth stop time. Or rather, how they take us beyond time. Time doesn’t stop, it refuses everything except forward motion, but in death and in birth, we go beyond.

2019 was so extremely full. Beautiful and powerful and transformative, but also, A LOT. I am ready for a year of less, though of course I have no control over how much, or how little, comes my way. Perhaps it’s wiser to let go of any expectations and instead find more moments to relax, even within all this muchness. Time won’t slow down, but I can.

Grappling with Thanksgiving

I love turkey and cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie. I love passing on family traditions to my toddler. And I especially love sandwiches stuffed with Thanksgiving leftovers. But y’all, we have got to stop with this ridiculous story about the Pilgrims and Indians becoming friends over an ear of corn and living happily ever after.

I get that people want one good meal with their families, just one day of eating and drinking and not worrying about everything else. But it’s not like we’re doing this on a random Thursday afternoon. We’re doing this on a national holiday based upon a colonial myth that enables the horrible and ongoing mistreatment of indigenous Americans. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t enjoy the day, but maybe while we’re eating our turkey and cranberry sauce, we should also consider discussing the truth about our country’s history and how we can take action to support present-day indigenous communities.

My idea is not perfect, but as a parent of a three-year-old, I’ve decided to focus on learning about the Tuscarora, a Native American tribe based in New York. The website I’ve chosen to use as my guide offers facts about things like their traditional foods, toys, and hunting tools, how they fled from North Carolina to New York because the British attacked them, and what their lives are like now. My plan is to read these facts aloud, pass around some pictures, and talk. Then, after exploring these materials, I’m going to pull up this list of online stores run by Native Americans and pick out something with my son. We white folk too often purchase “Native-inspired” products from places like H&M or Target instead of giving our money directly to the Native American artists who did the inspiring in the first place – many of whom are living in poverty despite the fact they’re making the authentic versions of the products we seem to want.

On this Thanksgiving, I am grateful for many things, including the opportunity to learn about our Native American neighbors, to spread the truth about our history, to use my money to support an amazing community, and to hopefully inspire my son to do his part in making this country a truly more equal and accepting place.

Huge thanks to Jen Winston (@girlsupplypower) for inviting Native Americans to take over her Instagram site this week and educate and motivate people like me. Check out Allen (lilnativeboy), Urban Native Era, Corinne Oestreich, #DearNonNatives, Tranny Cita, and Cleopatra Tatbele for more info on how to support Native Americans.

Photo credits:
N085/365 Corn Doll by Helen Orozco