Plum days

Seven years after moving to Prague, I’m wearing my first pair of Czech bought jeans today. Okay, so they were about double the price I would have spent in the U.S. for a pair of jeans. And one day post purchase, the decorative rivets have started to decorate our floors. But these jeans did come from a shop a mere block from our flat, were hemmed to just the right length and as a finishing touch, came with a beaded key chain, courtesy of the shop owner’s sister.

Most importantly, however, these jeans fit. They fit! After twelve weeks of counting the numbers in the food I eat, I have counted myself down to the size I was before I moved to Prague. This is mostly a good thing, but it means that I no longer fit into any of the clothes that hang in my closet, and I shuffle around walking like a rumpled penguin. Having to hitch up my trousers every five minutes almost made me revert back to eating cookies in the afternoon. Thus, the rivetless jeans.

The hardest part about all of this counting wasn’t telling myself I didn’t want to eat something but telling other people. You try explaining to your daughter’s grandmotherly baby sitter that, no you still think several slices of homemade gingerbread aren’t on the menu for you today, even if you stand up to eat them.

I seem to have finally persuaded her. Today, to celebrate the new pair of jeans, our sitter arrived carrying a giant paper bucket from KFC.

It was full of plums. Does anyone know a good recipe for plum jam? Or maybe a compote recipe would do. We've got about a hundred and fifty here ready to cook, at last count.

Brown Bear redux

Did I mention that Caroline is telling her books to us now? She’s been working on this for a bit - first lip syncing as I read to her, then echoing every line or jumping ahead to reach a favorite word or phrase before I get there. Sometimes during the day you can hear her rehearsing: "Do you like my hat? No, I do not like your hat. Good-bye! Good-bye!"

We often read the same book three times in one night. This is not always fun, especially if you and the Cat and the Hat don’t get along so well. So now I say that third time through is Caroline’s turn and hand over the book. Sometimes she’ll go for this, and ramble through the story ad libbing as she turns each page. She’s a perfectionist though and eventually she gets dissastisfied. In the middle of her account she’ll decide it‘s time to sing songs, or do something else more entertaining, or at least less work.

Then we tried Brown Bear. Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? by Bill Martin Jr. is a simple story book with beautiful illustrations and a catchy bit of repeated chatter: "(Brightly colored animal), what do you see?" "I see (another brightly colored animal) looking at me." Caroline loved it when she was a little baby, but we hadn't read it for nearly a year when I pulled it out again a few nights ago.

And discovered that the book is great for reading by heart because "what you see" is always the animal on the next page. Brown Bear sees Red Bird and Red Bird see Yellow Duck, and Caroline can easily keep going through blue horse, green frog, and on to gold fish with no problem. This is satisfying.

With Brown Bear, Caroline doesn’t let forgetting her lines phase her. The first time she read almost all the way through with no problems until she reached nearly the last page and realized she had no idea who the lady with glasses might be. She blinked twice, renamed the teacher "Green Shirt," and moved on with a flourish. Finished, she cheered in victory, gave me a high five and ran to the other room to tell Will, "Dada I did it!"

Now at night I ask her to read me Brown Bear, Brown Bear all by herself. She’ll go for it once or twice, but by the third time she’ll tell me, "Okay Mommie, how about a new one, this book looks good too don’t you think?" And I’ll say yes, and stretch out on the bed with my hands behind my head to hear the next rendition of stories from Caroline.

Kaštan creatures

A few days ago Caroline and one of her sitters came home with a bag full of chestnuts, some pine cones and a feather or two. They’d had a fun hunt in Petrin park, and I thought that a fine thing, a great activity on a September day when the chestnuts are falling and the leaves are crisped just right for scuffing through. Caroline and Jarka and I talked in our roundabout way about about the word for pine cones in Czech (šiška) and what type of bird the feather might have fallen from (my guess, pigeon). Then I went back to work.

Two hours later I found out that chestnuts aren’t just for keeping in your pocket for good luck.

Morning poem

Though I admire the morning and wish it most well, I prefer to greet it after a shower or at least a hot cup of coffee and fifteen minutes worth of waking up in front of the New York Times. When I told Will I was going to try my hand at writing a morning poem, following mytypography.com's lead, he said, "Good thing 'grrr grrr grrr' rhymes." He’d just delivered me a cup of tea so I didn’t hold it against him. Plus I’d already written the poem. For a precis, see grrr grrr grrr.

A Scrabble morning
"Draw the blinds", she said and
Craned her neck to view the ashen sky,
thinking - Victorian phrases,
that's what I'm left with.
What are the words for today?
"Stunned by sleep", "bitter", "sore"...

I slide those tiles from the table,
no points won,
stretch my pajammed legs and
pad to the kitchen for coffee.

Coloring book lessons

C and I had a colorful morning. We paper-machéd a jar to make a lantern (thanks to the directions of Be*mused) and then, while our jar sat to dry, we pulled out the magic markers. These are much fun and many colors and have I mentioned French, so their allure is strong and I was pretty quick about getting Caroline set to color a playground scene I’d drawn for her. Then I got absorbed into my own world of pens and paper. When I looked up again I realized she had colored in a one inch by half inch swing set - yellow, and quite thoroughly, but that was it. She was prepared to rework that swing and already the paper was nearly see through. I persuaded her to switch to a coloring book, to a picture of a train, and she took her yellow pen in hand, and then stopped.

She stopped because the picture had no yellow in it. Of course it didn’t, you might say, she hadn’t colored it yet, but what I mean is this - a lot of Czech coloring books have the picture on one page already illustrated, right next to the page waiting to be colored. Her illustrated train was blue, with pink wheels, and a black smoke stack. Yellow? No.

Czech kindergartens and her babysitters seem to put a lot of emphasis on coloring in the lines, and of not getting too loosie goosie with the colors. If Zdenek Miller colored his butterflies orange and brown, so should we all. Maybe this is good for hand-eye coordination and learning how to match colors, but I sometimes paint my skies apricot and my seas orange and I like to draw without thinking about it and for fun. So when I see her shoulders all wound up concentrating on getting something right, I don’t quite know what to say. She’s three after all and mostly acts rather than listens.

Caroline gave me the yellow (here you go mommie, your turn), picked up the pink and started to copy the pink train wheels into her picture, as careful as any three year old possibly could be. But try as she might, she accidentally filled in the white hubcaps on those wheels. Hm...she said, then shifted up to the already illustrated picture and used her marker to pink up its white hubcaps, and was done.

I decided to save my lecture on looseness for another day. The jar spent all day drying, while we went triking and roller blading and ate ice cream by the river. It is now a lantern alit outside my window, rather twinkly and blue.

Hatmatilka to some, poetry to others

Sometimes my job involves reading contracts. They start out shiny and smooth on the surface, impenetrable. I tend to get a lot of other work done before I read a page. Then I’ll reward myself with coffee, sit down again and realize I haven’t absorbed a thing. That’s when I pick up my pen and start drawing. ?? and "what in the.." and before I know it that contract has lost its hermetically sealed look and become something a bit turfy and easy on the eye. The work gets fun then and I argue my way through each clause until I’m done. It’s a lot like reading Wallace Stevens, actually.

Except that, working in Prague on contracts written by non-English speakers in English, I’m bound to find a humdinger of a sentence that just doesn’t work backwards or forwards. So sometimes I send it over to my Czech business partner, ask him to think about it in Czech and then in English again and see what we can figure out. (His hourly rates are a lot better than the lawyer‘s.) It mostly works.

Yesterday I sent him one of my humdingers, prefaced with "gobbledygook coming your way!" Gobbledygook was a new word for him and we looked it up. Lingea Lexicon gave us hatmatilka as its Czech equivalent. My etymology dictionary told me that hatmatilka is from the expression hat' mat', which is similar to hatla patla and halabala and related somehow to Halí belí, the Czech song and nursery rhyme that Caroline currently has stuck in my head from incessant singing. If anyone can tell me what hat' mat' means I’d be most appreciative. In the meantime:

hatla patla and halabala = seem to mean slapdash or shoddy. I love learning words like that, they just seem to stick in my mind somehow.

Halí, belí...
Halí, belí, koně v zelí
a hříbátka v petrželi.

Whoops, the horse is in the cabbage
And the colt in the parsley.

Okay, enough procrastination, back to clause 10.4.1.

Duck sounds so complicated

But it's not.

Sunday night I headed to the grocery store, list in hand to make a Czech-Mex dinner - chicken, tacos and salsa fresca. Will wanted to use up our taco shells and I thought it might be a good way to distract myself from thoughts of French food. When I got home though, I found that the chicken breasts I thought I’d bought had welded themselves together into one large duck breast, with bones. We nixed Mexican and decided to see what our cookbooks might recommend.

They didn’t. A duck complete was called for in all instances. Epicurious however, had several suggestions. And I finally found a use for the multitude of fennel seeds in our larder (in Prague, the spice sold as "cumin" is in fact fennel.* We have accidentally accumulated enough to season several potato fields).

Ingredients
1 duck breast, deboned (cooking shears make this an easy job)
2 garlic cloves, minced
1 tsp, fresh rosemary, chopped
1 tsp, fennel seeds, ground (caraway seeds work too)
2 tsp olive oil
salt and pepper to taste
cooking twine (finally found a use for the string that comes with Will’s favorite French sausages)

Instructions
Preheat oven to 400F (200C)
Wash, dry, salt and pepper your duck. Place it on a plate, skin side down.
In a small bowl, combine garlic, rosemary and fennel with enough olive oil to make it all stick together. Rub seasoning into meat. Don’t be shy, really rub it in, your taste buds will thank you later.
Roll up duck, skin side out. Secure with string. Two seem to work.

Heat oven-proof skillet over medium high heat on the stove. When skillet is hot, add the duck roll. Brown for about 10 minutes, turning to make sure every side gets toasty looking. When nice and brown, pour off fat and pop skillet (and duck!) into hot oven. Roast for 15 minutes, turning duck every now and then. Remove from oven and let it sit for 10 minutes. Only then, snip off twine, unroll duck and slice. - Makes enough for 2 adults plus 1 slightly picky 3 year old.

************
So incredibly simple. You don’t even need a sauce because duck is tremendously juicy and drippy (also why you don’t need to oil the skillet). Will licked his plate clean. I forgave the Czech grocery stores for not being in France, and when Caroline finished she said "ok, kde je moje pain au chocolat?" (Where is my chocolate croissant in Czechfrenchlish).

*Actually, the spice sold as cumin (kmín) is in fact caraway seed, as Dana quite rightly points out here. Will claims confusion and says he gets caraway and fennel mixed up in English too. Just to let you know, the caraway seeds tasted great with the duck.

Home from vacation

I entertained myself on the long car ride yesterday by coming up with a list of what I was looking forward to doing when I got home. Top of the list - sleeping on my own bed. After a week in France, my list did not include "going to the grocery store." Nor did the list mention "drinking pastis with orgeat at the little cafe at the bottom of a ravine by the side of a gorgeous river," or "star gazing in the fields next to our house and counting shooting stars." But I wish it did.

Because I love French grocery stores, I do. Actually, both Will and I do and now that we have a three year old, we will happily exchange a morning at the crowded local French town free-for-all market half filled with stands selling patchouli soap and pottery made in China for thirty minutes in the wide (uncrowded) aisles of the Super U admiring the yogurt, cheese, jam, cookies, sausage, wine, olives, chicken, chocolate.

And pastis tasted so perfect on that river, so much better than it ever tastes in Prague or anywhere other than the Mediterranean in the afternoon on a hot dry sunny day with old men playing bocce between the sycamore trees and children (ours too) playing in the fountain.

I will find the stars but they will not be right outside my door. I miss them tonight.

Happy Birthday Ellen!

Happy Birthday Ee! I love you.

J on our birthday

 

The grapes of August

This season’s grapes have arrived, and the boxes outside the fruit and veggie stores all along our street are dripping with them. Walking home from work on Friday I saw the green and thought "the fox and the grapes", and imagined an illustration for Caroline’s room, and then my stomach rumbled and I abandoned foxes and remembered a chicken recipe my grandmother used to make. Epicurious came through as it usually does and miraculously so did our grocery store.

It was a delicious early fall dinner, just perfect for celebrating the grapes, looking forward to the new wine that is nearly ready to pour and enjoying a delicious Ryzlink from a few years ago.

Chicken and Grapes
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 whole chicken breast, halved and pounded flat
1 shallot, minced
1 garlic clove, minced
2 teaspoons all-purpose flour (mouka hladka)
1/3 cup Riesling/Ryzlink
1/2 cup chicken broth
2 teaspoons fresh lemon juice (juice from 1 lemon)
1/8 teaspoon dried thyme, crumbled
1/4 pound green grapes, halved crosswise and seeded (about 3/4 cups)

For the instructions, check out the recipe at epicurious.

Hello Garfield

Caroline is an affectionate person, to a certain point. At night when I put her to bed she’ll hook her arms around my neck and not let go, coercing me to lie next to her for just a little bit. It is hard to resist that hook, since so often these days she spends her time practicing to be twelve, scowling at me and telling us vigorously to shhh when we say something distasteful to her (as in, just about anything she didn’t think of herself). So the hook works, and she can keep me for that little bit, until her delight turns to wiggles and she starts poking and prodding, or (if she’s feeling particularly silly) licking my glasses. But while she’s physically demonstrative, she’s not much for saying I love you, and has come up with her own version of the last bit of my good night ritual, when I say I love you, and she says hello garfield.

Helloo Garfield.

It took me a week or two to figure out this Garfield business, and it wasn't until tonight, lying beside her while we sang our good night songs and enjoyed the end of a fine weekend, that I realized what had happened. When I said I love you, she used to mumble I luv you or even I guv you. Then one night she switched to I Garfield, then to Hi Garfield. Tonight, perhaps inevitably, she decided on Hello Garfield. As a teenage three year old I guess she thought that even the cool kids couldn’t figure that one out, should she slip up and say it on the playground one day.

Ancient Egyptian a/c

Yesterday the sun baked our flat to its highest temperatures yet - something like 89F at 9 at night. This was a bit much even for our southern souls, and I decided to get creative with my cooling technique.

Inspired by a vague memory of a drawing of Egyptians fanning ice, I grabbed most of the ice packs from the freezer (we have an abundance, unused most of the year) and reverently placed them in front of our one fan. Then Caroline and I arranged ourselves Cleopatra style in front of the fan/ice setting, and waited. I took notes while Caroline tried to decide if it were possible to eat the ice packs, unstopper them or generally use them as weapons of chaos and destruction.

Once Caroline got tired of pretending to be Cleopatra, and the ice packs lost their icey edge and turned into wet packs we undid the arrangement and each tried our own technique.

Caroline draped a wet sheet around herself and refused to remove it.

I placed one last ice pack on my head and walked around quite elegantly and absurdly.

Will froze a beer to slush and drank it while lying on the floor and listening to music.

At midnight the flat had cooled down enough for me to get perky. So then I went to sleep.

* My notes: The air in front of the fan did get cooler as the ice in the packs started to melt (classic evaporative cooling). We decided it would have been even cooler if the packs were set in water - tonight’s experiment!

Counting, counting, numbers are for counting

Song Caroline likes to sing from her favorite Winnie the Pooh dvd, refrain running through my head these last few weeks as we track every heller and koruna we spend as an exercise in summer frugality. There is something oddly addicting about keeping track of daily life this way, so after a week I began looking around for something more to count. It didn't take long for me to add food eaten and calories burned to my opened often excel collection.

Watching the numbers add up each day has taught me more lessons than I expected it would. First lesson: the interesting relationship between calorie burning and consumerism. It’s obvious that when I don’t leave the house and instead work at home, I save a lot of money. No sandwich at lunch, no magazines or placemats purchased on the spur of the moment. But staying at home means that my daily walk to work is, well, nonexistent. I try to make up for it by pacing when I talk on the phone, doing lunges, toe lifts and other hanging about in a small space type exercises but the calorie burn just doesn't happen.

This week, I worked mostly at home. The thermometer kept registering 37 and beyond on our balcony, and when the mercury reaches numbers like that, our western facing office feels more like the inside of a bakery with the oven doors all open than a space for thinking. So I stayed at home, worked diligently, saved money, and was slothful. Until today. Today, I went to dance class.

.....

That rolls off well don’t you think? I’ve already casually inserted that information into at least two sms and three IM conversations (yeah, just back from dance, and you?) but I do believe that this could well have been and in fact, okay, it was, my first dance class.

I didn’t fall down. Hurray!

Actually it went even better than that, and I credit the fun to the teacher who is a friend of mine and not only a great dancer, but a damn good programmer, business analyst and knitter. She patiently worked us through the routine, matching the music to our pace - slow slow slow slow slow until we had some twenty moves learned, and then we danced, fast, hip hop.

I can’t wait to show Caroline some of these moves when she next pulls out our dancing shoes. She’ll probably wonder what I’ve been up to while she’s been at the swimming pool staying cool. Maybe I should think about putting together a hip hop disney mix. Hm...

In the meantime, I’m heading back to dance class next week. Let the numbers add up, it‘s worth every cent.