The rest

Jupiter is almost six months old and he just keeps getting more and more awesome. He sits and plays and jumps in his jumper and sleeps better and has three teeth and is growing hair and eating solid food and...I could go on. But as he gets older, the changes happen more and more slowly and I find myself not having the fodder for frequent blog posts.

So it's time to move beyond the boy to look at the rest of my life again. To take up the earlier raison d'etre for this blog: my love/hate relationship with the traditionally feminine arts. This includes motherhood, but it also includes so much more. And perhaps keeping this blog more up to date will inspire me to return to those pursuits now that I can actually do things while Jupiter is awake. Right now, for example, we're both sitting on the rug in the living room listening to Mozart. He's contentedly eating his obnoxiously expensive Sophie toy and I'm writing to you.

Sophie the giraffe is something, isn't she? Here's an article in the LA Times about her. In my defense, she's made of natural rubber and food-grade paint and, hell, she's French. How could I resist? Jupiter agrees. He loves to chew on her hooves and horns. If only our dog didn't want to eat Sophie so badly. I am constantly on Sophie-Alert in our house, lest our dog turn our beloved Sophie into a gnarly (high-priced) dog toy.

So along the lines of sharing my broader life, today I am cooking Mark Bittman's recipe for Chicken Adobo. It is gloriously simple. And the greatest part is that I can pre-cook part of the recipe during the day while Jupe naps, then leave it in the fridge and finish it in the broiler just before we eat. I hope it's as good as he says it is.

Last night I made his recipe for Pad Thai but had to use bean thread noodles since our local giant corporate grocery store doesn't carry rice noodles, and it turned out not so good. Granted, we didn't use shrimp (instead subbing in scallions, mushrooms and peanuts) and it was a very simple recipe, but the ratio of noodles to sauce was pitifully lacking. I ended up feeling like I ate a big bowl of flavored noodles. Blech.

Ta for now.

[UPDATE: I posted Bittman's Pad Thai recipe without reading the article, assuming that it was the same one that's in his famous How To Cook Everything. Well, my version of that book is more than 10 years old and perhaps Bittman has perfected the recipe since then because the recipe I linked to looks much better than the one I made from my book last night. I'll have to try this new one.]

[UPDATE #2: Whoa. I am so thirsty. The Chicken Adobo sauce was SALTY. But we used cheap (Kikoman) soy sauce and perhaps using high-quality stuff like Bittman suggests in the article, or maybe cheap but low-sodium mass market soy sauce, might have been better for my blood pressure.]