Happy World Breastfeeding Week/National Breastfeeding Month from Eden and me

Almond meal pancakes

This is sort of a compendium of several almond meal pancake recipes out there. Why almond meal? Because since it's made of ground nuts (specifically, almonds--skins and all) instead of grains, it's mostly protein and fat instead of mostly empty carbohydrates. You can make your own, but since trader Joe's sells it for about $3.99 a pound, we opted for ready-made. Having had experience with cooking substitutes before--especially for pancakes, having made egg-free, milk-free, and now grain-free varieties--we were surprised and delighted with how "normally" the almond meal batter behaved. Some sources say to make your pancakes small, since these don't bind quite like regular pancakes, but we made ours in a cast-iron pan and didn't have any trouble at all. We doubled the batch and ended up with about 18 medium pancakes, and had no trouble finishing them off ourselves!

Almond Meal Pancakes

3/4 cup almond meal

2 eggs

1/4 cup milk

2 Tbsp melted butter

1 tsp baking powder

Pinch of salt

Drizzle of maple syrup

Mix all ingredients together, adjusting milk amount until desired texture is achieved. Make pancakes in the usual fashion, cooking over a hot griddle until appearing dry on the top. This method does not result in the same air bubbles that "floured" recipes too, but they do puff up and get less wet on the surface so you can tell when it's time to flip.

Little sicky

Few things make you feel like a parent quite so singlehandedly as waking up to the hot gush of a child's vomit across your dozing body. Nor subsequently getting in the shower with said child to hose off at 3:00 in the morning. And especially, nothing quite like being the only person in the world that the damp, feverish little bundle wants to cling to.

Eden has the stomach flu, complete with fever. I would probably characterize it as her first real illness other than a couple bouts of the sniffles. Interestingly enough, it directly coincided with the time period where my work and clinical schedule have signaled a distinct downturn in the amount of nursing she's doing, so I'm not really surprised that she's sick for the first time. I've sorely missed the nursing, as well as her in general, so it actually felt really sweet and nice to spend all night and then the entire day with her cuddled on my chest, doing nothing but that and snuggling.

I think she's actually on the mend, since she hasn't barfed since this morning, but she's still quite clingy and hot. Bring on the snuggling and nursing.

Crispy Rosemary Chicken and Oven Fries

While we love the idea of roasting a whole chicken and using every bit of it, quite frankly more often than not we don't get around to making stock from the carcass (or we do, but it gets shelved in the freezer for months at a time), and plus, good whole chickens are not exactly inexpensive. And now that we're actively trying to prevent having a surplus of things like chicken stock in the freezer before we move, the whole-chicken option was seeming less and less attractive.

Enter chicken thighs. At Whole Foods, we can get a dozen decent-quality, skin-on (and seriously, why would you want them any other way?) chicken thighs for under $7. Looking for a way to cook them, I came across this recipe, which is deceptively simple but amazingly delicious. Of course, we make substitutions--russet potatoes for the red, dried herbs for the fresh, and I leave out the garlic powder altogether, not to mention cooking it for 20 minutes at 475 instead of an hour at 375--but I'm grateful for the basic recipe, which turned us onto something so good we now have it a couple of times a week.

One of my favorite things about this recipe is how the chicken skin slides right off like a crispy, delicious little jacket that you can pop in your mouth as soon as the chicken hits the plate. MMMMMmmmm. One of the keys to really crispy skin, I've found, is rinsing the chicken and then patting it REALLY dry (most people use a paper towel, I use a clean kitchen towel). Seriously, where have these BEEN all my life? It literally breaks my heart to think of all the amazingly tasty chicken skin that must be wasted somewhere in the interested of satisfying the demand for boneless skinless shoe leather chicken breasts. And, I've had oven fries before and found them to be lackluster (as some of the commenters do on the above recipe), but I'm now convinced that that comes from a misguided attempt at trying to minimize the fat content. Liberally drizzled with olive oil, they're tender, flavorful, and delicious.

Here's the recipe, the way that I make it:

Crispy Rosemary Chicken and Oven Fries

6 chicken thighs, rinsed and patted very dry

4 small russet potatoes, sliced in half lengthwise and then into wedges

Olive oil as needed

Sprinkling of dried rosemary

Sprinkling of dried oregano

salt and pepper to taste

Preheat the oven to 475 degrees F (190 degrees C).

Pour a little olive oil in the bottom of two 9x13 pans. Place the chicken thighs, skin side up, in one of them, and the potatoes spread out in the other. Drizzle both pans with olive oil and then sprinkle with the dried herbs, salt, and pepper. Cook approximately 20 minutes or until chicken is done and fries are cooked (cook longer for crispy fries).

Hot and sour soup

We recently ordered a batch of beef bones so that we could make nourishing bone broth, because I was starting to have trouble with my stomach again. Well, we wound up boiling the broth (rather than simmering it) and it was chalky and cloudy and we had to use this crazy method to clarify it. It worked, interestingly enough, so then we were left with several quarts of now-clarified beef broth and had to figure out the best way to use it.

We eventually decided on hot and sour soup, which we loosely based on this recipe and adjusted to our tastes, ingredients, and to fit into our mostly "primal" diet. I'm not even going to presume to give many specific ingredient amounts, because I've realized after following a lot of recipes that people's tastes and ingredients are different enough that the measures are kind of irrelevant and everybody has to adjust them anyway.

Here's how I made it:

(Primal) Hot and Sour Soup

A few Tbsp of lard, butter, oil, or other fat

1/2 chopped onion

1 lb pork of any kind, thinly sliced across the grain

Several large handfuls of thinly sliced green cabbage

A few grated carrots

A pint of sliced mushrooms

A little grated ginger and about the same amount of minced garlic

Pinch of red pepper flakes

Soy sauce

White or other vinegar

1 quart beef broth

Heat the oil in a medium to large saucepan. Saute the onions until golden brown, then add the sliced pork. Cook until opaque. Add the other vegetables in the order given, 3-5 minutes apart, giving each a chance to cook and wilt slightly. Add the ginger, garlic, and red pepper. Pour in a few glugs of soy sauce, scraping the pan to deglaze it as you do. Pour in the beef broth. Add a few splashes of vinegar until the ratio of hot to sour is right. Adjust seasonings and salt to taste.

We thought this was absolutely delicious, and are planning to make a shrimp version this weekend with the remainder of the broth. Bean sprouts (as in the original recipe) would also be delicious.

A year ago tonight...

...we were settling in for our first night as the parents of a brand-new baby.

We never could have imagined then all the immeasurable ways that Eden would change our lives for the better, and it's impossible to overstate how much richness and joy she's brought to our lives.

We love you, baby girl.

We're still here (for now)

It's been a long time since I've posted, partially because we've quickly gotten extremely busy, and partly because so many things have been happening and changing so fast that anything I'd planned to post quickly became obsolete before I got the chance.

To make a long and repetitive story short, while I have been able to start getting some GYN clinical hours done and I'm very thankful for that, a clinical site for me to do births has never really materialized in this area. The closest option was doing them at a busy hospital close to two hours away. Both in birth setting and geographic location, this was far from ideal. Going to Clinical Bound strongly reconnected me with why I went to midwifery school in the first place--practicing homebirth. Both from the perspective of providing this option to women and families AND the fact that it nourishes my own soul in a way that I don't think the alternative can. I recently went to the How to Start a Homebirth Practice seminar put on by a local midwifery practice at the annual ACNM conference, and one of the key things they said was that at a certain point, you have to decide whether you want to be a missionary or preach to the choir. Put that way, it makes it sound like there's something noble and romantic about blazing a trail--and maybe there is, but in my own practice, I've found it to be an embittering and futile exercise, full of dead ends. I've concluded that trying to provide natural birth options to women who don't especially want them and in the company of doctors and other hospital personnel who are dead set against them is at best doing no good and at worst, burning me out by spinning my wheels. (Can you smell the burnout yet? It's been lingering in my nostrils for months now.)

So anyway, as we've long admired the Amish and loved taking trips up to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, I was beyond thrilled to find an absolutely amazing homebirth/birth center/ hospital birth practice that agreed to take me on when our lease is up at the end of the summer. Not only is it the holy grail of clinicals, since I get to learn to practice in every possible birth setting, but I'll be doing so from a group of midwives with whom I share at least a majority of philosophies. Not to mention the fact that their clientele (70% old-order Amish or Mennonite)makes *us* look like a bunch of tech-obsessed yuppies in comparison.

Matt and I have actually both found part-time jobs up there as well (farming and birth assisting at homebirths!) and so all that remains is housing. We've actually found that trickier than we thought, but we're trusting that the right thing will come up at the right time. And the plan after I'm done with clinicals (hopefully by mid-December) is to move back to Iowa--back where it all began. Ironically, we left Iowa because I decided to become a lawyer because the political climate there was so hostile to homebirth midwives. Now, we're moving back in part because the laws themselves are actually more permissive than they are in most states (it's a complicated set of circumstances), and I should be set to do what I thought I'd never be able to: help bring little Iowans into the world AT HOME. (Including, I'm sure, a few of our own.) Unlike when we considered moving back a year or so ago (you know, like when I was getting teary just because we were changing apartments), we feel like we're really on the same page about moving and that we're both ready to go. We have some wonderful friends here that we will absolutely miss like crazy (especially you, April!) and that is our one big regret about leaving. Otherwise, though, it's always been our intention for our kids to grow up close to our families (in every sense of the word). Farming on at least a small scale is also still a dream of ours, and seemingly very possible there. And being within a couple of hours of our parents and all of our siblings? Priceless.