Packing up

It's officially less than a week until we move to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, where I'll spend the next 4+ months catching babies and Matt and Eden will spend long, outdoorsy days getting to know our new home. We're hoping that I'll be done by Christmas, but we've learned not to count on hard and fast plans, since ours have changed so many times--yet somehow always turned out better than we'd expected.

Life is about like this right now, but sub in clinicals, working, babysitting, preparing most of our belongings to go into storage for several months, trying to figure out what to pack to live in a 2-room cabin, and taking care of an insanely active 1-year-old.

It's sad to be leaving Reston and northern Virginia, where we went from a couple to a family and shared so many unforgettable moments. Not only have we walked circles around the trails of Reston with Eden in a sling or a backpack, but she now trots along them herself--obviously a big milestone. She's a native Virginian, and it's the only home she's ever known.

We also made our first "parent friends" here--people who'd only known us as a couple and who came to see us as Eden's mom and dad. They shared the pregnancy, admired our baby, and watched her play with their own babies. Corbin, Poet, Lyon, Max, Grace, Camryn, Asher, Camden and others have been Eden's first buddies too.

It will be especially hard for me to leave my nurse friends at the hospital--but then, it always is. What was supposed to be a temporary job while I figured out what to do next has wound up being a 3-year stint where I've met some exceptionally close friends, including Eden's godmother, who have witnessed my transformation from law school dropout into mother and almost-midwife. They've cheered me on, bared their own souls, and laughed at my filthy jokes. It's been an amazing time.

What's especially hard about moving now is that there's not quite finality to it, since we aren't going from point A to point B (which is Iowa, if I haven't said it out loud yet); we're going to point A-and-a-half first, during which I'll make occasional returns to point A in order to earn a little money, so that I don't really know what will be the last time I see people and so it lacks the epic finality that it did when we pulled down the driveway to leave Iowa the last time. In a way, it's sadder, because we always knew we'd be coming back to Iowa--at least sometimes. Once we leave Virginia, though--probably not.

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.