rambling about food and other goals.

March 3, 2023

I wrote another post more than a week ago (see below!) and each day since, I’ve thought, Today I’ll sit down and finish that post. But life is such a swirly chaotic whirlwind lately, doing nothing and also doing everything, and it just didn’t happen. Old me would have tossed it out, forgotten it, lost in the deep archives of my Google Drive. But 2023 me says, What the hell! Here it is! Have it a week late! 

I’ve been feeling excited about all the things I could do here - documentation I’m craving in this season, a way to mark and distinguish the days, a way to find myself again. There are moments I want to remember - a million times a day when I try to freeze a memory of August’s tiny fingers and peach-fuzz head and Leo’s voice quivering with excitement as he yells, Big snowplow! Snowblower! Lawnmower! 

It’s March already, and August is almost nine weeks old, and Leo will turn two this month. I had August at the pediatrician yesterday for his two month check-up and kept thinking, Two months ago I was here giving birth to this baby. 

Next week, I’m hoping to cook and eat:

• Homemade pizza
• Ottolenghi’s recipe for a red lentil coconut soup
• Lasagna
• Thai curry soup with ramen noodles and tofu

And finally, to say it out loud (so to speak), here’s the beginning of work towards a big goal, which is: running an ultramarathon. I’ve been thinking about this for years, but being pregnant, being postpartum, having young children - I’ve just held this goal close and told myself the time would come.

My plan:

• Start strength training - I began last month! I’ve always been terrible at including strength training in my running work, and I managed to run two marathons without it. But my body is older and weaker and I just don’t think I can run an ultramarathon without injury if I don’t start strength training now. My goal is to maintain a 3x/week plan for the next few months.
• Start regular long walks - I’ve done a few longer walks and hikes with August strapped into the carrier, and as it gets warmer, it’s my goal to start putting more non-run miles on my legs.
• Start running - target date of April 1 (three months postpartum) planning to start with a version of an easy running plan from these guys.
• Run a 5k - planning for early summer 2023.
• Run a 10k and/or half marathon - planning for fall/early winter 2023, with the goal to be consistently completing 5-6 mile runs on the weekends as a starting place for marathon training. 
• Run a marathon - sometime in 2024, location and date TBD.
• Run an ultramarathon - sometime in 2025, location and date TBD.

I love (love!) a long-term goal, I love distance race training, and maybe it’s crazy to think I can add this into my already full life - but I'm trusting the spark of excitement that tells me TIME TO START NOW.

February 22, 2023

I’m typing this with one hand, computer propped on my knees. I’m half-laying / half-sitting on the bed, a small baby wrapped in a blanket tucked into my left arm, sleeping. With Leo, I was always trying to set him down, to get him to nap in his bassinet or crib. And he was never very snuggly, just as likely to cry while I held him as not. With August, I know better how fast this time will fly. I feel less urgency to set him down so I can get shit done (honestly, what shit? fold laundry for the hundredth time this week?). And also - he is a very snuggly baby.

The thing I always come back to is food. I love food, and I want to think about it, cook it, eat it - and write about it. Not so much about it, but through it, a lens for my life. I just have never known how to get there. I always talk myself down from it - what a silly thing to write about, and what could I have to say about it, and anyway the golden age of food blogging (i.e. Smitten Kitchen and Orangette) has passed and now people write substacks and record podcasts and TikTok videos.

But here’s the thing - I don't want to do any of those things, and I don't even want to write a food blog, as it were. I don’t really want to write for anyone in particular (or even anyone at all), I just want to let myself sink into a thing that gives me joy - which is food.

I’ve named this the “year of” a few things - the year of journaling, the year of building community, and the year of no guilt. That last one, tricky. Once I started to really pay attention, I realized how much time and energy I funnel into guilt. That’s a whole thing to unpack, but meanwhile - I feel so much guilt around food, most of it swirling around what is the most ethical way to eat, followed closely by what is the healthiest way to eat. Which is not to say that I eat particularly ethically or healthfully - I just feel guilty all the time. Add in the responsibility to feed little humans and instill some food ethic and culture in them, and - guilt guilt guilt.

I’ve been swinging wildly around on how to address this because I am so goddamn tired of feeling all of those things. I just want to feel joy in eating and preparing food. Do I need to eat only plant-based food and the alignment of my values and actions will make me feel joy? Do I need to eat intuitively, balancing a cheeseburger with a lentil stew, listening to what my body wants? Do I need to eat more protein? Less fat? More carbs? More vegetables? What matters to me? What is right? I’m just so tired of constantly weighing all of these things in my mind, balanced with the fact that I do sometimes want to eat meat, and I do sometimes want to eat junk food that is purely for pleasure (rather than nutrition). I want to feel simplicity and joy in food, and I want to instill that in my children.

My grandma was a cook, but I think it would be a stretch to say she enjoyed it. Maybe she did? But often after preparing a feast, she would sit down at the table in a huff, not willing to eat a bite. She drank SlimFast shakes for lunch each day for as long as I can remember. She cooked out of love, I think, but not out of joy or delight.

Cooking has been…challenging these days, to say the least. When we moved last year, we had a commute that left us arriving home exactly at dinner time. Six months later, we moved again, getting rid of the commute - but by then I was pregnant and deep in first trimester food aversions. Then I spent the summer and fall solo parenting many nights and weekends, trying to cook dinner while exhaustedly wrangling a one-year old. Now, I’m almost two-months into this next era, with a newborn and a nearly two-year old, and I am beyond exhausted. We don't have a dishwasher. We’re getting ready to pay for two children in daycare, and food feels like the best/only place we can save money. The baby wants to nurse at the exact moment I should start making dinner while the toddler screams at my feet, “animals cookies* peeeease?! cracker? graham cracker?! smoothie (pronounced “smoozie”) peeeease!!!!”

Anyway, in an attempt to tap into the joy of food again, I thought I’d start writing about it here. At first, I let myself get paralyzed in deciding how (classic), but instead I am going to cut straight through that, instead offering: Here! Here are some things I ate this week!

For dinners,

• Black beans and brown rice - beans cooked in the “creamy beans” way - topped with diced onions and peppers, cheese, and avocado
  
• Frozen cheese pizza from Costco (we are now Costco people!) and a Caesar salad
• A vegetable and white bean soup from the freezer, gifted to us for newborn days, and ciabatta rolls from Walmart that are my go-to for rounding out a simple soup meal

For lunches, turkey sandwiches with Swiss cheese and Dijon mustard and spinach (of course feeling guilty all the while about it - meat, ugh - but oh! how delightful is a sandwich?!)

*Side note that Leo calls animal crackers "animals cookies" and there are at least five extra o's in his pronunciation of "cookies."

embracing the season.

For starters, it turns out that on August 7, 2022, I wrote a blog post that I never published.

Before then, and since then, a hundred more written in my head while a baby or toddler naps or cries

I am now nearly eight weeks from the birth of our second baby, named August, who arrived on the first day of 2023. A new year baby! The freshest and newest of beginnings! Eight weeks of maternity leave, of adjusting, of healing, of trying so hard (ironically too hard) to slow down and embrace the season I'm in.

I say that as I also simultaneously have a note saved in Evernote that documents my current plans to run an ultramarathon before I turn 40. In some ways I am amazing at slowing down, but in many ways I am not.

And after nearly two years of finding myself again, after Leo was born, here I am starting the process all over. All week I've been trying to make a list of things that bring me joy or make me happy in the purest sense. Parenting young children, working full-time, moving over and over again - it is so easy to lose sight of those things, and I find myself here struggling to make the list. But the gut sense I feel each time I revisit my attempted list is that one of those things must be to write.

More to come soon, I hope, but in the meantime, here's what I had to say six months ago about why I did and do want to write (and write here):

 ----------

In the eight (eight!) months since we moved, it seems my head is constantly swimming with things I want to write about, mostly things I want to understand better. But I have been chanting the mantra of, “I don’t have time,” straight through. The first year of parenthood, especially working full-time, especially with a partner who’s often working nights and weekends, has been defined for me by the feelings of both being bored and also having no time. There is no denying the magic of being with a small child, watching them develop new skills at a lightning pace, watching them discover the world one small piece at a time. Feeling the intensity with which they love you and need you - and you love them and need them. A million people, I’m sure, have tried to describe it. It’s like plugging into a current in the universe that you didn’t know existed before.

But passing the time with a small child is also, often, excruciatingly boring. Sometimes frustrating. Sometimes you’re literally sitting on the toilet while the child is face down on the floor, sobbing, “shoooosh! shoooosh!” (which translates to “shoes! shoes!”) because they desperately want to put on their shoes and go outside at that exact moment and not any later.

Ah! The intensity with which I have thought and felt and struggled over the past 16 months! I wish I had found a way to better document all of the moments, each small struggle and triumph, the ways that I changed dramatically, or slowly, or not at all. Now, 22 weeks (give or take) away from giving birth to another little human, and the intensity of it sometimes overwhelms me. But more than regret over the lost months and moments I’ve forgotten, I feel urgency right now to keep a record. Several things I’ve read lately have lit that fire inside of me.

• Luisa Weiss wrote in her last Letter from Berlin substack about her childhood summers in Italy, going to the beach, and her summers their with her sons, going to the same beach.
  
• Jenny Rosenstrach’s now college-age children started writing posts on her Dinner: A Love Story blog, and I remember when they were small, and it’s clear that they absorbed a childhood full of love of food and words.
  
• Andrea, who has been keeping the blog hula seventy since 2005, wrote last month about the joy and sacredness of the record she had been keeping, and especially reading it back to her also now grown children. “something else I underestimated: the unmitigated joy of reading old posts out loud to the humans you wrote about. one post led to another and before long, we were swimming in stories and details I had long since forgotten. I cannot explain what it felt like to read these pieces out loud to the kids for the first time. the kids, who are now 18 and 22. I cannot explain what it felt like in the room that night-- story after story, their joy, my joy. I cannot overstate this.” I cried when I read that, sitting in a dark living room after Leo’s bedtime.
  

I’ve sometimes struggled with this deep urge to write, but not knowing who I’m writing for. The feeling that my voice is one of a million voices, and most are much more worthy of being heard. But suddenly I’m feeling clarity in what draws me back, over and over, to a place like this. I want to keep the record, for myself, for my family. I love (love!) the way a simple dinner journal, or a handful of photographs, can become an anchor for that personal - and familial - history. In the day to day, it feels sometimes a silly exercise. But when my child (children!) are 18 and 19, as long as modern society hasn’t collapsed and the internet still exists, I want to be able to hand this to them. A small window into who I was as a human being, and who they were as small human beings. Who we all were together. I’m writing for their future selves, and mine as well. I don’t know how to get at that, exactly, but I am desperate for some documentation, and I’m tired of saying I don’t have time.

I’m sitting in our damp living room, everything sticky after a humid day yesterday, and a night and day of rain to follow. It was 90 degrees yesterday, and barely reaching 70 today. I didn’t expect how different summer would feel in this part of the world, how temperate and glorious it could be, surrounded by water, far north into Wisconsin.

Leo is sleeping, finally having settled into a consistent routine of napping each day after lunch for a few hours. I’ve already completely forgotten the struggles of the spring, when naps felt impossible, trudging mile after mile pushing the stroller, driving up and down the county, all to get him to sleep. When he wakes up, we’ll have a snack, and then go for a rainy hike, or maybe to the library, or maybe both.

For the first half hour of his nap, I got dinner ready - a pregnancy craving that I finally caved on, tater tot hotdish (made vegetarian with faux-ground beef). It struck me as I was assembling it that it’s basically a shepherd’s pie, with tater tots in place of mashed potatoes. And I thought a lot about the humble-ness of midwestern food, which I grew up on. So many places in the US and around the world have a regional food culture that’s sought after. Clam chowder in New England, barbecue in the south, tacos in Los Angeles. But apart from the occasional Chicago hot dog, what are people seeking out from the midwest? Maybe it’s that people really don’t come to the upper midwest unless they’re from here. I’ve horrified many an east coast friend and co-worker at my love of tuna noodle hot dish. I can see the ease with which much of the staple food of the upper midwest might be dismissed. Meat and dairy heavy, often reliant on things that come out of cans. But the comfort I find in those foods, and the intense nostalgia I sometimes feel for them, brings me back.

And now I live in the upper midwest, and if I want to substitute cheese curds for french fries with my burger, just about any restaurant will do that for me. I can tell you the handful of nearby parking lots and gas stations that have brat fry’s on the weekends, and every restaurant (even the Mexican restaurant) does a Friday night fish fry.

Already I wonder what food Leo will remember from his childhood, or what he’s absorbing right now. For the first few months he was in daycare here, I used to pack his lunches - even though the daycare provided lunch. We’re mostly vegetarians, I told them (but truthfully, only Jacob is a vegetarian, and I eat meat at least once a week). I packed neat little containers of hummus and veggies, and pasta and veggies, and eggs and veggies. But they told me he wanted to eat what the other kids were eating, and finally I gave in, and he’s been happily eating canned fruit cocktail and mystery meat casserole and hot ham and cheese sandwiches all summer. He comes home to mostly home-cooked, vegetable-heavy food. But sometimes we eat a frozen pizza or a box of mac n’ cheese for dinner. I don’t know. My relationship to food and the right way to eat has been complicated my whole life, due to many things, but anyway I don’t even really want to write about food right now.

I want to write about the anguish of walking through the garage with Leo, who is currently deeply obsessed with the lawn mower (mon-mowr he says, making his little mouth extra round on the o’s) and Jacob’s bicycle, which has a bike trailer attached, and which Leo loves very much to ride around in. The second we pull into the garage, he starts chanting mon-mowr! mon-mowr! We get out and spend a minute inspecting it, him looking at me so hopeful that maybe this time I’ll pull it out, and fire it up, and let him sit and watch while I push it around the yard. Then we move to talking about the bicycle, him grunting hopefully that I’ll take him for a ride, while I remind him over and over again, dada’s at work, so we can’t go for a ride right now. Finally, I bring him inside, and up the stairs, and I take off his shoes, and he stands at the baby gate blocking the top of the stairs and weeps. I have sometimes just parked in the driveway instead of the garage to bypass this whole process, but it doesn’t really work. We still end up standing in the living room, tearfully talking about the mon-mowr.

The other night, Jacob at work, I took Leo out to play in the backyard after dinner. When Jacob is home, as the one in charge of our meager gardening efforts, he’ll usually unwind the garden hose and take Leo around from plant to plant watering it. Leo, now deeply attuned to this responsibility, would not leave me alone until I also unwound the hose and watered each of the plants. Last weekend, he decided to take over, carefully filling a cup with water from his swimming pool and carrying it across the entire yard to water a particular plant in the corner.

I think I’ve been looking for some easy or obvious or natural way to document this season in my life. I take pictures and videos of Leo, of course, but I want something more. And maybe the truth is I just have to write about it. The obvious truth! Maybe I have to forego the nap I could take while he’s napping (a herculean feat for a pregnant woman!) in order to make the space I need for this. So now it’s 1:47PM, and odds are that Leo will wake up in the next ten minutes. I could’ve finished the dishes or folded the laundry or made the bed or finished some overdue work (ugh!), but my body and brain wouldn’t let me do anything but come here and write.