And Now For Something Completely Different

We Slivers are in a bit of a culinary rut. Mr. Sliver does most of the shopping and cooking, but let's not blame him. I know how hard it is to put food on your family. Every week, he prowls the Manager's Markdown bin hunting for bargains. The equation of frugality plus testosterone always adds up to slabs of meat the size of our six-year-old, all with menacing expiration dates. The bottom shelf of our fridge perpetually sags under their weight. If it's not a pork loin doing an impersonation of a human thigh, it's a roast shrouded in plastic sacks like something buried at the bottom of Tony Soprano's dumpster.

Despite all the words up there to the contrary, I'm not complaining. Really. I love the discount. He learned to shop like this by watching me, back in the dark ages when I actually used to help around here. What wears on us both, though, is the commitment. I've had exes who didn't stick around as long as our meat. Every night we're faced with the challenge of reinventing the roast — roast tacos, roast Stroganoff, roast ala King, chicken fried roast. If colon cancer doesn't do us in, boredom will. Suicide by Manager's Markdown.

So we're experimenting with new recipes, and entirely new sections of the market — sections regular folks shop in, not just us and the Duggars. Join us on our maiden voyage out of the doldrums as we prepare Beef Rendang, an Indonesian dish traditionally served at ceremonial occasions and to honored guests, like you.


RENDANG DAGING — Dry-Fried Beef Curry (Just trust me, okay.)



(click to enlarge)

Step 1: Gather mise en place

I learned that term in Culinary Arts school. It's all I remember, so I try to use it as often as possible. It's French for get your shit together. Sometimes I use it with my class, like this, "Boys and girls, if you plan to go to recess today then you had better mise en place right this minute!"



The Buddha isn't officially part of the recipe, but we think he adds good mojo.



Employ child labor whenever possible. It's an Asian dish.


Step 2: Cut beef into 1 inch by 2 inch strips.

(Before)



(After)



Step 3: Put onion, garlic, ginger and chilies in blender with 1/2 cup of coconut milk. Find a small child or someone you don't like much to blend it until smooth.



Step 4: Wait several hours for the burning of his eyes to subside.



Step 5: Pour pureed toxic onion goo into a large saucepan. Swirl remaining coconut milk into blender container to get every last drop of pureed toxic onion goo. Pour that into saucepan, too.



Step 6: Add all remaining ingredients except tamarind liquid and sugar to saucepan. Mix well.



Step 7: Add meat to saucepan. Bring quickly to a boil, then reduce heat to medium and add tamarind liquid.



Step 8: Cook uncovered for as long as you've got. Hours and hours and hours. Watch a movie, get a pedicure, call your mother.



Step 9: When gravy is thick, reduce heat to low and cook, and cook, and cook some more. Don't watch a movie this time, maybe just an episode of Mad Men or The Office — something interesting, but forgiving enough that you can get up and stir frequently until gravy is almost dry.



Step 10: When oil separates from the gravy, add sugar and stir constantly. Allow meat to fry in the oily gravy until it looks dark brown and delicious.

Like this:




Serve in prawn crisps as an appetizer, over rice as an entrée, or over Idris Elba for dessert.


If you try it, please let me know how it turned out. Or better, invite me over.



*No joke, when you seed your chilies, wear gloves. Or a hazmat suit. Or poke them with long sticks and scrape the seeds out with your toenails. Under no circumstances should you touch those seeds. Only a real idiot would touch those seeds. But if you do, find somebody to help you use the bathroom for the next several hours.

Don't ask.
.
.

Love — 1, Some Assembly Required — 0

Somehow, we've managed to enjoy ten years of happy marriage and perfectly respectable sex without ever owning a bed. It was just one of those priorities that never managed to claw its way to the top of the list. I sleep blissfully sandwiched between my husband and our son, three spoons in a drawer. Marking the boundaries above and below hardly seemed necessary. Besides, our mattress was manufactured in heaven. I climb on and barely have time to mutter a few words of sincere appreciation before I'm drooling daintily on our down pillows. Who needs a bed?

But I guess it's time. If we're going to sleep in a Family Bed like a couple of aging hippies, we should at least have the decorum to do it in a proper bed. And is there a better time than Valentine's Day to absolutely push your love to the brink of divorce? I can't think of one.

It wasn't buying the bed that challenged us. Buying the bed was a little miracle; we agreed on the first one in the first store. In retrospect, that should have been a clue. Nothing is that easy. The hard part was lurking quietly in the shadows, mocking our solidarity, waiting to pounce, smug in its invincibility.

Some Assembly Required.

Oh, it was good. It took a minute or two for Some Assembly Required to find our Achilles' Heel, but once it did, it chomped down mercilessly. After watching us strain gently to get the first three cumbersome boxes into the house, it had all the information it needed.



It bided its time until we got to the final, largest, heaviest box on the roof of the car. Then it lunged, pushing the box brutally out of our hands and onto our six-year-old's foot. The bastard.

After a few minutes kissing away tears, we redoubled our efforts and were back on track.



Some Assembly Required wasn't at all pleased that we got the boxes into the house without death or serious bodily injury, so it decided to fuck with our minds. While our backs were turned, it maliciously shredded several pages of the instruction book. All we were left with was a random list of hardware and a vague suggestion that we should make it all stick to each other.



And, for added fun, we should do it in an area that is actually several square feet smaller than the bed itself.



Oh, he almost had us.



Better luck next time.



The neighbors are having twins. We'll tell them to expect you.
.
.

Passing the Hat

Go ask your child what he learned in school this week. Go ahead. I'll wait.

Yeah, that's what I thought. It's in there, I promise. But it's trapped under thick layers of video game cheats and plot lines to every SpongeBob ever aired. The stuff they learn in school gets mired in mental quicksand, unless it's tethered to their heart. The limbic system of the brain controls thinking and learning; emotion is its on/off switch. If we want to make kids think, first we have to make them feel.

Today my school had a fundraiser — Caps for a Cause. The kids were invited to donate money in exchange for permission to wear their favorite hat to school all day. The money would be going toward the relief effort in Haiti. But these are little kids, few of whom have crossed Piaget's invisible line from concrete learning to abstract reason. An earthquake? In Haiti? We may as well be speaking French as we try to explain what that could possibly mean to a bunch of kids in Arkansas. So we got concrete. The day before the event, we showed them a video of who they would be helping, and why — just graphic enough to give their little limbic systems a good jolt, but not raw enough to disturb them.



Five minutes later, every child in the building understood. They went home, carrying the children of Haiti in their hearts. And they came back the next day, determined to help. The $350 we collected isn't much, I suppose, in terms of what Haiti needs. But our kids learned something invaluable — we all matter; we are all powerful; we can change the world. All we need is the capacity to care.










It's not too late. Have you done something to show you care?
.
.

The Drinks Are On Me

My mother once taught me that when you give a gift, you should imagine the person happy and give them the thing that would make it so. For my last birthday, she gave me this. Sometimes, it's like she peeks into my soul.

I'm not exactly what you'd call a big spender. And my slack code of ethics has plenty of built in wiggle room. Not only am I comfortable sneaking snacks into the movies, I actually kind of get off on it. I teach Pre-K for Chrissake; I take my thrills where I can find them. And to me, making it past the ticket guy toting a full buffet and open bar is a tiny adventure.

I know, I know, they have rent to pay. But I refuse to feel (very) guilty if they're going to charge twenty bucks for a watered down Coke and Crisco-coated popcorn. Besides, you know that stuff will give you a heart attack. I'd rather invest my money filling my breasts with a nice Red Zinfandel. For my health. I have a child to think about.



I wish I'd had the courage to just sashay right in, jiggling my new jugs for all to see. God knows it would have been a first. I wasn't so much blessed with jugs as jiggers. But I'd never worn the Rack before and I wasn't entirely confident that I wouldn't slosh or leak. Imagine the guy's face if just as he handed me my ticket red liquid started oozing down my chest, like a victim in a Quentin Tarantino film. So I kept the girls under wraps until the lights dimmed. Turns out, I worried for nothing. It worked like a charm. There was a brief learning curve, sitting in the darkened theater trying to figure out if the thing worked on gravity or pressure. But at the very moment I was trying to initiate wine flow by vigorously squeezing my pretend breasts, Penélope Cruz was generously revealing her real ones. I'm pretty sure nobody noticed me.

If you're ever in the mood for some PG-13 quality naughtiness and a movie that's already gone to video, I'm your girl. Just stick a baguette down your britches and some brie in your bra and meet me at the dollar theater. I'll be the one with huge, gently sloshing rack.



Cheers!
. .

Hair like Jesus wore it

As a Pre-K teacher, I am intimately, passionately aware of the need for rules and procedures. A classroom absent rules and procedures is filled instead with chaos, confusion and high blood pressure. Rules and procedures are our friends. But as with real friends, quality trumps quantity. Particularly with the younger set, the fewer rules you attempt to establish the better: Don't hurt each other, keep it to a dull roar, and if you really must play with your wiener, please go do it in the bathroom. I went to a workshop once that suggested boiling it down even further, to just one succinct rule: You can do anything you want, as long as it doesn't cause trouble. I thought of this today, when I heard about Taylor Pugh and his terribly troublesome hair.



Taylor Pugh's hair has earned him several weeks of in-school suspension. As you can plainly see, Taylor's hair has been very, very bad. It is not following the rules. That's because where Taylor goes to school, just outside Dallas in a place called 1947, students are expected "to adhere to the code of conduct." And his hair is not adhering. The district categorizes Taylor's hair as "distracting" and therefore disruptive to the learning environment. I am not making this up.

I couldn't agree more that hair can be distracting, disruptive and downright annoying. Several of my little girls wear so many beads and barrettes that my room sounds like Tito Puente's percussion section. I also have a little girl with flowing blond hair so enchanting that some of my boys will stroke it during class or tug it in line. And you should see the ruckus when the boy who normally wears tiny plaits shows up with his hair loose, which turns out to be a fabulously fluffy fro. Even I can't keep my hands out of that! I'm 45 and hair even distracts me. So I suppose we should just borrow some hair nets from the lunch ladies and get back to work. We can't have these four-year-olds distracted from the rigorous academics of Pre-K.

A school board member asked if Taylor's "parents value his education more than they value a 4-year-old’s decision to make his own grooming choices?” If you ask me, they do. It's just that their definition of education, like their son, doesn't fit inside a tidy prefab box. It appears they include radical concepts like thinking for oneself and challenging antiquated ideas that don't make sense. They also seem to be including the lesson of generosity and love, since Taylor plans to eventually donate his long locks to a charity that makes wigs for cancer patients.

Meanwhile, what is this school teaching Taylor?





PS, Hey Taylor, I like your hair. It's pretty, and I bet it's really quiet, too.
.
.

Game On

Little Rock has done something most unexpected this week—it's become winter. Some idiot tipped it off that January is supposed to be cold and it's decided to play along. Today, although the sun was dutifully holding up its end of the deal, we just couldn't seem to get on the right side of freezing. And I am not amused. My six-year-old, on the other hand, is having a ball. He's been merrily running around the neighborhood for the past two hours with his open coat flapping in the frigid breeze. He refuses to zip it, though, because then the neighbors couldn't see what's underneath—his new jersey.

Last Christmas, we went to see my nephew tear up the court at his high school basketball game. Alex is the best player on his team and watching him play lit a fire in my son. He came home eat up with the game, wanting to play it whenever and wherever he could . . . including inside our house. Clearly, a change of venue was in order. We got one today.



Upward is sports with a stiff God chaser. It's three parts team spirit and one part Holy Spirit. At least that's the blend we're hoping for. It's not that we're anti-God by any means, we're just not fans of proselytizing. We're even, to be honest, a bit cynical of organized religion. We've already planned our evacuation route the first time they bring a snake on the court or start speaking in tongues. But so far, the message has been positive and benign. The focus is on sportsmanship, fundamental skills and having fun.



They don't even keep score so everyone can be a winner. Although, clearly some kids have a bit more winner in them than others. Take our kid, for instance. From the initial evaluations a few months ago, it was evident that the child has talent. He dipped into his father's DNA and pulled out a heaping helping of grace, coordination and athletic ability. There was no doubt he'd do well when actual games began. So today, when they called his name and he joined the rest of the starting line up, I was proud, but not surprised.

The surprised part came about three minutes later. Turns out, he didn't escape the womb without a dollop of his mother's DNA. This became apparent right around the time he darted off the court, mid-game, to exchange high fives with a classmate he suddenly noticed sitting on the sidelines. And again when he drifted off for long minutes at a time to gaze at the cheerleaders. And certainly when he ran most earnestly into the middle of another game in progress on the next court over, completely oblivious to the fact that none of the players were on his team. It was a good five minutes before we could corral him and return him, at least in body, to his own game.

Okay, so he sucks. But he couldn't be more adorable while he's sucking.



Can I get an Amen?
.
.

The Full Mommy

.
.

When I first moved from New York to Arkansas, I felt compelled to travel back home four times a year. There was a lot of me left behind, and it took that many trips to scrape together the pieces. Each visit was packed with an extensive itinerary of people and places I thought I needed. But as my life in Arkansas filled out, my requirements from New York were conversely whittled. By now, it's pretty much down to family, a few lifelong friends, and Helmbold's hot dogs. Not necessarily in that order.

Diane is one of those cherished friends who always makes sure to see me when I'm in town. We grew up together and now, in bits and pieces, we get to watch our children grow up together. She and I share history not only because we lived in the same town, but also because we lived through a similar experience. We both have wanted children forever, and it seemed to take us that long to finally get them. And like that first bite of chocolate after a Lenten fast, going without for an extended period does wonders for one's appreciation. I've never seen a mom more committed to making her children happy. Which works out really well for my kid when we hang out with them.

Past visits with Diane have included trips to the amusement park, swimming in the lake near her house and playing in the indoor Disneyland that is her home. (There is a trampoline and swing set in the play room. I am not making this up.) This trip did not disappoint. In fact, it was interesting right from the get go: "Did you pack swimsuits?" No, no swimsuits. Snow pants, but no swimsuits. But that little detail didn't stop her from taking us here:


Ciccotti Family Recreation Center, Albany, New York


My six-year-old was raring to go in his SpongeBob boxers, which passed adorably as a swimsuit.



My middle-aged, out-of-shape, unprepared self, however, needed a bit of priming. The first hurdle was getting comfortable with the idea of purposely getting wet when it's ten degrees outside. That just ain't right. Since I never imagined for a minute that my brain might talk my body into it, I didn't waste any time at all getting it prepared. And believe me, in the middle of winter, it needed some prep. I don't know about you, but I'm not on speaking terms with my bikini wax come December. Or my razor. Or my pedicure set. Or, apparently, my pride. Those are all affectations for summer. Winter was made for binging and burrowing in forgiving layers. And I had no intention of shedding a one.

But then . . . there's Diane. How could I disappoint her when she so consistently shows us a good time? So I shoved my ego in a locker and accepted the black camisole and spandex bike shorts she thoughtfully provided me. Diane, as I have suggested, has a very big heart. A heart almost as big as her enormous, magnificent knockers. (Did I mention I was wearing her camisole?) Which was hardly an issue at all. Except for that small period of time, somewhere between three seconds and eternity, when one of those randomly timed dumping buckets of water released its contents on my head, suddenly ripping the camisole several inches below my navel. Which was good, really, because having my teeny tiny B cups involuntarily exposed to a roomful of strangers instantly put a little embarrassing leg hair right into perspective.

That list of places I need to go when I visit New York just got whittled again.
.
.