Night thoughts.

I'm currently lying in bed between my snoring husband & our not quite sleeping but drowsy nursing baby. Our determinedly sleep resisting baby. 

I feel like I've spent the last four hours trying to get Iris to sleep. 

Look how sleepy she is. 

I think I have. I have had almost no me time today. One of those days where Owen came home from work & Iris immediately began needing me & only me & so the evening went. 

I struggle in my heart at these times, because she's so wonderful & just when I'm getting the most annoyed at being stuck lying next to her in bed endlessly nursing, she's just so sweet & it's amazing really that she wants & needs me like this. 

It's wonderful, it's the most amazing thing I've ever done. Still sometimes I struggle with the patience to resist my desire to just go into the kitchen & drink some wine & listen to music & cook dinner the way I used to. 

Sigh. It was again one of those nights. Still trying out the early bedtime, so it was  just a long cycle of nurse for an hour, sleep for 20 minutes, wake up & scream, repeat. I wish her dad could console her, but he really can't. 

We had an excellent day until evening. Fun boob group, successful downtown trip to buy stamps at the post office, & duck pants & striped overalls for Iris at the Salvation Army,  & an overpriced hot chocolate at Greenfield Coffee for me. And a nice walk with the hound at home after. It was in the high 40s today, not bad for Western Mass in December. We got out of the house, we accomplished things, we hung out with cool mamas.

But I had high productivity hopes for the evening that sure didn't pan out. 

The positives: I took a lovely shower during Iris' first short nap. I started to cook dinner during her second. 

During the nursing her to sleep stretches I've been rereading "The Time Traveler's Wife", which is one of my very favorite books & why Iris was almost named Clare ( don't tell). 

I find it's difficult for me to read when I'm also tending to Iris, but I can reread my favorite books, they are like old friends. So rereading Time Traveler's Wife for the hundredth time is nice. 

I did make dinner, I made a turkey & Brussel sprouts curry from the endless pile of Thanksgiving leftovers, served over wild rice blend made with turkey stock & sour cream & sriracha.

Owen just ate leftover pizza from last nights' creative use of Thanksgiving leftovers,

but despite the baby related time constraints, I actually felt like cooking. I needed to. 

(Isn't this still a food blog?)

So by reading & cooking I got to feel like myself a tiny bit, I guess that's the moral of this story? 

And my sweet girl is now asleep & my husband is snoring loudly in my ear. 

Now Owen is talking in his sleep about beer prices. Iris seems totally out, except most likely not if I leave the bed. I am of course totally wide awake.

Hello world. 

OMG A Food Post, Finally. A Wednesday Night Dinner.

Blah blah blah this used to be a food blog & then I got pregnant & the food stopped, etc. 

I'm tried to remedy that. So here's what we ate tonight. 

Wild rice, sausages, Brussels sprouts, duck stock, shallots, dried Thai chilis from the garden the year before last. 

This is a pretty typical weeknight dinner for us, chipotle chicken sausages that Owen brought home from Fosters, some Brussels sprouts that needed to be used up, duck stock we made & froze when we had a duck last week. 

Some shallots, garlic, white wine, & butter aka the perfect way to cook almost anything. 

Wild rice & brown rice blend because I always get on a wild rice kick on the fall. 

All ingredients into one cast iron skillet. 

Bam. Dinner. 

Eaten in a bowl in bed because I either have to eat with Iris on my lap or laying down in bed next to me. 

Despite the fact that writing about food used to be my favorite thing I'm feeling strangely ambivalent about writing this. Last night I stopped writing to simply mess around on the internet & watch True Blood, & now with Iris napping on my lap I keep picking up my book or gazing out the window or going back to Facebook. 

That's what DustyRose is up to right now. Good old fashioned cat in a patch of sun. 

I don't know why this post is being difficult to write. This day makes no sense. Iris & I got up at 7:30 & it's now almost 2, & yet we just got dressed & still haven't taken the dog for a walk. It's starting to get less sunny & we should really head outside. I sort of feel like I've entered into the mama void today, the haze of the cycle of nursing & diapers & tummy time & books & playing & walking around in circles attempting to entertain the fussy child. If we have a plan we can get out of the house with relatively few problems, but on these days that we are home alone & Owen has the car, sometimes absolutely nothing happens & we have trouble even going for a walk before dark. It doesn't help that when I finally pulled myself together Iris just now fell asleep, on my lap, because I decided to nurse her one more time before going on a walk. When will I ever learn? 

So here we are, Iris napping while I fail to write a post about sausages, & fail to eat lunch today because I keep not planning well when Iris does let me put her down.

Ah well. I've kept a good fire going in the wood stove. We both are dressed. I brushed my teeth. I dashed out to feed the chickens & gather three eggs, two brown, one green. I started a load of laundry. I wrote this. 

And last nights sausages were pretty excellent. 

Ah she woke up. Let's try this walk business again. My goal is to keep it up with the food posts. Thanksgiving is next week, one of my favorite holidays because it is all about a big awesome meal, maybe I'll get inspired. 

Art & Motherhood (& Sandwiches).

Yeah, so today I was reading Alison Bechdel's "Are You My Mother?" while I was eating my fried egg & Brussels sprout sandwich for lunch (take "today" loosely because I am am currently post bath nursing Iris & can't imagine that I will actually finish this tonight). Anyway.

Set the scene. Iris is napping. I'm at the kitchen table by the window & the poetry books. 

Nice November light today. Bare trees, pale sunlight. 

Sandwich. Fried eggs, two of them, sliced bread, cheddar cheese, last night's leftover battered deep fried Brussels sprouts...there they are.

(See, this is still a food blog!). Lots of mayo & sriracha. I've got a cup of cold coffee from the morning. 

I'm reading. I'm eating fast, because who knows when the tiny human will wake up. 

And I'm reading Alison Bechdel, & she's referencing Adrienne Rich on motherhood, & I'm seated right there by all of Adrienne Rich's books, & I wonder, can you really be an artist & a mother? And do either on properly, the way you really want to? Can I? 

I always believe that you could, but actually being a mother, I don't know. I can't even write this post. 

I personally am so self centered when I make art, & I think I really need to be in that place where I put art first to do it well. 

And now I put Iris first, & can barely complete a thought. 

I feel like having Iris is the most important thing I've ever done & I would rather do this than have my opportunity to be self centered & make art back, but still. Do I want the same thing for her? Or do I want her to be famous & fabulous & everything she could ever possibly want?

Does anyone know?  

I don't know why I had such a moment there. Maybe I should just focus on sandwiches. It was a great sandwich. The eggs were freshly gathered from our chickens & I fried them in butter in a cast iron skillet & melted the cheese on top in the pan. 

And ha, Iris is sleeping on my lap now, so maybe I'll just post this as is. 

Happy Friday night, world, here at the homestead we are having spicy duck soup & homemade biscuits for dinner. 

And listening to Britney Spears. And still contemplating the meaning of motherhood. 

Snow Day Nostaglia & General Laziness.

Slightly cheating black & white post (whatever I make the rules here). 

I have a lot of paintings in progress but they are all wet (damn watercolors) & I just felt like writing. 

It's a snowy evening here in Greenfield following a snowy afternoon, & I left work around noon (I am terrified of driving in snow) just in time to see my husband for exactly one minute before he headed for work (he's a better driver than me, & works about 25 miles closer to our house).

I've been at home with the animals all day. Started paging through the old sketchbook. 

I have been changing things around here & drawing less out of my sketchbook & more on paper & shit. Like a real artist. But you'll see little pieces of randomness from sketchbook here & there for old times sake.

So here are some unpainted drawings from a Mini-Vaca taken on an extremely rainy weekend last June.

6.9&8.11: Two Cape Cod Sandwiches.

A post-driving curried chicken salad sandwich & a next afternoon linguica & mustard sandwich, grilled & eaten on the deck overlooking the pond. Then some insane encounters with huge snapping turtles ensued. Damn those things are weird & prehistoric & creepy. Try swimming with one. & huge. Did I mention huge?

6.9.11: BBQ Pork During A Late Spring Thunderstorm.

Another one of Mum's great dinners. Plus the sort of thunderstorm I'm really looking forward to as we approach the end of winter. We had some thunder & heavy rain last week & it reminded me how good that sort of weather is.

 6.10.11: Egg Salad Sandwiches & Vintage Dresses.

Typical Cape Cod Mini-Vaca Sort Of Day. Ate some tasty sandwiches, some chips, purchased one of my now all time favorite dresses at a thrift shop in Yarmouth, & saw some swans on a pond. There were dogs.

 6.10.2011: Cookout!

All Cape Cod trips should include some sort of cookout.

The next morning we ate this meal, in the pouring rain we collected buckets of seaweed for the garden, & then we drove home. 

 I'm fearing we won't have much Cape Cod Summer this year.
We really like our new house. We can grill in the yard here. We can hang out outside here. I can sit on top of the hill & enjoy the view of cornfields & the neighboring dairy farm, & draw & read there. We aren't stuck in town in Noho anymore.  We are making the kind of farming-style commitments that make travel complicated. I think we all need to recover from losing a major part of those summers.
That's all. Apologies for the lack of color. It's still snowing. I'll probably be back with more tomorrow.

Easter Wings (A Cape Cod Spring Holiday).

Happy Easter/Passover/Spring.

I am very fond of the Easter holiday, it is very aesthetically pleasing to me. Bunnies, Jesus, pastels, eggs, all very good. That said, this year I didn't really get it together to do anything about all that. No egg dying, I didn't wear a cute pink dress, & I haven't cooked rabbit since November. 

But we did have family, dogs, sticky wings, lots of good bread & butter, & a Cape Cod beach storm, aka an early Diamond family Easter.

4.23.2011: An Early Cape Cod Family Easter Dinner (With Dogs).

I had to work on Easter itself, & didn't really mind, since I very much appreciate all the ceremony & trappings of holidays, but also know that they don't really matter, in the sense that I can work all day on Easter in a pink dress then go & dig in the garden & enjoy that as holiday festivities (what I did last Easter). Plus I hate ham (is it the half-Jewish part of me?) Ham is great thinly sliced on a sandwich with the correct condiments, but an whole ham? One of the only, perhaps actually the only,  meat to which I say, yuck.

So the Diamond/Williams family (minus DR, who was missed but prefers not to travel, being a cat) packed up the car & drove to the family home on Cape Cod, stayed Friday night through Saturday night, & enjoyed the following pleasures: an early Easter dinner of Mum's sticky wings, roasted brussels sprouts, herbed mashed potatoes & French bread, an early Easter breakfast of cinnamon raisin bread & hard boiled eggs, both with the excellent bread from the French bakery in Wellfleet, collecting seaweed & shells on the beach in Harwich the pouring rain, Griswold cast-iron pan acquiring thrifting, Barb's Neiman Marcus chocolate chip cookies, & most importantly (or maybe most adorably?) a meeting of the dogs, Walty our hound meets Mum & Barb's Jack Russell terrier/beagle/dauschound? mix (we don't know what she is, just like Walt, but she looks like a tiny yellow lab pretty much-just imagine a full-gown high energy 14 lb lab with a terrier brain & a tendency for snuggling & here's Sophie), an awesome recent addition to the family. Walt & Sophie ran on the beach, rough housed, chewed on each others toys, leap off furniture, begged for food, cuddled on couches, lay by the fire, & overall had a stunningly good time. Yay dogs!

We drove back to Noho late Saturday night. 

On actual Easter, I worked, & then in a light warm rain, Owen, Walt & I foraged for fiddleheads by the river in the early evening, came home, I talked to my grandparents on the phone, ate steak & mustard greens, appreciated being alive & all the good thing I have, watched tv in bed & fell asleep. Where was the Easter bunny? I do not know.

Happy Birthday, Owen (With Lamb).

One year ago tonight, February 5th 2010, I was marinating a leg of lamb for Owen's 25th birthday dinner party the next day, February 6th 2010. My how time flies. It sure has been a long time since Lamb Week began, almost a year & a half now, so much lamb so many memories. This post from more recent times inspired me to go digging in the sketchbooks, & wow SO MUCH UNPOSTED LAMB. (Note to self: Get on that. Hint: Moussaka, finally).

Owen's Birthday Eve 2010 & A Leg Of Lamb Marinating Overnight In All The Good Stuff: Red Wine, Garlic, Balsamic Vinegar, Fresh Thyme & Olive Oil.

February 6, 2010: Owen Turns 25, over Lamb, Potatoes & Shallots, Brussels Sprouts, & Lamb Gravy, With Ali, Katie, & Melissa.

Happy Birthday Eve 2011 Baby. 26 tomorrow & more delicious food. It's my Gramma's 76th birthday today, so Happy Birthday Gramma also. Much love to you both.

Ode To Brussel Sprouts.

On several occasions this past winter, such as here & here, we bought one of those huge stalks of brussel sprouts (because they are so beautiful! remember my first one of the year last fall? plus are a way better deal then loose brussel sprouts generally) & hence had brussel sprouts for dinner over a series of nights, because a) brussel sprouts are freaking delicious & b) we like to make really good use of all available food & spend as little money as possible.

12.17.2009: Brussel sprouts & bacon. We ate them out of the pan just like this.

12.18.2009: the next night we did the same thing (because it was so fing tasty the first time) & added it to a box of mac n' cheese, & some additional blue cheese.
12.30.2009: the last of them, with a couple of chicken breasts & some dried lemongrass, served over coconut rice (i.e. coconut milk powder added to basmati rice in the rice cooker).

In conclusion: brussel sprouts totally rule. Sometimes they get a bad rep, but trust me. Yum. In fact, those brussel sprout stalks are so awesome, they are definitely going in our garden plot this season. oh yeah, I forgot, YEAH SPRING YOU'RE ALMOST HERE!!!!

Happy Valentine's Day From EnD.

Feed the ones you love, & make it pretty.

The actual food: pot roast simmered in our new-from-the-noho-transfer station cast iron frying pan (one of two) (yaaay dump finds) in olive oil, a yellow onion, garlic, white mushrooms, fresh thyme, & wilted snowpea sprouts, with sides of heavily buttered russian banana fingerling potatoes & my always classic roasted garlic brussel sprouts.

NOTE: cost of this meal = $3.72 + there were leftovers. Us poor folk do know how to live.

Cooking food is, as always, a metaphor for love.
& so, love love love, Happy Valentine's Day
(one day late, because I was, um, enjoying my own valentine's day sans internets)
& good eating.
xo, liz.

Here's Where We Get Back To The Gravy. Thanksgiving Part Three.

Um, Yeah, the 2009 Eating & Drawing Thanksgiving Live-Blogging Experiment kinda fell apart around the time that it started to seem like a really good idea to actually EAT Thanksgiving Dinner, rather than draw it & starve. Don't worry though, y'all, eat thanksgiving dinner I most certainly did & I drew it too.

Sides (other than stuffing): my favorite sides for most meat courses

(extremely delicious with steak)

buttery mashed potatoes & brussel sprouts roasted with garlic.

& finally, FINALLY, food plated:

rosemary & sage turkey breast, gravy, yukon gold mashed potatoes, apple-pinenut stuffing, roasted brussel sprouts with garlic.

Yup, I like gravy. I do think the Shawmut Diner's was was more satisfying. But this was my first complete Thanksgiving dinner, & I don't think it turned out half-bad.

The leftovers were better, Sunday night, over a glitter n' glow puzzle.

Thanksgiving dessert also didn't happen the night of Thanksgiving, but it happened, via David Lebovitz and Chez Panisse. Yeah yeah yeah I drew it. What was it? SUSPENSE.

An Old Classic Revisited, Part One.

Yup, I apparently now do Sequels & Conclusions on this blog. (& the Shawmut Diner Part Two will happen, DO NOT FREAK OUT, all you readers dying for that conclusion). FOOD WITH SUSPENSE!!!!!! Come on, you love it! I'm not sure if it's busyness, laziness, or the fact that the blog posts I conceive of in my head lately get ever more intricate & involved & difficult to actually complete in one sitting, & I like to put something up occasionally, so yeah. Here's another Part One. This one references a post I did long ago on this blog: i.e. the Classic New Boyfriend Dinner. I was pretty depressed when I wrote the original post.HOWEVER (seriously ladies, if you cook at all pay attention to this shit) Part One will actually tell you nothing. Part Two. Pay attention to that. This is just about stuff. THE FOOD STUFF.

Ingredients spilled across my kitchen table.

New yellow potatoes & brussel sprouts.

A reasonable but not expensive piece of steak & shallots (very important) & garlic & cheap red wine & butter (also important but not as much)

& then you let your cat sit on the table because she is oh so adorable.

& now there's a baguette!

& then you actually cook this shit. Details coming soon.

"Dinners for Boys You Like," also a new category on Eating & Drawing, also coming soon.

(that's what she said)

Brussel Sprouts & Pumpkin Beer.

That is the theme for today.

It's mid-October in Massachusetts, so time for lovely things like gorgeous stalks of brussels sprouts

& sampling various pumpkin beers in my kitchen on a Monday night.

I sold a lot of these today, & they are just so pretty.

Actually my pretty shitty day was somewhat redeemed by some of my last customers buying one of these & inspiring this post.

& Pumpkin beer!

Shipyard Smashed Pumpkin Ale & Dogfish Head Punkin Ale.

In my favorite pint glass from the Rendevous of course.

Brussel sprouts are one of those foods that people think are gross until they realize they are delicious. Really. I turn people on to brussel sprouts everyday. Well almost.

The whole meal: roasted brussel sprouts, brown basmati rice, sardines (I know I'm weird, I LOVE sardines)(at least the kittens appreciate this habit) & another Dogfish Head Punkin Ale.

In the conclusion (at least for tonight) of the pumpkin beer challenge, Dogfish Head won, hands down. I was really excited about the Shipyard, & it was boring. & I open the first Dogfish, which I've had before but not this year, & it was perfect. Just want you want. But I love Dogfish beers in general, I feel like they craft beers like I cook, all crazy & jumbled & random & take risks & somehow it works.

There are so many pumpkin beers though, this being New England, so I guess I will just have to sample more to be fair.

Aw, poor me.

But right now I want a pumpkin themed dessert & I have none.

Rin?