lettuce gather together

Tonight was the annual Girl Scout Mother Daughter Potluck Dinner. One of the activities involved telling our daughters funny stories about our mothers. Fortunately, I had to reach back no further in my memory then just this morning. I was able to tell Emily about how my mom, in her grand tradition of completely sucking at all things carpool related, picked Lisa up at the West Palm Beach airport last night, despite the fact that Lisa had flown into Fort Lauderdale.

As mentioned numerous times in these pages, I am irrationally competitive about these potluck affairs. Cpmbine that with my innate distrust of most food made by other people and my efforts to spend this week shedding the weight that I put on over vacation, and, well, I needed to bring a salad, and a good one at that. I'm happy to report that the entire thing was eaten.

Here's the recipe. It makes a lot of dressing, and that part can easily be cut in half. You'll need less than half of the recipe as written for the amount of salad I made.

calling dr. bombay

For quite some time, like years, I've dealt with, well, I can't even tell you what I've dealt with. Let's just call it The Embarassing Symptom, or TES for short. When I went to the naturopath about my foot cramps, i mentioned TES, and his eyes kind of lit up, like he'd just won the Quack Jackpot. It's some kind of excess of Ying or deficiency in Yang or something. He recommened a $250 blood test, not covered by insurance at all, to determine its cause. I bit.

I put off going in for the results for better than a month, mostly because he'd expressed suspicion that the culprit was a sensitivity to dairy, which would mean no cream in my morning coffee for three months. But, finally, today, I went.

The test showed extreme sensitivity to Flaxseed oil (my morning cereal?) and MSG (not too hard to avoid, as I don't eat too much processed food. It also showed moderate sensitivity to apples, which I can trade for pears or oranges (They are not quite as portable, but I'll live:; some chemical found in glue and nail polish (I'll do my best, but, like, come one...I'm hardly skipping pedicures all summer, and I'm not eating the polish either way); egg whites (ok if they're baked -- phew!! -- just not scrambled or is, say, creme anglaise); FD&C Blue Dye #2 (ok, skip the blue m&m's. whatever); and, get this, red grapes in all forms, including the fermented one!

I need to find out which white wines are made from green grapes. Anyone know??

This. Is. Important.

My morning coffee, much to my relief, has remained sacrosanct. Really, anything else I can survive.

something new for dinner

I am a big food porn addict. I like to watch cooking shows. I check cookbooks out from the library. And I get cooking magazines. Oh, do I get cooking magazines. Bon Appetit. Fine Cooking. Cooking Light. And I'm about to add a new one...Eating Well.

But, as part of my new healthy eating plan, I've decided to make a radical departure from past protocol and actually cook things from the magazines, or at least from the healthier ones. So now, when I make my weekly menu plan, I'm going to pick a new recipe to try. Maybe something with a new grain, or hidden vegetables. Whatever. Just something different. I've invited Emily to leaf through them, too, and to make requests. Did I tell you that, somehow, she has opened up to trying new foods, and even new vegetables?!? Recent additions have included quinoa, shrimp, salmon (or at least a salmon burger), salad, mango, and pears. Her request for next week's menu was Asian Salt & Pepper Shrimp from Eating Well. Cool, huh?

Anyway, I made the recipe below for dinner tonight. It's from this month's Cooking Light. It was so good. And I don't even really like roasted red peppers! Although now I wonder if I really do, if it's just those slimy wet things in a jar that I hate. We pretty much did everything but lick the bowl. I served it with sautéed shrimp on top -- I just heated a bit of olive oil in a nonstick pan and tossed in a pound of shrimp with garlic, lemon zest, parsley, salt, and pepper. Also, don't believe them about the 8 ounces of pasta. There's at least enough sauce for a pound. I used whole wheat fusilli, and that was good; I wouldn't like it with long pasta. It would be good with spinach chopped in or, if you weren't eating with Andrew and Emily, with lots of hot pepper flakes.

lesson learned. really.

Last year, I posted about Aron Ralston, the man who lost his hand in a hiking accident. Well, he didn't lose it, exactly. He knew where it was because he had cut it off himself, but it was gone either way. I posted about how I had learned a lesson from his mistake, and I was going to do a better job of letting people know where I'd be hiking. And, for a while, I did. But like most lessons that you don't learn through personal experience, it didn't stick.

I've been hiking a lot since the weather changed, and I have been sloppy as can be about it...parking my car, strapping on my ipod, and heading alone into the hills. Or worse. No ipod, but a kid or three, with no cell phone, no first aid kit, and no note to let anyone know where we've gone. And, let us not forget: I am a trained Girl Scout leader. I would never do this with my troop but, somehow, with my own kids, I've been entirely laissez faire.

On Friday, I took Jonah, Emily, and Emily's friend Monica to the Nature Center. I have been eating a lot, and wanted some extra exercise. Plus, Jonah had been inside all morning, and needed some good old fashioned tuckering out. So we started on the red trail and then, rather than cutting over to the Jonah-friendly light blue trail like usual, we headed up the yellow trail. Now, I do the yellow trail myself all the time. It's about a mile and a half, gently rising and falling, only moderately challenging. I had confidence in Jonah's ability to handle it. But I forgot about the streams, which are narrow and not too full, even after the runoff, and which often have log bridges for crossing, but which sometimes have to be crossed by hopping from rock to rock. Jonah found those a bit unnerving, but he handled them with my help.

Then the girls found the treasure hunt. Someone had placed a series of ribbons on trees with pushpins. Ostensibly, the first person to find all of them would win a prize. The first pin was at the head of the green trail, which forks off from the yellow trail that we were hiking. I'd never hiked the green trail before, but the girls were really excited about looking for some of the ribbons, the day was beautiful, and Jonah was still going strong. So we headed off on the green trail, and walked and walked and walked. We found one ribbon and, by the time we got back to the yellow trail, we were tired, and glad to be near the end of the loop.

We had only one more stream to cross. Emily was showing me a way to pick across it, but Jonah was nervous and cranky and suddenly, trying to watch Emily and my own feet while simultaneously holding Jonah's hand and showing him where to step, I brought my foot down on a patch of slimy moss, and pitched into the stream, taking Jonah with me. I got wet; Jonah got wetter. He had bruised his knee; I had sliced a neat piece of flesh from the ball of my thumb and was bleeding, although not too badly.

I was about a half mile deep in the woods. Jonah was crying, but there was no one around to hear us. I could do nothing for my thumb but stick it in my mouth. I had no band-aid for me, no instant ice pack for him. Nothing. I managed to get us both up, carried him across the stream, and gently led us all back home.

Ultimately, we were fine but, all weekend, thinking about how much worse it could have been has been terrifying. What if he had hit his head? What if I had really cut myself badly?

I've dug out my old fanny pack, and I'll be keeping it in the car with some bandages, a tube of neosporin, my swiss army knife, a small bottle of water, and a cold pack inside. If I go alone, I'll let someone know where I am or, at least, leave a note in the car. If I take the kids and I'm the only adult, I'll be sure not to head that deep into the woods without a phone again.

Hiking is such a wonderful way to get some motion in my day and to spend time with the kids. I've been enjoying both the effort and the result, and going for longer and more challenging experiences, both alone and with my family. It's been easy to forget that, even on a marked trail close to home, it's not a danger-free endeavor.

From now on, I need to work harder at remembering.

they have a holiday for this now?

Happy 4:20, everybody!

Or should I say "Happy National Smoke a Doobie Only I am So Old and Square I Didn't Even Know This Existed Day!"?

Did you all know about this already? Apparently, somewhere along the way, "4:20" became slang for pot. And 4:20 replaced 11:11 as the preferred time for getting high. And April 20, well, you get the picture. I learened this, of all places, on NPR yesterday. National Public Radio. Not, you know, on tour. Oh, no. On NPR, as I chopped spinach for my family's healthy dinner.

This afternoon, I told this all to my friend Tracy, who is still young and groovy and runs my favorite local dining establishment. She felt sorry for me and gave me a hug. That's my life now. Cool chicks hug me out of pity as I chase my son out of the last actual phone booth in the county.

In happier news, the antibiotics kicked the bronchitis out of my system, I hit my goal at Weight Watchers, I'm going shoe shopping tomorrow, and the sun is out.

i've got a secret

Did you know that the rate of twins increases significantly in women who become pregnant over the age of 40? It turns out that, after a certain point, women are much more likely to release more than one egg per cycle. Also, did you know that, if you don't take your birth control pills every single day, you just might wind up pregnant? Common sense, no?

I didn't used to know all of that, but I do now.