As loud as I wanted

Ah. Okay. Where were we?

Everything is happening at lightning speed. I have to get back to writing it down, or I’ll forget.  One morning, you wake up and you’re 33 years old, with two dogs and a spouse and a refrigerator full of esoteric vermouths and amari, and the next morning, you wake up and you’re 34 years old, with two dogs, a spouse, and a 12-week-old child in a bouncy chair on the floor in front of the refrigerator.  The other day at a doctor’s checkup, I actually told the nurse that I was 33, because I forgot that I’d had a birthday. 33, 34, same thing. In any case, I’m still a baby when I get a shot.

We are beginning to find moments of normalcy. On Monday, we put June in the car and drove to Vancouver to see Bruce Springsteen in concert.  He played "Cover Me," and it was sufficiently deafening that I could sing along as loud as I wanted without worrying that anyone would hear. I also ate a hot dog with yellow mustard.  It was outstanding. June stayed back at the hotel with our friends Katie and Kyle and slept through the entire show.  Someday, when she’s moaning about how ancient and uncool and deaf we are, I’ll tell her about the days when we were seeing Springsteen and sacrificing our hearing and she was drooling shamelessly all over a borrowed hotel playpen.

Twice now, Brandon and I have gone on dates. Real dates, without a small person around.  Of course, these dates are on Sundays, at lunchtime, and Brandon goes to work afterward.  The first time, we went out to lunch at The Whale Wins. (The sardine toast with curried tomato mayonnaise and shaved fennel! The whole roasted trout with brown butter and walnut sauce!  The brownie!  Eric Bordelet’s pear cider!) Then we went to see the new James Bond movie, which was exciting, except that we failed to note that the movie would end after the babysitter was expecting us home, and that meant that we were those people, the ones who trip on your purse while climbing over you and tiptoe sheepishly out of the theater with twenty minutes left. The second time, we went out to lunch again, and after having three-quarters of a glass of Champagne, I fell asleep in the car on the way back to our neighborhood. When I woke up, we were parked in the lot outside the grocery store, where we were supposed to be doing our Thanksgiving shopping, and over in the driver’s seat, Brandon was now sleeping.  We are pros at sleeping in parked cars.  Who knew? This past Tuesday, I had a fabulous nap in a parking lot on Granville Island, with cars roaring across the bridge over my head, while Brandon and June explored the market.

June looks exactly like Brandon when she smiles, and the rest of the time, or most of it, she looks like me. Early the other morning, in our hotel room in Vancouver, I heard her start to fuss in her playpen-slash-crib, and when I bent down to pick her up, she let out a tiny gleeful scream and I could see, even in the dark, that she was grinning at me. I don’t know if I’ll ever get over the fact that she exists - except when she’s having a flamboyant meltdown like she did yesterday afternoon while we attempted to take a walk, and then I am pretty sure that I will definitely, without a doubt, never ever get over it.

When we were first thinking about having a baby, I read Anne Lamott’s Operating Instructions - there’s an Anne Lamott book for every phase of my life!  Such a consolation! - and a couple of days ago, I decided to reread it.  There’s so much that she gets right. "Before I got pregnant with Sam," she writes on page 60, "I felt there wasn’t anything that could happen that would utterly destroy me. . . .  Now there is something that could happen that I could not survive: I could lose Sam. I look down into his staggeringly lovely little face, and I can hardly breathe sometimes. He is all I have ever wanted, and my heart is so huge with love that I feel like it is about to go off. At the same time, I feel that he has completely ruined my life, because I didn’t used to care all that much."

Sometimes when I’m driving, because I do all of my thinking (and now, sleeping) in the car, I think about Tina and my dad, all the people June will never meet. You’d think I’d be used to it, now that Burg has been gone for ten years next week, but grief always catches me off guard.  I can’t believe that June will never know my dad; that she’ll never get one of his scratchy, bracing, beard-forward kisses; that he will never have the opportunity to forget her birthday, something he was always so good at.  And then I think about the fact that June will never really think of my mother as a twin.  I just can’t believe she’ll never know The Twins.  Brandon tells me almost every day that he sees them in her, and that makes it a little better.

It feels good to come back to this space.  It never fails me.  Thank you, always, always, for reading.

P.S.  This song. (With thanks to my friend Brian for pointing it out.)  Stevie wins again.

I stand by my assessment

I know. The universe does not need another recipe for a banana baked something. And yet.

It’s a rainy Friday afternoon, and I have a couple of hours(!) home alone(!) to do whatever(!) I want(!), which is mostly to eat Häagen-Dazs coffee ice cream and stare at the wall. Brandon and June are out on the town, having a lunch date at a friend’s new restaurant. I hope June is polite and doesn’t spit up at the table or get totally milk-drunk and harass the server - or that, if she does, she at least tips well. Baby jokes! It’s come to this! God, I am so, so sorry.

I’ve been wanting to tell you about this recipe for several weeks now. I first made it on September 7, a Friday.  I remember the date because I was in very early labor that day, though I wasn’t entirely sure of it yet. My mother was in town, and we were trying to keep ourselves occupied. There were three overripe bananas on the countertop, and I felt like baking. But I had already made two banana breads and stashed them the freezer, so for the first time in recorded history, banana bread seemed like a bad idea. Instead, I got out Kim Boyce’s excellent book and thumbed through it until I came to a recipe for Banana Cereal Muffins.

I don’t have a picture of said muffins for you. But I’ll go ahead and let you in on a secret: they’re not especially beautiful. They look like muffins, muffins that might even be good for you. They’re brown and lumpy on top. But they are very, very delicious: tender and with a hearty crumb, faintly buttery, intensely perfumed with banana. They were the first thing I ate after June was born, and though I’m sure the astonishment of that moment has biased my opinion somewhat, I stand by my assessment of the muffin. I can’t remember why, but Brandon had to feed it to me - maybe I was holding the baby? - and rather than putting the whole thing up to my face, he broke off bites and put them in my mouth. It was a very sweet gesture, except that the bites he gave me were tiny, as though he were feeding an injured bird, and he kept getting distracted by something - it must have been the baby, who, yes, I must have been holding - and soon I was barking, "MORE MUFFIN. THE MUFFIN. GIVE ME THE MUFFIN." Which, of course, is nothing new.


Banana Cereal Muffins
Adapted from Good to the Grain, by Kim Boyce

I think of this as a garbage disposal-style recipe, and I hope you won’t take that the wrong way. What I mean is, you can throw your nearly dead bananas at it, and your leftover hot cereal from this morning, and that bag of dark rye flour you’ve had lying around in the refrigerator since last March. Or, if you’re short a banana but happen to have some applesauce, put a little of that in instead. I might even try using leftover oatmeal next time, instead of the cracked grain cereal.

Another note: Boyce calls for creaming butter when it’s cold, rather than room temperature. I can’t say for sure, but I think she does it as a convenience: that way, you don’t have to plan ahead. I was nervous, but when beaten on high speed, it really does cream just fine.

½ cup cracked-multigrain hot cereal, such as Bob’s Red Mill or Bluebird Grain Farms Old World Cereal Blend
Pinch of salt
1 cup (140 grams) dark rye flour
1 cup (140 grams) all-purpose flour
1 ½ tsp. baking powder
½ tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. kosher salt
1 tsp. ground cinnamon
6 Tbsp. (85 grams) cold unsalted butter
¼ cup (50 grams) dark brown sugar
3 very ripe bananas, about 1 ¼ pounds or 565 grams
2 Tbsp. unsulphured (not blackstrap) molasses
1 large egg

Bring 1 ½ cups water to a boil. Add the cereal and salt, and whisk to prevent clumping. Reduce the heat to low and cook, uncovered, stirring occasionally, until the cereal is tender, 15 to 20 minutes. Cool; then set aside ½ cup of the cooked cereal, saving the rest for another use. (You can freeze it in ½-cup portions to use for more muffins later, if you want.)

Preheat the oven to 350°F. Grease 8 cups of a standard-size muffin tins.

In a medium bowl, whisk together the dark rye flour, all-purpose flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and cinnamon.

In the bowl of a standing mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, combine the butter and the brown sugar. Beat on high speed until the mixture is light and creamy, about 2 minutes. Using a spatula, scrape down the sides and bottom of the bowl. Add the bananas, molasses, egg, and the ½ cup cooled cereal, and beat on medium speed until thoroughly combined, a minute or so. It may look curdled. Don’t worry about that. Add the dry ingredients, and mix on low speed to just combine. Using the spatula, mix a bit more to ensure that the flour is entirely absorbed.

Scoop the batter into the 8 prepared muffin cups. (I use an ice cream scoop to do this, but you could also use a spoon.) Bake for 35 to 40 minutes, rotating the pan midway through, until the bottoms of the muffins are dark golden in color. (Twist one out of the pan to check.) Remove the tins from the oven, transfer the hot muffins to a wire rack, and cool slightly. The muffins are best eaten warm from the oven or later that same day. Or, on later occasions, consider warming them in the oven or toasting them lightly before serving. They also freeze beautifully.

Yield: 8 muffins

All right

Well, well, well! I’m typing this with a baby strapped to my chest! Still trying to figure out how that happened.

I hope you’re well. Things are all right here, I’m relieved to report, especially given the fact that I had exactly zero experience with babies prior to birthing one three short weeks ago. I have never felt so simultaneously capable and incompetent. It depends on the day. Sometimes the hour. But we’re figuring it out, with help and handholding and deliveries of soup and Szechuan pork and plum cake from our parents and friends and our adoptive family at Delancey and Essex. It helps that June has the world’s best cowlick, and that she makes pirate faces when she’s hungry. It helps that I really, really, really like her.

Last week, someone asked me how it feels to be a mother. I have to say, I don’t feel like a mother yet. I don’t even know what it means to feel like a mother. Right now, more than anything, I feel best if I don’t think too hard.

I’ve never been a journal- or diary-keeper. This site, though I don’t like to think of it as anything remotely like a journal, is my closest thing to it. But if I were keeping a journal of this period of time, I would want to make note of Music Hour. Every morning, after June has had breakfast, I sneak out to make coffee or pay bills or shower, and she and Brandon lie in bed and hiccup, listening to music and looking out the window.

June is a great fan of Elvis, Johnny Cash, old country-western as a general category, and Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto (with gratitude to Unofficial Auntie Elissa for the suggestion). She also likes Arthur Russell. She does not like the silence between songs. She is deeply insulted by the silence between songs. Like me, she is made alternately ecstatic and weepy by Paul Simon’s “Graceland.” She appreciates my singing voice, which is something that no one on Earth has ever appreciated, ever. She can stay.

Be back soon.

We did it

I am very happy to announce that June is here.

I had my first contraction while sitting at the bar at Delancey last Friday evening, eating dinner with my mother, and went into early labor in the middle of the night. Twenty-nine hours later - after deafening my companions on the drive to the hospital; discovering that I wasn’t far enough along to be admitted; a few hours spent laboring on a bench on the nearby campus of Seattle University, scaring incoming freshmen into a lifetime of abstinence; and much care and encouragement from my saintly longtime doctor, the world’s finest doula, and a nurse named Wendy - our daughter June Elizabeth Alexander Pettit was born at 6:29 am on Sunday, September 9. She weighed 9 pounds and was 20.5 inches long, with a full head of wavy dark brown hair. I still can’t believe we did it.

Brandon and I came up with June’s first name over a year ago, when we were still only thinking about becoming parents. Neither of us really remembers where the idea came from, though I think we borrowed it from June Carter Cash. June’s middle names come from two of my mother's siblings. Elizabeth was my aunt Tina’s formal first name, and Alexander was the middle name of my uncle Jerry, who died of AIDS when I was nine. I like knowing that Tina and Jerry will always be with her now. Especially Tina, who wanted so much to meet her. I hope they got to wave to one another as they passed, Tina leaving and June arriving.

Thank you so much for the support and care you’ve shown me and Brandon in these past months and years. I know June has already felt it, too. We’re so glad to know her, and to introduce her to you.

Be back soon.

[Second photograph by my friend Lecia Phinney. I highly recommend clicking it to make it larger. Blogger is making it oddly blurry here.]

Essex

I MADE IT! By which I mean, I managed to not go into labor before, in the middle of, or in the days immediately following the opening of Essex. VICTORY.

I imagine that I will very soon start cursing the fact that I am still pregnant, but for now, I feel like I should be given a medal, or a cocktail. Since neither is a viable option, I made myself a pan of flapjacks and ate a quarter of it in one sitting.

I haven’t written a lot about Essex here, not because it has felt like any less of a big deal than Delancey, but because the first half of this year, which was when the project began to move forward, ate me alive. There were a couple of months when, in my own head, I had to pretend (la la la) that Essex wasn’t actually happening. But last Wednesday, with great help from a lot of people, it happened. Essex is now open! Every Wednesday to Sunday! Starting at 4:30 pm! I’m so proud of it, proud of Brandon for dreaming it up, proud of our staff for working so hard, proud that we actually did it and that I didn’t have the baby while hunched over the computer in the office, formatting the cocktail menu.

In the early days of Delancey, I was too busy making salads and mistakes and popsicles to reach for my camera and take pictures. I have pictures of Delancey under construction, pictures of Delancey just before opening, and pictures from months after opening, but I have almost none of its first weeks. So this weekend, I sneaked into Essex in the few quiet, golden moments between set-up and opening time, and I snapped some.

Essex sits directly next door to Delancey, in the former home of Bella Umbrella. Even before we learned that the umbrella shop was moving out, we had talked about someday opening a bar there. Maybe it could work hand-in-hand with Delancey, we thought, and be a place for people to hang out before or after dinner. As we began to think about what we would want our bar to feel like, and what we would want to drink there, and what we would want to eat there, the idea grew. Since this is our neighborhood, we wanted it to feel like a neighborhood place, but with exceptional cocktails. Even more, we wanted to sort of geek out with it, to make a lot of the cocktail ingredients in-house - and not just bitters, but liqueurs, fernet, vermouths, and sodas. That thinking then quickly extended itself to the food. If we’re going to serve pretzels, let’s say, we should make them ourselves, we decided. And we should serve them with Brandon’s homemade mustard. And while we’re at it, hey, maybe you could eat a whole meal at Essex!  Maybe we could serve open-face toasts with clothbound aged cheddar and house-pickled peppers. And maybe that lacquered and smoked pork shoulder that Brandon has been tinkering with since May. And maybe spot prawns caught nearby, with a pot of chile-spiked mayo. And oh, oh, OH, our own version of a Thin Mint! We could play around, we realized, and really make stuff - stuff that didn’t necessarily fit at Delancey.

We decided to call it Essex because, in Manhattan, Essex and Delancey Streets intersect, and the Essex and Delancey subway stops share a station. Our Essex and our Delancey share a staff, two bathrooms, a kitchen, a hallway, and an overstuffed office that gives me heart palpitations. Like Delancey, Essex was designed by Katie Caradec (my cousin!) and Pantea Tehrani, of tbD.

And to really keep it all in the family, Brandon named our first liqueur, made from three different kinds of citrus and aged for four months in rye barrels, after my dad. It’s called Burg’s Extra-Special Orange. Burg will have been gone for ten years, ten years, this December, but if he were still around, I think he would have claimed this bar stool as his designated seat. Maybe we should have a plaque made for it. Maybe someday.

British Flapjacks
Adapted from my recipe in Bon Appétit, March 2010

Because I really did eat a quarter of the pan in one sitting, and it would be mean not to share some with you.

1 stick (113 grams) unsalted butter, cut into 8 pieces
½ cup (100 grams) packed light brown sugar
¼ cup (60 ml) golden syrup*
2 1/3 cups (210 grams) quick-cooking oats (not instant or old-fashioned)
Pinch of fine salt
Crunchy salt, such as Maldon or fleur de sel, for finishing

Preheat the oven to 350°F. Butter an 8-inch square metal baking pan. Combine the butter, brown sugar, and golden syrup in a heavy medium saucepan.  Stir regularly over medium-low heat until the butter melts, the sugar dissolves, and the mixture is smooth. Remove from heat. Add the oats and fine salt, and stir to evenly coated. Transfer the mixture to the prepared pan, and press it out in even layer. Bake until the top is golden (the edges will be darker), about 20 to 25 minutes. Transfer the pan to a rack, and allow to cool for 5 minutes.  Then cut into 4 squares, and cut each square into 4 triangles. (The mixture will still be soft and a little crumbly; just do the best you can.) Allow to finish cooling completely in the pan. (The flapjacks will firm up as they cool.) Before serving, top with crunchy salt to taste.

*A type of syrup popular in the UK. Available at some supermarkets, specialty foods stores, and British import shops.  (If you live in Ballard, like me, you can find it at Ballard Market.)

Yield: 16 servings, if you have a lot of restraint.

All of it

Hi, all. I’ve received a number of concerned e-mails and comments in the past few days, wondering if the quiet around here meant that the baby has arrived, so let me say first: NO BABY YET.

I am, however, in my 36th week of pregnancy. And as of about ten days ago, I finished writing the manuscript for my next book - or this draft of it, anyway. There’s still plenty of revising and hand-wringing to do, but at least I now have something to improve upon.  And Essex, the bar we’re putting in next door to Delancey, is opening in less than a week. (!) Lots of Big Life Stuff. Huge Life Stuff. Giant Life Stuff.

Oddly enough, or oddly for me, I’ve been feeling okay with it. It was only this past Tuesday afternoon - as I stood in the dining room at Delancey, surrounded by power tools, cases of newly delivered wine and vegetables, upended chairs, slips of paper, wine samples, and dozens of jars of housemade bitters and liqueurs - that, for the first time, I felt like cowering in a corner. And screaming. Just briefly.

But mostly, it’s been okay. And I’m glad for that, because I want to be present for all of it, for every stupidly stupidly stupidly full minute of these last pre-child weeks: the late-night pizza at Delancey, the Essex menu-planning meetings and spot prawn tastings and cultured butter tastings and beer-boiled pretzel tastings, the errands, the quiet moments between errands, our fifth wedding anniversary, the half-days off, the feeling of driving around with the stereo* up and no baby yet in the backseat, no one to take care of but myself.  It feels right to pay attention now - to this summer, to my life Before. I know that sounds very final and dramatic and sort of sad and possibly even apocalyptic (dun dun DUUNNNN), but I don’t mean it that way. I just mean that it feels good to be in the middle of so much, and to pause and look around. Because I know everything will look different soon.

I took the photographs in this post over the past two weeks.  The ones of Essex, in particular, were taken last Friday. They’re already out of date. Along that wallpapered wall, there’s now a walnut banquette and a row of porcelain sconces, and there’s white marble on top of the bar and walnut cladding along its face. About an hour ago, pendant lights were being hung. I cannot possibly say enough complimentary things about our friend Joe Burmeister, the man who’s overseeing the whole mess and making it into something with actual shape. This time - unlike three years ago this Sunday, when we opened Delancey - Brandon and I are not the ones swinging the hammers. That may be part of why I’m not writing this from a psychiatric ward.

Instead, I’m eating my weight in tomatoes. No small feat, given that my weight is something special lately.

I’ve also made that blueberry crumble I mentioned in my previous post, and a fresh blueberry pie, and a peach crumble, and a loaf of zucchini bread. It was all tasty.

But to be 100% honest, none of it made me feel like writing about it. The truth is, I think I like a bowl of raw blueberries, or a few slices of peach, or a pile of plain roasted zucchini, more than anything interesting that I could make or bake from them.  The Life Lessons of Molly Wizenberg, age 33¾.

(Alice shares my sentiment.)

More soon.

* I’ve been listening to R.E.M.’s Murmur since I was 14, and I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of it. The best song, in my opinion, begins at 26:51.

P.S. Sarah Coffey! Are you reading this? You sent me (via Delancey) a very, very kind card and baby gift, but in a moment of overzealous straightening-up, I threw away the envelope with your address on it. Gah. If you’re reading this: thank you.

Lately

Last night I went to the grocery store for milk and yogurt and the usuals, and the cashier smiled and commented on how much my belly has grown since she last rang me up.  For the past couple of months, each time I’ve gone grocery shopping, no matter who my cashier is, he or she has asked about my progress and said a few nice words.  I don’t know any of these people. No idea what their names are.  A few of them might have been to Delancey, since it’s in the same neighborhood, but I don’t think that’s it.  I think they know me by the round appendage on the front of my body.  I hadn’t expected to like being That Pregnant Lady, but today I’m starting to think I might actually miss it, this feeling of having a cheering squad wherever I go.

Anyway, that’s what’s going on around here.  Just, you know, talking about my body with strangers in the checkout line.  That, and continuing to work on my manuscript, and helping Brandon try to get Essex open before we fall into the Black Hole of Infant-Related Sleep Deprivation.  There will be custom walnut bar stools.  And wallpaper with herbs and whales on it!  Lacquered, smoked pork shoulder! Housemade amaro!

In the meantime:

I bought apricots at the market this morning, and though I mostly want to stand around and sniff them, I think I’ll turn them into a crumble.  I’m going to try a new recipe, and if it turns out to be worth sharing, I’ll pass it along.

And after that, whenever blueberries are ready, I want to make this.  If any of you have tried it, please report.

And I highly recommend this.  I’ve made it twice in the past three weeks, mostly to eat for breakfast, but then I wind up stealing a slice after lunch and another in mid-afternoon. One note: I use Bulgarian buttermilk, which is creamier and sexier than the usual low-fat kind.  It’s available at my local grocery store, Ballard Market.  And I use white whole wheat flour instead of the regular whole wheat flour, because that’s what I currently have around.  And I buy whole raw flax seeds and grind them in a spice grinder.  FYI. 

Since reading Megan’s post, I’ve been thinking about making my own yogurt.  We’ll see if anything comes of this, however, given that I first started thinking about making my own yogurt a year and a half ago, when I read this piece.  I’ll get there someday.

If I weren’t supposed to go easy on caffeine and yadda yadda blah blah blah, I would be drinking cold-brewed iced coffee every morning right now.  Have an extra glass for me.

I love it when Tommy talks food.

Youngna drew my attention to this E. B. White piece, which she calls "the ultimate summer essay."  I think she’s right.

Katie has a lovely, delicate eye, and she’s been on fire lately.  For example, this.  Which is a photo of this strawberry cake, which is also on my to-make list.

Last: I went to visit an old friend and her brand-new son, and when she showed me his nursery upstairs, I suddenly had a vision of him a few years from now, building a blanket fort in the corner, under the eaves.  And then I thought, A BLANKET FORT!  I get to build blanket forts again! And maybe eat strawberry cake in them.

I took the pictures in this post earlier this week, while on a 36-hour mini-vacation with Brandon.  We went to Whidbey Island, ate mussels, read the newspaper, saw a bad movie, visited a farm that grows some of Delancey’s produce, and met a dog named Peanut.

I hope summer is being good to you.