My sidekick...

My little sidekick is gone. Absent. Vamoose. I shouldn’t be so dramatic. Allow me to restate: for at least seven hours every Monday through Friday my son has skedaddled from my life. No need to issue an Amber Alert. My son is finally in all-day school.


It was inevitable. Kindergarten last year was a loosey-goosey half-day of song and revelry, as were all the years of pre-school proceeding it, and those little three hour spans were all either of us was accustomed to with school up until now. A week after diving into the grueling rigors of first grade, he seems to be rolling with the whole sitting-at-a-desk and eating-lunch-with-hundreds-others just fine. My one and only has flown the coop without much of a glance behind, no feathers terribly ruffled.

The decision to have a single child is one that has always felt right to me. My reasoning is that I get to have the motherhood experience while still enjoying a full life outside of being someone's mother. My friends who have more than one child lead active and interesting lives, rich with the interesting stuff of life outside of motherhood, but I know for myself it would be the death knell for any hope I have of living a creative life. I have never been someone for whom it is natural to juggle and multitask: I can do it and I have to all the time, but I am just not particularly adept at it. When I try to juggle for prolonged periods, it means that stuff gets dropped, broken, inadvertently trod upon. For me, being able to really dig in and concentrate on the task in front of me is essential to that being both a gratifying experience and me being reasonably successful at accomplishing it. When I have a bunch of different responsibilities vying for my attention, I just sort of become dysfunctional and, well, unpleasant to be around. When I have two or three Big, Important Responsibilities - say, for example, raising a child, writing a novel, organizing an event – along with a reasonable cushion of time to be able to devote to them, I'm in my element. Too many dependencies that demand my attention and my limited time resources, though leave me anxious and unfulfilled. I need to really dig my fingers into the rich loamy soil of all-consuming projects to function at my optimal best.

This awareness of my shortcomings has resulted in my unshakable conviction that if I had more than one child, I would soon be joining Sylvia Plath’s ghost and countless other defeated mothers with my head in the oven or jumping off the cliff or speeding away in the car without a license plate. It’s not because I don’t love children but more because I’m a fundamentally selfish person and I know that what I’m already giving – to my family, my friends, my cat, myself, my creative life, my interests – is not a boundless resource. I have to manage that tap pretty closely. There are women I see all the time, friends of mine even, with four or five children who are able to be present, to not be snippy, to not mind being called away every other minute to attend to a diaper, a snack, a spill. I have admiration for that Buddha-like quality of selflessness so many possess, the limitless font of unconditional nurturing, but, boy oh boy, that is not me. If there were only the option of raising five children or raising none, I’m pretty confident I know what I’d choose. I say this while loving my son with my whole flawed heart.

One of the real luxuries of being the mother of one is being able to truly concentrate on my child, or what my friend Rae refers to as my “little project,” fully. My son and I have always had a close, symbiotic bond, perhaps most perfectly represented by the freakishly short umbilical cord we shared between us. He was never the sort of toddler who wandered, who I had to worry about roaming into the street: he was always firmly planted, happiest in the arms of his parents or at our side. My mother has given voice to many worries over the years – that’s what she sees as her birthright, being a Jewish mother and now grandmother – and she has said in the past that she is concerned that our son is too close to us. The thing is, though, that he has always enjoyed going to school, never complained about us leaving him much past that first month or two of pre-school, and of course he likes playing with his friends with no grownups around. As he has matured, he has moved beyond his comfort zone socially and he is quite fine when we are out of his field of vision these days. For the most part, though, our son likes being with us, which I actually think is kind of cool. Of the things there are to worry about in life, should a close bond between parent and child even register, I mean as long as it’s not emulating something out of the Norman Bates family dynamic? I know there will come a day when he will lock himself in his room and barely manage eye contact with his me and my hyper-annoying motherly ways so I am enjoying our closeness while I can.

But now he’s gone for most of the day. The days of hopping on the train to go downtown – a museum? Millennium Park? - on an afternoon lark are behind us. The latitude one feels in pre-kindergarten and even kindergarten starts to dissolve as the expectations pile on, and with that our days of calling in with a stuffy nose so we can go to the free day at the Field Museum are, for the most part, behind us. I was given an amazing opportunity, a tremendous luxury of time that I am well-aware is quite a privilege – during which I could devote myself to raising my son and indulging our whims (among many other things). Now, though, the time of that freedom together is behind us as we move to another stage in life.

The past week has been difficult to get accustomed to, I have to admit. I keep expecting to see my little sidekick, the ketchup to my mustard, the Cisco to my Pancho, nearby as he has been for most of the past seven years. He’s not at arm’s length these days, spouting off theories of alien abduction (I have a delightfully strange child) and drawing elaborate space machines. We’re not taking off to the woods to look for signs of craft landings or investigating tree stumps for fascinating bugs. He’s at school, filling his classmates’ ears with the product of his very active inner world. I miss him, having his sweet face being nearby, his soft cheeks always available for a quick nuzzle. In some ways, motherhood is a process of continually saying goodbye.

Despite this, I have to say that I am also very excited about the easing up of my responsibilities as entertainment coordinator. Now I have the time I have been so longing for since my son was born to unabashedly follow my muse and wherever that leads me without interruption from approximately 8:00 a.m. until 3:00 p.m. Monday through Friday. This is going to be a time of growth for me, I can feel it, of moving beyond my own comfort zone. For the past seven years, I had a convenient excuse for not fully pursuing my creative goals: not enough time! Too many interruptions! (Not that I have been totally shiftless, just not as productive as I like to be.) Now I am ready to dive back into that world out there and commit myself to the new path I know is there, clearer dreams and ambitions.

My sidekick has moved on and now so will I. While there is a loss here, I am eager to see what this will mean for both of us.

The Vegans In The Dells...

Sometimes we all just need a break.

This world is cold, hard and mean like a little metal ball sometimes, ready to ping you wherever it hurts most. In fact, sometimes you feel like that especially vulnerable bumper in the pinball machine, hit repeatedly by the ball (ding-ding-ding-ding-ding...!) as the toll rises against you until you are ready to topple over with just one more hit. This early summer, I kind of felt like every time I left the house I had to look over my shoulder for that mean metal ball, ready to roll me over at any moment.

Still some of us are so hardwired to believe we can affect positive change that the prospect of the absence of this ability would make it very challenging to get out of bed in the morning. So we put on our happy faces, frown a little at our newspapers, pull ourselves out of it somehow (Coffee? A hug? Whatever it takes...) and go on about the business of trying to make the best of this very flawed place. Some of us are activists, busying ourselves with meetings and petitions and protests. Others are artists, using the creative process to give voice to our discontent. And then there are the community builders, helping this world we are trying to will into existence take form in the shape of relationships and personal connections. Whatever it is that we do, we do it because we have to to respect ourselves and to feel some measure of effectiveness. This all works, often magnificently well, but sometimes we just need to chuck it all for a day or two or three and let ourselves get silly. We need to grin, laugh, giggle, chuckle, let go, and relax. We need to eat calorically dense, nutritionally modest food, entertain ourselves in ways that amuse but do not challenge, find peace with allowing our inner-simpleton to take over the driving for a bit.

At times like these, there is the Wisconsin Dells or the equivalent near you.

My husband and I started going to the Dells every year on our annual voyage to Minnesota, otherwise known as when the Jewess observes the happy Viking family in the dead of winter. The Dells is approximately the mid-point between Chicago and his tiny hometown in Minnesota, a three-and-a-half hour drive, a reasonable distance in which to have earned a lunch or dinner break.

I had heard of the Dells all my life but only went there for the first time as an adult. The first time I went, it was a revelation, though I scarcely remember the specifics. I was simply too overtaken by sensory overload, even in the snowy quiet of December. I have come to learn that driving into town in the winter, the Dells takes on a radically different quality than in the summer: the nearly deserted downtown, spookily empty roller coasters, the billboards that must look so enticing under the punishing July sun - water-drenched thrill-seekers; big, icy drinks in sweat-beaded glasses - chill to the bone in late December. It is a distinctly sad time of year, the death cycle for pretty much everything but polar creatures, but for those of us who cherish the bittersweet, the Dells in winter is also exquisitely plaintive. It seems as if you can hear last summer's voices shouting, thrilled at the whatever adventure awaits in front of them, in the distance. In the very far distance.

In the summer, this is a very different town, every chock-a-block inch of it alive and fully awake. We had been to the Dells several times in the winter before we went in the summer, when the beast is really alert. Every time that we've returned, my initial assessment has barely diminished: this is a staggering town, deeply impressive in its audacious embrace of the tacky.

It can be described as Las Vegas for kids. Or the sort of town a consortium of seven-year-olds would create if they ran the town council. Everything is loud, obnoxious and created for maximum fun, at least what your typical seven-to-ten year-old tends to find fun. Much of it is also under gallons and gallons of chlorinated water. Subtlety is not a prized quality in the Dells, in fact, I would say that it is scorned; the Lutheran reserve and stoicism that pervades through much of the Dairyland politely inspects its nails and whistles to itself when it comes to city planning here. As long as it's family-friendly, there is seemingly nothing that is beyond the pale, pushing the envelope of frivolity too far. Even the pictures of those dressed up as bordello barmaids in the "old time" black-and-white portraits at the novelty photo studios in the downtown area are stripped of any prurience.

There are two distinct parts of the Dells that interact together chaotically but still agreeably. There is the more contemporary side, the one with the big water park hotels and
expensive theme parks with "Extreme Rides" (anything where a human form and bungee cords interact reboundingly) and then there is the Old Wisconsin Dells. This the part that was created from the 1950s through the 1970s, seemingly influenced by the blocky aesthetics of The Flintstones meets the groovy, faux-natural style of The Brady Bunch with a nice blast of futurism (Robots! Space exploration! Mind-blowing science!) inserted throughout. It is all done seemingly without tongue-in-cheek (tongues are too busy lapping up syrup-and-crushed-ice-based beverages here) or an ironic sensibility. This is the Dells I love. It is the anti-slick, the anti-Disney. Throughout the town, there is no single unifying corporate iconography or overarching theme other than the pursuit of fun for its own sake, and whether that takes shape in the form of a Wisconsin Duck (a vehicle that drives on land or water) or an afternoon visit to a haunted house teeming with animatronics, it is up to you.

One memorable visit to the Dells pre-parenthood was with Lisa, my best friend from college and onetime partner in crime, who was visiting from California and is constitutionally unable to refuse the promise of a silly good time. We went there with a little bag of, um, dried mushrooms that we had to consume so they didn't go to waste and then hit the water slides for a madcap twenty-four hour adventure that included the largest water park in the US (key memory: riding down the lazy river in an inner-tube and the girl who slowly drifted past, inquiring, "Is that an earring in your nose?," [I had a nose ring at the time] me answering in the affirmative and then her saying, "Cool..." as she languidly floated away), a visit to Biblical Gardens (now closed, sadly), which Lisa, a former Catholic schoolgirl, giddily defiled at every little statue station depicting Jesus' life by placing her breast in his outstretched hand. We also tried to figure out what was exactly behind the sunny smiles and overwhelmingly energetic mien of the largely European workforce at The Cheese Factory, a vegetarian restaurant in nearby Lake Delton, by climbing the fire escape on the side of the building, like that would reveal something. (We learned later that The Cheese Factory is somehow affiliated with A Course In Miracles, which leads me to a funny aside: when I told a friend that a new vegetarian restaurant that was opening in Chicago had a meditation studio operating from it, he said, "Can't a vegetarian restaurant ever open here that's not affiliated with a cult?" which cracked me up, both because of the preponderance of the sort of thing he referred to and because of the notion that meditation practitioners are cultists.) We drove home the evening after we arrived, sunburned and sleep-deprived and happy to have been there.

Last weekend, we took my son to the Dells for the first time in the summer. We also took my mother along. This would be a very different trip, double-entendre fully intentional. When you first drive toward the downtown area, officially called the Wisconsin Dells Parkway but we like to maintain the Vegas parallels by referring to it as the Strip, you are immediately greeted by big wooden roller coasters up against the road, just feet away, sending screaming riders slowly up and then plummeting down. My son gasped. His eyes, already enormous, rapidly drank in everything as he whipped his head from side to side, not wanting to miss a thing. He is right square in the middle of the demographic target: a seven-year-old boy. He was visibly shaken at reaching his mecca, pointing, gasping, finally insisting that we stop the car. Now! We happily obliged.

So there is a miniature golf course that is truly immense on the left as you enter the Strip. And there is a haunted house with an animatronic creature that throws up water and a Ripley's Believe It Or Not Museum, something called The Torture Museum and lots of candy shops selling grotesquely pumped up caramel apples and dozens of varieties of fudge. The sickly-sweet smell of melted sugar is everywhere. Needless to say, it is not a vegan paradise in the Dells, aside from The Cheese Factory and its sister bed-and-breakfast restaurant, and at one point, my family had three varieties of fried potatoes for two meals. I prayed for our arteries, vowed to eat as much green stuff as possible as soon as I could and moved on. That's what the late Tommy Bartlett, the entertainment mogul with the eponymous water ski show in the Dells, would have wanted me to do.

In the Dells, concrete volcanoes emerge from miniature golf lands, timed to erupt every fifteen minutes. Adults clutch three-foot-long strawberry-flavored Puffy Rope Marshmallow Candy as though that's a perfectly acceptable choice. Novelty t-shirts announce to the world that the wearer feels cuckolded by his wife. Most apparently never got the memo that fanny packs are not stylish. Either that or they just don't care.

So we had fun. My son proclaimed that the Dells is "the weirdest place he's ever been" and that he would like to move there, two seemingly incongruous thoughts that make perfect sense to young people. No doubt this desire to be a permanent Wisconsin Dells resident is fueled by his fanciful and still naive grasp of "the real world" and how it functions. I'm sure that he thinks that residing in the Dells would be nonstop revelry as we would go from water park to Duck ride to Ripley's Museum to dinner out and back again in the morning. And, really, why would I want to try to puncture this impression? The real world of rushing out the door and deadlines and appointments and passive-aggressive coworkers awaits.

The strongest visual memory that remains the one that sums up our trip to me is this: John and I were in this positively insane pool at Mt. Olympus that shoots - seriously! - nine-foot-tall waves over the assembled every ninety seconds. At the first wave, I instinctively grabbed onto my husband, apparently the wrong thing to do, as it pulled both of us to the bottom of the pool. By the time we emerged back into daylight, a person in a bungee swing thing was catapulting way above our heads from a nearby ride. Seeing that person swinging up against the bright blue, cloudless sky as I wiped my eyes and gasped for air will probably stick with me for a very long time. That was the Dells experience in a nutshell.

What won't stick around for a long time? This vegan fudge, perfect to bring along to the Wisconsin Dells or the equivalent near you. This is not health food by any means but it is cholesterol-free and delicious, and sometimes, you just have to enjoy yourself.

Vegan Fudge

12 oz. dairy-free chocolate chips
6 Tablespoons melted Earth Balance or coconut oil
3 1/2 cups powdered sugar
1/3 cup baking cocoa powder, sifted
2 tsps. vanilla
1/4 cup rice, soy or coconut milk
Optional: 1 cup vegan mini-marshmallows (like Dandie's by Chicago Soy Dairy's) and/or toasted, chopped nuts, especially nice are pecans.

Lightly grease an eight-inch square baking pan.

Place everything but the optional ingredients in a double-boiler and stir until all is combined and the chips are melted. Add any optional items and stir together. Pour into the prepared pan and chill completely. Also, swirling creamy peanut butter or vegan cream cheese through might be a nice addition if that's how you roll.

Enjoy!

Meet me at the intersection of Whale Bait and Misogyny...

In PETA's most recent ill-conceived but predictably mean-spirited billboard campaign against women, Jacksonville residents are asked to "Save The Whales": this time, overweight females in red polka dotted bikinis. (I will not boost their numbers even slightly with a link: you can find their campaign with a simple search.) Maintaining their now-standard practice of disingenuously and steadfastly avoiding the core problem in their message, when questioned about the sexism of their campaign, a senior PETA campaigner clutched her oyster-free pearls and claimed a benevolent motivation: they are simply trying to help those poor fatties! Okay, she didn't exactly say this, but she did in so many words: she said that they "...weren't trying to insult anyone..." but that they are trying to "...help overweight residents [a.k.a., the female population] of Jacksonville...lose weight."

First of all, if they don't want to insult anyone, well, then it might behoove them to brush up on some basic etiquette. PETA has now become That Person. Do you know whom I'm referring to here? The one everyone has learned to avoid because of her habit of offhandedly tossing dagger-like insults this way and that in her quest to "help" others? We all have known someone like this at some point in our lives and we all avoid her now. This person has so little self-awareness that she has no idea why she is no longer invited to parties, why no one returns her phone calls, why former friends seem to disappear into the ether. Basically, she sucks and even if it's sometimes impossible to tell if she's passive-aggressive or just plain insensitive, it is abundantly clear that either way, we know she is not someone anyone wants to be near.

Regarding the other aspect of PETA's campaign - the latest in their string of attacks against women somehow tied up in a poorly articulated, incongruous attempt to shame people toward vegetarianism - my patience with social justice movements that refuse to acknowledge the obvious intersectionality of one form of oppression with another grows more frayed by the day. Ping! Another strand just snapped. And it's not "just" the approximately 3,301,112,087 women of the world who are considered fair game by the creative brain trust at PETA: they have willfully cultivated a blindspot the size of the Atlantic ocean when it comes to acknowledging all commonalities of discrimination and oppression except for when it benefits their cause. If it was decided that they could use imagery from the deplorable "sport" of "midget" tossing to encourage people to do more salad tossing, PETA would have no compunction about doing this. Well, damn. I hope that I didn't just give them an idea.

In that spirit, let's just let it all hang loose and commence to grabbing from one injustice or exploitation to stupidly try to decrease another. We will ignore that it makes absolutely no sense strategically - and, in fact, you've strategically painted yourself in the corner - and that it's ineffective to boot. Let's see what other organizations can do to boost their notoriety - I mean, spread their message - PETA-style. The points where exploitation intersect must be obliterated!

Sierra Club
Inspirational Idea: Overweight women create too much shade for plant diversity to flourish.
Slogan: Fat Chicks Kill Biodiversity!

The Alliance for Climate Protection
Inspirational Idea: Skinny chicks shouldn't get overheated by wearing too many clothes.
Slogan: Stamp Out Global Warming - Skinny Chicks Must Go Naked!

Great Ape Project
Inspirational idea: Sponsor a bunch of big, hairy feminists to get waxed to increase awareness of the plight of non-human primates.
Slogan: Fewer Hairy Apes, More Great Apes!

Greenpeace
Inspirational idea: Sponsor a "Sexiest Environmentalist Alive" contest to encourage more young people to live more sustainable lifestyles.
Title: Green(est) Piece o' Ass!

ACLU
Inspirational idea: A commercial campaign and libertarian's wet dream!
Execution: Strippers shed clothes while reciting your First Amendment rights and - quick cut! - Rebel Chef-Provocateur Anthony Bourdain picks it up where they left it off, while eating foie gras off an endangered rhinoceros' rump and smoking a Cuban cigar.

United Students Against Sweatshops
Inspirational idea: Tie up young scantily-clad female college students on campuses across the country to dramatize the cruelties of sweatshop production.
Slogan: We're All Hot And Bothered About Sweatshops.

Amnesty International
Inspirational idea: End human rights abuses worldwide, like the right of international skinny chicks to not be hated on by jealous fatties everywhere.
Action: A letter writing campaign to European hotties oppressed by their husky step-sisters. Photo exchange encouraged!

Global Exchange
Inspirational idea: Bring awareness to the exploitation of cocoa plantation workers internationally.
Campaign: Fair-trade chocolate wrestling contests on college campuses across the country until there is one winner. She gets to have her naked body cast in fair-trade, organic chocolate and displayed in a traveling exhibit across the country.

So, you see, we shouldn't restrain our creative expression by pesky political correctness. Who cares about political correctness when you've got whales to save - oh, wait, that wasn't even the point - when you've got fat people to shame into vegetarianism, or at least into staying off the beach in Jacksonville?

Oh, PETA...Why do I even bother?

Vegans Are Scary to Top Chef Masters

This woman strikes fear into the pure, pure hearts of Top Chef Masters everywhere...

Last week, I watched a program I'd never seen before. I'm not much of a TV person, though I admit that I did get a little tipsy from gorging on it after our six-week technology freeze at home from late May through June, also known as The Great Blackout around these parts. I also know that people who don't partake in the televised arts can be insufferable in their puffed up, snorty abstinence of it ("I haven't owned a television in twenty years!") so I take what I think is more of a balanced approach, which is that most of it is time-wasting, stupid trash that causes brain rot (see? I'm nothing if not balanced) but that there are nuggets of gold here and there if you are willing to sort through it. Generally I'm not willing as I have other things I'd far rather be doing. My mother still doesn't understand how a daughter of hers could be so indifferent to television, especially when this child grew up on Saturday morning cartoons and Happy Days just like all the other kids. I think it happened over my college years when I didn't have a television and was perfectly happy living life without one.

In addition to being sort of annoyed by TV in general, I don't have whatever gene or inclination within to be interested in any shows within the competitive reality oeuvre (and not just because I'm a snob - although I am, proudly) but I happened to tune in last week to Top Chef Masters on Bravo. I had heard that the actress Zooey Deschanel would be on the program, and that these highly regarded chef-y dudes would be challenged to create a meal for her. My interest was piqued because somewhere or other, I gleaned that she is a vegan.

The intersection of the starched white jackets and egotistical mien usually associated with serious chefs and a vegan client throwing a wrench into the bacchanalia promised to be interesting and it was. I live in a "food town" and the foodie culture here alive and well: people will travel all over the city to discover an out-of-the-way, obscure little restaurant or rare ingredient and the successful chefs are lauded to almost mythic proportions. I love food and cooking myself but I think that the adulation of this upper echelon chefs to be, frankly, very silly. Why should those who strive to create delicious dishes (seriously withdrawing my vegan orientation here, of course) be revered more than any other creative professional at his or her peak? The celebrity chefs here seem to exist in some sort of shiny bubble of protection and exclusivity formerly reserved for the once-in-a-lifetime geniuses. I think that with the rise of the Food Network and foodie culture in general, the chef as precious god-figure has really taken root.

On Top Chef Masters, highly regarded chefs from around the country compete in a series of cooking challenges week after week until the most masterful of all top chef-ery is crowned. There is a panel of mostly dour judges who give points for these competitions and one chef is told the dreaded catch phrase, "Please return to the kitchen and pack your knives," at the end of each episode (I'm extrapolating wildly here, based on my viewing of Top Chef Masters once). Anyway, there was some sort of stupid cheeseburger competition before the interesting part of the show, which I will totally ignore other than to note that when you make an avant-garde-y cheeseburger soup with ketchup croutons, it's apparently not so much of a crowd pleaser with the panel of barely-able-to-avoid-crotch-scratching dudes who judged the first competition. Sorry, artsy lady chef! Oh, and Morgan Spurlock of Supersize Me, apparently on another PR goodwill mission to prove that he likes meat, damn it (and so do industrial agriculture critics Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser, don'cha forget it!), was part of this first panel of judges. Morgan's still working that wholly unattractive handlebar-mustache-turns-into-a-mini-beard thing.

After the first challenge, a bright-eyed Zooey is introduced in a video greeting and with her, a list of impossibly draconian restrictions on the meal these top chefs are to prepare for their big competition of the episode. As horror slowly washes over their tired, top chef faces, Zooey cheerily - almost apologetically at times - informs the gathered competitors that she is a vegetarian who does not consume dairy or eggs. One such chef, Art Smith, mutters contemptuously and with the gasping tone of a dime store detective who just discovered the perpetrator of a heinous crime, "A vegan!..." Art, you shouldn't behave so foreshadowing-ly snippy if you expect to win this competition. He even slams his fist on the counter upon uttering the dreaded "V-word," which I'm pretty sure is the sound heard 'round the country when we vegans disperse and determine whose home we will invading for Thanksgiving dinner at each year. Oh, wait, back to Zooey and the chefs: did she mention that she is gluten- and soy-free as well? Well, she is. Ha ha! Horrorstruck, their eyes glaze over as they mentally flip through recipes and fling them over their shoulders, one after the next. Except for one. While four out of five top chefs look as if they were suddenly stricken with the Swine Flu, Rick Bayless of Frontera Grill is the exception. He is not daunted by the unique challenges of this competition as he seems to be a preternaturally peppy sort, one who might be similarly galvanized by a hangnail, a toe stubbing. (Oh, and speaking of Bayless, I have a personal story about him at the end. Hang in there!)

Art Smith, however, is having none of Rick's annoying cheerfulness as he's in what can best be described as a snit. He is Southern, he reminds us throughout, and he specializes in comfort food. He doesn't know of these high-falutin' Hollywood actress-y ways! After all, food is love, his mama taught him, causing me to imagine him at his mother's side in the kitchen, his grown up head on a little child's body, which is always how I visualize adults as children. "I cook a lot of fried chicken and macaroni and cheese," he says in an interview painted thick with the foreshadowing brush of failure. "I'm thinking to myself, what am I going to do?"

So this is where I get annoyed. (Okay, admittedly I was already annoyed by Morgan Spurlock's facial hair landscaping.) If you are an artist, especially enough of one to be competing to be named a Master by a tribunal of dour-faced judges, shouldn't one be invigorated by such challenges? Art Smith was a personal chef to Oprah Winfrey for years and is now a successful restauranteur in Chicago but apparently he is not one for straying beyond his comfort zone. While Rick Bayless happily trilled on about the starring role of vegetables and grains in traditional Mexican cooking, which is what he is known for, Art looked more and more vexed by the challenge. Apparently to Art, for whom food is love, if it can't be battered and deep-fried or at least enveloped in melted cheese, it ain't love. Again, putting aside my vegan sensibility - which I pretty much have to shove in the closet kicking and screaming at this point - and just analyzing this attitude from the perspective of a creative artist, I find it hard to be sympathetic to poor Art's plight.

One of his fellow competitors, a smirking Italian-American chef, likened this particular competition to cooking with one hand tied behind his back. This is reminiscent of the uproar some of Chicago's most haughty chefs during the ill-fated foie gras ban of a couple of years ago, when the withdrawal of fatty duck liver påté - a single ingredient - left them feeling artistically constricted. I do understand that for someone to whom cooking means familiar animal products (meat, cheese, milk, eggs), it might seem daunting, especially when coupled with the gluten and soy restrictions, but then, after that initial freak out, you know what a creative master does, right? She takes a deep breath and starts imagining options. Slowly, she starts to build on each one until she has imagined something that could be interesting, and then she takes parts from one idea, fuses it with another, removes parts, modifies it again, realizes with a flash that she can add this element that will pull it all together, and another will make it even better, and, finally, she might have some nervousness, but she is captivated by the idea, even excited by it. This is known as flow, the creative process researched and described by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and the mark of a true master, I think. One might be considered very accomplished at what he does well, but unless one can challenge himself beyond this limited sphere, I don't believe that artistic genius is at play. And protest all you want about your family or ethnic traditions and your creative expression needing to remain unrestricted but this is the truth and those who work in creative fields know it to be so: sometimes the more you narrow in your focus, say by removing ingredients from a chef's common repertoire, the more expansive it becomes. Like Ms. Deschanel, I am a vegan with soy and gluten restrictions for health reasons, and while I do understand that it is occasionally a pain, I also know that it is eminently do-able. As with supposed limitations, mine have caused me to look beyond my familiar zone and, well, be more expansive and creative. Because of this, I can see that there are so many more possibilities than the ones I was once familiar with. Want to get out of a creative block? A surefire way, to me at least, is to impose some restrictions on myself. This is paradoxical, I'm certain, but once I do that, the possibilities really open up in front of me.

Art folded. I don't know how to factor in the inhibiting aspects of being filmed during the competitive process, but let it be noted that grace under pressure was not Art's strong suit. He went the safe route, which to him was preparing the dessert (couldn't he hear me screaming at the TV to do anything but dessert?), and he decided that it was appropriate to purchase pre-packaged rice ice cream (again, more screaming at the TV as that stuff is foul beyond belief), dress it up with some puréed strawberries to make it all nice and sloppy and soupy - I mean, to ribbon through the ice cream - and accompany it with a vegan version of his family's peanut brittle recipe. There was a general consensus that the brittle was delicious but the ice cream soup was a failure, not only because the main ingredient tasted gross but also because it was store bought. In the end, he was on the chopping block with Anita Lo, the only female chef left in the competition and one who specializes in pan-Asian cooking but could only put together a lackluster dish of oily eggplant and that vegetarian pantry cliché from the 1970s, brown lentils. In the end, the grim-faced tribunal of critics gave Anita one-half more of a point, probably because she at least prepared everything on her dish, and Art was let go. He told the judge-critics that, yes, he knew how to make sorbet, but "I want(ed) to make it right." How exactly does this inspire confidence in your skills as a chef?

Last, a couple of remarks by the judges that simply cannot go without a counter remark. First, Gael Greene, a famous New York critic who apparently slept with Elvis and wears hats indoors (boy, would my Great Aunt Rose not approve) drolly said that the vegans at the lunch table were thrilled by the meal because "...God knows what they get to eat." Oh Gael, Gael, Gael. Yes, because a diet that includes all the vegetables, grains, fruits, legumes, herbs, nuts and seeds produced on this green earth and all their various, infinite permutations is simply too limiting. Second, Jay Rayner, the pompous food critic of The Observer. said that he was impressed by the food overall because, "...In my experience of vegan food, it is usually a symphony of beige." This take down is so easy I shouldn't even bother, but I have to get the last word, even if it is on this blog seen by perhaps three people. Really, Jay? You mean that fish, chicken, eggs and dairy impart so much dazzling, vibrant color to a dish? If someone mentions beige, this is what I think of, you know, like as opposed to pomegranates, bell peppers, chile peppers, adzuki beans, rainbow chard, radishes, melons, broccoli, red and golden beets, dozens of varieties of tomatoes, carrots, corn, oranges, mangoes, kidney beans, apples and on and on. And you know the color that is on a dish made with animal products? Well, Jay, that comes from plant foods. For someone so confident in offering his views, you wouldn't think he'd walk into such an obvious trap.

And now for a little closing story: my son and I were at Chicago's wonderful organic Green City Market six weeks or so ago and saw Mr. Rick Bayless as, unbeknownst to us, we happened to be seated in the area where he was going to be doing a cooking demo. We were just sitting there in the shade, my son eating a baguette and strawberry jam, when this crowd started gathering around, gobbling up all the seats and then forming in an arc around the stage. I was watching all this, wondering who on earth could cause such a stir among our normally mild-mannered, too cool for school populace when I saw that Rick Bayless was up on the stage, working with his assistant, unpacking and prepping for his demo. Camera phones came out, people started doing that annoying photographing with a cell phone thing. Anyway, he begins to talk, this and that about regional Mexican cooking, and a volunteer from the market starts handing out copies of the recipe he would be preparing. More cameras clicking, more glazed expressions of adulation. Anyway, blah blah blah, regional cooking, Mexico Mexico Mexico, traditional, regional, blah blah blah, I'm a really nice guy, if a shade or two dweeby, when all of the sudden, he pulls out this, well, for lack of a better word, absolutely vile, severed goat's leg. It's all there, undisguised because this is Serious Regional Mexican Cooking. The Green City Market shoppers are nonplussed because they mostly worship at the altar of Foodie-ism and many would suck the marrow right out of that goat's leg on the spot if Rick told them this was a traditional Mayan delicacy. Not so much my son. He gazed upon that proudly brandished goat's leg and he responded how any sane, non-sadistic newly-minted seven-year-old would: he loudly and unapologetically said, "Eeeewwwwww!" Star-gazers near us whipped their heads around all Regan-from-The-Exorcist-style to behold who had uttered such rude disapproval and it was a weird moment, because as I was internally calibrating about 3% embarrassment and 97% pride, the crowd decided they couldn't quite direct their ire at the little boy with the big saucer eyes, so they directed it at his mother instead. I smiled and shrugged. And that is my personal Rick Bayless story.

So television, Top Chefs, Morgan Spurlock's facial hair, foreshadowing, the creative process, failure, my son's first review of Rick Bayless. Life is like this sometimes...

Places I have known...

On Tuesday, my son and I took the Green Line to the Brown Line, and rode that in a long zigzagged path across the middle of the city, to near the end of the line, where the famously elevated train points its nose down and riders find themselves at street level. The Rockwell stop is almost jarringly different from any other stop I can think of in Chicago's long, wide train trail. Instead of looking out at grey back porches, behemoth steel buildings or crowded streets, when one walks out on the platform at Rockwell, it's like a little slice of quaint Americana suddenly: there are trees, human-scale shops, open sidewalks that look freshly swept right there at street level. No need to descend down a vertiginous stairwell to get to the street below: one is where she needs to be practically as soon as she grabs her son's hand and hops off the train.

This was my stop years ago, back in the early nineties, having moved there not long after another George had sent soldiers and a fusillade of gunfire to Iraq. I came to live here, in the residential area between Lincoln Square and Ravenswood Manor, after living at my parent's home in the northern suburbs for six torturous months post-graduation. Living with my parents was a rude, harsh awakening for a girl who had been coming and going as she pleased for four years, on the phone whenever the desire struck, stumbling through the door in a loud, wow-I'm-lucky-to-have-made-it-home-alive whoosh of keys and purse straps. Admittedly, my habits at twenty-one left a lot to be desired. The me of today is rolling my eyes at this once-me, and she is rolling her mascara-flecked eyes defiantly right back. Still, if you really thought about it, you'd feel sorry for this once-me at twenty-one: I had come from a town I loved, left the friends I adored, to return to the place I had dashed out of years before, a house with so many unhappy memories and more in the making, still under the dictatorship of an authority figure with whom I fundamentally and frequently clashed. To say I was eager to leave this home again is an understatement.

Back home again, to a place that now felt like anything but, I had just one good friend, Eric, whom I was close with in college. One day Eric decided he wanted to take black-and-white photos of me at the beach - it was chilly but sunny and beautiful, from what I remember, a perfect autumn day - and afterwards we wandered back to his apartment. Eric was my lifeline then, a rumpled, brilliant, hilarious friend who dabbled in socialism and wound up at the University of Chicago on an academic track. He was leaving town, though, lured to Miami (a place he hated and left before long) but he felt terrible about leaving my sad sack self behind after we had dreamed of playing house together and buying leafy plants and French presses (I didn't have the heart to tell him that I killed plants and was revolted by coffee - it didn't matter). Eric was leaving, though, which was awful enough, and the likelihood of an early release from the North Shore seemed to be swirling in a cruelly drawn-out fashion down the drain as well. I think Eric felt terrible about leaving me, and so on that October afternoon back at his apartment with all his taped up moving boxes depressingly all around us, he introduced me to Judith, a friend of his roommates, someone who was also in search of a new life.

Judith, a recent Detroit transplant, wasted no time in convincing me that we had to go to bars in cute black dresses together, discuss literature and writing up into the wee hours, shield one another through the slings and arrows of life, and if we were to do all this, we should be roommates. Judith was very intense and protective; she was both an opera singer and a poet so she required a particular degree of drama in life. She was tall, with long, curly dark hair and olive skin. Judith was also very maternal, which was useful as I was in the market for being adopted and my marketability was diminishing.

Within a matter of months, we were roommates, living in a beautiful, large two-flat with wood floors and a bright sun room in Lincoln Square. Judith had the place picked out and I eagerly signed on, knowing nothing about the neighborhood or what the future might hold, just eager to be pulled to a dramatically different tide as I tried to figure out what to do with my fine arts degree and life in general. I bought an antique bed and vanity from Judith's ex-boyfriend, a gay musician who came to accept and embrace his homosexuality after their break up, and to this day, I still have that set in our guest room. At the time, it was the only bit of furniture I owned and I was so proud of it. Today, I climb on that pretty dark wood bed to read the morning newspaper, and every day, I am reminded of our apartment on Leland, a place I lived for a relatively short amount of time, but a time that is etched deeply in my mind nonetheless.

The Lincoln Square of the nineties was quite a different scene than it is today, though some things remain unchanged. There is still the European feel but back then, there were more actual Europeans, retired college professors and landlords who sat in the sun across the street from the German deli. The square, a cute little diagonal strip between Lawrence and Lincoln, was a ten minute walk from our apartment, and this was the hub of the neighborhood. There was the Brauhaus, still in operation, a German restaurant into which no vegetarian should ever tread (a thickly accented server there once offered me hassenpfeffer, or rabbit, as a dish suitable for a vegetarian, but thankfully I spent much of my childhood watching Bugs Bunny cartoons and was wise to her). There was the Merz Apocathary, also still standing, an ancient, long and narrow shop, all wooden counters and thick but pleasant herby scent throughout. This was the place to get homeopathic hangover remedies and Dead Sea bath salts; as a lover of both vodka tonics and aromatic baths, this place received a fair percentage of my paycheck. Lincoln Square was also lined with bakeries, trinket shops filled with miniature glass pieces and under stern German management, burrito joints, an imported shoe shop, a crowded antique emporium, a couple of Thai restaurants. The L tracks curved sharply overhead, intersecting the square at Western Avenue, above the bus terminal; gangs of pigeons noisily shot up each time a train rumbled past. This was home.

Specifically, though, home was a few blocks west, down Leland to where the trees start pushing together and the earth begins to buckle up around the river. If one were to venture a little farther west, she would find a pretty natural area in Chicago, almost wild in places, formed around the river that feeds into our beautiful Lake Michigan; there are docks and boats in back yards, geese floating past. On my block, though, it was pretty removed from this more natural setting, living so close to Western and Lawrence.

Just down the street from me, two blocks away, was Rockwell, where my son and I left the train. Trains pass frequently here, and, as I said, they are right there at street level, so one has to wait behind the long arm of the gate often. My son doesn't remember this, but back when we went to the Waldorf school on Friday mornings during his toddler days, we would often come here afterwards to sit and watch the trains go by: for a small child in love with railroad gates, also known as ding-dong lights, the Rockwell stop is a mecca. There's a cute little shopping district right here, now known as Rockwell Crossing, which was then known to Judith and I by the much less evocative but perfectly useful phrase "by the train stop." Back when I lived here in my early twenties, there was a grocery store on the corner, one with a friendly woman behind the cash register who also was the owner (was she Hispanic? Middle Eastern? I don't remember, but I do remember that she was very sweet). I could buy my basic necessities there - in my case at the time, the list was short: chips and salsa, laundry detergent, not much else - and they had a little produce section that grew droopier as the week progressed. There was a scary Chinese take-out place in a forbidding brick building with obscured glass blocks; I ventured into here only once or twice as it was unsettling even to my low standards. Across the street, there was the WomanMade Art Gallery, and for a time, I briefly thought I might have found my place here, drawing with others on Saturday mornings, but they moved out shortly after I moved in. Down the street, on the other side of the train tracks, was a bizarre southern bar, not southern-themed in a kitschy, ironic, post-modern sort of way, but in a Confederate flag hanging out front, too-scary-to-even-go-inside-to-make-fun-of sort of way. There was always a motorcycle or two out front and occasionally a dude with lots of facial hair and a Camel t-shirt face down in the sidewalk planter. I always gave this place a wide berth, crossing the street whenever I needed to pass.

In the Rockwell Crossing of today, which I see laid over the train stop shopping district of the past like a transparency with a different Sharpie-drawn details over the same raw structures, that southern bar is now a bar and grill (or is it a grille?) with an expensive awning and American-style menu but no passed out bikers or Confederate flags in front. The grocery store is long gone, replaced by a successful parent-and-child yoga studio. There is a doggy boutique, bagel shop, photography studio, a midwife's office, an upscale shop for the home. If anything reflects the changing nature of the neighborhood, it is this little section off the Brown Line.

This was where I lived when I met John, the father of my son, my partner. But that marked the end of my Lincoln Square days. Before I met John, there were languorous Sunday brunches in our apartment, and this was where I learned that I loved to cook. There was the three women group Judith had put together as a cappella singers, practicing once a week (it would end badly one day, with slammed doors and I remember shock at the ease with which angry curse words could shout from the mouths that had once formed angelic harmonies together). There was the sad family upstairs: a very passive, nervous wife, a wavy-haired toddler and a hotheaded, wild-eyed husband who stalked across the creaky wooden floors downstairs, screaming at them both every day. I remember grilling corn on a little Hibachi in the tiny square of grass in our back yard, and I remember the time Judith accidentally knocked an air conditioner out of one of our windows and held on to it by the cord as she called for me frantically (and I remember seeing our Arabic neighbors in the building pressed up close to ours next door, a group of two or three men, watching the scene wordlessly of us trying to coax that precarious and expensive machine back up to the window as if they were watching a movie). I remember boyfriends and break-ups in a way that seems unbelievable now, a revolving door of would-be and ill-fated suitors. I remember our European landlord, a man who inflamed Judith with his patronizing airs and hit on me every time he stopped by. I remember my horror as a man beat his girlfriend in front of our house in the middle of the night and Judith's response, which was more irritation at being awaked then anything: she came from Detroit, after all, she had witnessed a murder up close as a child. (I also remember the woman's horrible, guttural crying - like a mortally wounded animal, a mother who had lost a child - and that she threw up on the grass; I ran outside to help her but by that time, she had disappeared into the night.) I remember the woman who sat with her son on the front porch of a two-flat down the street, telling him in a voice that rang up into my ears like it was spoken for me alone to hear, "Danny, that is not a need, it is a want." I vowed right then that I would be a mother like her one day.

And now, seventeen years after Judith and I parted - again, not well, with me feeling overwhelmed and her feeling abandoned - I was walking down Leland with my son, my very own. He got a juice at the bagel shop and we walked past my old apartment, the one where I slept off too many hangovers but also the one where I fell in love with the tall, long-haired and recently divorced Scandinavian looking man who was part of the Green Mill poetry slam after-party that found its way to our home. I pointed out our house, and my son remarked that it was beautiful. "That's where I lived when I met Dad," I told him, with so many other memories flooding through me it was almost hard to talk. We stopped at the playground on the end of Leland where it meets Elizabeth, a tiny playground with the bare minimum of equipment but one that my son enjoyed nonetheless. On this day, a van from the park district was in front, and there was a long table set up with chairs. The Craftmobile apparently sets up here with watercolor paints, brushes, cups and paper every week. There was nothing special about the materials - just the same cheap stuff one could get at any dollar store - but as with so much in life, the idea of shifting things up a bit, of painting outdoors in this case, brought droves of kids and their caregivers to the little playground. My son did a quick painting of a space ship, whipping it out one-two-three like Picasso did as an old man, confident and impatient, and then he was ready to go.

We walked back to the Rockwell stop and we waited behind the gate for another train to pass. It whizzed by, just a couple feet from our noses, and I held on to my son extra tight. The Rockwell stop never ceases to shake me up a little.

City kids, country kids

In the span of an average day,
our city-dwelling children might be exposed to dogs, cats, squirrels, birds – especially pigeons, robins, those little guys I maybe mistakenly call chickadees, geese and cardinals – and if our children are very lucky, they might be startled by a sharply-striped chipmunk darting past. In the summer, they can see ducks and even the occasional heron passing through town like a traveler with an intriguing accent. There are so many advantages of urban living with children, too many to list and you already know them but I’ll still give it a whirl: museums, great restaurants, a diverse population, public transportation, cultural richness, so many possibilities for diversions.

As with most things, there are distinct disadvantages to urban living with children as well. The tall buildings can blur out the sky, especially when downtown. How does this influence their sense of vastness, of both ambition and humility? Do they ever feel a gasp catch in their throats when face-to-face with a force of nature that is truly immense? There is not much more ripe with possibility than a whole expanse of stars shimmering in a pitch-dark sky, like pulsating, illuminated holes punched out of black paper, and this is something we city people with our light pollution and towering buildings just get a dim, truncated view of at best. And it’s not just the sky. I worry about my son and his friends having enough trees to climb, meadows to explore, rivers to dunk cups into in order to study the murky contents. And there is always noise – of car alarms and voices nattering on cell phones and the recording on the train (beep… ”An inbound train toward the Loop will be arriving shortly…” beep) not to mention the aural onslaught of the El itself, so much so that my internal radio dial takes at least an hour to switch off when I’m trying to sleep. How does this affect those who are immeasurably more fine-tuned and sensitive?

For me, the benefits of city living outweigh the benefits of a more rural setting and I think this is true for my son as well. We are raising him as a vegan and I think it is pretty easy to live as one where we do, with access to so many well-stocked grocery stores, so many vegan restaurants in relative close proximity and an active, diverse community. At the same time, it is an interesting experiment we are undertaking with raising our children as herbivores. Veganism, it could be argued, is distinctly urban in concept and demographics. On the other hand, it is intricately interwoven with something that was once completely in the domain of the country: how our food is produced, how it arrives on our plates and in our stomachs. So while many city dwellers may be raising children whose palates swoon for cuisines from far-away nations (injera bread from Ethiopia, dal from India), who can easily tell you the difference between omnivores, vegetarians and carnivores, it is a very good possibility that these same children have never seen a four-legged being larger than a St. Bernard up close. The danger of raising our vegan children in an urban setting is that most animals become purely conceptual and our practice becomes merely theoretical. For it to stick, we need to make the animals they are protecting real and the lifestyle they practice an active, personally-rooted conviction.

Insert SASHA Farm.



My family is part of a great group of interesting, dynamic vegans called the Chicago Vegan Family Network. We usually only see one another once a month, but we are a big part of one another’s lives. In addition to our monthly potlucks, our children play together and become passionate friends, the adults offer wisdom and support to each other and we do things like track down gelatin-free marshmallows once a year and flood nearby states with a big ol’ camping trip. Another thing we do, for three years running now, is visit a farmed animal sanctuary called SASHA Farm in tiny Manchester, Michigan, home also to some sort of famous chicken broil. This is where our city children feed voracious goats (is there any other kind?) carrots, learn that pigs loooove grapes, that the safest way to feed a cow is to hold an apple flat in your hand and smoosh it up close. They also learn that cows are slobbery when eating apples. They learn that pigs are covered in bristly hair, cats raised together will eat one another’s food and get a little chunky and that the fluffy reddish dog Toto nips but does not bite. The sheep stay back on the hill in a group, the horses have impossibly soft, velvety muzzles and one of the goats is not too friendly. They learn these things in a very short amount of time and the animals transform from idea into flesh-and-blood in the matter of a couple of hours on a farm. What is sort of staggering to me is how quickly and effortlessly a rooster crowing can become integrated to our minds. At first the sound is unexpected, then it becomes charming and before too much time has passed, the rooster crowing in the background is accepted as part of the environment. As part of our environment. Of course it was. It was as natural as hearing a train overhead and quite a bit lovelier.


This is Nick, contemplating a goat with the most delightfully inscrutable expression.



Tewa, our newest member, originally from Ethiopia, feeding a goat.



Jack here, Alice and her little sister, Eden. Alice is one of the "big kids" now.



City kids, taking a relaxing sojourn on a swing together. These kids are so comfortable together.



Alice with a horse. What more can I say?



You may notice by now that I find it impossible to not try to kiss the various creatures. It's compulsive. I can't help myself.



Jack, Eden's best friend from earliest childhood, also contemplating a SASHA animal in the most beguiling fashion.



Alice again with a cow, ever mindful of avoiding the droolies.



Kids and horses. Pretty self-explanatory.



Sylvana loved the horses.



Justice feeding a goat.



One lucky chicken.



This is Levi in the cat house, which was a very popular destination point for our kids. I think those cats probably got a well-deserved nap when the children finally left.



We had a picnic, played duck, duck, omnivore on the grass outside the barn (Tewa learned this game with astonishing speed), and huddled together to decide which animals we would sponsor as a group. We decided on a goat and a turkey. The turkey was one who was in particularly poor shape. His bones, bent and painfully warped, struggled under the weight of his enormous chest, genetically engineered to grow to immense proportions to supply the boneless white meat of the sandwich and filet, slapped between two slices of bread and never thought of again. This turkey, and so many others like him, was simply not designed to live past a certain age, usually not past a few months. He was without a name; the children, after floating names like "Cool Dude' and so forth, came to the name Al, which was an abbreviation of Albus Avis, White Bird in Latin. Monte Jackson, the wonderful cofounder of SASHA Farm, was so happy that we'd adopted this bird. He told us that he was hoping that Al would make it through the winter.

Unfortunately, we received news last week that Al died. I haven't told my son yet. Our sponsorship money will go towards another SASHA turkey. It is very bittersweet, of course, the little bit of sweetness present because we know that Al got to live out the last of his days at a sanctuary, that he felt human kindness, human tenderness. You see the worst and the best of humanity in stark relief when you are at an animal sanctuary. I am so grateful that our city kids could see this with their own eyes, helping them to develop into even more compassionate, engaged children as they grow up. These animals aren't just conceptual, suffering isn't just theoretical, and living compassionately isn't just an ideology: the animals are flesh-and-blood, suffering is real, and living compassionately is an active, dynamic and personal commitment.



And, of course, SASHA Farm, and the roosters crowing, and the pigs begging for scratches and the goats waiting to be fed and all the magnificent muzzles designed for nuzzling will be around next year, for us city folks to get our country fix.

Shalom, everyone.

Lettuce Wraps of Gratitude...

So hallelujah and huzzah and hurrah, the fearsome Technology God has smiled down upon us (or at least taken the appropriate measure of pity) so we've finally got working email/phone/TV-we-can-ignore functionality back at the bungalow and suddenly things are a little less "Pa, could ya go fetch some water from the well? I'm feeling mighty parched," around here and for that, I am deeply grateful. Six weeks - six weeks and you're midway through a trimester! - without have made us all a little more resourceful, a little more apt to suggest an early evening stroll, and a lot less reachable, and through the fresh lens of being unplugged for so long, I can see how technology has its benefits and drawbacks - don't throw that lightning bolt at me, scornful Technology God, oh, please be merciful - in a way I was only theoretically clued in to before. And though I was tempted to cackle all melodramatically "See ya, suckers!" at my fellow library computer room denizens - with the occasionally loud personal electronic devices and weirdly stretched way-the-hell-out arms totally crossing into my territory and giggling teenaged boys punching one another on the shoulder to show off soft porn on their monitors - when I skipped out of there this morning, I also feel like we endured something together (a hostage situation, getting stuck on an elevator without power) and while I don't exactly have survivor's guilt, I will always have empathy for those who are at least somewhat unmoored in the ocean of technology. I can see that all this talkety-talk is making the Dark Lord of Technology raise an overgrown eyebrow contemptuously towards me so I will end it now with a good recipe you should try at home and the acknowledgment that I am truly grateful to be plugged back in.

Lettuce Rolls of Gratitude

2 cups dry rice, your preference

1 bunch broccoli, cut into florets
1 1/2 cups frozen peas, defrosted

1/2 cup smooth, natural peanut butter
2 cups water
4 cloves garlic, minced
1-inch piece of ginger, grated
2 tablespoons tamari or soy sauce
1 tablespoon umeboshi vinegar (found in the Asian section of your natural foods store)
2 teaspoons cumin
1 teaspoon coriander
1/2 teaspoon turmeric

Two small can water chestnuts, drained and slivered
1 or two heads of Bibb, Butterhead or Boston lettuce, washed, leaves separated and allowed to dry
1 lime, cut into wedges

Cook the rice. Meanwhile, steam the broccoli for three minutes. Add the peas and steam until the broccoli is bright green, about five or six minutes.

In a blender, add the peanut butter, water, and garlic. Squeeze the ginger into the blender, releasing the juice but not the pulp. Add the rest of the ingredients up through the turmeric. Blend that sucker up until smooth.

When the rice is done, put it in a large saute pan with the broccoli and peas. Mix this together with the peanut sauce, stirring over medium heat until the sauce has thickened. Oh, yeah! Add the water chestnuts.

When it's all thickened and thoroughly combined, serve portions lovingly spooned into individual lettuce leaves. Roll up or eat taco-style with the filling in the middle. Serve with extra tamari, lime wedges and Sriracha or hot chile sesame oil. You will love this, I promise, and it will taste like a big production but it's really not.

This produces a lot of the middle part, the stuffing, which is delicious on its own as vegetable rice with peanut sauce. I brought some of the leftovers along with us to the farmer's market last week and this guy with bright blue eyes came over and asked which booth he could also make such a purchase. I smiled but let him down gently. "It's from home," I said, "I'm sorry." He thanked me anyway. Make this delicious vegan meal, bring some leftovers out in public and see if the same thing doesn't happen to you.

So with that, I'm back, babies. And it feels good.

XO