cat named pig

A few months ago I decided to start a new family tradition: Pizza Friday. I love that I can just do that, just start a new tradition whenever I want, because I am one of two adults supposedly in charge here. There’s a lot of power in being a so-called adult (and most of the time I use my power for good, as in the case of Pizza Friday).

It’s a very convenient tradition, given that we all love pizza and by the end of the week no one feels like cooking (or hearing Siena yelp, “NO! NOT [insert any food I might have made that is not pizza/quesadillas/pasta with butter and Parmesan]!!” when she sees what we’re having for dinner).

Pizza Friday has been a great success so far. (How could it not be? The name itself contains two of the nicest words in the English language.) Sometimes we order in, sometimes we go out, sometimes we make our own, and occasionally we just heat up some frozen pizzas and call it a night. This week we had Matt’s sister, her husband, and our sweet baby nephew coming over so we were scanning menus trying to decide what to order.

Matt read a list of toppings out loud, one of which was anchovies.

Siena [making a face]: “Eew — anchovies!”

Matt: “Siena, do you even know what anchovies are?”

Siena: “Yeah, they’re gross bugs!”

Never one to be left out of a conversation, Elliot pipes up: “Yeah, they gross BUMBLEBEES!”

Because I am in a great mood, here’s a little Sunday night round-up of things that fall solidly in the plus column:

• It’s officially Chili Season — a bigger deal to me than Football Season, although they definitely overlap and both go well with beer. We kicked the season off this year with the classic vegetarian chili recipe we’ve made so often we can do it without thinking. Or while watching football, as Matt did this weekend. (I would argue that’s the same as not thinking; he might disagree.) Sunday nights and one other meal a week are now accounted for, from now until spring — wahoo!
• It’s also (duh) Pumpkin Season — I made these on Friday night and they’re almost gone. And if I’m honest? I’m totally having one for breakfast in the morning. (For lunch I’m eating the leftover cream cheese frosting with a spoon.)
• Sara and Avery were in town from South Dakota, and the girls didn’t even destroy anything while Sara and I sat around and talked about foods that taste good. We also enjoyed a pumpkin ale, because, you know, ’tis the season.
• This weekend we went to: the farmers’ market, Trader Joe’s, and Rainbow Foods. We are ALL SET, grocery-wise. We won’t need to leave our house for a month. Which is fine, since it’s supposed to snow again soon. And that cuts my will to leave the house in half every time.
• In a burst of Martha-esque inspiration, I threw my customary laziness to the wind and worked on our holiday cards for this year. IN OCTOBER. We might just send them out BEFORE the holidays this year, instead of just pretending they were supposed to be “New Year’s Cards.”

Wow, this is a fairly boring list that in no way justifies how happy I feel right now. I think this sudden joie de vivre is mostly due to the fact that I was sick earlier in the week and then a miracle took place and now I AM NO LONGER SICK. I CAN DO ANYTHING. (If you read this blog last winter at all, during the Great and Tedious Chronicling of Minor Unwellness, you might understand why the simple fact of recovering from a cold feels miraculous. I AM HEALED!)

(Whoa. Calm down there, Self.)

Here are some pictures of kids with pumpkins. Happy mid-October!

The other night we went to Fat Lorenzo’s for pizza. It was crowded, as always, in the tiny little entrance/waiting area/gelateria, but somehow we lucked into a few chairs. Elliot, however, had no use for the chairs as they interfered with his plans to run around like he was being chased by angry bees. After about thirty seconds of that — enough time to bump every single person in the area at least twice, and by “area” I could mean either the space we were in or a certain “area” of the anatomy and the sentence would be accurate either way — I pulled him onto my lap and whispered that I had a story for him.

He leaned in and miraculously held still while I made up the following cautionary tale, in the tradition of the Brothers Grimm but with a happy ending:

Once upon a time there was a little boy named Elliot. He was at a restaurant with his family and he was acting very wild, running all over and bumping into people. And nobody liked that. Then the door opened and a man came in with a very large backpack. He scooped Elliot up and stuffed him into the backpack, then zipped it shut and took him far, far away. When he unzipped it again, Elliot looked around and said,

“Where are my mama and my daddy and my sister Siena? Please, take me back to them!”

The man said, “I will take you back to them, on one condition. You must not run around in the restaurant ever again. You must go back and sit nicely, and then you must eat your pizza nicely when it comes. Do you promise?”

Elliot promised to be good, so the man brought him back to his mama and daddy and sister, and they all ate a huge pizza and lived happily ever after.

Laugh as you may (yes, this is why I stick to non-fiction in my writing), Elliot loved this story and asked me to repeat it five more times before we were seated. Tonight at dinner, he asked me to tell it again. Siena laughed when she heard it and Matt, well, Matt probably thought it was dumb. (To which I would say, “Yeah? Dumb? It got him to sit still didn’t it? So is my story dumb, or is it dumb like a FOX?” Or something. I haven’t worked it out yet.)

And then. . . Elliot announced that he wanted to tell a story. The following is an approximation of what he told, minus a whole bunch of adorable and hilarious that doesn’t quite translate to the written paragraph:

One upon a time, there was a girl named NANA [this is what he calls Siena]. And she real bad and a big man came and put her in he backpack. And threw her in the GARBAGE. And Nana say, “Where mine mama and daddy and mine little brother EL-LI-OT?” And he taked her out of the garbage and she seed her mama and daddy and her brother El-li-ot and dey all eat pizza.

He totally needs to take over this blog. The GARBAGE twist puts my version of the story to shame.

(I shouldn’t have used that title, as I now have the incredibly grating Little Einsteins theme song in my head and probably will for the rest of the day.)

But the fact is, Siena and I are on a mission this week. Mission: Ratatouille.

We have the Pixar movie and Siena’s been on quite a kick of watching it during “Rest Time” every day lately. (Her Rest Time this summer is Elliot’s Nap Time, both of which could just as easily be called Mama Needs A Break Time, but that doesn’t sound as nice. So Elliot sleeps and Siena watches a movie and/or asks me for a snack every 6 seconds, and we all just chill out a little [during the moments when I am not fixing snacks]. It’s great.)

Anyway, Mission: Ratatouille came about when Siena asked me, after her umpteenth viewing of Remy’s culinary triumph, if she could try ratatouille sometime.

My inner monologue jumped into hyperspeed with excitement at this request. [OMG my daughter wants to try something new*! A dish with multiple different ingredients visibly touching each other! And it's made of vegetables that are in season at this very moment! We even have most of them in our fridge!]

I did a little happy dance and got busy researching recipes. Since there’s only a slim chance that she will actually eat this once she sees how very much the ingredients all touch each other, I knew my only hope was to find a recipe resembled the elegant ratatouille served in the movie. And then I found this recipe at Smitten Kitchen. Perfect.

I’m off to the kitchen to start slicing veggies. Place your bets now on whether or not Siena will allow a single bite to cross her lips tonight. (The smart money’s on NO, but hey, I’m excited to eat it.)
…..

*Siena has become quite the picky eater this summer. Two or three years ago, we were those annoying parents who bragged about their toddler eating sushi and whatnot, but now she gives us flak for anything outside the holy trinity of pasta/sandwiches/Mexican food (and even the Mexican food better not “look weird” or contain too many ingredients). Sigh.

[Update: The ratatouille turned out great -- I thought. It resembled the dish in the movie and it was a great way to use up some of the veggies we got from our friends' CSA box, which they asked us to pick up while they're out of town. Siena, however, was devastated when she saw it and realized that is was just. vegetables. It turned out she had thought the disc of parchment paper Remy lifts from the dish in the movie was a tortilla, so she had been expecting something very different. That still doesn't address what she thought the obviously vegetable-looking things were under the "tortilla," or why she thought she wouldn't mind all those different things touching each other. It turned out she did mind, to the surprise of absolutely no one.

Elliot, on the other hand, ate a couple bites quite happily before he realized that his sister deemed this food unfit to eat; then he wanted nothing to do with it. Fortunately, I had accidentally opened a much nicer bottle of wine than we normally drink (read: more expensive than $4; I hadn't realized Matt had been saving it) and was so busy saying things like, "Wow, this wine is really good. Is this from Trader Joe's?" to care whether the kids were eating the ratatouille. And thus concludes the saga of What We Had For Dinner Last Night. The end.]