Roasted vegetables: carrots + golden beets

I am officially obsessed with roasted vegetables. They're so beautiful, so simple and so delicious.

Cut into evenly sized pieces. Toss generously with extra virgin olive oil and sea salt. Bake at 375 degrees Fahrenheit until amazing. 

Before:

   

After: Wrinkly goodness

All the jobs I've ever wanted.

Some people seem born with their calling, finding a passion for their chosen career path at a ridiculously young age.

For the rest of us, we search. Hopefully we find the thing that brings us satisfaction as individuals.
Hopefully.

I haven't found mine yet, although maybe I stumbled over it along the way and kept on going.

This is an inventory of all of the professions I ever wanted, as far back as I can remember:

Monkey doctor (that's the first I can remember, back when I wanted to change my middle name to Orangutan, because it had a better ring than Amanda)
Scientist
Veterinarian
Nurse
Talk show host
Marine biologist
Musician
Artist
Writer
Poet
Photojournalist
Radio personality
Photographer
Professor
Cook
Baker
Sex educator
Midwife
Doula
Massage therapist
Yoga instructor
Publisher
Editor
Art director
Graphic designer
Interior designer
Visual merchandiser
Art handler
Curator
Gallerist
Exhibition designer
Set designer
Stylist

I'm still trying to figure it out.

Naked with a mocha

I snuck out to Manhattan this morning for a little quality time with myself. It's different now, feeling naked without the baby attached to me, a reminder that I am an individual unto myself.
Not mother.
Not sister.
Not daughter.
Not wife.

Just me.

I resist the urge to make lists and be productive. For now, it's just me and a cafe mocha at City Bakery.

Love.

Project: Living room

The living room needs some love.

After being in the apartment for over four years, we're ready to rework the main living space in favor of something more functional, sophisticated and, well, grown up.

Right now it's a combination of Ikea (mostly from the As-Is department after the Brooklyn store opened), street finds (the black and white Finnish designer chairs and the quirky, broken metal fan) and hand-me-downs.

We definitely want to keep the following:
-painting (done by a very talented friend of mine, Nicholas Kashian), although it needs to be stretched and framed
-yellow sideboard
-large wardrobe-turned-media storage unit that came from Germany, although it's badly in need of stripping and new paint
-white Geneva speaker/ stereo system

Where to begin??

Baked goodness

They stare out at you on the street, imploring you to come in and taste the sweet, rich doughy goodness.

I had to photograph the black & whites for you, my love.

But I didn't go in. Not this time. Not this time.

Kissing you.

This is what I needed this morning

The good life

Today I splurged. I wasn't exactly planning to drop a chunk of change when I went out, thinking we'd just grab a nice Sunday afternoon coffee. But then I made the mistake of going into a shop I've been eyeing for a while.

And then I saw this:

I couldn't resist. I was useless against the sumptuous hand-crafted black leather bag. Gorgeous. I'm not a bag person, but this was something special. It's by BILLYKIRK (www.billykirk.com).

I love my neighborhood: the shops, the restaurants, the Sunday morning farmers' market. The old Italian immigrant neighborhood where you still hear the southern dialect spoken in the corner store, the grocery, the bakery.

But there's also the new contingency in the neighborhood: the stylish singles and couples,the ex-Manhattanites, the baby-makers. I'm in that group (but not the Manhattan part). Maybe I feel a little cliché sometimes, but I had no idea the neighborhood was going through a boom when I moved in, drawn by the quaint charm and its proximity to my job less than a mile away.

Who knew that four years later I'd be walking down Court or Smith with a baby of my own?

Today I feel so Brooklyn. Or rather, very Carroll Gardens/ Cobble Hill-esque. I headed out early into the brisk February morning, the cold wind biting my skin as I made my way up Smith Street to the green market to dump my week's worth of saved kitchen scraps for the compost collection. Then off to an intense hour and a half of Vinyasa yoga. Awesome.

Call it cliché, but this is the good life.

Recipe cards

One of the many things that Bea left behind was her recipe box. For such an avid cook, this is at the core of the kitchen.

Browsing through the cards, you can see that some were used more than others, by the spills, the wear. Others, neatly typed or hand-written by a friend probably never saw the light of day after they made it into the archive of the box.

Here are two cards that I find just so lovely that I photographed with my phone.  The first card for Noodle Pudding has her infamous bad handwriting. Even she had trouble deciphering it.

No wonder she didn't use some of the cards all that much.

Octopus

This is a re-post of an article I read last month and am still thinking about. Thanks to IFLS. She does excellent work, sharing information that blows my mind once or twice a week.

These are octopus eggs.

Octopus reproduction is fairly uniform across species. When a female is ready to mate, she releases a chemical into the water that attracts males. They follow this chemical to the female, where they will often fight one another for the right to mate with the female. Sometimes the female will mate with more than one male. The same chemical that attracts the males stops the males from eating the female - cannibalism is common amongst octopodes.

Once it has been decided who will be mating, the male transfers packages of sperm called "spermatophores" to the female using his third right arm (which typically has no suckers). The female stores these, and then builds a den. She then seals the entrance. Once this is complete, she lays the eggs and fertilizes them as she goes using the spermatophore. A female octopus can lay tens of thousands of eggs, and they all hang from the roof of her den. Once laying is complete, she settles down and spends the next few months (up to six and a half, depending on the species) caring for the eggs. She ensures that bacteria and algae do not grow on them, and she blows water across them to ensure a constant oxygen supply.

The eggs will then hatch, and the mother removes the rocks sealing the entrance. The offspring swim to the surface, and the mother crawls out of her den and dies.

 
Interestingly, octopodes are known to be incredibly intelligent. Read more about octopus intelligence here in Orion Magazine.

"Researchers who study octopuses are convinced that these boneless, alien animals—creatures whose ancestors diverged from the lineage that would lead to ours roughly 500 to 700 million years ago—have developed intelligence, emotions, and individual personalities. Their findings are challenging our understanding of consciousness itself."


Fascinating.

Flower shop window

I love this: the neighborhood flower shop's Valentine's Day window.

It's the same every year.

The first time I saw this window, it stopped me dead in my tracks, momentarily enchanted by the luminous display, a sharp contrast against the cold February night. The glowing, shining red beacon called to me.



That was four years ago. It's amazing how much life can change in that time.

But not this window.

Please stay like this forever.

The origin of the Perfect Container

This is Bea.

It only makes sense to start here since she is the originator of the concept of "The Perfect Container".

An avid cook, Bea always took an odd pride in her ability for spatial relations, being able to select the perfect sized plastic container to fit the food to be put away. Call it a quirk, but she was good at it. After putting away said food, she was quick to announce to anyone within earshot "Look, the perfect container!".

Bea was my grandmother. She died last year, on June 9, 2012, just a couple weeks before the birth of my first child. We knew it was the end, but I couldn't bring my round self to go and see her. Already a hormonal emotional mess, I was afraid to face her- not because of any sort of guilt or family issue, but because I knew that I would have to say goodbye, much like I did with her husband, my grandfather, seventeen years prior.

But she was already gone, having slipped away for years into the nebulous world of dementia.

I saw her three months earlier when I was just beginning to show the first signs of the real pregnant belly. By that time her world had reduced to just a few inches in front of her. She was barely aware of my presence while we sat and ate ice cream together, my mother feeding her gently. It was all I could do to hold in the tears. I had seen her before, but not like this.

Not like this.

And so I was afraid to see her even farther inside of herself as she slipped away from a blood clot that began in her leg and slowly traveled to her heart. The same way her mother died some sixty years earlier. We were almost relieved when she developed the clot, finally seeing a possible exit for her. Despite the loss of her mind, her body was still exceedingly fit and healthy. She broke her hip a couple years earlier at 90 and was up and moving around just a few short weeks later. Not that she had any idea where she was going.

Bea.

Maybe this is my homage to her. The perfect container. Not just for leftovers, but for all that life can contain. We will see where this road leads.

Welcome.