Ian turned 16 this week. I’ve known this young man since he was six. He is growing into an adult before our eyes. Every time I see him he is at least an inch taller.
What a weird dichotomy to celebrate the life of a wonderful young man amidst the passing of George Floyd. The world is unsafe for Ian and for Keith and for Keith Junior. I hold my breath every time they leave the house, praying for their safe return, wishing I could be with them everywhere they go to literally protect them from danger.
I can’t actually change the world, but I can continue to show up and do my best. This week, we saw again just how much needs to change. We all did. There is a deep well of sadness in the air, but we have to keep pushing forward and reaching for the life we dream of that is free of racism and safe for EVERYONE. Black lives matter so much. Ian’s life matters.
This week, I texted and called and advocated and I also baked a cake.
I got to celebrate a wonderful young man turning sixteen. I called the birthday boy and asked him what kind of cake he wanted just like I do every year. For the past few years, he’s wanted an ice cream cake from Baskin Robbins. This year, he requested a lemon cake.
What sixteen year old wants lemon cake?
I don’t particularly like lemon cake, but I’d do anything for Ian so I started researching lemon cakes online. Ina won, of course. Her cake is a beast. You have to zest eight lemons. She perplexingly calls for extra large eggs in her baking, which I don’t understand.
Why not regular eggs?
The lemon cake recipe makes enough for two loaf cakes. Cake by the pound. I made one loaf and a dozen cupcakes. You have to make the cake and then a simple lemon syrup to pour over it while it’s still warm and then top it off with a lemon confectioner sugar icing before serving.
It’s a lot of steps. Oh, and did I mention that Oakland had a heat wave this week and I made this cake in my 90 degree kitchen? I was sweating from the heat and from baking something that is a bit outside of my baking comfort zone.
But, when Ian was here and we got to celebrate his life, it felt so worth it. Keith made his famous fried chicken and the boys hung out and explored our new neighborhood. We sang happy birthday to him and there was real, true joy as we dug into our lemon cake together. I hope he knows how loved he is and how much we want him to be safe and happy always.
Happy birthday to Ian. Let’s continue to fight for a better world for him and for our youngsters.
Hi, hello, from me and my new favorite soup: Roberto (New Yorker). I can’t retrace my internet breadcrumbs to remember where I came across this soup from Helen Rosner, who is the New Yorker’s Roving Food Correspondent, which sounds like a dream job if I ever heard of one, but this soup is now firmly entrenched in my life. I’ve made it several times and each time I do, I exclaim over and over how damn good it is.
Made with the most simple and humble of ingredients, it just has a special soup alchemy that does me in. Like any good soup, it gets better with time. I’m a major fan.
As you know, I typically link to the original recipe source for my damn delicious posts but today I’m going to share my version of the recipe with a few little tweaks. Here’s why: her original recipe is beautifully written but it’s a pain in the ass for me to follow every time I cook it because she uses a LOT of language to describe the cooking process. It’s helpful, especially for the first time cooking it, but not for when you want to get in, get out and eat dinner. So, mostly for my own laziness, I want the recipe saved in my own archives.
Enjoy!
Ingredients:
Glug of olive oil
1 medium-sized onion, diced
2 tablespoons pre-minced garlic or about 3 cloves fresh garlic
1 pound of hot italian turkey sausage, removed from casings
1 28 ounce jar of whole peeled tomatoes (san marzano if you can)
1 quart of chicken bone broth/stock
1 can of beans, drained. Any type! I like white beans, but anything is good
1 bunch kale, chopped or a few handfuls of any sturdy green (collards, chard, spinach)
1 cup grated parmesan cheese
lemon or lime slices for garnish
salt and pepper to taste
Directions:
Heat olive oil glug in soup pot over medium heat. Add onions and and cook until fragrant. Add garlic. Season with a bit of salt and pepper.
After about one minute of garlic cooking, add sausage to pot. Allow to cook until nice and browned and broken down.
Once sausage is browned, add tomatoes, beans and broth. Bring to simmer. Use a potato masher or the back of your spoon to break down the tomatoes into bite-sized pieces.
Prior to serving, stir in parmesan cheese. It will flavor, but won’t make the soup ‘cheesy’. Season with additional salt and pepper to taste.
Ladle soup into bowls and garnish with a squeeze of lemon or lime.
Do you have any delicious soup recipes as your go-to? This one is my all-time fav!
I’m knee deep in the therapeutic process these days. Every Friday, I Facetime with a wonderful therapist who is helping me retrace the script of my life. We’ve been doing visualization exercises where I travel back in time to revisit certain formative experiences. From there, we start to unwind the thread of my subconscious beliefs to identify where certain patterns took root in my life story. I get it if that sounds a bit mumbo jumbo to you, honestly. If I didn’t see it working in my own life, I might roll my eyes a little at it.
Today, we stumbled upon one of the deepest traumatic experiences in my childhood. It involves a former step-dad beating my mom while I was six years old. I was listening alone in the back bedroom of our house terrified out of my mind. I don’t want to get into anything more specific than that, but I will tell you that I relived that moment again as a 34-year-old woman this afternoon and it felt just as real to me today as it did three decades ago.
My therapist helped me reprogram the trauma today by asking me to visualize going into the situation as an adult. I went back and I held my own childhood hand and I asked that little girl if she wanted to leave the situation. When she told me she wanted out, I marched her down the hallway and out of the house. I took her to the safest place I know in this world and I comforted her and I told her that she was safe now and she didn’t have to live in fear anymore. I told her she was brave and I told her what happened to her wasn’t right and that I was there for her and I was going to protect her from experiencing that pain again in her life. I hugged her and when I did so, I kid you not, I felt the back of my neck tingle as she was absorbed in the cocoon of my love.
Talk about intense, right? When I opened my eyes, I felt a little shocked to see myself Facetiming with my therapist. It was like I was transported into an entirely different situation.
After our session ended, I walked around in a bit of a daze for the rest of the afternoon. I took a nap, I reorganized my kitchen/quarantine office and I watched some tv. In the evening, I pulled out some butter and some eggs to do a little therapeutic baking, too. I decided to make Oatmeal Chocolate Chip cookies from My Cooking and Baking Dream List. My current step-dad always makes the ‘Vanishing Oatmeal Raisin Cookies’ recipe that’s under the lid of the Quaker Oats quick oats. It’s his signature and it never fails.
As I baked, I listened to Travis Tritt on Spotify. He reminds me of growing up in Arizona. I mixed and measured, thinking about my current stepdad who is so gentle and sweet and who makes my mom happy. I bopped around my kitchen and I just felt a lightness inside. It felt like a weight that has resided in my sternum for so long I didn’t even realize it was there anymore has dissolved. I thought about my current life, the peace I am creating, the path I have blazed. I have made so many mistakes, even repeating the trauma of my childhood by marrying a man who also beat me and made me feel so unsafe and so afraid for my own life.
But my story doesn’t end at my mistakes. I didn’t accept the inevitability that I would replay the trauma of my childhood. I clawed my way out of that life and I rebuilt a new one, brick by brick. I live in a peaceful home now, where I listen to country music and I make cookies and I bravely go to therapy to ask myself the tough questions about my current relationship and the fear I have around marriage. I commit to moving forward always, stubbornly holding onto my belief that I can live a full, happy life with fulfilling relationships and a deep and abiding joy.
I’m still very much on that journey, but days like today give me hope that I’m getting close because I revisited the most painful experience of my life and transmuted it into something beautiful. I released a pain I’ve been carrying around for years, the weight of it just vanishing before my eyes.
Forever more, these are going to be called Vanishing Trauma Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies in my mind. They’ll remind me of this major milestone, where I took my pain and alchemized it into something delicious. I realized tonight as I was baking that I already kept the promise I made today to my six-year-old self. I already did take that little girl out of that painful experience and I rebuilt her world into something safe and secure and beautiful.
Oh, and I’m just getting started. I’m pretty sure she and I are going to make this life even better, cookies and all.
Vanishing Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies
Ingredients:
1 cup (1 stick) plus 6 tablespoons softened butter
3/4 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup white sugar
2 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup chocolate chips
3 cups quick oats
Directions:
Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Cream together butter and sugars.
Add eggs and vanilla. Mix well.
Mix flour, baking soda, cinnamon and salt in a separate bowl until they’re all combined.
Add flour mixture to butter mixture and mix until all the flour is integrated.
Stir in oatmeal and chocolate chips.
Drop onto a cookie sheet and bake for about eight minutes, until the edges are brown. Let cool for a minute on the pan and then cool completely on a wire rack.
Enjoy a still-warm cookie and give your inner child a big, huge hug. 🙂
