twenty-something years of "what have you been up to?"

  • recipe cheat sheet

    Dinas_recipes_small

    I’m blatantly ripping off Amy’s angrychicken recipe cheat sheet, perfect for hanging on the refrigerator. I thought it was so smart I had to do it. I am so sick of looking for the same recipes all the time. We have gone through so much vanilla and flour (I order it by 25 lbs bags from King Arthur) than I ever used before. If you want something here, you have to bake it yourself, so there has been much baking in the last year and half. Which is good, because the low fat banana bread that I love from Starbucks, according to their website, is 380 calories. Whoa.

    I hardly ever use the salt called for in the recipes, except in the pizza dough and crackers, in which case, it’s crucial. I usually use half or two-thirds the butter called for and substitute a local plain yogurt they have here, that doesn’t even have a label. The butter here is all imported from France, and it’s awesome. I also use at least partially whole wheat or white whole wheat flour in almost all the recipes, most of the time, after the year-long brainwashing from Jennifer Fulbright. Like Amy at angrychicken, these are the original recipes, I make substitutions as I go along, depending on what’s around, but I like to start with the originals. Like Amy, I don’t need the cooking instructions. I just need the proportions, I know the process and which pan to use and that most everything does fine at 350 degrees.

    The recipes come from a variety of sources. Ludmilla, Peter’s sister is a baker extrordinaire and I could easily do a whole sheet of her original recipes. The pumpkin bread’s origins are hotly contested. It might be a recipe first used by Peter’s sister Helen, who cooked for a restaurant for years. But I got the recipe from Ludmilla. Years later I asked Peter’s nephew Peter for his amazing pumpkin bread recipe, he said he got it from his mother, and she got it from Milla, so it was the same recipe boomeranging around the family.

    Angel Biscuits recipe from Cooking Lite magazine, circa 2000, Sky High Biscuits from a restaurant we frequented in collage, the Epicurian in Arcata, California. A friend got hired there, thank god, so she could sneak out the recipe to their amazing whole wheat biscuits. Sesame Water Crackers from a Portland local, restaurant owner and cooking show star Caprial, from her cooking with kids show. Roll the dough out in a pasta cranker and bake them in huge sheets, serve with hummus. Brilliant. Pancakes and waffles from Joy of Cooking. Carrot Muffins and Chocolate Cake from Everyday Cooking. The Apple Cake came from Camille’s first year of preschool at the San Francisco Jewish Community Center. The class baked it for Rosh Hoshana and I think every parent asked for the recipe. They baked something, usually challah, every Friday and we were always encouraging her teacher to write a cookbook. My sister is always a great resource, and luckily she’s compiled her recipes in a cookbook she gave me. Many of the recipes here I copied off sheets of paper stuffed into a recipe book she hand wrote for me when Peter and I got married.

    Printable recipe sheet here.
    Download dina_recipes.pdf

  • what took me so long?

    Desk
    I hung up a cotton ribbon to make a changing display of inspiring items over my desk.

  • three weeks

    The kittens wandered out of Camille’s bedroom for the first time, the mom saw and carried them all back in. It’s hilarious when she carries them in their mouth. We are little worried about the mom, she is so skinny, and lizard is her preferred food. And we refuse to catch them for her.Kittens_2

  • ceci pas une chouette

    Camille is doing a report on owls so we’ve all been reviewing owls, the pellets, the fixed eyes, the round ping-pong ball eggs. In French they don’t call a barn owl an owl hibou, they call it a chouette, like it’s a different kind of bird. Also, as you know, chouette means cool, or neat. Camille and I think it’s funny that when you’re saying, c’est chouette you are saying, “that’s cool/barn owl.” In her report she talks about the difference between the chouette and the owl. Barn owls don’t have the feathers that look like ears.

    Last week her class visited the zoo, and a visitor had something in a bag squawking. He pulled it out and here’s what it was:

    Baby_owl
    I think he wanted to sell it to the zoo, all the animals in the zoo here are local animals, but they already have an owl. Three species of owls live in Niger, owls are quite a successful species!

    Last night I stayed up way too late stenciling this t-shirt dress for Camille to wear when she does her presentation: (although I’m not sure how cool it is to walk around wearing a dress that says “not cool.” I’m not sure how much 5th graders are into irony. Hmm, maybe I’ll do a chouette lower down that says, “c’est chouette.” Oh god, back to the freezer paper.)

    Pas_chouette_2

    Later. Okay, I added it and she loves it, although she had me cut it off so it’s a shirt, not a dress. I took that dress out of the hand-me-away bag anyway, so it’s least it’s having one more go-around. Of course Stefan wanted in on the owl love.

    Stefan_teeshirt

  • penmanship

    Abc

    I love Stefan’s handwriting. I think it’s so nice for a first grader.

    The other day he said, ” I want to be an animal scientist, but I also want to be a rockstar. Can you be more than one thing? Because I know this is a little weird, but I also want to be a cheerleader.”

    “President Bush was cheerleader,” was my response, although MANY other questions have come to mind since then, but he doesn’t want to elaborate. Is it a way to meet girls? Or the spangly costume?

  • same as last year on january 27th

    Eyebrows_2

    Oh, just another weekend when you hire a guide to lead a group, including the Ambassador, on camels to a village famous for its pottery, watch someone make pots from the river clay, look for hippos as you float back in boats, then have lunch of grilled capitaine on the bank of Niger river. Same old, same old.

    And the kittens are two weeks old.

  • les tomates

    Tomatoes_2

    One of my favorite things about living in Niger is the quality of the tomatoes, and the produce in general. The tomatoes are this gorgeous in January. The produce here is just super fresh and hasn’t been genetically altered to transport well, it’s grown for flavor by small farms. Le Pelier, an Italian restaurant here, inspired me to make a salad they serve, it’s just tomatoes with basil–we have it in the garden almost year-round–oil and vinegar, salt, pepper and pressed garlic.

  • does anyone still say, “gives me the willies?”

    Bats_close_2

    Driving down one of the main roads in town, Camille pointed out that she’d noticed when walking that the clumps in the trees are not tangled branches, like I thought, but hundreds, maybe thousands, of bats.

  • sunday

    Kittens_week2

    Didja think I’d make it whole week without a kitty cat post? They are one week old today. The white ones are starting to show faint markings, but look mouse-like and aren’t really as cute as the tabby one, don’t you think? I’ll think the white ones will get cuter. I hope. Or I’ll never find anyone to adopt them. They haven’t moved from this spot in about five days. They can’t really walk yet and they’re eyes aren’t open. So the first week, they just nurse and sleep, –as Craig Fergason says, remind you of anyone?

    And Stefan reading one of his favorite books, an animal picture encyclopedia. The puppet is afraid of the snakes.

    Stefan_reading

  • les fraises

    Strawberries
    Stefan had two bowls of sweet, ripe strawberries at lunch, he was so happy he did a little strawberry dance. We’ll have them for about a month. We will make ourselves sick on them, because they are the only berries we will have until we go home to Portland this summer. I can’t tell you how much it cheered me up to see these today. I bought a couple pints and they are already almost gone, I had to hide some for Camille. They are picked ripe, are delicious and go bad by the next day. This year I’m going to buy some to freeze for smoothies. Leopold knows where there is a farm and he can buy me a flat. Strawberries.