Domestic Bliss: A Recipe for Minestrone Soup

There are blogs, terrible novels and a good number of cooking shows that would have you believe that the apex of domestic bliss is this: Mama is in her cozy kitchen, children at her feet, preparing a nutritious meal for her family. She is calm, her hair is good. Perhaps her sweet son or daughter helps her to stir the pot. A cat and a pot of basil share a spot on sunshine on the windowsill. It smells like peaches and vanilla. Outside, birds chirp a little song. Come with me. Peek into my Monday. Let us cook this delicious minestrone together.

(I forgot to take pictures.)

MINESTRONE

Ingredients

Gather these from the supermarket in a hurry on your way home from work. Your husband has committed to getting your daughter from kindergarten. This means you have about an hour before they get home. Run! 

• 1/2 pound (about 1 1/4 cups) dried white beans such as Great Northern, picked over and rinsed 
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/4 pound pancetta (Italian cured pork belly, available at Italian markets and specialty foods shops) or sliced lean bacon, chopped
• 1/3 cup olive oil
• 1 onion, chopped
• 1 large carrot, cut into 1/2-inch dice
• 1 rib of celery, cut into 1/2-inch dice
• 3 garlic cloves, chopped fine
• 2 zucchini, scrubbed and cut into 1/2-inch dice
• 1/4 pound green beans, trimmed and cut into 1/2-inch pieces
• 1/2 pound boiling potatoes
• 4 cups shredded green cabbage (preferably Savoy)
• 1/2 pound kale, rinsed, drained, stems discarded, and the leaves chopped (about 6 cups)
• a 28-ounce can tomatoes, chopped coarse and drained well
• 4 1/2 cups chicken broth (preferably low-salt)

• freshly grated Parmesan, garlic bruschetta , and dry-cured sausages as accompaniments

Pick me up!

Preparation

Get home. Good news: Noodle and Daddy aren't here yet! Bad news: there is cat pee in the hallway, AGAIN. Those filthy animals. Drape toilet paper across the mess. You have no time for this now. You have veggies to prep before all hell breaks loose. 

Despite having destroyed the hallway, the cats expect to be fed. Feed them. Try not to have a terrible attitude about it. Also try not to slice your finger open on the can again. Dammit, again!

Okay, okay. Focus on cooking. But first, you need to take off your suit jacket. Also the skirt. But no time to change anything else; stand in the kitchen in your pantyhose and blouse. Pretend this is empowering. Wash the vegetables while you read the recipe on your laptop; try not to drip water into the keyboard. This looks like a great recipe. Shame about all the steps. Why can't you ever cook anything simple, for Gof's sake? Stupid, stupid, stupid. Alright. No big deal. Multi-tasking. Women are awesome at multi-tasking, you read it on IFLscience or something. 

First step: Let the beans soak overnight. Ha! What kind of a**hole has time for that? You bought canned beans, like a boss. Go ahead and puree half of them now, because later there will be a toddler around, and putting toddlers and immersion mixers in the same space is basically like combining monkeys and guns. Ha. Yes. You feel very smug and organized for having thought of this. You'd totally say that if you were on your own cooking show. 

"Remember, everyone," you'd say, in your best Mary Berry voice. "Blend your beans before your child gets home! Would you leave monkeys in a room full of guns?" 

Next step: crisp the pancetta in a pot. Simultaneously peel carrots, chop celery, slice garlic. This is so totally under control. Add the veggies to the pot. You have four whole minutes to chop the next set of veggies. This is easy. 

The click of keys. "Hi babes, we're home!" says Alex. 

Uh-oh. 

"Mommy mommy mommy mommy mommy mommy!" says Noodle, racing down the hallway. She may or may not have a little sheet of cat-urine soaked toilet paper attached to her rain boot. 

From down the hall, the husband calls: "Wow, you couldn't clean this up?" You ignore him as he mutters and cleans up cat pee. 

"Hello my love! How was kindergarten?" you ask the Noodle, smiling. Aww. It's so great to see this kid. What a cutie. 

"Up! Mommy, up!" She says. You hoist her up. 

"Look! Mommy is making minestrone. That is a kind of soup," you explain, stirring the veggies. 

"Cheese?" she asks. 

Current favorite food EVER, which, frankly, who can blame her.

"No," you say. "No cheese. You had a snack at kindergarten. Let's wait until dinner."

"Wahhhh!" she cries. 

"Mommy has to chop some more veggies now, so I have to put you down," you say. You turn your face toward your husband, who appears to be dawdling. "MOMMY HAS TO CHOP SOME MORE VEGGIES NOW." 

"CHEESE!" screams the Noodle. 

Daddy appears. "No cheese," he says, to great wailing and gnashing of teeth. "You want grapes?" Grapes are okay. He has no comment on your attire, because standard.  

They disappear with a bunch of grapes, and you frantically chop: zucchini, green beans and...motherf***cker, potatoes too? Where is the peeler. Where is the peeler. There! OH MY GOD. Peel, chop. Chuck, stir. 

"Mommy. Mommy. Mommy. Mommy. Mommy."

"Yes, darling," you say, as you pick apart a head of kale. 

"Cheese?"

"How about you go read a book on the couch with Daddy? Does that sound like fun?" you say.  What is that man doing? Is he...omg, is that Facebook? "ALEX!"

"Alex!" says the Noodle. "Alex! Cheese!"

"Daddy," you say. "Go play with your daddy." 

"Come read a book with me, Noodle," says Daddy. He holds up Good night, Gorilla enticingly. It is the current favorite. 

"Elmo?"

"No, a book." 

"Tubbies?"

"How about this book?" 

"Of course." Noodle toddles off. 

Chop the kale. You've decided to skip the green cabbage, because if there is one thing you've learned in life, it's that if you make a recipe that uses only "4 cups of shredded green cabbage" you will shortly thereafter have half a head of slowly rotting cabbage in the back of your fridge. "Don't forget," you tell the imaginary cameras in your imaginary giant, airy kitchen. "Kale and cabbage are basically the same thing anyway! Ahahaha!" 

Angelic giggles tinkle out of the living room, and Daddy is reading. You smile beatifically.

Add the kale to the pot, stir until wilted...Stir until wilted. Wilt. Come on. Wilt already. Oooh, you could go cut some basil why you wait, since you actually have some for a change! Oh. THAT'S wilted. And...did the cats eat some too? Oh. My. God. Daddy and Noodle have finished two whole books. Check on the kale, which is still kind of like the soles of combat boots. American kale wouldn't do this, you think. This is just some b.s. Austrian pseudo-kale. You should have bought the green cabbage. 

Little feet pad sweetly across the floor. 

"Mommy, book," says Noodle. She is standing by your feet with a book. Reading is really good for you and you should encourage it. Reading is probably even better for you than minestrone. Could this recipe take any longer? Seriously. 

"Why don't you read with Daddy, honey?" you say.

"Because I already read two books with him, idiot," says Noodle. She doesn't actually say that, but you can hear it in your head. 

"Look! Daddy is playing with blocks. Why don't you join him?" you say. Daddy clicks the blocks together, optimistically. (He's so great, you think, in a footnote).  

Noodle points her finger in your face. "I haven't seen you all day, because all you care about is going to work, and now you're ignoring me. You will not read me Hop on Pop even though when I say the word 'pop' your heart nearly does." 

What she actually says is: "UUUUUP! CHEESE!"

It is really very, very warm in the kitchen. And very cramped. And the floor is suddenly covered in something sticky. 

You breathe deeply and try to remain calm. You feel terrible. Toddlerhood is short and precious. The days are long but the years are short. Cherish this moment. Be in this moment. Do not think about cigarettes at all. Think about the precious, fleeting, beauty of childhood. You're going to miss this, right? Actually, you know you are. That's the f***ing tragedy of the thing. 

You pick her up. "Hi, lovely. No cheese. But do you want to watch me make the soup? You can help, okay?" 

Add the tomatoes--try not to cut your child while opening the cans! Now add the "broth", i.e. 4.5 cups of water and soup cube. Hey, remember when you used to make broth from scratch? Meditatively skimming chicken foam while This American Life ran in the background. You'd drink tea, and smoke cigarettes out the window. Oh my God I LOVE cigarettes. 

"Soup!" says Noodle. 

"Do you love soup?" you ask. Foolishly, self-indulgently. "Does this look yummy?"

"No!" she says. "No! CHEESE!"

Breathe more.The Om Shanti part of your brain wins out against the part that desires to put your face through the wall. But it's a close call. 

Your arm is breaking with 11 kg of toddler, but hey, you're almost finished. Check the recipe. Scroll down. Hm hm hm. Ah yes. 

Cover the pot and simmer...for an hour? AN HOUR? This kid will be asleep in an hour! 

The Om Shanti part of your brain is no longer winning. You mysteriously want to actually...cry? Is THAT this feeling you are feeling? Ew. Unacceptable. You are a professional. Also a domestic goddess. There are no problems. There are challenges. And challenges have solutions. 

"Would you like some cheese and bread?" you ask. "And, um, this nutritious carrot?"

"Cheese!" she says happily. And cheese for dinner it is. 

Look into the camera with a knowing smile and a wink. "And remember, if you wish to avoid any fuss you can make this soup a day ahead. Just refrigerate and re-heat! No one will ever know the difference."

***

P.S. This recipe from epicurious.com was actually totally delicious, and even the Noodle liked it...the next day. Highly recommend. 

P.P.S I seriously have no idea how other people dis-attach their small children (plural! I have only one and can't manage!) from their legs while they are, for example, wielding large knives or manipulating hot fat. Please tell me your secrets. 







  

Happy New Year! The Flight Home

I have some serious amounts of back-posting to do, but it's January 3rd so let's start with a beginning: 

Happy New Year! 

Nava and I spent the 31st flying from Dallas to Vienna via London, while Alex flew on a separate itinerary via Frankfurt. Our airplane was packed nearly as tightly as our suitcases full of Christmas largesse. I had a little cold but Nava, with her babyish immune system, was sick as a dog: ripe cough, runny red eyes, perpetually dribbling nose. So it's to her endless credit that Miss Nava did not cry at all the entire flight to London.

Anyway there were about five other babies who were hogging the mic, so to speak. For my part, I stopped feeling sorry for myself at boarding when I saw a lone lady flying with very tiny twin babies, who (like us) had neither a bassinet nor an extra seat. She sat a few rows ahead - in the middle of the middle row in coach - with a suckling babe in each arm. They would take turns crying all night. 

Row 32 Seat F

We passed her - let us call her Mary - on a trip to the bathroom. There she sat with her babes finally both sleeping, her eyes open and staring straight ahead, face expressionless, the three of them illuminated like a memorial to maternal discomfort under their neighbour's yellow reading light. 

Now there, I thought, is a woman who is reaching very deeply into her happy place. Perhaps she was thinking about how as a child she would hang from the monkey bars for as long as possible, trying to squeeze all the blood out of her fingers. Foolish, foolish. Or perhaps she was revisiting those many times, now merged into a single, shimmering memory, when she had sat in her living room, a book open in her left hand, a turkey sandwich in the right. How breezily she had scratched her elbow, turned a page, pulled a strand of hair from her eyes, perhaps even twiddled a pen between her feckless fingers. Gone, all gone. I wished her well and hoped that one day in her dotage her boys would install her on a richly outfitted Mediterranean yacht. Women are so awesome. 

As for young Nava, she kept it together beautifully until midway through the second leg of our journey, just two hours from Vienna. Enough was enough. She threw down the fabric book she had patiently slobbered on for the past twelve hours, furrowed her brow, looked me in the eyes and did not cry. 

"Meeeh!," she said. "Meh, meh, meh. Baaooo! Eek!" 

And I was like, Holy smokes, my baby is bitching at me. I said, "I hear you, kid."

"Baah. Meh. MEEEEH!" said Nava, repeatedly slapping the very nice man sitting to our right. "Meh meh meh meh meh meh MEH."

Sadly, I forgot to take a picture of our misery, but let's just say that when we deplaned we looked a little like this: 

We got to Vienna at 5.30pm on the 31st of December 2013. And that was just the beginning. 

This is What Constitutes a Major Achievement in My Life These Days

Because Alex and I are adherents of the Path of Least Resistance School of Interior Design, we decided to conveniently locate Nava's diaper changing table in our living room. For the same reason, and because we are almost entirely innocent of either good taste or disposable income, our living room is basically monochromatic: everything is either black or white or a shade of gray. 

But the changing table was made of wood stained a fairly deep yellow, which didn't match, and it was missing an attachment that would have made it deep enough to fit a baby (we'd been laying her sideways). 

So last weekend, we built an attachment and painted it white!

BOOM. White changing table. Shot from below to add majesty.

Um, and that's it. 

Gosh. I was hoping this would be more of a blog post. It seemed like a serious achievement at the time. It involved planning the table extension, dismantling parts of the table, going to the hardware store, having wood cut, sanding the whole thing, nailing new bits together and painting everything twice. All on a Saturday. OH, oh, AND blogging about it. WITH a baby! I think we should get extra points for doing it with a baby. 

Not that our baby can talk or propel herself, or anything, but she does squall* loudly and for no reason for a couple hours every evening, and that made it pretty hard to concentrate. On the plus side, it made it totally irrelevant that Alex could have woken the dead when he was nailing pieces of wood together (at that point I was making futile efforts to calm our hysterical and inconsolable bairn, who was not hungry or in pain but was having her usual 6 pm bout of what I imagine is Creeping Existential Dread). 

Whatever. Fixing up the table was really hard and we are proud of ourselves. 

Here's a picture of our baby. She continues to be by far the best thing we've made. Didn't even have to go to the hardware store. 

P.S. Shana Tova, to those who celebrate it 

* By the way, the expression "a squalling infant" was a cliche I'd often read, but I feel like now I really understand. And we're lucky enough to have what they call an easy baby (knock on wood, salt over left shoulder, etc)! 

Quickly blog faster! About women

Holy beans, I have access to a computer and the baby is sleeping. Quickly blog faster! I only have a few minutes so I'll keep this post narrow: Women are insane. To be more specific (and, like, fair), what I mean is that some women really lose it around babies.

I've really noticed it walking through the wilds of Gumpendorfer Strasse with the Mouse.
Complete strangers will surreptitiously cross traffic so that they can walk near the baby and peep at her feet. Old ladies rise from their bus seats like Lazarus to peer into the carriage, and young girls come bounding out of the shops where they work to coo and sigh. 

There is much squealing.  It goes like this. Someone will come up and say, "Mei das Putzi ist ja GANZ ein neues, so ein KLEINES *indecipherable cooing*" Still smiling like madonna, they ask, "Und? Wie alt?" (Loose translation: "What a wittle snooky wooky wookems woo. How old is she?")

And I say: "Fast ein Monat." (A month, or whatever). And they squee and clutch their hearts. When I told one woman on the bus that Nava was only six days old the woman actually shrieked and had to clap her hands over her mouth and sit down. Other times real tears come into these ladies' eyes. 

One person I have only met once for five minutes walked right up to us in the street, apologised briefly ("Sorry, ich muss das jetzt sehen -- so SÜSS!"), pulled the child's sock off and then just stood there holding her foot. Another girl was gazing into the carriage when, with no forewarning, she reached in, pulled the sleeping baby's dress up and placed a single finger on her teeny weeny belly button. Then she literally stood there until it started to rain. 

Ickle wickle baby toesies!

It's insane. Worse, I'm almost certain that I'm going to become these women - I, too, am grievously addicted to the smell of fresh baby and the sight of wittle pink toes. 

However. Despite the crazy, its exactly those hormones that make us ladies into sensitive fertility goddesses. 

Now, I'm not saying breeding is our best feature. Women don't need to have kids. Even if they do have kids I suspect that raising those kids is a whole lot more challenging than just bringing them into the world. There are many parts of women that are brilliantly designed to do all kinds of other things, like sneezing and calculus. And we should do them. It is great news for the world that ever more women are shaping religion, politics, science, engineering and other fields previously monopolized by the boys (who did a lovely job most of the time, but also brought us, respectively, holy war, regular war, social darwinism and the bomb). 

Our worthy minds aside, though, girls' bodies are amazing on an esoteric level, and that is especially obvious when it comes to perpetuating the species. Not to brag or anything, but my body isn't just some abstract temple: it's a serious, life-building factory. My magic womb knit an entire person together while the rest of me ate Ben & Jerry's and sobbed at vapid Dove commercials. (By the by, pregnancy really solidified my belief that any person who thinks I shouldn't be the boss of my body can go hump a scroll.) 

Every part of the female organism is linked to every other part, and to the baby, like that jellyfish tree in Avatar. The baby bleats once and you're awake; if you think about the way she smells your breasts leak. When she nurses, your uterus contracts ever closer to its pre-pregnancy size. Many aspects of childbirth and care would physically hurt more but you're flooded with love chemicals. I imagine there is a mixing board in our wombs and before it sits a great mother DJ with her incantations and ivory chopsticks, tweaking our cycles and sleep, our blood and milk. 

The whole system is enough to make you believe in rain dances. Women are fucking awesome. 

So, you know, I guess its okay that strangers come and try to smell my kid's head. It's a side effect of their feminine awesomeness. And anyway, they can usually be scared off with that other essential womanly skill: bitchy resting face.