This Is Not Delicious

** IMPORTANT NOTE FROM THE BLOGGER: This post is actually about how a certain class of cookie embodies the futile, broken dreams of Western civilization, but I take a really long time to get to the point. Sorry about that. In my defense, brevity might be the soul of wit but a didactic ramble is often its elaborate coffin, so, you know, have some respect. Also, writing about my doubleplus cute daughter is the only way I can smuggle in pictures that people actually want to look at and when you write blog posts this long it really is important to have pictures.** 

We've crossed a sad milestone here on Gumpen Village Street. It used to be that the child distinguished between things that were delicious and things that were disgusting. Now she recognizes that a lot of stuff is just...kind of okay. And I'm sad about it, because it is the beginning of the end of innocence.  

Waffles are delicious...for now.

There was a time when all food was good. Then she started rejecting stuff on the grounds that it was "yucky", "disgusting," or "spicy" -- more recently, "sour" or "nasty". These judgments are delivered with a look of horror, a grasping of the tongue and sometimes tears and even spitting. 

But at least it was cute. Like the rosemary incident. One dinner a couple months ago Noodle was tucking into a fresh bowl of pasta with tomato sauce, which she loves, when she froze. Mid-bite. 

Dammit, I thought. I knew it. 

"This is a stick," the Noodle said to me with distate, holding up a single, tiny rosemary leaf. 

"It's rosemary," I said. "It's an herb." 

Noodles with sticks. This photo is a poor recreation of the offending dish.

She peered into her bowl. "No, this is a stick." She went in like a monkey looking for fleas. "Look! Other stick."

She held each leaf up demonstratively before smearing it onto the table. "Stick," she said. "Stick. Stick." You stupid, stick-hiding fiend, she thought to herself. It was a long dinner. 

But in the weeks since she turned two, there is a third, sadder category of food: Stuff she'll eat but without pleasure. 

Rice crackers, for example. Our go-to playground snack. One recent day she looked up at me, rice dust on her lips, and noted: "This...this is not really delicious, Mommy." And then with a hint of sorrow she polished off the rest. 

Or last week. She was eating my soup and seemed to be enjoying it, so I went fishing for compliments. "Mmm, is it yummy?" I asked. "No," she said with a shrug, "It's not really yummy." And kept eating. 

In fact, the only things that she finds delicious are, I'm afraid, things that everyone finds delicious, like ice cream and candy and cheese. (And plain black bread, for some reason, but I'm sure that'll end soon too.) 

And I guess this makes me sad because it means the way is prepared for her to experience disappointment. The let down. The long slow process of becoming jaded. Heck, one day soon she's going to realize that sorting rocks and riding the bus to the supermarket actually constitute a fairly shitty Saturday, and then what will I do?  

On the other hand, it's an achievement that she can distinguish between things that are delicious and things that we eat because they keep us regular. It means she has a sense of personal taste. Maybe she'll be less likely to buy in to stupid fads. 

Which brings me to the actual reason I started this blog post. Ready? 

MACAROONS ARE NOT DELICIOUS.* 

I mean, HELLLOOOOOOO. They are not delicious, and they do not even keep us regular. 

Destined to break your heart. Actually I never made this recipe, so I shouldn't judge, but I will.
No macaroons are actually delicious.

Ya. Macaroons. That is what this post is really about. Macaroons are the insipid, overplayed arm candy of the confection world. And if one more shitty schlock shop starts selling these by the checkout counter, I might scream. Is there no escape? Every airport. Every bourgie supermarket. Every bakery. 

Sure, they're pretty to look at. Their smooth, bland form allows for fun with color and indeed many are beautiful. It's obvious why the people have been Instagramming them ever since Instagram was invented. But #yum? Please. 

Et tu, McDonalds? REALLY? 

Macaroons are disappointment itself. To bite into a macaroon is to feel your hopes dashed and, worse, to feel like a sucker for having hoped your stupid hopes in the first place. How could you have believed that something so beautiful would actually taste good? 

A bit Orwellian, really.

Remember that scene in American Beauty (reach way back, guys) where Kevin Spacey's character finally gets the girl of his burning imagination and then it turns out she's just a clueless child onto whom the man has been projecting his remarkably lame fantasies? They didn't even need to make that whole movie. Alan Ball could have just passed around a box of macaroons and waited until everyone took a bite and been like, "That? That feeling you just had? That's what our movie is about". 

Macaroons are not disgusting (actually, I had a foie gras-stuffed one this summer that was SUPER disgusting, but that was an exception). They are just...nothing. They are okay. But you should only eat food that is just okay if it contains vitamins or supports your ability to poop. 

You should definitely not be paying (way) upwards of fifteen euros for six cookies that are just sort of okay. Bizarre liver-based varieties notwithstanding, your average macaroon is made out of egg whites and food coloring. Sure, the gorgeous cardboard boxes are fit to be used as the display sarcophagi of tiny dead pharaohs, but still. Have we lost our damn minds? The Emperor is naked, y'all, and has been for years. 

Laduree has boxes fit to bury tiny Care Bear kings. Still not that delicious though.

Enough already. Let's go back to eating rice crackers and cupcakes. I mean real cupcakes. The kind that don't have a three-inch butter-boner on their heads...and on that note, I'm going to stop because I feel another food rant coming on. 

Oh man. This blog post is such a macaroon. 

-------------

*Betcha didn't see that one coming, eh? Keeping it fresh. 

Beached Noodle: Bubble's First Seaside Adventure

Lignano, like any really popular tourist destination, is in many ways just awful. Located in very northern Italy, Lignano has Austria's closest beach. As a result, the place both feeds on and is totally ruined by hordes and hordes of pink, German-speaking mountain people seeking a plunge in the sea.

Sand mouse.

It is filled with gaggles of drunk teenagers on spring-break type trips. The beach is packed with endless rows and depressingly deep columns of umbrellas and deckchairs, all of which are strewn with low-maintenance holiday-makers and their noisy offspring (like us). Long-suffering immigrants march the beach doing the hard sell on shitty trinkets. Miles and miles and miles of beachfront property are filled with medium-sized hotels that range from soulless to cheesy. 

From the neck up, baby.

But the good outweighs the bad: you can always find a room and an umbrella, there are arcades and amusement parks (never been myself, but Gulliverlandia sounds intriguing), they sell ice cream and sunscreen every ten feet, and you have to walk about 100 meters from the tideline into the placid sea before the water gets up to your waist. It's like going to the pool, only safer. The beach is soft and sandy and devoid of all life besides the very occasional mollusk, bait-size fish or crab. And despite the fact that it's 90% Austrians roaming about, you are actually in Italy, and so the fruit and veg, restaurants and coffee are all great. 

I've been there with friends several times over the last ten years or so, and have usually stayed in the same hotel, where you have bring your own sheets and towels and toilet paper and pay extra if you're not going to personally scrub the room clean afterwards (which I'm not, thanks). The mattresses and pillows are salty and lumpy. But every room has a kitchen and a balcony with a table and plenty of chairs, and it's directly on the shore, and in general feels like a home. I kind of love it.

Destruction.

On this trip I asked Clemens, who is responsible for making arrangements (because he speaks Italian and his family have been staying in this hotel since time immemorial) what the rooms would cost if we used booking.com. He looked at me like I was insane. 

"Have you seen Frau Kohlrabi's book?," he asked. (Everyone calls her Mrs Turnip. Apparently her actual name sounds a bit like "Kohlrabi," and she looks like one, too.) He explained that paying up involves a ten-minute wait while the Turnip licks her fingers and flips back and forth through the pages, making notes and erasing numbers with a stubby pencil. "I have no idea what she's doing in there," said Clemens. "Maybe she's just acting important." 

Bubbles helping to dismantle a castle.

We spent the evenings with our friends, drinking vino on a balcony next to the baby monitor. Ten years ago we'd be up all night at one of the truly terrible discos and would sleep it off on the beach. Now we pushed the sleeping baby down past the bars at nine p.m., shaking our heads at the sight of shirtless boys and glittery girls drinking vodka out of hollow watermelons. They were hopping around to commercial techno, showing off their boring tattoos and their very nice bodies, getting it on with randoms, and ultimately vomiting on everything nice. It's actually quite heart-warming. There is nothing more feral and human than a bunch of drunk youths. 

In the early morning Alex, the Noodle and I would go stroll around the mostly-empty main strip. A smashed watermelon, lost hair decorations, broken glass. In some cases you could almost picture exactly what had happened where. 

I should never have let her taste ice cream. She's a machine.

For instance, I tried to withdraw some money from an ATM and realized only after several minutes of pushing diverse buttons (I speak zero Italian) that it was empty and wasn't going to work. Then I noticed that the wall and floor all around the cash machine were covered in big, wet stains. Elementary, my dear Watson, I deduced. The machine must have stopped working some time last night. And then I thought, I should probably wash my hands. 

What has not changed over the years is my deep affection for building sand castles. If Alex and I have one thing in common, it's the fact that we can both really get into crafting something tedious. This year we had the added benefit of the Noodle, who was our personal Godzilla. Her presence also seemed to justify buying all the fancy plastic tools we wanted. Well, her and the fact that we no longer calculate the opportunity cost of beach toys in terms of vodka-filled melons. 



This year, with six of us working to pile sand, hold passers-by at bay and keep each other well-moistened with light white wine spritzers, we managed to do quite the project--a larger-than-life sand mermaid lying around on the beach. Lots of little kids and their parents came by to take pictures and help donate seaweed, shells and blobs of sand. (You know you're in Europe when no one gives a hoot that you've built sand hooters.) 

Noodle, for her part, had a blast at the beach. She was either laughing hysterically at the waves, the sand, the muck and the algae, or she was fast asleep. Needless to say, this was also awesome for her parents. 

First baby beach trip was a great success. Can we go back yet? 

Family selfie!

The youthful hordes I was talking about? They liked the mermaid too.

Look on our works, ye mighty, and despair!

Of Halloween and Eating Babies

Happy Halloween! More and more Austrian children and drunken young adults celebrate Halloween each year, but alas our baby is a little too young.  I secretly would like nothing more than to dress her up like she's going to an Anne Geddes photo shoot but sadly I couldn't think of a single justification. 

Babies dressed as food. (Actually I think this is
freaking adorable. Costume here.)

Anyway, because Halloween is supposed to be at least a little scary, I thought this would be a good time to bring up the eating of babies. As in, you know, eating babies. 

This is a terrible thought, right? Occasionally you read a story in the newspaper about people who killed and ate a baby and it is the absolute worst crime that there is, the most heart-wrenching:  the murder and cannibalism of a defenceless little muffin. 

A cutesy poopsie muffin that you just want to EAT. 

You see? What is wrong with us? We compare babies to food all the time - pumpkins, cookies, sugar, honey, sweet peas, nuggets, peanuts.  

We're so sick in the head, half the time it's the first thing we talk about when we meet a new baby. As we pretend to gnaw on one of their tiny feet or slurp on a mini-finger, we'll coo and say one of the following: 

"Ooh, I just want to eat that arm!" 

Also dressed as a vegetable.
Well, technically a fruit. You see what I'm saying.
This costume for sale here.

"I want to nibble on her fat little toes!"

"Look at those squishy little cheeks - yum yum." 

"I am going to eat you right up! Yes I am! Yes I am! Num num num num num." 

Where did this come from? Does every culture do this, or do we just need some kind of collective therapy? 

Anyway, this week it became clear to me how deeply ingrained is this habit of equating cute with delicious as I was talking to our niece, who is our buddy and just the sweetest little eight-year-old in the world. We were sitting with the baby between us, and the niece says to me (in German): 

"Ach, she is just so cute I want to EAT HER. You too?"

"Sometimes," I say. I smile at the baby and pretend to chew on  her foot. "Because you're so sweet and delicious, right? Hum num num." 

Um. So cute, so wrong!

The baby giggles.  

"Hahaha," laughs our niece. Then she says, "We can split her. Fifty fifty. The left half for you, the right half for me."

I look up. 

This peanut costume also kind of looks like 

something else that starts with a p that you 

would not dress your child as. Cute kid though.

The site its from has a bunch of food costumes for 

babies. Yum! 

She goes on, "And we'll have her head for breakfast, the middle for lunch, and the feet for dinner. Right? We should save the feet for last. Because they look the most delicious." 

I am horrified. 

"Dude. What are you talking about?" I say to her. "That's sick." 

The niece looks at the baby. "Oh," she says, leaning her sweet head on a fist. "Yeah, true. That is sick." 

And you know, it kind of is. Happy Halloween! 

P.S./Update: You know who probably really eats babies? Fox News. Please see this article about Halloween. It leads with "Finding a Halloween costume that doesn't terrify politically-correct college busybodies could be a challenge this year..." and goes on to quote campus organizations that raised concerns about blackface or dressing in sombreros or as geishas and so on. I actually agree with Fox that half the fun of Halloween is being a little offensive, which is why next year I think I'm going as Fox News. 

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)!