Deli salad

After the relative success of the spinach and kumara gnocchi, I decided to postpone trying the fish pie recipe until winter.

My next attempt at domestic goddess-ness was to be Salmon Risotto, from a recipe found in Jude Dobson's Baby and Toddler Recipe Book. The results were edible, but nothing to write a blog post about - although perhaps the unexciting flavour was due to the fact that I'd miscalculated the number of cartons of fish stock I needed to buy.

The Deli Salad was much more rewarding; it was really easy to make and tasted great, which would have earned a good score on Flying Kiwi's scale. On the other hand, the recipe calls for meat and she's vegetarian, so maybe not.

Deli Salad is my version of a recipe found in Gabriel Gate's guide to everyday cooking. I substituted chunks of ham off the bone for the turkey, tinned mango slices instead of fresh, lemon juice instead of red wine vinegar, salad leaves instead of beans and omitted the chives, walnuts and carrot (the latter two because of allergies).

And here's the original recipe:
After-Christmas Tukey and Mango Salad (serves 2)
3 tbsp plain yoghurt
juice of 1/2 lemon or 1/2 tbsp red wine vinegar
large pinch of curry powder
salt
freshly ground pepper
2 cups turkey meat, thinly sliced or cubed
1 tbsp finely chopped walnuts
1/2 ripe mango, diced
1 cup cooked beans, cut into small pieces, or 1 cups salad leaves
1/2 grated carrot
2 tbsp chives, cut into 5 mm pieces or other herb

In a salad bowl, mix the yoghurt, lemon juice, curry powder, salt and pepper.
Add the turkey meat, walnuts, mango, beans, grated carrot and chives. Toss well and server immediately or refrigerate for 10 mins before serving.

Easy peasy.

All about the Buffyverse on Wikipedia

Oh my goodness. Why did no one ever tell me there was so much written about Buffy and Angel on Wikipedia?!? Why did I not think to look on Wiki for Buffy articles?!? I could just drown in Buffy-ness!!!

The cutest insomniac

It's high time we had another gratuitous shot of Baby, isn't it? Here she is, all dressed up and ready to head off to a pre-Christmas barbie with our American friends. Aren't those the most scrumptious jeans you ever seen?

a dog's dinner

Imagine you're a starving Kenyan kid, and someone offers you a free nutrition-packed meal. All you have to do is add water and you've got all the calories, protein, vitamins and minerals you need.

Then imagine finding out that you've been eating dog food.

I can only compare it to that moment back in my childhood, when I realised that those delicious meaty things I'd been gobbling down were lamb's tongues. Tongues of lambs. Just like your own tongue, but cut out of the mouth of a poor little bitty woolly lamb. Need I add that I could never touch those things again?

Anyway, I digress.

According to the woman who's planning on donating the food to the Kenyan kids, it's all kosher (so to speak) and nothing yucky. All the same, it'd be best not to let on to the kids that they've been eating the same thing Rover is.

In which Johnny Depp manages to look like Michael Jackson

The boy sent me out to buy Charlie and the Chocolate Factory yesterday - ostensibly for me, because I am the Depp fan in this house, but also because he's a big fan of Helena Bonham Carter.

I'd heard not-so-positive reviews of the movie, so I didn't expect to be wowed or anything. However, I really liked it. The Oompa Loompas (or the one actor who played all of them) were great and their songs were cool, Depp was suitably weird and Charlie's four grandparents were a hoot.

The only thing I wasn't so sure about was the ending. It's been many years since I read the book, but I really don't remember Wonka having a reconciliation with an estranged father, nor do I recall the big family-is-everything...thing (I've been having a damned hard time thinking of the right words these days; blame it on motherhood and sleep deprivation). This is surely a Hollywood add-on, especially the father and son thing. Ang Lee did it with The Hulk and now Tim Burton has done it with Willy Wonka.

Overall though, I enjoyed it and I'm looking forward to viewing the extras tonight.

Happy Chinese New Year

Yep, the Year of the Dog is upon us. That means big, council-funded Chinese cultural shows during the weekend, lion dances featuring at several Chinese restaurants about town and those ubiquitous little red packets of lucky money.

My family has never been big on traditions; we don't buy new clothes to wear for the new year, we stopped having celebratory dinners ever since my brother and I became too busy with our own families, and it's illegal to play with firecrackers outside of Guy Fawkes' Night.

But we do believe in those little red packets of lucky money - that is, my mum believes in giving them out to the children (i.e. that's my brother and I, and our respective partners and offspring) and we recipients believe in getting the handout. I suppose now would be a good time for my brother and I to start giving out little red packets to our own kids, but I don't know if we're supposed to. After all, unmarried adults are regarded as children; maybe we're off the hook indefinitely because both of us siblings are technically children.

I'll be dropping by at my mum's later on this arvo, but it's going to be a short visit though. For a while Baby hwas able to stay awake for an hour and a half before needing a nap, but lately she's regressed to needing a nap after only an hour at the most. It's not very convenient as it means that by the time we've got to Mum's house it's already nearly time to come home again for her feed and naptime.

Have a good one. Woof.

Sleeping on a full stomach

Baby's got a new habit; because she's usually not hungry when she wakes up, and because she normally has really short naps, she now has a tendency to be ready for her feed and her sleep at the same time.

Having a baby who's hungry and tired at the same time isn't ideal, because she can be too tired to feed and too hungry to sleep. Hmmm...

Usually I manage to feed her a few minutes before putting her down for her nap. Otherwise I do her nap routine, leave the room and then have to re-enter five minutes later because she's just decided she's hungry after all.

Is this a bad thing?

Well, the good thing is that she'll sleep better because she's got a full tummy. It also means minimal cry-time before she falls asleep, because she's nice and relaxed.

The bad thing is that I fear she's developed an association between feeding and sleeping, and that's going to get in the way of her sleeping-training. It also means that maybe she won't feed unless she's ready to sleep (maybe that's why she's never hungry when she wakes up in the morning). So in the near future when she needs only one or two naps during the day, maybe she'll only want food once or twice a day.

Despite my worries, I'm glad that today she's had nice long naps. At long last, she's napping like those babies in the parenting books (not that I'm reading them any more, oh no, but if there's one lying around the house then it's just a waste not to leaf through it...). It's such a pleasure to watch her play with her daddy in the evenings and not be overtired already.

..and the gnocchi was delicious in spite of my efforts...

At the weekend I gave the spinach and kumara gnocchi recipe a try (I've typed it below in case you want to try it yourself), so I sent the boy to the supermarket for spinach, kumara (that's New Zealand's sweet potato, to you non-Kiwis), flour, Parmesan cheese and butter - actually, the only ingredients we already had in the kitchen was the salt and pepper.

I ran into trouble right at the beginning; the recipe says I need two medium kumara. How big is medium anyway? Then I realised that I also needed 3 egg yolks; I'm allergic to eggs so I couldn't use 'em, but I had no idea what to substitute for them. So I did what I usually do in such a situation - if I don't know what it's for, just leave it out (which probably explains why I gave up cooking for other people years ago).

In the end though, despite the fact that I completely ommitted 3 egg yolks, used way too much kumara and had to add lots of extra flour, forgot to chop the cooked spinach until after I'd tried to mash it into the kumara, and put all of the grated Parmesan cheese into the mixture instead of only using one third and sprinkling the rest over the top before putting the whole lot into the oven), I produced some pretty tasty gnocchi.

Here's the recipe if you're curious; it's from NZ Woman's Weekly Easy as 1 2 3 by Robyn Martin:

Spinach and Kumara Gnocchi (serves 4, or two brave people)
350g fresh spinach
2 medium kumara
250g tub ricotta cheese
3 egg yolks
1/4 cup flour
3/4 coarsely grated Parmesan cheese
freshley ground black pepper
1/2 teasp salt
50g butter

Wash and cook the spinach in a saucepan, drain and cool. Squeeze out as much liquid as possible then chop finely.
Peel the kumara, cut into pieces and cook in boiling, salted water until tender. Drain and mash.
Stir in the spinach, along with the ricotta cheese, egg yolks, flour, 1/4 cup Parmesan cheese, pepper and salt.
Shape tablespoonfuls of the misture into egg shapes and roll them in flour.
Bring a large saucepand of salted water to a simmer. Add the gnocchi and cook for 2 mins or until they lift off the bottom of the pan. Remove them from the water.
Place the gnocchi into a greased, ovenproof dish.
Melt the butter and pour over.
Top with the rest of the cheese.
Bake at 200 degrees Celsius for 20 minutes.
Serve with tomato pasta sauce (I used shop-bought sauce).

Exasperation

Baby's nap training was going well - in the last week, the time it takes to put herself to sleep decreased from almost an hour to sometimes less than a minute (although each nap still only lasts 45 minutes). But this weekend it's gone a little backwards, and I blame the boy.

It's not that he'll pick her up if she gets hysterical - that's perfectly understandable (as long as he doesn't then rock her to sleep, which he did last weekend, to my annoyance); I think it's because Baby has so much more fun during the weekend because he's around.

It seems to me that Baby goes to sleep more easily during the week because I'm relatively boring. Under my care, the most excitement she can expect, is tummy time, rolling around naked on the floor (that's her not me), occasional swings (where I sit her on my hands and swing her from side to side) and endless opportunities to watch me do housework.

The boy, on the other hand, happily makes up for not being there during the week (he gets home in time to do her bedtime routine), by giving tons of cuddles and hours of the kind of play that daddies are so good at. So it's probably no wonder that when Daddy's home all day, Baby doesn't want to sleep.

But that's no excuse to cut short Baby's nap time just because she's been protesting for over half an hour. In doing so he may well have cancelled out a whole week of sleep training. I'm just a little irritated. I can see now why some people become control freaks.

Mmm...baby rice...

Today was the day I started Baby on solids.

I mixed up some baby rice cereal with cold boiled water, according to the instructions on the package, but it looked a little lumpy - sort of like badly made porridge. But that didn't faze me because it's really only supposed to give her a taste of non-milk food.

She opened her little mouth as soon as she saw her specially-bought Tommee Tippee silicone-tipped spoon approach, loaded with yummy rice-y goodness. Obviously she was expecting something tasty.

But I could tell this was going to be a work in progress when I watched her face crumple as though to say "what the...?" and slowly work the stuff out of her mouth with her tongue (the rest of it came up when I put her down for "tummy time").

Tomorrow I'm going to try mixing it with a little breast milk to see if she likes it any better.

In pursuit of the perfect recipe book

You know how I've started to take an active role in our household's dinner-making duties? Well, after a week of stir-fried this and stir-fried that, relieved by two nights of pizza, it's time to try something different.

I came home from one of my walks with a couple of recipe books from the library; nothing fancy of course, anything that has the words "...for dummies..." or "...for beginners..." is probably right up my alley. So far, I've only found one recipe in each book which I'm game to try (one is for fish pie and the other is for kumara and spinach gnocchi).

I'm pretty fussy about what I'll try. It's not enough that the photo of the finished dish looks scrumptious; I have a whole mental list of criteria before a recipe starts to look good:

1. the recipe has to be easy to follow. Numbered instructions are the way to go.

2. the list of ingredients shouldn't be too long - preferably five, tops. And if there's anything I can't pronounce or have never seen in a supermarket then I'm not making that.

3. if making a dish requires a piece of equipment I don't have, I'm not interested. This includes whisks, blenders, mortar and pestles and terrine moulds.

4. if one or more key ingredients is something I'm allergic too (or something Baby could become allergic to), then the recipe's no good. So that means nothing with eggs, carrots, nuts or chicken. And you know that means that cakes, vegetarian dishes and risottos are probably not on the menu.

5. I'm ethically opposed to the idea of veal (think of calves who've been separated from their mums at birth, stuck in a dark barn and deliberated malnourished in order to produce that nice, light-coloured flesh), so no veal dishes please.

6. measures have to be metric, because I can't convert from empirical in my head.

7. and the picture of the finished dish has to be suitably appealing.

So, just because there's nice photo of Nigella Lawson or Jamie Oliver on the cover, it doesn't mean I'm going to find a use for it.

Manipulative? I wish!

I have Ms Mac to thank for this quiz...

Your Birthdate: October 12

You're a dynamic, charismatic person who's possibly headed for fame. You tend to charm strangers easily. And you usually can get what you want from them. Verbally talented, you tend to persuade people with your speaking and writing. You are affectionate and loving, but it's hard for you to commit to any one relationship. Your strength: Your charm Your weakness: Your extreme manipulation tactics Your power color: Indigo Your power symbol: Four leaf clover Your power month: December

What Does Your Birth Date Mean?

A step toward domestic goddess-ness

Finally there are cooked dinners at the Short and Sweet household; the Plunket people thought it would be good for me to do household chores while Baby is awake (thereby leaving me free to nap or whatever when she sleeps), and cooking should be one of them.

But I have baggage when it come to cooking; I lost interest in anything to do with hot kitchens in my teens, after years of helping my mum every evening and weekend with her Chinese food business. On the other hand, the boy and I are both heartily sick of those ready meals, and the lack fresh vegetables in my diet was taking its toll on my digestion (further details would simply be Too Much Information).

So, despite the fact that the only cooking I am comfortable with is stir-frying or toasting, I've taken on the role of dinner-maker. It's not so bad really - the need for fresh ingredients gives me more reason to go for a walk; the spectacle of food preparation gives Baby something to look at when she's not practising her rolling or doing her tummy time; I have something to keep my mind off Baby's I-don't-want-to-sleep-and-you-can't-make-me protests; and most importantly, the boy and I are now eating more healthily.

The boy is not used to eating Chinese food so often though, so I might even scout out some new recipes (gods forbid!).

I also find myself doing a heck of a lot more cleaning too, all in the name of entertainment for Baby. For the first time in my life I am seriously considering buying an apron.

visible lines

You know, there is one thing more unsightly than VPL (visible panty line), and that's Visible Breast Pad Lines.

The ugliest vaccine

Unfortunately for Baby, there's a meningococcal B epidemic in New Zealand. There is a vaccination program, but it requires several jabs over several months and each jab makes her utterly miserable.

Yesterday Baby had her five-month vaccinations, and her third and last meningococcal B (Mens b) vaccination. Contrary to the nurse's assurance that most babies don't get so unwell with the third one, the poor wee scrap is feeling very poorly indeed. When I went in to give her the 10pm feed last night, I just about scalded my hands on her feverish skin.

2.5 mls of Pamol (Paracetamol for babies) and two hours of cuddling and rocking later, she was finally back in her cot asleep.

Until 3am, that is. Baby marked her 22-week birthday with a scream that threatened to burst my ear drums (I was sleeping in the spare bed in her room).

"Time for some more Pamol", I thought. Despite it's supposedly "pleasant" taste, Baby sure doesn't like it; we've always had to syringe the stuff into the side of her mouth a little at a time, to minimise spit-up. On the fifth and final squirt, an ominous gurgle came from the back of her throat and before I could say "where's the tissues?" she'd puked up the entire dosage - as well what looked to be her total milk intake for the last three feeds.

"Oh good job, Violet" I silently muttered as I attempted to mop up the baby, my lap and the rug, not only was she not medicated but I'd have to wait at least four hours before I could try again, and she was now hungry, dehydrated and exhausted as well.

One good thing came of it though; all that regurgitated liquid cooling on her body seemed to help with her temperature.

Needless to say there wasn't much sleep to be had by either of us, and I can look forward to another night just like it. But I was not at all pleased to see that Baby's so-called third and final Mens b jabwill not be the last one after all .

Why do they all hate Wendy?

I normally avoid reality tv like three-day-old pooey nappies, but I now regret having missed most of the last season's Project Runway. By the time I caught on, eight designers had been eliminated and Wendy Pepper was already the girl most likely to be ignored at the after-show party.

But who would have thought that the show was so big? That you can actually buy the garments (and other stuff, including a Project Runway Barbie!!) from the show?

Tonight's episode was a bit rubbish, because it was just a big end-of-contest bitching session among the entrants, mainly targeting Wendy and the Brit, Vanessa.

But if we get the next season on tv, I'll be there. Trinny and Susannah, you've met your match.

The Second Book report from PBA (Parenting Books Anonymous)

I'm afraid I'm still reading parenting books, though lately I've been concentrating on sleep books:

Brian Symon's Silent Nights gives a really good explantation on how sleep cues work. At the beginning of night time sleep, both tiredness and various cues (e.g. darkness, being in bed etc) contribute to putting you to sleep. As the night goes on and as you continue to sleep, the amount of tiredness decreases; this means that the external sleep cues are increasingly important if you wake up and need to fall back to sleep again.

Symon is an advocate of the CIO (crying it out) method of sleep training. He's very convincing, right up until you actually try to put it into practice and find that listening to the crying is just too stressful.

At the other extreme there is Elizabeth Pantley's The No-Cry Sleep Solution. It's appeal lies in Pantley's promise that you can get your child to learn to fall asleep on her own without tears, as long as you are very patient and follow her method. Most of her case studies are parents who've been co-sleeping with their baby for months (or years); what a boon this book must be to ex-attachment parenters. The book contains lots of suggestions as well as worksheets for the reader to log existing sleep patterns and progress, which is great for people like me who, truth be told, like to be told what to do.

However, where it falls over for me is the need for patience. This method is supposed to take possibly weeks or months - by then my body will have adjusted to surviving on 2 x 3 hour sleeps per night.

But wait - there's more! I've also been reading the Serenity movie magazine. It's one hundred comic-book sized pages of character profiles and behind-the-scenes details. A publication such as this would be useless without some input from Joss Whedon, and there's plenty of that.

I've nearly finished Hideyuki Kukuchi's Vampire Hunter D,a vampire story in a futuristic setting not at all like the Buffyverse. While it's a good story, I keep getting the feeling that the translator's grasp of English could've been better. So it's a little surprising to see the translation credits go to someone with an English name (Kevin Leahy).

Carrie Fisher's The Best Awful though, is not keeping my attention. Although she's a very witty person, I just can't relate to the Hollywood world which is the setting for this story. It may end up being a non-completer.

The best of 2005

Just when I couldn't think of anything non-baby-related to write about, glomgold tagged me for a meme:

Four jobs I've had in my past:
Computer programmer
Shop assistant
Library assistant
Call centre operator

Four things I want to do before 2006 is over:
Get my boobies back
Sleep through the night
Start going out in the evenings again, sans baby
Move to a bigger, more child-friendly house

Four things I say a lot:
Shit
Bloody Hell
Pleeeeeease stay asleep
Is that a pooey nappy? Did you just poo your nappy???

Four things I don't trust:
My instincts
Advice from religious people
Salespeople
Winston Peters (a particularly unsavioury NZ politician)

Four things I do trust:
That the boy will always think of a way to make my life a little easier
Those lovely Plunket people who help me with my babycare concerns
That no matter what, something will come up which will prevent Baby from sleeping through the night
Lawnmower men whose lower legs are covered in grass clippings

Four people from history I'd like to meet:
Mulan. If she actually existed.
Jesus Christ. If he actually existed.
King Arthur. If he actually existed.
My ancestors in China. I'm pretty sure they existed.

Four best movies of 2005: (movies I saw in 2005, that is)
Finding Neverland
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Dogville
Serenity

Four best books I read in 2005:
We need to talk about Kevin, Lionel Shriver
Diary, Chuck Palahniuk
Q and A, Vika Swarup.
The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold

Four people tagged:
The Editter
EB
Boudica
Nigel Patel

The lawnmower man

I've just fired the guy who has been doing my lawns for the past few years. That is, I left a message on his phone asking him to please send me the final bill, which is no doubt enormous by now because I haven't received one from him for maybe a year now (and don't think that means he's forgotten to charge me), because I've made other arrangements.

I think fifteen bucks to mow a couple of postage stamp-sized lawns is exorbitant, because he leaves most of the grass clippings behind (mostly plastered all over the walls of the house), and doesn't bother trimming the bits down the side of the fence. So he's gone, matey.

The lawnmower guy has been irritating me for a long time now, but I never got around to doing anything about it. But the other day a complete stranger, who just happened to be a competing lawnmower guy, started chatting to me outside my house. He was friendly, seemed to appreciate that I hate hearing the sound of a weedeater at dawn, and Baby liked him. Plus, his lower legs were completely covered in grass. If that isn't the sign of a dedicated grass cutter I don't know what is.

I will keep a close eye on him though, in case he morphs into a giant gopher-like lawn-eating creature from the Stephen King story.

Never wake a sleeping baby...

Baby and I had another visit with the Plunket Family Centre, the people who are helping me sort out our (okay, my) reverse cycling problem. Their feed-often strategy doesn't seem to be working, so I've been given a daily routine to try on Baby.

The Plunket nurse who gave this to me stressed how important it is to get Baby to get her five feeds per day during the day, rather than during the night.

Tell me about it.

Having a little more predictability in my day would be great. I could actually make appointments and be pretty sure I can turn up.

I'm supposed to wake her up for a last-feed-of-the-night at around 10pm, the theory being that this will avoid having to get out of bed and feed her at midnight or 1am. I'm a little sceptical whether this will work (I've read that there's maybe a 50/50 chance of success), but what's the harm in trying?

Well, for a start, the very thought of waking up Baby at night on purpose gives me the heebie jeebies.

What if she wakes up, feeds and then doesn't want to go back to sleep?

But on a slight tangent - just talking to the Plunket nurses always gives me a feelgood. They're really encouraging and tell me how normal my anxieties, and Baby's foibles, are. That's a heck of a lot more than I get from socialising with the mother's group - the mums I talk to only want to chat about how well everything is going. That's sooo not blogworthy.

A room of her own

Baby moved into her room last night (though I'm going to sleep in a single bed next to her cot for the next few weeks). In hindsight, the timing of the move wasn't the best - but then, just about any time is a bad time for a baby to be moved from the master bedroom to what was previously the family storage room.

I thought we'd have trouble with the move, when Baby didn't fall asleep during her buggy ride, timed to coincide with all the furniture moving. After over an hour of being pushed up and down the neighbourhood's bumpiest streets, Baby stayed determinedly awake. Then she screamed herself silly for the last twenty minutes before conking out. Not a good start.

Then it looked as though the storm was going to make it hard for her to fall asleep. The gale force winds had not only blown over a whole section of the corrugated iron fence dividing our property from our neighbours' - it was trying to blow the fence back up again too.

In the end, she did fall asleep in her new room. Only she woke up about three times before midnight and about five times after midnight.

Routine rebound - baby cunning

We'd gotten into a nice, predictable routine for Baby's daytime naps and bedtime. For her naps, we'd sing her a couple of lullabies and rock her in the darkened bedroom, before putting her down in her cot just about asleep. (For bedtime, this is preceded by a warm bath, and I try to give her a feed if she isn't already too tired to eat.)

But, at least for day naps, that's all changed.

Just as we expected, Baby's associating certain things with sleep - lullabies, rocking, being wrapped in her blanket or zipped into her sleeping bag etc. Only Baby doesn't seem to like going to sleep. So as soon as we start crooning (or doing anything else which is associated with sleep), she starts to arch her back and cry, as though to say "I don't hear you I don't hear you I don't hear you!".

This kinda makes the whole point of having a pre-nap routine a little...pointless.

We're now having to be surreptitious. Don't announce that it's nap time, just sneakily carry her into the bedroom for a little "quiet play"; no lullabies, just croon some easy-listening songs; no rocking, just cuddle her until she's nice and dozy.

And we're having to keep changing our strategy every time Baby catches on. It's a little like the eternal battle between predator and prey, between bacteria and antibiotics, between 'flu strains and 'flu jabs.

Where did that year go?

We weren't planning on welcoming in the new year in person, but Baby woke me up at 12am on the dot so I got to silently wish her a happy new year while she not-so-silently demanded a midnight feed thank-you-very-much.

It's hard to believe a whole year has been and gone already. In the last twelve months, I have:
-started a new job so that I could concentrate on library school,
-dropped out of library school (probably permanently) because I got pregnant,
-found out that pregnancy is not necessarily synonymous with the word "glow",
-left my new job to go on maternity leave,
-found out at first hand what child birth is really like (my mum was right - it sure does hurt),
-welcomed an unbelievably cute little person into the world
-and gained some idea of what sleep deprivation torture must be like.

Now that we have a baby in the family, I know that time is now going to pass even more quickly than it did before. In what will seem like a matter of seconds, Baby will transform into a crawler, a walker, a talker and a pre-schooler, respectively. Next thing I know, she'll be hawking her modelling portfolio to prespective agents, and her daddy will be warning off her biker boyfriends with a shotgun.

Happy New Year!