Another Day, Another Antibiotic

After the holidays died down we were keen to get the grill fired up and have our first burger event of the year.


This was fairly successful though the guys are not really too keen on meat these days.


Elliott, however, was quite impressed with the ketchup.


After dinner I came around the corner and saw Elliott sitting in a pile of cookies that he had apparently knocked off the counter. The interesting thing was that he was not trying to eat them, he was just sort of rolling around and kicking at them like a cat enjoying catnip.


Two Fridays ago we were afforded the opportunity to go out for dinner. We picked a restaurant based on the beer and the ability to watch the Blackhawks. While we had to peer into the next dining room to see the game while someone played Bob Marley songs on the guitar, the "three ounce" beer tasters were poured quite generously.


The following day the guys both decided to wake up about 15 minutes after I got home from work and spent the next six hours in bed with us allowing us little to no sleep.


The day after that Jen and Lauren took the cousins out to get their photos taken. Some cousins were more into it than others. Can you figure out which cousin was a little less into it?


Can you tell which cousin would have rather been doing anything else?


Can you tell which cousin maybe wanted to punch the photographer in the crotch and make a break for it?


Can you tell which cousin may have secretly been plotting to murder his mother and auntie in their sleep?


Can you tell which cousin may look into your soul and cast darkness upon your very being?


This was all forgotten later that night when he met us all at Grandma and Grandad's where he got to eat copious amounts of corn on the cob.


Right after Passover/Easter weekend I had an alarming amount of carrot and parsnip tzimmes left. I decided to mash it up and turn it into a delicious carrot and parsnip bread with sour cherries. The result was quite nice. I highly recommend for any excess tzimmes you may have around.

I know this is a common problem for a lot of people.


One morning when Jen "accidentally" woke up Elliott he had to come and stay with me. We tried to call Nana and Grandpa on FaceTime (one of his favorite things to do) but unfortunately they were not available. Instead he spent much of the morning just talking about how awesome it would have been.


I took them in to the doctor on Friday after completing their second ten-day round of antibiotics for a check up. Martin requested a tissue and then used it to clean the doctor's chair, desk, and door.


Elliott grabbed the keys right out of my pocket and tried to use them to open the doctor's locked cabinets. Elliott has never really used my keys before for anything so it was a little surprising that he was interested in them, now where they were, and seems to have a good idea of how to use them.


The result of the appointment was that they both still have ear infections. This meant we had to go to Walgreens and pick up another $150 worth of prescriptions for them. It also meant that our stupid, terrible, awful, no good, very bad heath care provider had to one again be confounded by the fact that we have twins and not be able to fill our prescription without an hour's worth of phone calls.

I won't tell you who it is but it rhymes with Boo-nited Elfcare.

We can't exactly blame them. After all, they are the only twins in America.



One night, waiting for Mummy to return from work I decided to do an Animal Sound Identification Lightning Round. They scored quite well.


Over the weekend, tired of all the kids music channels, I decided to play the Empire Strikes Back soundtrack. Elliott was particularly impressed. Martin's reaction was also great but I was unable to get it on video.


On Sunday we went to a local farm festival where the boys had a pretty good time playing around. Elliott was a big fan of this area where he pretended to be a giant who was ransacking a tiny village. He was particularly ruthless with the scarecrow.

Elliott has long been a defender of crows.


Martin became extraordinarily hungry towards the end of the trip and the sample portions of pie only fueled his anger at not being able to eat everything he wanted. We were foolish in not bringing any snacks with us even though we were a mere five minutes from home.


Elliott also enjoyed shaking the hell out of this wind chime. Elliott deemed it not nearly windy enough and rebranded this item as a shake chime.


This latest antibiotic, or perhaps a cumulative effect from all three, has left their poor little intestinal tracts in bad shape. This has meant for an average of 4-6 diaper changes before lunch time and recently expanded to vomiting. The doctor supposes that in their weakened state they may have contracted a stomach virus. The fact that Grandma is also in that camp without any antibiotics would lend support to this theory.

They've been on antibiotics for 25 of the last 30 days. This leads me to wonder if the cure is worse than the sickness. I'm pretty sure that they'd be better off just letting these ear infections work themselves out after what they've been through.


Illness be damned! After we got them to sleep last night we proceeded onward with our Cinqo de Mayo dinner. I started by grilling some avocado in the skin then topping them with salsa and cumin-spiced sour cream. This made for a pretty tasty end to a rough day for all of us.


Jen, before knowing the boys were sick, had requested a margarita. I was still able to deliver but it was consumed with less joy and more tired resignation than originally planned.


I also grilled up some seasoned Mahi Mahi and vegetables and made these tacos on corn tortillas with cilantro, spiced sour cream, salsa, guacamole, and crumbled cotija.


Never one to pass up a good beer opportunity, I enjoyed this Daisy Cutter Pale Ale from Half Acre. It was very tasty and I'd highly recommend as an accompaniment to tacos.


After dinner Jen bravely volunteered to open the bag of unspeakable horror that was sent home with the boys from day care.


Because of their illness they soiled every bit of clothing they had and we had to walk home with Martin wearing no pants and Elliott with no shoes. This left Jen up late Googling solutions for barf-stained shoes.


After his sickness we had to keep Martin home from school this morning where he drank some juice out of a cup then immediately passed out on top of me about two minutes after his mother left for work.


I transferred him to the couch where he has been sleeping for more than two hours. I'm hoping that a combination of sleep, a bland diet, and a lot of liquids makes him better for tomorrow.

Otherwise either Jen, I or both of us may be fired.

Foods Inspired by the Movie "White Christmas"

I've had a lot of dumb ideas. One idea I particularly like is having a meal themed after a particular event, especially with friends. I guess you could say I'm kind of like Heston Blumenthal's much dumber and less-skilled younger brother.

We made plans last week with our good friends, Paul and Caolan, to watch White Christmas togeter like a family. All four of us became increasingly excited about this event as it approached given that we are all fans of the movie and of each other's company. We would make great eighty-year-olds.

This is apparently not a new phenomenon. Two years ago we had a similarly idiotic meal with our friends when we celebrated a movie that none of us had actually seen by making Croque Monsiuers and watching 'It's Complicated.' So there is some precedent.

So it was that I found myself tasked with trying to find the foods in the movie White Christmas and plan a meal around them. Any fool would have stopped here after realizing that there is precious little mention of food or actual food in the movie at all. Reading the script reveals there were actually a few references to food that were removed from the final movie such as mentions of lamb chops and tuna sandwiches that were cut from the movie. They were probably left out because Bing Crosby was just winging the scenes in between rounds of golf.


Before starting the dinner we played with the boys for a while, got them off to day care, and then went about our daily chores.

After picking them up we got to eating dinner and watching White Christmas with Paul and Caolan, but not before getting some presents for the Wombats and getting them to bed.



The boys got a sweet ball from Caolan and Paul which they immediately got to work playing with.

Then it was on to our bizarre dinner. So I present to you the foods of White Christmas. Since they are so scattered, and mostly involve sandwiches, they didn't make for much of a meal. Jen hates sandwiches for dinner, Caolan is a vegetarian, and Paul is mostly fond of pasta and Ethiopian food. So it was that I felt the need to present these foods in a mostly symbolic manner so that they may serve as a sort of Seder plate during our regular meal.

The items are listed as they appear in the movie, chronologically. We did not eat them in this order because I felt it would be odd to begin a meal with eclairs and coffee.


In the beginning of the movie the sheriff is delayed by Wallace and Davis's manager with eclairs and coffee. I only know they are eclairs from reading the script. In fact, for years, I thought he was eating dinner. I guess this makes sense given police proclivity toward morning pastries.


For dessert I served eclairs from the bakery down the street along with piping-hot coffee.


In the "drafty old club car" Davis gets Wallace to lose the hard feelings he has toward the ladies and they bark out orders at the poor club car attendant who has to to fix them club sandwiches, lemonade, and a malted.



Given the nature of recurring sandwiches I felt it would be redundant to make sandwiches twice so I stuck to the lemonade and malted. Lemonade is easy, you just pour it out of a container marked "lemonade" but I had never made a malted milk shake before so I had to look up a recipe. Apparently this is also very easy and merely consists of combining milk, malted milk powder, and ice cream in a blender. I topped them with crushed malted milk balls.


The malted turned out quite well. It may have been one of the only parts of the meal that was not openly revolting. In fact, I'd even consider making it again!


In this scene Wallace also mentions, "Hot buttered rum, easy on the butter." So as an after dinner drink I made some hot buttered rum bu whisking some brown sugar, butter, cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, and salt, placing a dollop in each mug, topping with a little rum and boiling water. I made hot buttered rum once before in 1997. I remember thinking it sounded delicious but ultimately being extremely disappointed in the rather nasty results.

This version of the drink was better than I remember but I don't think I'll be rushing to make it again. I think I can wait another fifteen years.


In probably the most famous food-related scene in the movie Wallace explains to Betty how different foods make him dream of different things. Ham and rye makes him dream of a tall, cool blonde. Turkey makes him dream about a brunette. A little on the scat-back side, but oh, sexy. Liverwurst makes him dream about liverwurst.


Apparently the only foods he eats are sandwiches and the only thing he dreams about is women.

And liverwurst.


I was pretty sure I was the only one who'd eat these sandwiches (and probably for lunch the following day) so I presented them and had a few bites of each. I made the turkey simply on white bread with butter, lettuce, and avocado. I doubt there was avocado on the sandwich in the movie as I don't think avocados were invented until the 1980s.

I also made ham and Swiss on rye bread with mustard and, of course, liverwurst with mustard and lettuce on fresh Italian bread.



The part I was dreading was drinking the buttermilk. In the movie Bing tells Betty to "bring the cow" referring to what I thought was milk but Betty distinctively calls it buttermilk in a later scene. I have cooked with buttermilk many times in the past but I've never had it as a beverage. It just seemed that one should leave buttermilk as an ingredient, not a beverage.

You may be saying, "Keep buttermilk in your way and let me keep it in mine." If you are, however, you are wrong. It is no good as a drink.

As it turns out it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. Actually, it was mildly enjoyable.


In the scene where things go sour between Wallace and Betty, Davis is sitting over a fire roasting hot dogs while Judy holds what appears to be an inappropriately large basket of hot dog buns for two hot dogs.


This was one I struggled with as we do not have an open fire in our home -- thankfully.


I also have never associated hot dogs with the holidays but, for completion's sake, I roasted a couple over the open flame on my stove and served them with a much smaller "basket" of hot dog buns.


Nothing says Christmas like poorly roasted and even more poorly presented hot dogs.


There is no beer mentioned in White Christmas but I couldn't have that. Luckily there was a release this year of White Christmas Ale from Sam Adams. This was a pretty standard spiced wheat beer and it was very tasty. Jen, in particular, really enjoyed it. It's a shame it's pretty much sold out for the season.


After dinner we exchanged present. We got Paul a really crappy paperback book purporting to be a "high quality paperback."


We also got them some chocolate D&D dice.

They got us a certificate for free babysitting so that we could go out for dinner some night in January or February.

We totally got the best gift of all.

Cinco de Blanco

Today began with us taking our first class on how to birth some babies. I was disappointed. Don't get me wrong, the class was great. It was really informative and the woman who taught it was amazing. However, I've spent my entire life being shown what these classes are like in the movies and this class just didn't deliver on that level. We never got onto the floor on mats nor did she teach us how to breath really fast like hee, hee, hee, hee, hoo, hoo, hoo, hoo.

There was a part where we practiced how to moan though. That was awesome.

After returning home and watching the hockey game the Kentucky Derby took over our television sets. We were too tired to do anything about it. I figured I'd be able to watch a three minute horse race even though I cared about it so little. After watching some guys yap on and on about horses and furlongs Jen noticed the something we'd overlooked in the corner of the screen.



That's right. There were over three hours to go until the derby started. That's when we turned off the TV and took a nap.



I started off tonight by making a virgin margarita for Jen. After all today was Cinco de Mayo. Since we have never met a foolish made up holiday we didn't like I decided to make something vaguely Mexican for dinner. One day there will be a made up holiday for every ethnicity in America so that Americans can get drunk and fetishize a different group of people.

That's part of what makes America great.



We had to go to the mall today to pick out some fabric swatches for the baby's room so I took advantage of this trip to try to find a tortilla press. Unfortunately I came up empty. This left me pressing my tortillas between two cutting boards with a small pan. This did not yield the thinness I desired but it was a passable technique in the absence of a press.



After cooking the tortillas on my pizza stone I put out a spread with chips, refried beans, pulled chicken tossed with spices, guacamole, salsa, and cilantro.

I also made queso blanco which was a little more queso clumpo than I had hoped. I didn't really have the appropriate cheese so I tried melting some queso fresco down with milk, onion, smoked paprika, chili powder, a splash of hot sauce, and cumin. The flavor was excellent thought he texture was sort of like cottage cheese.



The finished tacos were quite good. The tortillas did not have the texture of little old Mexican lady that could have improved them but they were as passable as you could hope from a French Canadian/Italian kid from Rhode Island.



Mexico is not a country I associate with fine beer production. I could simply be misinformed since the only exposure I have is to the beers that are imported to America. What I've tried so far has not impressed me greatly.

I wanted to go with a Mexican beer that I'd never tried before for tonight's meal, however, since I couldn't find one even at the huge liquor emporium I opted to go with this Sol from Cervecería Cuauhtémoc Moctezuma. I haven't had this beer since the 1990s and I certainly have not blogged about it since blogs did not exist at that time.

This beer tasted pretty much like any other Mexican lager I've ever had. I thought I detected a slight soapy scent from the yeast but I think it was because I had just chopped a whole bunch of cilantro. Then I thought I smelled lime but I think it was because I'd just sliced some lime for Jen's margarita.

At the end of the day I don't think it tasted like much. However, that tends to work well with spicy food. It was extremely easy to drink which was fine with me.

I needed a night off from all those complicated beers.

Milk Not Jails

Yesterday a knock came at the door. It was a representative from Milk Not Jails to deliver a bundle of goodies to us. I had almost forgotten that we'd made a contribution to their efforts back in August through their Kickstarter campaign.

Milk for Jails is a great organization. I'll try to explain without getting too political. Basically they have the radical idea that maybe rural New York is better served through supporting local agriculture than through continuing to support the largest prison system on planet Earth. Maybe a dairy farm is a better idea than another prison so that America can continue to have more of its own citizens imprisoned than any other country on the planet.

What a concept!



The great thing about having paid for this in August is that it was like getting a special early Christmas gift!

We got butternut squash from African Zion Organic Roots Farm; lemongrass tea from Evolutionary Organics in New Paltz, NY; a dozen eggs from pasture raised hens from Tellos Green Farm in Red Hook, NY; Chocolate raspberry truffle ice cream and mango drinkable yogurt from Ronnybrook Farm Dairy; garlic from Streetlight Gardens in Albany, NY; Adirondack Red Potatoes from Conuco Farm in New Paltz, NY; Sauerkraut from Greyrock Farm CSA out of Cazenovia, NY; braising greens from 5 lbs. of Dirt Farm in Montgomery, NY; baby bok choi from an unspecified location; lettuce from Finger Lakes Fresh in Ithaca, NY; apple butter made by Bed-Stuy Farm Share in Brooklyn, NY; Pea Shoots from Evolutionary Organics in New Paltz, NY; and honey almond granola from Hawthorne Valley Farm.

Wow. That's a pretty good haul. We actually just donated because we supported the cause. I wonder how much they're making from our donation after they gave us back all this stuff? Did we donate to their cause or did we just shop with them?



As I looked at all these ingredients to try to figure out something to make I had some of this Imperial Pale Ale from Captain Lawrence Brewing Company. I figured this was the right way to go in keeping with the local New York theme of the meal.

I have to say, I'm warming up to IPAs. I was never much of a fan but now I actually find myself looking forward to them. Perhaps my tastes are being refined. Maybe I've reached a new level in my appreciation for the ancient beverage of beer.

Maybe I'm just getting old.



For a first course I sauteed up some shrimp with garlic, olive oil, red pepper flakes, and fresh basil. When they were just about done I sliced up some freshly boiled Adirondack Red Potatoes and fresh sliced basil from our window box.

I also tossed the pea shoots with some lemon, shallots, honey, toasted poppy seeds, olive oil, salt, and pepper. I worked in a restaurant where we used pea shoots (or pea tendrils as we called them) all the time for garnish. I've never actually eaten them before tonight.



For a side dish I cooked the braising greens with some olive oil, butter, bacon, onion, garlic, molasses, the remaining beer, water, salt, pepper, and cayenne.



For dessert we were quite well taken care of by the chocolate raspberry truffle ice cream from Ronnybrook.



On this day, in 1933, we saw an end to prohibition in America with the ratification of the 21st amendment to the Constitution. Even though I wasn't really in the mood for it I figured there was no better way to celebrate than by having some gin. And what better way than with a gin and tonic made with the finest ingredients?

To cap off the night we celebrated with a screening of A Christmas Story/. Well, we watched it. It just makes us seem like asshole film buffs if we call it a screening.

We also like to listen to things on vinyl. We're that kind of jerk.