Life in Chicago

Adventures in Baby Food

Lately I've been giving a lot of thought to the kind of mom I am. I've quickly realized that, with each choice I make about how to parent, another set of choices blooms. Being a modern, urban mom, the kind of mom with a faded Obama bumper sticker and tattoos (also faded), who leans towards baby-wearing and insisted on a natural birth, pretty much means that I HAVE to make my own baby food, right?

Seeing as friends began sending me baby food cookbooks before Veronica was even born probably answers that question. But the thing is that even if I weren't the kind of mom I described above I'd still probably attempt to cook most of my baby's meals, if only because I love cooking and baby food presents a whole new culinary adventure.

Follow this link to read more and enter to win a Beaba Babycook!

Speaking of Food

My Mother's Daughter

Last night we had friends over for dinner and as I was preparing the meal I thought a lot about my mother and how much I might and might not be like her.

On the surface I think I'm very much like her. I'm tall and confident, friendly and engaging. I like to entertain and think of myself as someone who can find something to talk about with just about anyone. I love to throw parties and host dinners and I like to celebrate things and I never stop thinking about how to incorporate good wine and food and friends into every situation. All of these are attributes I always admired about my mother and are ones that I now find myself in possession of.

But last night as I was preparing the meal I planned to serve to our friends I couldn't help but think about the negative image of that picture and about all the things that make me different from her. I happened across that realization at 7:25 when our guests were due to arrive at 7:30 and I had just finished prepping and preparing absolutely everything.

I stood in the kitchen for a moment making a mental checklist. The goat cheese/tapenade terrine with sliced baguettes was in the oven all ready to be pulled out and presented as hors d'oeuvres, the gratin was also in the oven bubbling away merrily, the tomatoes were sliced and sea-salted and saran-wrapped in the fridge, the asparagus washed, the halibut still marinating but ready to go on the grill, and the individual chocolate souffles for dessert already premade. I'd even gone for a 4 mile run, taken a shower, fixed my hair and put on a pretty shirt. All since coming home from work 2 hours earlier.

It was an odd sensation and one that was amiss from the image I hold in my head of my mother before a dinner party. Not that I think I have to be like her exactly but after she died and I was in my early twenties living in New York I held so fiercely onto the image of her. I clung to whatever figure of her I was able to resurrect in my head and I tried desperately to become that thing so that I could never truly lose her.

But I think, try as I might, and I even stopped trying after a while, I never could have completely become my mother. And if I had succeeded then come 7:25pm last night I would have been standing, not in my neat and orderly pre-prepared kitchen, but rather in the midst of a charmingly chaotic meal planning mess. The asparagus would have been half-washed in the sink, potatoes still needing to go in the oven, whole tomatoes would have been lolling about on the counter and I would have been up to my elbows in lemons attempting to marinate the fish at the last minute. Hors d'oeuvres would not have been attempted until after the guests had arrived and dessert would not have been premade or even thought of yet.

But strangely enough, I feel certain that somehow the same meal would have appeared on the table last night. And I take comfort in knowing that.

Ways to Be

Last night Tarek and my friend Cat joined me and Greg for dinner and we had the nicest time out on the deck in the warm breeze under the moonlit sky.

I made the best homemade pizza I've made yet with spicy chicken sausage, my special red sauce, ricotta cheese, mozzarella, parmesan, and kalamata olives on a whole wheat crust with big heaps of fresh arugula to finish. And we opened a beautiful bottle of Beckman Rosé to start.

(I couldn't believe this but yesterday I came home to a shipment of wine from my favorite vineyard in Santa Ynez Valley -- Beckman -- that was an engagement gift from Lien. As if her presence over the weekend wasn't enough. And when I emailed an immediate thank you she informed me that there's a second shipment coming in August -- just because she knew it would make me ridiculously happy.)

So last night was just such a nice evening. The weather was finally that perfect summer warm and it was so good to catch up with Cat who's been living in Bali for the last 6 months. The last time we all saw each other was in December when I cooked dinner for us in my old apartment in Lincoln Park. It was cold and snowy and we all crowded into my little kitchen to eat together.

Cat is a yoga instructor and craniosacral therapist and she and I met on an airplane last summer, almost a year ago, on the 4th of July. We were on a flight from Los Angeles to Boston and I was on my way to meet Greg for only the third time ever so that we could spend the weekend on Cape Cod with my family. Everything in my life felt so heightened and electric and I distinctly remember wondering who I would end up sitting next to on the airplane -- my life felt so alive and interconnected that I knew it might be someone interesting. And of course, it was Cat. And of course now we're friends.

Cat has the most amazing energy and has been all over the world and had us all simply enchanted last night with her stories about Bali and the work she's been doing. We talked late into the night, opening more bottles of wine and eating yummy engagement cake that Greg's mom made.

At one point we were talking about the afterlife and what we think happens when someone dies and finally Cat said, "For as many ways as there are to live, I think there just as many ways to be dead." And we all leaned back, struck by this idea. It was a new thought even for her, occurring to her as she said it, and it hung in the air, this simple yet profound idea. For as many ways as there are to live, I think there just as many ways to be dead.

We all closed our eyes shortly after that and for a few minutes we practiced simply being. We listened to the wind in the trees above us and felt the warm breeze across the apples of our cheeks, our feet flat on the smooth wood of the deck, the taste of wine in our mouths, our lives rich and full within us. 

Looking Forward

It's Monday morning, the first week of June.

This weekend Greg and I are having a big engagement party and in addition to all of our fun Chicago friends, Greg's parents are coming in from Ohio and one of my best friends (and bridesmaids!) Lien is coming from LA. She arrives on Thursday night and I can't wait to pick her up. The last time I saw her was the night before I left Los Angeles and we sat on the deck of my old apartment and stared wonderously into its empty rooms. That was nine months ago.

On Friday I'm going to take Lien to see the space where Greg and I are getting married and then we're going to Trump Tower for lunch at Sixteen. They have a turkey burger that Oprah has deemed the "best in the country." Lien (already a burger aficionado) and I used to get turkey burgers at Hal's on Abbot Kinney in Venice and when I've missed LA these past nine months -- going to Hal's with Lien has been top on my list of things that make my heart ache. We'll see how Trump's Mar-A-Lago turkey burger compares. And then on Saturday Lien and I are trying on wedding dresses!

This past weekend was nice. It will be one of our last low key weekends. From now through August we either have guests coming to stay with us or we are going out of town every weekend. Knowing that makes me appreciate every quiet night that comes my way and yesterday I spent the entire day writing. In the morning I wrote an article for Ideal Bite -- I'm doing a whole summer farmer's market series where I'm profiling either a chef or a vendor from one of Chicago's fantastic farmer's markets. And then I spent the majority of the day working on a huge article about green travel in Chicago. In the late afternoon I wrote up a post for She Wrote, He Wrote about going to Mayfest on Saturday in Lincoln Square.

So it's Monday, start of the week, and I'm counting down the days until Lien arrives (4!) and obsessing over Tom Skilling's 7 day Forecast in hopes that Saturday evening is nice enough for a sparkly deck party.

February Afternoons

It's Wednesday afternoon and I've just finished baking a double batch of red velvet cupcakes to take to my co-workers and hospice patients tomorrow.

It's been a nicely busy week with good days at work and social gatherings in the evening. Today it was sunny and not extremely cold. It feels like a whole different world when the sun is out these days. My mood immediately brightens and my whole attitude feels lighter. I can hardly begin to imagine how glorious Spring will be.

Tonight Greg and I are going to get the keys to our new place and take measurements and ooh and aah over this apartment we've been dizzy with anticipation to see again ever since we signed the lease. We officially move in on the 29th but we'll get to start taking over small stuff in the next two weeks, hopefully making the big moving day a little less traumatic.

I think we both have the sense that beginning life in this new home will be a real starting over time in both of our lives. Or at least it will provide a new and incredible plateau from which we can continue climbing upwards. We both have plans to begin new writing projects once we get settled and moved in and I really feel that life there will be the beginning of really feeling like Chicago is my home.

Lots of things are in the works right now. I've been working on a lot of little writing projects and reconfiguring some ideas about my larger writing projects. My book, it seems, will take some more work to make it into something original enough to be publishable. Seems that another dead parent cancer memoir ("while beautifully written") is just that -- another dead parent cancer memoir.

I've been feeling discouraged about it lately but it's about time for that to stop and for me to just begin reworking it. And Greg and are I scheming a new online project that we'll hopefully launch next month. And I'm also in talks with some other writer friends about plans to expand Life in Chicago. We'll see how everything pans out and I'll definitely be posting updates.

Lastly, Greg has a new piece up today on Jargon Chicago about how he wooed me to Chicago. It's one of my favorite of his recent pieces and I highly recommend reading it. All it Takes is a Mixtape.