Happy Holidays from the Chovy Family

Savory Fall Risotto

I made this last week, and remembered to have the camera ready to take a picture of it, but then the batteries were dead, and I was too impatient and hungry to track down new ones. So when I made it again this week, I was sure to remember.

Here's the finished product:




This is from a recipe of Jamie Oliver's that was published in the Oregonian a few years ago. He called it "Pumpkin, Sage, Chestnut and Bacon Risotto"; I call it Butternut & Bacon Risotto, and my version (adapted from his) is below.

Butternut & Bacon Risotto

1 medium butternut squash, sliced into 1-inch slices and seeds removed
olive oil
1 T whole coriander seeds
salt and freshly ground black pepper
12 thin or 6 thick slices of bacon or pancetta (I had thick on hand)
a few ounces chopped shelled roasted chestnuts
15 or so fresh sage leaves
6-8 C chicken broth, reconstituted from concentrated stock
3 shallots, finely chopped (about a racquetball's worth)
2 large ribes celery, finely chopped
two small or one large carrot, peeled, halved lengthwise, and sliced on the diagonal
6 or so leaves of black Italian (lacinato) kale, stems removed and sliced crosswise into 1/4 inch pieces
1 1/2 C arborio rice, give or take
[1/2 C dry white wine or dry white vermouth--didn't have so didn't use]
a few tablespoons butter, cut into cubes
a few ounces finely grated parmesan

Preheat oven to 375°. Cut neck of butternut squash into 1-inch slices. Cut bulb of squash in half lengthwise, remove seeds and pulp, and then cut crosswife into 1-inch slices. Arrange squash on a lightly oiled large rimmed baking sheet, drizzle with a little olive oil, and set aside.

Using a mortar & pestle, crush the coriander seeds. Sprinkle about half of them over the pumpkin, along with a little salt and pepper. If using thick-cut bacon, spread it over the squash slices now. Bake until squash is soft, about 30-40 minutes.

Meanwhile, combine the other half of the coriander seeds with the chestnuts and sage and a little salt and pepper. Add a tablespoon or so of olive oil, and toss to coat. Pull pan of pumpkin out of the oven. If using thin-cut bacon, spread it over the squash. Sprinkle the coriander-chestnut-sage mixture over the top, and return to oven until bacon is crisp. [I found my bacon was so thick that I had to pull it off for more frying to fully render the fat, which added another step. Tant pis.] Remove from the oven and set aside.

Warm your broth in the microwave so it's piping hot. Heat a large skillet, dutch oven or risotto pan, add a little olive oil, shallots, celery, carrots, kale and a pinch of salt. Sauté until starting to soften, then add rice and keep stirring for a couple of minutes, until the rice starts to be translucent. If using wine, add it now and stir until it's absorbed.

Start adding broth a bit at a time, stirring well after each addition (but you don't have to stir it CONSTANTLY). Meanwhile, chop the bacon (before or after frying it to crisp it up if you used really thick bacon like I did), and skin and irregularly-chop the squash, adding it to the pan as you go (that way the earliest bits will break down completely, and the later bits will be chunky). Rice is done when it doesn't have any hard bits in the middle.

Remove pan from heat and stir in butter and parmesan. The original recipe calls for sprinkling the bacon, chestnuts, coriander & sage on top, but it's much easier to just mix them in.

Now, that's basically the structure of the recipe as it was printed in the Oregonian. However, it would be possible to make it in fewer steps and with fewer pans. I think I might have done it this way before (there's a note at the bottom of my copy of the recipe--"cook pumpkin in risotto?"). This would involve starting out with the bacon in the risotto pan, frying the sage leaves with it, reserving a small amount of bacon grease to sauté the aromatics, and dicing the squash raw and adding it to the pan with the first addition of broth. I think it would still work, and it would be faster and easier.

One thing's for sure--do not skip the crushed whole coriander seeds. In the past when I've made this recipe, I didn't have any on hand and used a small amount of ground coriander. It's so much better with the crushed whole seeds, I can't even tell you.

You Would Never Do This with a Film Camera

As I've mentioned before, Number Two loves to take and look at pictures. Today he took (with only the smallest amount of help from Daddy) an actual picture of a person (me).



This is a more typical picture (Mavis's feet).



And this is what he looked like when we took away the camera.

A propos of nothing

Will someone please tell Hillary Clinton to stop wearing tapered pants? Thanks, appreciate it much.

Mergers

While I don't agree with Steve Dallas about the cause of linguistic sloppiness, I can empathize with his frustration. Everywhere, it seems, terms that once had specific, narrow meanings are broadened and, frankly, made much less interesting or useful. For instance, the word "bungalow." It used to be that this word meant only a one or one-and-a-half story dwelling with large overhanging eaves and a sizeable front porch, usually with a dormer of varying size and shape. But just in the last couple of weeks, I have seen it (wrongly) applied to houses that might more accurately be called "cottages"--no eaves to speak of, no front porch, no dormers.

Or what about "capri pants"? This term used to refer exclusively to pants cropped about halfway between the widest part of the calf and the ankle (didn't it?). Pants cropped just below the knee were "clam diggers"; "pedal pushers" had another discrete meaning. But now pants of any length between the bottom of the knee and the top of the ankle are "capri pants." Sloppy, sloppy, sloppy.

That's not all that's sticking in my craw these days, though. Just a couple of weeks ago, the New Yorker used the wrong one of the affect/effect noun pair. And it was in an article in the body of the magazine (the piece about Orson Welles and Laurence Olivier), not in a Talk of the Town piece, which I find sometimes less carefully edited. Grrr.

Two Months Old

The bebe is two months old, and practically perfect in every way. Seriously, she is a really great baby. Eats well, sleeps well, good-natured, cute, doing all the things she is supposed to be doing. I know, I know, just wait until she is a teenager. Ha! If she's anything like her oldest brother, I can expect her to start acting like one some time mid-way through first grade.

Here she is in my favorite outfit for her at the moment--one I bought for her after she was born and I saw what she really looked like, as opposed to what she looked like in my imagination. I think she looks great in brown (which looks HIDEOUS on me!). If you can't tell in this medium, the pants are velveteen. The shoes were originally a gift from me to my niece, J&J's youngest, and now fit the bebe perfectly. The outfit sadly no longer does--note how the sleeves are practically three-quarter length. In the first shot she is smiling at Daddy, and yes, that's spitup.






Note that she still has brown hair! She also has a pretty severe case of hat-head. Longer hair = more mess-up-able. It's not quite as dark as it seemed when she was first born, more of a medium-brown chestnut color like some on my mom's side (my mom or her brother, though my mom had blond hair as a child) than my dad's (or grandmother's) very dark brown. I've looked through the slides we've scanned so far for a good picture of my grandmother, whom I think the bebe resembles and for whom we've named her. This was the best one I could find (isn't this just the perfect picture of Christmas 1964?), of my grandparents, uncle (my dad's brother--yes, they look alike) and aunt.



Here is a zoom-in on just my grandmother (obviously we'll have to scan the slides at higher res if we intend to do this to any of the others):



Can you see it? I can especially see it in the mouth and chin.

Finally, a couple of bonus shots of Number Two, because he likes having his picture taken (as opposed to Number One). The schmutz around his mouth is the remnants of tonight's dinner, chicken with mole poblano.

Editing

So, how do you decide when to stop sending someone Christmas cards? I always struggle with this, particularly if I haven't heard anything from their end for a while. There's no way to tell if they're happy to get your card or if it goes straight into the recycling unopened. Any of you have a good rule of thumb on this one? If someone moves and you don't have their new address, how much of an effort do you make to track them down to keep sending them missives that may, after all, be unwanted?

There's No Place Like Utard for the Holidays

We're heading to the Wasatch Front for Christmas, and it occurs to me that if I start planning NOW, we might actually be able to see non-family friends who live or spend the holidays there. My current thinking is to have crazy potluck open-house get-togethers on either/both Boxing Day (December 26) or New Year's Day. So, if you don't live in Utah but are planning on being there for the holidays, or if you live in Utah and think I might not have your correct contact info, and you think you'd like to see me and/or my child(ren), let me know.

Olio

Well, I'm finally about done with the last of the Thanksgiving cleanup. No, really! The last thing was to wash and press all those beautiful lace table linens that came from my grandmother. The trouble is, to get them (or any fine table linens, made of linen or cotton) beautifully shiny and smooth, they have to be pressed while thoroughly damp, and not just from spraying them right before ironing. They have to be damp for a while, so the fibers can relax. Since I have a front-loading washer that spins as fast as my car's engine at freeway cruising speeds, they are perfect for pressing pretty much right out of the washer. So I waited to wash them until I thought I'd have a chance to get around to ironing them right after. That chance finally came last night and this morning.

I did not grow up with cloth napkins--strange for someone whose mother seemed so to love ironing. But I guess with six kids the laundry load was already monumental, so perhaps not so strange after all. Anyway, somewhere along the line I decided I liked using cloth napkins, so any time we eat in the dining room, that's what we use. I have plain white cotton napkins, variously colored ones that match placemat sets (I'm not generally a tablecloth kind of gal, as you may have noticed from pictures of my table), and a few sets of white and ecru linen ones that I bought at an estate sale. More than I can realistically use, really.

Anyway, I love using cloth napkins for anything fancier than a weeknight family dinner. It took me a while to become comfortable really wiping my mouth on them, but now I don't hold back--I suppose it helps that I never wear lipstick, which might give me pause. But with the aforementioned front-loader (which can also achieve a water temperature of 205 degrees Fahrenheit), they almost always come clean.

Been busy lately, trying to get birth announcements out, plus Christmas cards, and then party invitations; Christmas shopping; another house project (I know, I said I was done!); getting back to teaching choir at Number One's school; and just plain old taking care of the kids. The house project is related to this summer's slew of projects, so not really something new. Just a couple of smaller things to help make all the $$ we spent this summer last longer.

As for the kids, well! I'm tempted to start calling the bebe Genius Baby, because Saturday night she slept for over eight hours straight. Even better, they were almost exactly coincidental with the hours that I wanted to sleep! Sunday was a good day. That was the first time she'd slept that long (she's only seven weeks old, after all), but she does regularly go five or even six hours at a stretch. Good girl.

We've never yet had to make a trip to the emergency room for one of the kids, but I feel quite certain that we will have to eventually. Yesterday, Number Two was running around in circles in the living room and kind of sort of falling down on purpose. Of course, on about the second time he landed right on his face and gave himself The Fattest Lip Ever.



I'm also really loving his language these days. He's stringing together longer sentences, but still in a rather staccato fashion, and with adorable Toddler Approximate Pronunciation. Some words are beautifully clear, and others can only be understood in context. Ls are pronounced either as Ws (weft instead of left--he knows his lefts and rights, btw) or Ys (yehyoh for yellow), depending. Combined consonants including S drop one letter (suck instead of stuck, for example), but not always the second one. "Small" is pronounced with a nasal exhalation before the M. Longer words are particularly susceptible to elisions, additions and transpositions--"diffeff" for "different," etc. Fortunately, he's pretty good about repeating himself when asked, so we can usually communicate pretty well.

I have realized that I don't write much about Number One compared to the younger two. Partly I think this is because he spends most of his days at school, and when he's home he's frequently entertaining himself. He also is turning into a teenager before his time, so not only are the things he does less cute and endearing, he'd probably be mortified if he knew that and what I was writing about him. I will say one thing: he's decided to be Draco Malfoy next Halloween. Won't that be perfect?

Edited to add that I think it might actually be "yeft" instead of "weft," and I forgot the cutest one of all: "movie" is pronounced "moozhee."

En garde!

The boys tonight argued over who got to eat the last piece of broccoli.

Which tells me that the bebe is going to be the one with the uncanny ability to ferret out every last piece of chocolate I squirrel away (is that a mixed metaphor?). Kind of like me as a kid. Joy.

Dandy Dinde

We had a crazy crowd chez Chovy yesterday. We hosted three other young families, so there were children aged 7, 7, 5, 4, 4, 2, 2, 2, 2, and zero (yes, that means the adults were outnumbered--a childless couple did show up for desserts, which made things briefly even, at least on paper). My idea was that more guests => less for any one person to prepare, which turned out to be just right. And the kids made less chaos than I had feared (thanks to starting at a regular dinner hour, being pretty well prepared, and having a favorite movie for them to watch after they had inhaled their dinners and the adults were still eating).

I made the turkey, gravy, stuffing, mashed potatoes, and pumpkin pie. Others brought the green beans with slivered almonds, yam souffle, rolls, pecan pie, apple pie à la mode, mint brownies, fruit pizza, and pumpkin chocolate chip cookies. Everything was delicious. We had a two-year-old table (the coffee table with kid chairs, moved into the dining room bay window--Number Two was the only toddler who actually sat and ate for any appreciable amount of time), a kid table (all boys!) in the breakfast room, and a grownup table set with my grandmother's sterling and linens.

I thought the turkey turned out fabulously well this year. I bought a natural turkey, but did absolutely nothing special to prepare it (I have a newborn, remember?), just loaded the stuffing, put it on the roasting rack and shoved it in the oven at 425° for a half-hour, then lowered the temp to 350° for most of the duration. I tried to use my oven's probe so I wouldn't have to keep checking the temperature, but had a hard time finding a good spot to stick it because (this year's big experiment) I put the turkey on the rack breast side down, AND LEFT IT THAT WAY THE WHOLE TIME. There are lots of recipes that recommend putting the turkey prone for part of the cooking time, but they all say to turn it supine at some point so it looks better. Well, I don't care what it looks like! What with resting and carving ahead of time, no one other than me and the carver sees it whole. I only care what it tastes like. So, I would say this experiment was an unqualified success. With no brining, and no basting, I had breast meat that was juicy--hooray!

The stuffing was also primo. I made a loaf of plain white bread in my bread machine (remember how trendy these used to be? now I only use it once a year), cut it into half-inch cubes, and dried it in the oven. Right before loading, I sautéed in a few tablespoons of butter a large onion and four or five ribs of celery, finely chopped, and added a lot of finely chopped herbs (a whole bunch of parsley, and fistfuls of thyme and sage from the garden) at the end. After tossing the veggies/herbs with the bread cubes, only about half of it fit in the turkey's two cavities, so the other half got tossed with two cups homemade chicken broth and put into the crock pot on low. Before serving, I mixed both parts together. Yum--the stuffing was the one dinner item I didn't parcel out to send home with the guests; I just like it too much to share.

As I mentioned, the pie crust using part leaf lard (4 T, with 6 T butter) turned out flaky and fine. I can hardly wait to use it in a crust I'll be eating right away, and not the next day. The filling was the good old stand-by, the recipe straight off the side of the Libby's can. To me, it just tastes how it oughter.

Hope you all had a wonderful holiday!

Heirlooms and Shiners

Last Sunday I put the bebe in a dress (?) that I wore as a tiny baby (per my mom). Since we were born in different seasons, she wore actual clothes underneath (I'm sure I probably only wore some kind of decorative panty). It's fine white batiste with machine-made lace and very very fine hand embroidery. Wait until you see the even-prettier number that was my mother's and will be the right size next summer!



Number Two's shiner is developing nicely. I'm not sure how well you can see it here, but I did love this picture:



Here it's maturing even more, into that nice yellow-green shade. It should be gone in a few days.



Number Two got his hands on the camera the other day when Mavis and I were gone to Number One's parent-teacher conference. He was trying to see the pictures on it, and ended up taking some of his own. Here's a representative shot, showing his bejammied legs and his big brother's bare ones (big brother and the babysitter were playing Yahtzee and not paying overmuch attention to Number Two's activities!):



And speaking of Number One's conference, well, his teacher said he's a model student. Doing well in every subject, never disruptive in class, a great example to the other kids, eagerly helpful to the teacher--hard to believe it's the same kid we have to nag and nag and nag and nag and nag to do his writing homework. But hey--I'm not complaining!

Laaaarrrrrrrrd

Well, I wanted to use some of the leaf lard in my Thanksgiving pie crust, which meant I had to render some. Thanks to the wonders of Google, I got a general idea of how I should go about it, and set to it.

Here is the big box of fat:



I pulled out a few of the pieces (the fat from each pig was cohesive and they were pretty easy to separate from each other), chopped them into one-inch chunks, and popped them into the Cuisinart:



After processing:



Then I put the end result (3-4 Cuisinart-loads) into my 6-quart dutch oven and into a 220-degree oven for about a million years (more like 8-9 hours). This is what it looked like when I pulled it out. I'm fairly certain that not all the fat was rendered, but I'm not sure how much longer it would have taken to get it out at that temperature. I think next time (oh yes, there will be a next time--I barely made a dent into that giant box, but I got more than enough lard to last me for this winter's pastry-making) I'll try it at 250. And I might use the meat grinder attachment on my KitchenAid instead of the Cuisinart.



After pulling it out of the oven, I let it cool for a while, then strained through coffee filters and portioned out into small plastic containers to freeze. Another thing I learned for next time: don't let it cool for more than an hour before starting to strain; it needs to be quite hot to make it through the filter.

Another thing my Googling told me was that the fat I got might not technically have been leaf fat (which is strictly the fat around the adrenal glands), but might have been caul fat (which is located around the intestines and other organs). Either way, it was dead cheap, and when I was using it to make my pie crust tonight, it smelled just like the pie crusts my mom made when I was a kid.

A final note: the fat is easiest to handle when it's colder than fridge temperature. Next time I'll start chopping it fresh from the freezer and see if that works. Colder fat leaves much less pasty residue on everything you're using to break it down into smaller pieces, making for easier cleanup. I could definitely tell a difference between the first batch of fat I processed and the last.

Anyone wanna come help me render the rest, say, in January, when the holidays are over and I'm done with my stupid CLE reporting?

Jeg elsker gjetost

Saturday was book group, to discuss The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger. This book is a great book group book, with lots to talk about and an engaging plot. The book is set in Chicago and Western Michigan, which didn't do much to inspire me culinarily. However, in one scene a couple of the characters eat at Ann Sather's, a Chicago institution serving Swedish and American food. I've eaten at Ann Sather's, plus I grew up eating some Norwegian food, plus I had lunch at Broder last week, SO, I decided a Scandinavian menu was in order.

We started with gjetost, the brown, nutty, caramelized Norwegian goat cheese (gjet = goat, ost = cheese; despite what I thought as a kid, it has nothing to do with toast). We ate it the way my dad served it to us as part of Sunday evening "snack," back in the days before the consolidated meeting schedule: Kavli, thinly spread with butter and honey, then topped with thinly-sliced cheese. Divine.

The main course (on the light side, since I wanted everyone to have plenty of room for the finisher): baked scrambled eggs with smoked chinook salmon or golden trout, and havarti and jarlsberg cheeses; baby greens with raspberry vinaigrette and hazelnuts. To make the baked eggs, I put a slice of artisan bread (trimmed to fit) in the bottom of the ramekin, topped it with chunks of salmon/trout and havarti and finely grated jarlsberg, then poured the egg mixture (10 eggs for 8 8-oz ramekins, plus about 1/2 C cream and 1/2 C milk, lightly salted and peppered) over the top and baked at 325° for about 40 minutes--until puffed and not wobbly in the middle.

The really exciting part of brunch: the sourdough aebleskivers, with buttermilk syrup and marionberry and lingonberry jams. There are lots of aebleskiver recipes out there, mostly just variations on pancake and waffle recipes. They're all good, but the sourdough ones are about a million times better.

To make sourdough starter, mix 2 C flour and 2 C water in a large plastic or glass bowl, using a wooden spoon. Lightly cover with a thin dishtowel and leave at warm room temperature for 3-4 days, stirring a few times a day. When you're ready to use the starter, save some for future use (so you don't have to start over every time--1/2 C or so in a jar in the fridge that you stir every few days, and add flour to every so often), then mix in 1 beaten egg, 1/8 C oil (more if you're going to make waffles with the batter), and a mixture of 1 T sugar, 1 t baking soda and 1 t salt. When you mix in the dry ingredients, the batter will about double in volume. Cook it up right away (before the batter completely deflates), and enjoy!!

Progress!

Number Two's had a language breakthrough in the last day and a half--last night he said what we are considering his first complete sentence, with subject, verb and object: "[Number Two] like ham." It seemed fitting (the ham to which he was referring had lately been served in macaroni and cheese, on a Hawaiian pizza, and in the below soup). Then, this morning he came out with "[Number One] watch TV" and "Mommy make toast," followed by many others as the day went on. We're also seeing development in how he recalls and relates things, and makes connections--it's so cool!

Number Two also got his worst owie to date today. We were at a friend's looking at pictures she took of the bebe, and as he was making his way over to the Duplos to build a tower, he lost his footing and fell into the coffee table. The look on his face was just awful--pain and shock and betrayal, all at once, more than he could get out in one cry. It took a long snuggle for him to recover enough to get back to tower-making. It actually looks a little worse in real life than in this picture (taken as I was getting him up from his nap):



I'm pretty proud of how much cooking I've done this week: only one takeout dinner (though, granted, Sunday dinner was at J&J's), two batches of cookies, and a good dose of planning and prep for tomorrow's book group brunch and next week's Chaos, with Turkey (tm). A few nights ago, we had this soup, adapted from a recipe in the Cook's e-newsletter.

Pink Soup

(It was only pink because of the red Swiss chard stems I included. It did also have some pink ham, but I think you could make a perfectly fine soup that tasted exactly the same but was not pink.)

6 C chicken broth (1 C homemade concentrated stock, diluted)
2 lbs potatoes (about half peeled-and-cubed russets, half marble-sized multicolored babies)
1 bay leaf
1 T unsalted butter
1 4-oz link country sage sausage, cut into 1/4" slices
about the same amount ham, cut into bite-sized pieces
1 medium yellow onion, cut in half polewise and then sliced thinly crosswise
1/2 bunch Swiss chard, leaves and stems separated, and cut crosswise into 1/2" pieces
1/2 C frozen corn kernels
a little flour-water slurry to thicken at the end
2 T balsamic vinegar
salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste

1. Bring broth, potatoes and bay leaf to boil, then simmer until potatoes are tender. Mash the russets roughly, so some chunks still remain.

2. Meanwhile, melt butter in dutch oven and sauté onion, chard stems and sausage until getting nicely browned. Add chard leaves and cook just until they're starting to wilt.

3. Add potato mixture to sausage/onion mixture (removing bay leaf), deglazing pan as needed. Stir in corn kernels. Use flour-water to thicken as desired. Simmer a few minutes to blend flavors. Stir in balsamic vinegar, adjust seasonings and serve.

One Month Old

And still a brunette! If her hair's going to fall out, we expect it to do so within the next two weeks. But gosh, her eyebrows are dark, too (as you can see). And I frankly have a hard time picturing a blonde with this skin tone. Her eyes are getting bluer by the day, at least. She's pretty cute, though--think we'll keep her.

Oh, and I forgot to mention--on the eve of her one-month birthday, she started smiling! Haven't been able to capture it with the camera yet. She also feels different to hold--she's gone from being a tightly curled bug, all self-contained, to actually relaxing into my body, snuggling up. And of course she's bigger.

C is for Cookie

What could be better than nuts and honey?

Here is the silver lining to the magazine prank of the last few months (got an issue of Sew News today, yay): a good recipe. The Cookie of the Month in the September issue of Martha Stewart Living was Honey-Walnut Coins (try as I might, I could not find this recipe on marthastewart.com, but Google found it at the walnut board website). I have always believed that walnuts are evil, but I quickly figured out a way to get around that issue: hazelnuts. Now, I've learned in the past that nuts aren't always substitutable, but this time it worked like a charm.

I also used local late-summer honey instead of Martha's recommended orange blossom, and the floral, slightly fruity flavor was divine. I'd also recommend making the cookies quite a bit thinner than specified in the recipe (I made the dough into a log and then cut it, after chilling, into 3/8" slices--next time I'll even try 1/4"), and cooking them a bit longer, until well golden all over, not just pale golden at the edges. I skipped the final honey glaze, and there was no shortage of honey flavor.



*To toast hazelnuts, bake at 275° until they start to smell toasty and the skins have split. Let cool and then rub the skins off with your fingers or a coarse kitchen towel.

**"C is for Cookie" is one of Number Two's favorite songs, and the first one he ever tried to sing on his own. He misses most of the words, still, so it goes "C, cookie, C, cookie, Cookie, cookie C, Cookie cookie cookie C," etc. We are loving watching/hearing his language acquisition--new this week: gerunds, possessives, and plurals!

Happy Halloween!

Food Find of the Day

When Mavis went to the farmers' market today, I had him ask our friendly pork dude about leaf lard or leaf fat, thinking he would make himself a note and bring some for me next week. Instead, he reached back and pulled out a 17-lb box containing the leaf fat of 25 hogs, for which he charged us 20 bucks. Oh me oh my. I'll still need to render it, but I think my holiday pie-making needs will be fully met and then some.

Ready for Her Closeup

Getting to Know You

So this week we've been doing some (but not nearly enough) resting and recovering, playing lots of games with family, and starting to get to know the new member of our family. Mavis's sister Auntie K left yesterday evening, and my parents left this morning. We've got another week until the last visitor (Mavis's dad) leaves, and hopefully this week will have enough resting and recovering, along with the other stuff.

The wee girl (haven't come up with a great blog name for her yet--she doesn't look anything like an Ingeborg, and I'd really rather avoid just calling her Number Three) developed jaundice, so we didn't get lots of wonderful pictures of her this week. Besides making her yellow, the jaundice has also made her very very sleepy. We're hoping for less yellow and less sleepy this week. I did get a couple of detail shots, though.

Both boys were born with Mavis's feet--flat, zero arch, long and skinny and rather shovel-like. This baby's feet are lovely, with high arches and long, practically-prehensile toes. Her baby toe, in particular, is long and stretchy. I couldn't get her to stretch it all the way out, but this picture gives you some idea:



Then, at the beginning of the week, with her sleeping on my lap, I thought she had some lint caught behind her ear. Turns out she has a tuft of hair growing out of the top of each ear. The head hair may or may not fall out, but I'm pretty sure this will, so I was glad to capture it with the camera. This picture also shows one of the little ear holes (right in front of the top of her ear) she inherited from my mother. Her oldest brother has one on one side, and my niece has them. My sister says she has them, too.



To treat her jaundice, the doctor prescribed a phototherapy blanket. It's not really a blanket per se, but a flexible pad with UV light conveyed through fiber optics. It's very bright light, and even wrapped in a blanket some bleeds through. We called her Glow Baby or Glow Bug all week (phototherapy went M-F, and she had blood tests to check her bilirubin levels M-Sat and a final check on Monday--not fun).



Number Two loves to see pictures on the camera, but if there aren't any on there you have to take some first:





On Saturday, J of J&J threw a very nice brunch in honor of the bebe. Those in attendance included McOllie and TiF, who looked as if they color-coordinated their outfits that day.



Brunch also provided a chance for some girly-cousin bonding.





Saturday evening, Mavis's parents took us all to Meriwether's, where we had previously gone with family to celebrate each child's birth (well, for Number One it was a different restaurant, l'Auberge, in the same location). Number Two was his usual sweet adorable self, and an elderly woman came over towards the end of our meal to say she'd been observing him the whole time and thought he was beautiful and remarkably well-behaved. He also did not really like his chicken strips (though he did enjoy dipping his fries in the ketchup), preferring instead Mavis's pappardelle with duck ragú.





Sunday we had a big family dinner chez nous at mid-day. We ate Surf and Trough: Roast Pork Sirloin with either rhubarb-ginger chutney or Cuban mojo sauce (hooray for vinegar and things that never go bad!), roast Columbia River fall Chinook salmon (the other half of the fish my dad caught) with Fish Sauce, Orange and Green Mashed Potatoes, steamed broccoli, and crusty bread. For dessert we had apple crisp (made with apples from our tree, Winesaps) with vanilla ice cream.

At church, the bebe had her diva moment. For the actual blessing (on which Mavis did a lovely job), she wore her great-grandfather's blessing gown, now 100 years old and very fragile. In all likelihood, she will be the last child blessed in it. For transport to and from church (the gown being more than slightly incompatible with modern carseats), she wore the dress I was blessed in 40 years ago (pictured at bottom), a sweet little pale pink smocked eyelet number with matching panties. I wasn't blessed in Grandpa's gown because its existence was not discovered until my brother J was born the following year. Whereabouts of my little pink dress were of late unknown until my nieces and nephews left some toys out after the last family gathering at my parents' house, two weeks ago, when it was discovered among the doll dressups. Amazingly, the plastic lining of the panties is still flexible, and the elastic is still stretchy.