Food Tyrant or Responsible Parent?

So anyone who reads this blog knows that I have some particular opinions on food. Some might say that I am even a bit of a snob about food--I like to think it is more about having a semi-refined palate. This most often gets played out in our household when I refuse to stop at fast-food joints when time is tight. The boys all know that I really, really prefer that we don't eat prepared, institutional food and have no problem sharing my opinions on this matter with others.

Now that said, I know that given schedules, it is sometimes almost unavoidable that there are times when fast-food is the answer, but the boys still relish the chance to point out that they got to indulge. As evidence, I offer up two exchanges from this week.

1. At a school event this week:

School Principal to the Engineer: Hey, there is that new Wendy's nearby. I stopped there and had those new spicy chicken nuggets. They were pretty good. Do you like those?

Engineer: My dad doesn't like us to eat fast food.

Nice. The eight-year old giving the school principal some nutritional education.

2. A Wednesday night (note that Wednesday's at our house are crazy as the boys go straight from school to piano lessons and then have to go straight to baseball practice--including a uniform change in the van and I race from work to practice):

The Captain to me after getting home at 8:30 pm after baseball practice (in a gleeful 5-year old voice): Hey Papa, guess where we ate dinner tonight? You're going to be angry! McDonald's!

Win some, lose some!

Seattle: Food, Travel Karma and Parental Guilt

The Hunger
The noticeable silence here has been due to a week-long work trip up to the great city of Seattle. Not that I saw much of it since most of the time was spent in meeting rooms, both large and small. The highlight was a series of dinners with colleagues at the end of long days of work—almost all which featured seafood. Highlights included the:

• red curry thai noodles and sushi at Dragonfish;
• tuna tatiki and the spicy poke salad at Red Fin;
• crab cakes and kasu marinated black cod at Steelhead Diner (best restaurant of the week); and,
• the curried mussels and olive-crusted halibut at BlueAcre.

May we all be so lucky to live in a place where that kind of seafood is found on every corner!

Travel Karma or You Can Never Get Ahead
So my travel to Seattle started at 4:00 am Tuesday morning and looked like a long day which involved a connection through Atlanta (don’t ask). However, upon arriving at the airport gate I found myself being paged and told the direct flight had seats and was leaving now if I wanted to hop on. Uh, yeah. But what about my luggage—on its way to Seattle? Well, we will see once we get there. Alas, first bag off the plane. But now I am in Seattle at 9:30 a.m.—surely I won’t be able to get into my hotel room. Wrong again—straight in I go. Wow, that was some stroke of travel luck.

But of course we all know one fundamental rule—air travel basically bites and you know that for every good turn, two bad ones are on there way. Fortunately, I only had to wait for my return trip. We get to the airport, board the plane, pull away from the gate, stop, only to hear the captain announce that he heard a “funny noise.” Back to the gate—an hour of waiting to discover all was okay and away we go again. Unlike, the earlier experience with baggage, my bag was not first—not that it would have mattered since we had to wait 45 minutes for our bags to be unloaded.

When all was said and done, we got home three hours later than scheduled—exactly the amount of time that I saved on the way out. Hmmm.

That’s OK, It’s Just a Once in a Lifetime Event
Now leaving home always carries a load of sadness and guilt with it, but this one had a extra kick. You see, Emmett starts Kindergarten this Fall and as a result, he gets to go to the summer session which just happened to start the day I left for Seattle. Now technically, his first day at the new school is in August, but still it was a drag to miss his first actual day. Better mark my calendar now for the Fall because who would want to miss this?!

All Parts of the Pig Weekend

It has been a while since we bought our house, but the last time we did, all the rage was to have chocolate chip cookies baking in the oven when you entered an open house so you felt welcome and "at home" (and didn't smell the pets that lived there for the last decade). A fine strategy if you are in love with chocolate chip cookies. But if you want to sell me a house, here is the correct recipe:

Heat up a small amount of olive oil in a frying pan, add some thick cut bacon or pancetta, let simmer for a few minutes--then when you see me pulling up to look at your house, throw in some garlic. Result? I walk in and offer to buy your house on the spot, because I want to live in this house with your bacon and garlic.

That, in fact, is one of the smells that you would have experienced in our house this weekend during the great Christmas blizzard of 2009 as we were buried in two feet of snow in 36 hours. But only one, as there was much cooking (and shoveling, and sledding, and other snow activities--not to mention cookie making) at our house. And much involved pork as Neats responded to the oncoming storm by reverting to her German heritage and bought pork in as many forms as she could imagine using during the storm--a ham, bacon, and sausage (two kinds). That resulted in the following:

• Saturday Dinner: Risotto with ham, mushrooms, green beans and cheese (with a base of garlic and onions of course).
• Sunday Breakfast: French toast and sausage.
• Sunday Dinner: Bacon, garlic, tuna and spinach tossed with spaghetti (a killer recipe that is an easy and quick fall back on any well stocked pantry when you are in a pinch).
• Monday (snow day!) Dinner: Slow cooked red sauce with Italian sausage over penne along with a spinach salad with a warm bacon dressing and apples and pine nuts.

Lest you worry that we only eat pork, there were other items in our diet this week . . . like cookies--five kinds in fact, all fresh made for the holidays! And suddenly, I feel the need to sleep.