Feeding the kids

You know, I just saw this article in the New York Times about helping kids eat healthy foods, and all I have to say is, New York Times, do you realize that you’ve opposed every parenting book published since 1985 that wasn’t sponsored by the Christian Coalition (motto: nothing like a good smack to help Johnny eat his broccoli)?

I mean, how dare you suggest that we should not let our kids eat whatever they feel like eating.  I know several serious authors — serious! — who insist that toddlers instinctively know what their nutritional needs are, and will eat exactly as much as they need to fulfill those needs.  Which makes perfect sense, because I, as a perfectly functioning adult who can cook an entire meal, instinctively know what tastes good is good for me.  Which just doesn’t explain why I eat so many cookies…

My favorite tip in the article, however, is the one about dressing up the vegetables with a little fat.  When I lived in Japan, I was surprised to find how delicious the vegetables were.  Cabbage dishes that melted in your mouth, spinach concoctions that tasted of sesame and rice wine, sprouts browned to perfection in a savory sauce — oh, there were some classy veggies!

Then, when we moved to Arizona with Ben, I noticed a similar phenomenon; Abuela vegetables.  Ben, who wasn’t a big fan of greens as a baby (still isn’t) would ask for 2nds and 3rds at Abuela’s house — even when it was purslane, a green weed she used to pick in the arroyo.  Ben learned to say frijoles before he could say mama, practically, and uncle George loved to give him the choice of Abuela’s beans, or ice cream, just to watch Ben choose the beans (he always did, indicating an early talent for sucking up).  Anyway, the secret of Abuela’s vegetables isn’t really a secret; they were fried in garlic-saturated oil, they had chunks of Mexican cheese nestled among the greens, or they swam in a lovely butter sauce.  They were about a thousand calories per bite, but they were also full of all the wonderful nutrients that we desperately want kids to eat.

I’ve decided that the problem here is that most Americans eat vegetables like they do penance.  Tofu has a bad name; just try offering tofu to an American male, and you’ve immediately challenged his manhood (try it in the summer, raw and ice cold with some spring onions on the top, drizzled with soy sauce — even my father loved it).  Also, we don’t love our vegetables the way we should; they linger in the fridge and wilt, so that by the time they’re cooked they’re practically compost.  I’m not pointing a finger here; I’m equally guilty.  I’m just saying it’s no surprise that kids don’t like vegetables, when so many of our traditional dishes (peas and carrots, anyone?) are mushy and tasteless.

Anyway, I know how hard it is to get children to eat well — oh yes, I know! — and I’m sure Ben will be forever traumatized that we make him count up bites when he’s reluctant to try something (listed as a parental mistake in the article, incidentally).  But, I had an elderly Japanese woman tell me if I wanted my kids to eat vegetables, to start them off easy, with tempura (breaded, deep-fried vegetables with a dipping sauce).  With that in mind, I’ll share the recipe, and much luck to everyone in getting their kids to eat a decent meal.

Vegetable Tempura
For vegetables, any will do — carrots, broccoli, sweet potatoes, cauliflower, beans, onion, lotus root — you can try just about anything. Just cut the vegetables into manageable pieces; for potatoes/sweet potatoes/lotus root, cut thick circles. For broccoli, each large floret can be dipped and fried, and for carrots, cut a large carrot into thirds and then cut into four strips. Medium to large shrimp are also delicious dipped in the batter and fried.

Dipping sauce (you can buy this in the store also, check the Asian foods aisle):
1 cup dashi broth (this is fish broth; you can also substitute 1 cup water and 3 tsp salt)
3 tablespoons soy sauce
2 tablespoons sugar
1 tablespoon mirin (if you don’t have it, add 1 tbsp cooking sherry plus 1 tbsp sugar)

Put all ingredients in a saucepan, bring to a boil, then let cool. Heat a frying pan with a couple inches of vegetable oil in the bottom.

Photo courtesy of An American in London

Tempura batter:
1 cup all-purpose flour
2 eggs
3/4 cup ice-cold water

Very lightly mix the eggs, flour and cold water (the colder the better) in a bowl until ingredients are just blended but the batter is still very lumpy. Test oil temperature by dropping a little bit of the batter into the oil; if it sinks for a second and then rises up, it’s the right temperature. Dip vegetables into the batter and then fry in the oil. Carrots and green beans can be dipped in clusters of 3 or 4 and fried together. Frying too many bunches at once can cause the temperature in the oil to drop, making the resulting tempura a bit droopy, so watch the temperature.

You should end up with lightly cooked vegetables nestled in a crisp batter shell. Dip in the sauce and enjoy!

Thanks to the book, Japanese Family-Style Recipes by Hiroko Urakami, for the ingredients list; substitution suggestions, however, are mine.  The photo of vegetable tempura can be found at the interesting travel site An American in London; for some reason it won’t allow me to put the link in the caption.

Marti and I spent a long time tonight talking about politics, about who is principled and who isn’t, or if “principled” even really applies to politicians. But one thing is clear: I’m a Democrat because of my principles, and because I believe that more Democrats share those principles than Republicans. It took me a long time to get to this place where I agree with one side rather than the other, but I truly believe that allowing religious interests to seep into our politics will make us little more than a theocracy — no better than any Islamist country that elects its ministers to office. Call them Imams or Preachers or Pastors or right-wing nutjobs — they all stink in politics.

Afterward, though, after talking about all this, I felt really sad.  Sad enough that I could not sleep, and here I am, up at 3 a.m., writing a forbidden post on politics.  But what can I say?  It’s infuriating.  I mean, the media is terrified to criticize the Republican candidates, there is a media blitz about an aging beauty queen who is completely unqualified to sit public office, let alone the White House, and in all this I fear that we will, again, slide backwards with another conservative election.

What matters the sex of the candidate if that candidate does not support women’s rights? I am sick of puppets. Marti admires the Republican party for this strategic move on the chessboard; I just find it sad. As always, women are being lied to and manipulated when their best interests are not at heart. Someone who makes rape victims buy a rape kit in order to be examined — not a women’s advocate. Someone who publicly refused to take maternity leave because she thought it was unnecessary — not a women’s advocate. Someone who touts abstinence-only sex education, then turns around and flaunts her pregnant, teenage daughter to the world — not a women’s advocate.  I might shoot a gun, be able to skin and quarter a deer and know just the right way to cook a sage grouse, but that doesn’t make me qualified to run the country.  Nor does it mean I have conservative values.  Those are just skills — the skills of someone who grew up in the backcountry.  I, at least, can speak multiple languages and am familiar with what, exactly, the job of vice president is.  Perhaps I should apply for public office?

Is that what the glass ceiling is all about?  Realizing that it’s really not that big of a deal, this representation of all the people in the United States?  I mean, why have women held back, if all you need is to cater to men’s opinion, and show your pretty face?

I wait for the day when a female candidate is not another move on the chessboard, but a real political figure, with the education and experience she should have in order to hold the highest office in the land.  Someone who actually cares about women’s issues, even if it means that she might not be as popular.  Someone who is honest and truthful, and makes me proud that another woman is running for a public office.  Maybe it’s just a dream, but didn’t someone say once, I have a dream? We all have one. I’ll keep dreaming mine.

Barack Obama 2008

I loved, loved, loved this absolutely fabulous skit from Saturday Night Live. Whenever I feel particularly rabid about politics, I am comforted by the fiction of Douglas Adams, particularly this quote about the two-headed president of the fictitious Imperial Galactic Government (they don’t allow presidents with a whole brain), which is clearly a stab at the U.S. (after all, he’s British, and he didn’t say prime minister):

The President is very much a figurehead - he wields no real power whatsoever. He is apparently chosen by the government, but the qualities he is required to display are not those of leadership but those of finely judged outrage. For this reason the President is always a controversial choice, always an infuriating but fascinating character. His job is not to wield power but to draw attention away from it.

As you well know, I also enjoy the work of comedians such as Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart, particularly when it comes to politics; it helps to laugh. I did enjoy this SNL piece, however, and loved their choice of Tina Fey, who really is a dead ringer for Palin.

I get wayyyy to worked up over politics, and tonight, just as I was fuming over certain things (like why teenage pregnancy is suddenly no big deal to certain political groups) I saw this great video by Steve Colbert.

I also found a supremely interesting article by the associated press, which can be read here, about truth and lies in politics today (as one of my favorite bloggers put it, “it’s a report from the AP, not some spooky liberal blog that wants to kill babies.”)

Anyway, I plan to go back to sticking my head in the sand and trying to avoid political events as they unfold.  I did not watch either of the conventions, and I cling to what my dear friend Margo McNabb says: “Real politics are local.”  I’m sorry to say I was ill and had 3 ill people to look after during local elections this year (September 2nd is such a strange date for elections) and so I missed them, but I do agree with her and hope NOT to miss them again.  And it’s true; what the board of supervisors does in Tucson affects my life a lot more than distant Hill politics.

Ok.  So, I am taking a deep, liberal bleeding-heart yogic breath in and trying to let go of the fury, but before I do, I have to include this article as well:  Praise for Pregnant Teen Shows Double Standard, where the author considers what the rhetoric would be like if Bristol Palin were a pregnant black teen instead of a white one.  Okay!  I’m done!

Honestly, though, growing up in a split family — my dad got married at 17 as well, and divorced within 10 years, as half of shot-gun marriages do (more than twice the national average) — I have to say I feel very sorry for Bristol Palin.  Maybe this was the only way she could get her mother, who is working two jobs, caring for a special needs child and now campaigning for a national race under the guise to family values, to actually pay attention to her.

Guess what Bristol — you got it.

Tags: family values, Palin, Politics, teen pregnancy, vice president

The world is divided into two types of people. There are people who have really cool skills, and they develop those skills over time and become progressively better at them until they become masters. These are the “got skills” people.

Then there are people who have really excellent, really boring skills. And maybe they major in something that utilizes those really boring, un-useful skills, and suddenly find that using those boring skills in order to receive slightly-over-minimum-wage compensation makes for a really boring life. So they end up trying many other things, things they are not skilled at, in order to enjoy being mediocre at something cool and interesting.

You can guess which category I am.

I am a writer. I enjoy writing. I also enjoy reading books and killing monsters on World of Warcraft. Oh, I like wildlife too. And I really like bossing around teenagers and other small persons who might be frightened or intimidated by me. My job list:

• Teacher
• Office clerk
• Office administrator
• The person who paints the little numbers on the seats in a baseball stadium
• Wildlife Tech
• Daycare worker
• Program Instructor
• Assistant Librarian
• Nanny
• Landlord

Some of these vary in the coolness factor.  For example, daycare worker, office clerk and the person who paints the little numbers on a baseball stadium — near the bottom.  Program Instructor, Wildlife Tech and Teacher — nearer the top.

I recently took a personality assessment test and was categorized exactly the same way I was categorized when I was 22 and graduating college.  I am, according to Meyers-Briggs, the rare, exotic type of INFP.  Around 3-5% of the total US population is like me, which is a really good excuse for why I never like anyone and rarely make friends.  It doesn’t go on to explain why I have a hard time being nice — today I made a 19-year-old college kid lean over and pick up the trash he’d thrown on the ground in front of a horrified crowd that included his perky blond girlfriend — or why it is so satisfying to humiliate said frat-boy types.  I’m sure my problem being nice has absolutely nothing to do with why I don’t make a lot of friends.  The two are completely unrelated.

Somewhat ironically, my personality type is focused on “making the world a better place.”  Hmmmm.  Enforcing littering laws falls under that, right?

Anyway, I started this post to discuss my extremely poor business skills.  This year I started renting out the guesthouse; currently it is rented monthly, but I rented it weekly and sometimes daily over the spring.  Being an absolute novice at business, this is what I learned:

1. The nicer the person is on the phone, the less likely they are to pay you.
2. Get the money first.  Then give them the keys.
3. The most respectable people are the dirtiest.
4. Leaving a check on a cinder block wall on a windy day in order to pull that noxious weed right in front of you is not a good idea.
5. Before you agree to absorb the fees for a credit card transaction, check what the fees actually are.

For those who I talk to on a daily business, you may know of my obsession with owning my own business.  I have wanted to own a business for a long time and I’ve met a lot of different people who’ve had strong opinions on it, the main (ok, the only) prevailing opinion being “why are you so crazy?”  I think this is partly due to the fact that people are generally averse to risk and owning a business is a big risk.  I don’t think it has anything to do with the fact that I consistently go over my household budget every month, frequently lose my keys and majored in English and not business.  It’s all about the risk factor.

I am considering business school.  I’m not considering it to the point of filling out the extensive application, but I still have 27 days, 10 hours and 52 minutes until the application is due.  Plenty of time!

Anyway, a lot of interesting people have been INFPs, including Homer, Laura Ingalls Wilder, William Shakespeare and John Mildew Smithertonian, who would have been a lot more famous than those other guys if he hadn’t spent all his time searching for his keys.  Anne in Anne of Green Gables was also an INFP with a really bad temper, which heartens me.  Secretly I always wanted red hair — what better excuse for yelling at people?

Here’s an interesting collection of INFP characteristics.  Some apply, some don’t, but it’s rather interesting to be categorized…

creative, smart, idealist, loner, attracted to sad things, disorganized, avoidant, can be overwhelmed by unpleasant feelings, prone to quitting, prone to feelings of loneliness, ambivalent of the rules, solitary, daydreams about people to maintain a sense of closeness, focus on fantasies, acts without planning, low self confidence, emotionally moody, can feel defective, prone to lateness, likes esoteric things, wounded at the core, feels shame, frequently losing things, prone to sadness, prone to dreaming about a rescuer, disorderly, observer, easily distracted, does not like crowds, can act without thinking, private, can feel uncomfortable around others, familiar with the darkside, hermit, more likely to support marijuana legalization, can sabotage self, likes the rain, sometimes can’t control fearful thoughts, prone to crying, prone to regret, attracted to the counter culture, can be submissive, prone to feeling discouraged, frequently second guesses self, not punctual, not always prepared, can feel victimized, prone to confusion, prone to irresponsibility, can be pessimistic

Tags: career, INFP, job, personality type, skills