A First-Trimester Love Letter

Dear Baby,

You do not know me yet, but I am your mommy. When you become aware of such things, you will hear my heart beating all around you. And when you are born, you and I will recognize each other, as if we had been friends a long time.

When you are out the in world, you will discover many things, not the least of which is that food is art and magic and divinity. Your daddy will present you with marvelous concoctions draped in wonderful things like roulades, sandwiched between days of peanut butter and jelly and Chef Boyardee. You will develop tastes, likes and dislikes, and will not be shy about letting your voice be heard.

But for now, the choices are all mine. I am doing everything I can to make it easy for you to grow in peace. Some things are simple -- giving up wine and lunchmeat is not a sacrifice. Others are harder. Sometimes I want to slather goat cheese on everything I eat and wash it down with a sugary forbidden Coke. When your daddy and I were out to dinner a few weeks ago, I waged a fierce battle in my head as I contemplated the consequences of the steak tartare. You won -- the delicious raw meat stayed in the kitchen.

I must apologize for all the crackers and dry cereal in the past six weeks, but as you approach the size of a peach and I near the second trimester, the days of Cheerio-popping are almost over, soon to be replaced by cravings for everything from milk to hot sauce. I promise to try and continue to make the right choices for you over the next six months, but as you will inevitably learn, sometimes you just need a McDonald's cheeseburger. Or two.

It's a strange and wonderful thing to never be alone, to know that every decision affects a sweet wee being floating in a dark and quiet world. Everything I eat grows your little brain and little eyelashes. Bananas and broccoli take on a new importance, and goat cheese, no matter how sublime, can be effortlessly shelved for 40 weeks.

Rest easy, Baby. Mommy will take care of everything.

Beware the Succubus Heavy Cream

Cream soups are my savior when I am home alone with the kids for the evening. If I have a cream soup, and chicken, and a starch, and some kind of vegetable, I feel like that resembles a complete meal and even hits most of the food groups. 

But the other night, as I was preparing to pop open a can of cream of mushroom soup to dollop over my chicken and rice, I was lured to the fridge by that devastating siren of the culinary world, that ingredient that is concurrently evil and divine, and my entire evening changed: It was a pint of heavy cream, rich and fattening and glorious. The cream soup went back in the cupboard, the fresh mushrooms emerged, and it was on.

This was the third time in a week we had cooked with heavy cream, and I could not entirely suppress a feeling of guilt that I was prematurely blocking my toddler's arteries. It was likely, I told myself, that heavy cream and fresh mushrooms have less preservatives than the soup. I argued myself down, and into the saucepan went a waterfall of cream, on top of slightly browned portobellos.

The key to a really beautiful white sauce, I have been taught, is to let the heavy cream reduce and thicken, all the while adding generous pats of butter (not margarine ... why bother?) and sprinkles of parmesan cheese. The butter melts and spirals yellow in the lightly bubbling cream, as the parmesan softens and diffuses flavor. After several minutes of patient stirring with a wooden spoon, and the addition of tomatoes or rosemary or more butter, the heavy cream has abandoned its original form and become a graceful blanket of sauce. 

Done right, such sauce is blissful. Tossed with chewy gnocchi or ladled over chicken and risotto, a perfect heavy cream sauce can transform my Monday night from "dinner is the only barrier between me and the couch" to "maybe I'll linger a little longer at the table and just lick my plate while no one's looking." 

And even more enticing is that the same heavy cream used to dress your pasta can be whisked, with sugar and vanilla, into pillows of whipped cream for your after-dinner treat. Versatile, impressive no matter what it adorns, heavy cream is a decadent gift to noodles and pies everywhere. It is enough to make me forgive the blocked arteries. 

Food is an Instrument of Wedded Bliss

Four years ago this week, Chef Matt made an honest woman out of me at the magnificient Cathedral of St. Paul. The day flashed by in a flurry of taffeta and vows and tears and dancing, and I made a desperate attempt to take mental snapshots of everything that was not caught on camera, to file away for reminiscence's sake or for the rainy days of marriage.

Among a thousand other memories, what I remember most was a new husband who looked at me like he could not believe his luck. I was never one to think that I was a great catch for anyone, but that look was unequivocal in its meaning: You are a great catch for me. I still see that look sometimes, but as more time has separated the present from our wedding day, I see that belief more often in his actions than his eyes, which, to me, is even greater proof.

Everyone's marriage is perfect on that first day, when the joy is intoxicating and everything seems more beautiful under the influence of a white dress and a haze of champagne. You learn quickly that married life, even if it is wonderful, is not a fairy tale, that it demands hard work and compromise you never could have imagined while gazing at each other over a first dance.

Over time, the little actions show love far more earnestly than words at a wedding dinner, because they come amidst nasty bouts of the flu, stressful losses of jobs, empty checking accounts, and children who will not sleep. When my husband, who was prone to leaving cabinet doors open and a trail of socks across the bedroom floor, makes sure that the house is picked up before I get home from work, I know he loves me.

For us, our great love affair with food has only served to strengthen our great love affair with each other. Every time he cooks me up something special after I have had a long day, or saves me the last scoop of cookies and cream because he knows I love it, or thanks me for my suppertime concoctions even though they are rarely fancy, I know he loves me. Each anniversary, when he recreates our wedding dinner, I know that he does it not just for tradition's sake but also to demonstrate, through his great gift with food, that our love is alive and well.

I do not mean to be overly sentimental. But when the first week of November each year sweeps in with wedding flashbacks, I cannot help but remember that gush of emotion and the promise of great things to come. And the great things have certainly come, disguised as thoughtful pots of etouffee and late-night Blizzard runs in my third trimester and sincere compliments on my improvised lasagna. These are the actions of love in our house, and they abound.

The Comforting Foods of Fall

The other day, I spent a rare peaceful moment reading on our front porch swing, inhaling deep breaths of warm autumn air and mourning the loss of summer. Fall can be a lovely time in Minnesota, but hiding just behind the smell of wet leaves are sharp icy winds, so I can never quite leap onto the autumn bandwagon.

My husband, however, is a creature of fall. He eagerly anticipates the resurrection of his sweaters and the recollection of early October mornings spent on the North Shore of Lake Superior. But most of all, he loves the reappearance of fall foods. 

Ingredients are seasonal, as you might expect. The cycles of growth and weather ensure that the watermelons we eat in excess in the summer are far superior to those we might find on a grocery store's bottom shelf in the winter. Restaurants take seasonal ingredients into account when changing menus, to fit both availability and mood; I am always relieved when berries and heirloom tomatoes appear on menus after months of silence.

But Chef Matt's attachment is largely to the ingredients of autumn, foods that defy the image of dying crops and weakening sunshine: apples, sweet potatoes, wild mushrooms, pumpkins, squash, beets, cranberries. Such foods are wonderful in their stamina and subtlety. A sweet potato can hold its ground paired with something as delicate as a cream sauce or something as hearty as peppercorn-crusted steak, without disappearing under either. And apples, so fine alone, are equally beautiful in a pie or garnishing a pork loin. 

I feel as if fall foods are Mother Nature's way of shouting at us, "Wait! Wait! I'm not done yet. See what else I have before you turn in for the winter!" Summer foods are abundant and brash and sweet, and winter foods unleash survival instincts in the way that they stick to our bones. The produce of autumn settles neatly in between. 

My preference is generally for the foods of summer, but I see the allure of the fall harvest.  Butternut squash ravioli and pumpkin pie are cozy and comforting, and as the days cool, there are few things more healing than a cup of hot cider. If I must endure fall on the way back to summer, I shall at least eat well on the journey. 

Mouse in the Kitchen, Girl on the Counter

As a rule, I try not to dwell on the aloneness that comes with being a Kitchen Widow; it only frustrates me and makes Chef Matt feel guilty. But try as I might to rise above the frustration and the occasional dip into self-pity, I do have nights that stretch on forever or nights where every minute is filled with some sort of near-catastrophe that is impossible for two hands but would be manageable with four. 

These nights test my stamina as a Kitchen Widow. Mostly, I do all right: the kids always get fed, bathed, read to, pajama-ed, and tucked in. If it is sometimes 10:00 before the toddler actually stays in bed, so be it. But I had a moment tonight that brought me to the edge of my tolerance for the aloneness, a moment when I briefly considered asking Matt if he knew of any cooking jobs with bankers' hours, and it had nothing to do with our kids and everything to do with a small brown rodent that scurried past my feet as I was starting dinner.

I am the cliche when it comes to mice. At the first sight or sound or sign of a mouse, I am perched on furniture and leaping from chair to chair to avoid the miniscule possibility that I might come in contact with the critter as it runs past. Usually, Matt is home to reassure me that my cowardice is unfounded, and he charges bravely in, armed with traps, to save his damsel in distress.

Tonight, our baby was in his high chair and our daughter playing outside when I spied the mouse and immediately took a flying leap onto our center island, where I sat for ten minutes, formulating a plan. I stared at the corner where the mouse had fled, and while tossing baby treats at our son to keep him happy, I snatched up our Swiffer and advanced on the corner. For me, this constitutes the height of bravery. 

The mouse reappeared twice, both times sending me back up onto the island, and tried to get out the back door. Finally, I opened the back door wide, still blindly throwing snacks at my poor baby, and waited for him to try one more time to get out. I did not want to use the Swiffer as a weapon if the mouse went anywhere but outside, but I steeled myself nonetheless. Finally, after 30 minutes of my glaring at the corner and calming a fluttering heart, the mouse snuck out the back door, and I slammed it shut behind him. 

The great casualty in all this was the lovely dinner I had planned. There was no way I was going to mash potatoes and saute mushrooms, when such inattentiveness might allow the mouse to escape to another part of the house. Instead, I threw a frozen pizza in the oven without ever taking my eyes off the corner. Thoroughly tweaked out, I hauled the kids upstairs immediately after dinner, where we hid the rest of the evening. 

It may seem illogical that I felt the aloneness more acutely tonight with the appearance of a mouse than I do when handling the necessities of home and family by myself. But I think it is merely an issue of practice. I handle the solitary feeding/cleaning/bathing just fine alone because I do it almost every day. If I had to combat mice every day, I might be less of a shrieking little girl. As it is, I'll just let Matt handle it, by himself, when he gets home. 

Blessed are the Messy Children at Dinner

A few years ago, there was a television commerical that depicted a couple gazing at each other over a quiet, romantic dinner. Then the camera panned out and showed screaming children throwing food and running amok, sandwiching the couple and their amorous moment in a circus of mealtime chaos.

Sometimes, when I glance at my husband across the table, I get lost in a cloudy dream sequence where it is just me and him and a beautiful osso bucco. It is only when a baby sneeze showers rice cereal into my hair that I am jerked back into the reality of dinnertime with children.

I have occasional flashes of our brief life together before children: leisurely meals that took hours to prepare; leaning against a kitchen counter, talking, with a bottomless glass of wine; spontaneous walks to the pub down the street; long evenings at dimly lit restaurants. We ate without curfews or timelines or interruptions, without pauses to cut chicken into chewable pieces or squish bananas into a texture appropriate for a mouth with four teeth. It was an unknowingly selfish time, and I admit that there are days that I long for such quiet, singular meals.

Our house is certainly quiet now, at times, but the silence of sleeping children still pulses with life and the potential for noise, in a way that our two-person home never did. But I know that someday, when our house is once again the living space of just Chef Matt and myself, I will long for the dinners with loud, messy kids. I will recall the merry-go-round of child-feeding -- one parent spoons cereal with the other argues the case for vegetables -- and will certainly miss the sticky fingers and the early victories with silverware and the surprisingly sweet way that babies chew.

I do love occasionally having Matt all to myself, eating without having to cajole or scrub food out of little eyebrows, but a dinner table with laughing, yelling, chattering children is a profound joy that we could never have imagined while sitting alone, in candlelight and stillness. We were missing out, but did not know it yet.

The Great Minnesota Eat-Deep-Fried-Foods-Together

Early on a Thursday morning in late August, as the sun rises over a muggy Twin Cities, a slumbering animal comes to life on 320 acres in St. Paul. Crowds wait outside entrance gates to be the first ones to view the largest pumpkins, witness the birth of lambs and calves, navigate the wares, and be endlessly entertained.

The mass of humanity that pulses up and down the streets for 12 days, rain or shine or oppressive heat, comes to the Minnesota State Fair for any number of reasons, but chief among those is to answer the most pressing question of all: How much deep-fried food can I consume in one day?

Chef Matt and I only attend the State Fair every other year, partly because of the price tag and partly because the consumption of so much fair food makes my heart stop a little in protest. We love fair food, which is best eaten while sitting on a curb somewhere, engaged in the best people-watching of the year, but after one particularly ugly fair-food binge a few years ago (and the harsh realization that alas, we are no longer 18), we have trimmed our fair fare to a highlight reel.

There are three non-negotiables on our list: corn dogs, roasted sweet corn, and Sweet Martha's cookies. Corn dogs, that quintessential fair food, are best when the fried batter is still hot and chewy, drizzled with mustard that inevitably lands on your shirt, shorts and shoes. The roasted corn, plunged into hot butter, is nothing less than a Midwestern confection. And Sweet Martha's cookies, always our final stop and always eaten with cold milk, are warm and gooey and piled impossibly high in a cone cup, or even better, served by the dozens in a bucket.

Aside from the Big Three, we vary our food choices to hit a solid representation of the fair's offerings. We have eaten, at various times, deep-fried pickles, hot dish on a stick, spaghetti and meatballs on a stick, mini donuts, deep-fried risotto balls, Australian battered potatoes with ranch and cheese sauce, and cheese curds. The infinity of food at the fair and our flexible list of snack requirements are all part of the fun for us biennial visitors: will we eat alligator on a stick in 2012? deep-fried candy bars in 2014?

The State Fair is, at worst, a strain on your wallet and your arteries. At best, it is a jolly 12-day block party where all diets are shelved, no one can stop comparing foods consumed, and the food groups descend into two categories: fried and not fried. But leave your food guilt at the door, Minnesotans, and eat a deep-fried pickle in the alternate reality that is the State Fair, where there is no shame attached to eating cookies out of a bucket. Such blissful freedom won't be back for 353 days.