Oh Hello

Time for a quarterly update on all the Havi happenings? Sure. Matilda felt my old choking and dying netbook needed to face just one more challenge and ripped the spacebar off a few months ago, but now I have a shiny new Mac and no excuses about how typing is so hard (you rip off your spacebar and try it).

Fall was rather lovely here in Chicago. It was warm, the foliage was as good as this New Englander could ask for from the Midwest, we managed to apple pick and pumpkin carve and dress our daughter up as Elmo for the Lincoln Square Halloween festivities. She was a little thrown off by all the other kids screaming "ELMO!" in her face, and we were a little thrown off by the adults who shoved their kids in her face while avoiding eye contact with us and saying in an odd whisper/yell,"looook! ellllmmooo!" It was neat. 

My incredibly inspiring friend Amy ran the marathon in October, and we CTA-hopped all over the city to see her at mile 10ish, 20ish, and the finish line. Matilda was awesome and only once did she actually try to run away into the street and join the marathon (true story). She helped hold up signs for Auntie Amy, did not complain when her lunch consisted of an applesauce and crab rangoons on the street in Chinatown, and appropriately fell asleep right as we saw Amy turn the corner and head up to the finish line.  

Also, I don't know if you've you ever carried a stroller with a 29 pound toddler in it up and down dozens and dozens of stairs to and from the L tracks, but 1) it was sort of the crowning achievement of our almost two years of urban parenting, and 2) Joshua and I hobbled around for a day or two like we had run the marathon instead of leisurely puttering from spectator location to spectator location.

We hosted Thanksgiving for the first time and after much late night obsessive googling and seeking constant support from friends and Alton Brown, we brined and roasted our first turkey and oh, we owned it. My facebook profile picture is still Joshua and I standing over that turkey. We celebrated on Wednesday night with Joshua's family, his sister's boyfriend, and super marathoner Amy who is all the family I'm ever going to get here in the heartland (sob!) but if I had to pick someone to spend every holiday with, it would obviously be her anyways. It was really a wonderful night. Of course we barely picked up the big camera, but we did instagram that dinner to death.

Before everyone arrived, we managed to catch some shots of Matilda eating cranberry sauce for lunch. She looks like such a grown up girl in that picture on the right, but after searching through last years Thanksgiving pics I'm happy to say that, beneath those long curls and despite those pearly chompers, she still has the same rosy baby cheeks and sweet smile as last year. Keep changing slowly, firstborn child of mine.

Joshua's parents and sister left Thursday morning to visit his brother's family in Texas, and we lazed around watching the parade and football until I left to give thanks at work with the NICU babes. I have to say that waking up on the holiday with leftovers all ready to go is actually an amazing way to celebrate the holiday. Wednesday Thanksgivings forever!

My favorite part of the year is really the weekend after Thanksgiving when you are still full and making turkey sandwiches slathered in cranberry sauce for every meal and still feeling very blessed, but you also know that you can now celebrate Christmas without feeling like you are shortchanging Thanksgiving. We don't do Black Friday, so it's the weekend when Christmas still feels sort of far away and you think you have all the time you need for wrapping and baking and creating holiday cheer (you don't). In that spirit, we have all these magical plans to go tromping through snowy fields someday and cut down our own tree, but this year in the time we had allotted (Sunday evening after I had worked three overnights in a row) and the attention span of our child (short, prone to violence with containment), we were only able to pull off the magical run-into-home-depot-and-pick-which-tree-looks-like-it-would-be-most-beautiful-without-this-netting-on-it experience. 

This festive activity culminated in a certain child being carried out of Home Depot kicking and screaming, and required Joshua to saw off the lower branches because we did not have the time or apparently, the parenting skills, to hold our family together and wait in line for that at the store. But lo! our tree is actually beautiful sans net, and there are no huge holes or birds nests or anything else terrifying and nature-ish. A Christmas miracle! 

We are still enjoying the Christmas season and thank God for jeggings and scrubs because the delicious spoils from multiple cookie exchanges keep piling up on our counter. Luckily stress is counteracting the saturated fat because this week Matilda learned how to lock herself in her room (a day that shall live in infamy because 1) it was literally Pearl Harbor Day and 2) the comedy of errors that occurred was actually unbelievable) and she also learned how to throw herself out of her crib. This made for a rough parenting weekend. Then last night she insisted on extra hugs and kisses before bed and said "Nigh nigh, I slweepy, Mama" and pulled her blanket over herself to emphasize the point so my little heart grew three sizes that day.

In Which I Pretend to Be a Food Blogger

I really do love to cook.

I just don't do it often enough. Between working three nights a week, the vast and endless world of Chicago restaurants begging us to eat on their patios instead of in our condo, and the fact that my husband could happily eat a bowl of popcorn instead of a meal any day of the week, my motivation to cook isn't exactly through the roof.

However, I'm discovering that I have surprisingly strong opinions on how I want Matilda to perceive food, meals, and eating in general, so our days of flopping in front of the TV to chow down on one of our beloved Trader Joes freezer meals are dwindling. I'm actually so excited we have a baby to motivate us into changing our lazy habits - with a city full of farmers markets and our half-share in a CSA starting right around her six month birthday in August, we have no excuses not to eat healthily and well at home.

There's a restaurant near us with this amazing earlybird any-fish-any-way special that has become a huge joke between Joshua and I. We love this place - Glenns Diner for you Chicagoans - and we are obsessed with this elusive special and yet we have never, not once, been able to remember when it ends and make it on time. Well! It turns out it ends at the geriatric hour of FIVE pm, and we were reminded of that this week when we thought fish sounded good and we were thinking it was still shockingly early in the evening. After some frantic iPhone searching and an ill-advised left turn into traffic, we discovered that at 5:33, we were going to miss it. We really didn't want to spend a ton of money on dinner, but now we were in a seafood-or-bust mood, so out of the blue I decided to make fish tacos at home.

We made a quick detour to Trader Joes and sat in the car for a minute searching for an easy recipe online, which I then promptly ignored (this is why I cannot ever bake anything! It's like I get mad at the recipe for being so bossy). We grabbed a few ingredients and within an hour were eating a healthy, delicious, completely homemade meal. Why do we not do this more often? I have absolutely no idea.

We Will Never Ever Make It to Glenn's Before 5pm Fish Tacos

Marinade

1/4 cup olive oil

Juice from 1/2 a lime

1 tbs apple cider vinegar

1 tsp garlic

1/2 tsp cumin

1/4 tsp cayenne

Salt/Pepper to taste

Tilapia fillets (we found 3 large frozen fillets at Trader Joes for $5.97. Is this a good price? I have no idea, I don't buy fish).

I'm also not a food blogger, so voila! Ingredients dumped in a bowl! And that is exactly what we did - whisked everything together, brushed it over both sides of the fish, let it sit for about 15 minutes, and then put the fillets in individual foil packets for the grill.

Fish, marinating pre-grill. The photography dwindled during the foil to grill process because a certain four month old SOMEONE needed to eat. Joshua is the grilling expert in our house, but I do know that white fish needs to be cooked until it's opaque and easily flakes with a fork. Grilling time is going to vary but for us with the fish in foil that took ten to fifteen minutes.

Slaw Topping

2 cups shredded green cabbage

1/2 cup greek yogurt (you could use sour cream or mayo or some combo of these, but we love the tang and protein of the yogurt)

2 tbs apple cider vinegar

juice of 1/2 lime

Salt/Pepper to taste

Mix all ingredients together, toss with cabbage and chill while the fish is grilling. Take pictures of the random ingredients still sitting around on your counters because the light is so pretty.

That corn and chile salsa is from Trader Joe's (like everything we eat, fresh and frozen, apparently) and it is deliciously sweet and a little spicy. It's totally not necessary but a nice bonus topping to the tacos.

Toppings

4 corn tortillas, warmed on the grill

1 avocado

1 jar of corn and chile salsa, awesome for the reasons listed above.

When the fish is done, break it into pieces with either a fork or clean hands (see Joshua up there with his sparkly clean paws?) and place into warmed tortillas. Slice up avocados.

Get really excited about smushing up avocados in the next few months and feeding them to your baby. Or if these don't happen to be your circumstances, get really excited because these tacos are wicked good and you are about to eat them. Top with the cabbage slaw, the corn salsa, avocado slices, look at the clock and realize 7pm is a much more normal time to eat dinner than before FIVE at Glenn's.

Enjoy...

Babies Who Brunch

Now that I finally, finally, finished Matilda's birth story (thousands and thousands of words and really, I cut out a lot - you're welcome!), let's move on from all the transcendent, emotional hoopla and talk about what we have really been doing since her birth.

Brunch.

Matilda went to a restaurant for the first time when she was 14 days old. She had already been to the pediatrician several times, the hospital for a few blood draws (she was a bundle of jaundiced joy), Target, Whole Foods, Trader Joes, the airport to pick up my parents, a Super Bowl party at Jessica and Jakob's...actually, looking back on it I can't believe it took us two weeks to park her carseat on an upside down high chair and re-enter the delicious world of bottomless cups of coffee (yes, I switch to decaf...eventually), crispy hash browns, and sweet stacks of pancakes.



We love brunch. And we're picky about it. So yes, that sure is a Tre Kronor menu in her carseat for those of you who are also discriminating about brunch. That was the first restaurant we ever went to when we moved to Chicago and we have spent more time downing coffee and sharing cinnamon rolls in that little yellow room than we have in any other place in the city. So when my parents were here visiting Matilda, we decided Tre Kronor had to be the first restaurant we ever brought her.



This was her second trip, at seven and a half weeks old. In the meantime, she had been to m.henry, Southport Grocery, and Wildberry. Since then she's been to Wishbone. And if I'm going to get serious about the restaurants she's been in, not just for brunch, Matilda has slept happily at Orange Garden, Prasino, Chilis, Garcias and I'm sure others that I can't even remember. Oh yes, her one and only meltdown was during a dinner at Andies. I hope that doesn't mean she won't like Lebanese food, because I was sort of planning on pushing hummus as a nutritious snack.



She was drowsy and sweet when we brought her here to Matilda, which has a nice website and a great menu and so was a little bit of a surprise when we walked in to realize it's basically a bar. With good food, but still. We took our baby to a bar. Luckily my parents were with us so it didn't look quite as Teen Mom as it could have.

We absolutely love exploring Chicago's restaurants - it's what we do instead of going to a movie or a show. While I hope little Miss Matilda will grow up to appreciate living in a city of boundless dining options (and will not be a picky eater!), we are definitely trying to take advantage of her sleepy babyhood to enjoy going out to eat with our friends. The toddler years will probably find us at home a lot more, wiping yogurt and veggies off our own floors instead of those that are open to the public. But for now it's a lovely little luxury for me and Joshua to wake up late on a Saturday after a crazy week of baby-wrangling and extra long work hours, and decide poached eggs sound delicious. And I have no idea how to recreate that at home. It's also nice for me to get out of the house and see my friends during the week. I may need to pick up overtime when I go back to work to support our now-more-passionate-than-ever brunch habit, but we all must make sacrifices. In the meantime, Matilda sleeps like a dream in her carseat, wakes up wide-eyed and happy to find new things to look at, and has no problem eating her own meals on the road under a nursing cover. As an aside, those things are supposed to make nursing in public more discreet, but I think it's funny how many older people have come right up to me to tell me how smart they think I am for using one. I am scared to think how many bare breasts hanging over toast you would have to see before crossing a restaurant to basically thank someone for keeping her chest to herself.

So we love our brunches and breakfasts and coffee dates with our little urban baby. And every time I see a kid in a high chair (right side up!) grabbing eggs off his parents' plates at Tre Kronor, I am so excited for Matilda. I can't wait for her to realize how fun and delicious her little life is going to be, whether we are out or at home.

In the meantime, we have big plans this week for brunch at Bongo Room. Bring on the overtime!