I don’t think I ever feel more like a parent than I do when I’m sitting with my kids’ teachers and having parent-teacher conferences (I also sort of freaked out a little when I realized that there is less than 4 months left in the school year. The time! Where does it go!). To celebrate Mia’s stellar report card (she is reading 2 grade levels ahead) I took her out to lunch after I picked her up from a half day at school. We weren’t the only ones with that idea. Seemed like every place in the neighborhood was packed, bewildering the sushi restaurant waiter and the table sitting next to us. They were visiting friends in the neighborhood and had wondered if everyday was like this, if parents in our Brooklyn neighborhood took their kids out for sushi lunch all the time (ha!)

I can’t remember the last time I had one-on-one time with Mia, just like this, sitting down at a restaurant eating a leisurely lunch. It was nice. But it sort of highlighted a bunch of “issues” she’s having with Claudine lately – so much so that I discovered she had written quite a few essays and mini-books at school about her relationship with her little sister. The word “annoying” came up more than a few times. It’s kind of amazing what’s revealed when it’s written down, even by a 7 year old. I sense that she gets really frustrated when Claudine wants to join in at every toy or game that she plays, copies her drawings *exactly* when they are sitting opposite each other at their art table, and in her words, gets more attention from us. “Claudine! Claudine! It’s always about Claudine!” (Um, is it bad that I always think of “Marsha Marsha Marsha!” when she says that?).

It’s interesting to see their relationship evolve. Right now, there is a lot of fighting. Their bickering will often be the thing that wakes me up in the morning, but it’s not all bad. I know that Mia deeply cares for her little sister, plus she told me that she’s glad Claudine didn’t end up being a boy because they can play together with all the same girly toys. It does makes me wonder how different Claudine would be if she were the first born. She copies and emulates Mia so much. I always wanted a sister growing up. Which reminds me of this little snippet of a book about siblings that I read at my parent-teacher conference today:

(a short essay with illustrations on how your sibling was born, by Mia)
First, you ask your mommy for a sibling.
Then you wait and wait and wait and wait.
Finally, Mommy goes to the hospital.
Your sibling is born and you have someone to play with.
When your sister gets older, she gets annoying.
It reminds you that you don’t want any more siblings.

Long ago, before I moved to New York, I would hear stories from Jenna about all the cheap and tasty food that she missed in NY when she got homesick. There were the big fat quesadillas and burritos at Benny’s Burritos, the Hijiki-Tofu Patties from Dojo, the Chinese food from House of Vegetarian, and most of all the Falafel Sandwiches from Mamoun’s in the West Village. Coming from a part of the country that used to lack authenticity in certain culinary genres, I always got jealous. And hungry.

We’ve been making efforts to eat less meat in our diet again lately, so I made falafels last week, using a recipe someone gave me a long time ago when I decided I should just cook the foods I craved if I couldn’t get them where I lived. The chickpeas are not cooked before frying, only soaked in water overnight. They should be ground up in a food processor until they just start coming together, but not too much so that they might become a paste. Easy enough to make, as long as you don’t mind the deep-frying.

Falafel (makes about 15-18 patties)

1 cup dried chickpeas
1 small onion, chopped
1 Tablespoon chopped fresh parsley
1 teaspoon ground cumin seeds
1 teaspoon ground coriander seeds
1 large clove garlic, peeled
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking soda
juice of 1/2 lemon

Soak the chickpeas in plenty of cold water overnight. The next day, drain them well, then put them into a food processor. Grind them until they will hold their shape, but not enough that they become a paste. Add the remaining ingredients and process until well ground and fully incorporated. Form into balls or patties about 2 inches across and refrigerate while the oil heats up.

Begin heating about 6 cups of vegetable oil in a large saucepan. When it reaches about 350°F you should start frying the falafel. Carefully drop them in one at a time, and cook them for about 4 minutes, or until they are golden brown on the outside and fully cooked on the inside. Repeat until they are all cooked. Serve immediately. They can be made into pita sandwiches, or served with other middle eastern items (tabbouleh, tzatziki, hummus, etc…) as part of a mixed platter.

…I wrote my first blog post. Crazy, right? I had forgotten how little the girls were, how Claudine was really just a baby when we started the business. We had no idea at that moment that we’d be where we are today, 3 years later, still posting to the blog pretty much every day or that we’d be entering year 4 of the business. I know that I’ve said that I write on the blog for me, to deposit my thoughts and photos, document where we are in life and business for future reference, and to have a place to recollect memories. While that is still true, it’s became so much more over the years. All of you out there leaving comments, supporting us, and in a few instances, becoming really good personal friends, have meant so much. You have no idea. Thank you.

So a few updates: We’re still mulling over cookie names, but we did pick one random winner (congrats Malgorzata!) from our contest and cookies will be on their way!

We’ll be donating 15% of all sales this week from our website and etsy shops to support the earthquake and tsunami relief efforts in Japan.

…and lastly, there are real signs of Spring now. We felt it over the weekend, especially when we walked around the neighborhood and it was still light out at 7pm! I might be jumping the gun, but I plan to store away all our Winter boots this week. Daylight savings, on the other hand, totally threw off my timing today and I am dead tired, but despite just receiving some bad news I’ve been anxiously waiting to hear about, I’m determined to make it a great week and think positive thoughts. xo.

Where *are* we? I may have asked myself the same question a few times. Ok, full disclosure (and you know how I feel about sponsorships, ads on blogs, tie-ins with corporate entities, etc.etc. Why yes, I am a bore), but the girls and I were invited to a “Chari-Tea” party with Kelly Ripa on Thursday, sponsored by Electrolux to kick off their campaign to raise awareness and support for the Ovarian Cancer Research Fund. You don’t have to buy anything and you don’t even have to donate any money. All you have to do to participate is visit www.kelly-confidential.com , pick an outfit for a virtual tea party and Electrolux will donate $1 on your behalf for every visit. Look, I can get behind that. I can get behind raising awareness for ovarian cancer, and these washer and dryers weren’t the focus of the event at all. The kids hanging with Kelly Ripa were. I appreciated that because I can only admire these machines from afar. Let me tell you, after seeing them in person these aren’t city washing machines. They are huge. If I had these in my apartment, I’d use them as extra closet space, but these things really need their own room. Even if you did have the space in the city (lucky you), I’d bet that these would still look ridiculously big in your apartment. These are for the ‘burbs only. Claudine didn’t even know what to make of them when she looked up and saw them towering over her, all imposing, silver and shiny. “What are these?”, she asked. I told her that they were washing machines and she was all like, huh? “But they don’t look like our washing machine in the closet”. Precisely.

So another disclosure. We totally got picked up in a car that was paid for by Electrolux. When I found that they were providing transportation to and from the event, I was all, “oh, nuh uh. We’re from Brooklyn and we can take the N train, we don’t need to get picked up by no car”. But then, you know, the day came, it was all arranged for and yeah, it was pouring rain that day so it beat walking to the train station and sitting on the N train for 45 minutes. Plus the girls felt all fancy and I wore heels! Not Kelly Ripa caliber heels, but heels! I pulled the girls out of school for the day and they were so excited to be going to a hotel, and not just any hotel, but the Plaza Hotel.

We arrived and the girls ran around the red carpet out front under the heated lamps (no, silly, not for us. The red carpet is always there) and we went inside. The girls ogled at all the flowers in the lobby and they kept saying ,”wow. this place is soooo fancy”. Sheesh, it’s like they were visiting from the small, quaint town of Breukelen and seeing the city sights for the very first time. When we made our way to the Eloise Shop downstairs, we were greeted by Ashley who gave each of the girls a hanger with an outfit picked especially for them, complete with sparkly shoes, and a shopping bag with their names marked in pink tags. The girls got dressed and put on kid-sized panty hose for the first time. Mia said she liked the way it made her legs feel all tingly and cool when she walked (bwahaha). I guess the girls weren’t used to the sheerness of the white panyhose because they kept lifting their skirts to look at their underwear through the hose. Greaaaat. Especially since there were a lot of cameramen and corporate suits from Electrolux standing around. I kept having to tell the girls to keep their legs together and not to scratch their butts. At last, Kelly Ripa arrived and made a short speech (she actually choked up a little at the sight of all the little girls since her daughter is a little older), and then helped the girls accessorize and get their faces painted with flowers.

I don’t get star struck by celebrities at all, but Kelly was really attentative and absolutely lovely with the girls. She sat down at each table and chatted with each tea party group. I couldn’t hear what my girls and Kelly were talking about, but judging from the look on Mia’s face, she was totally charmed by her.

Oh, and you know, I totally tried to get the scoop from Mia.

Me: “so….what did you talk about with the lady in the white dress?”
Mia: “oh, you know…stuff. I don’t remember, really”.
Me: “Do you know she’s famous? She’s on TV”.
Mia (instantly brightens up and cracks a huge smile): “really?!” (Oh, I’m totally going to point out the big Kelly Ripa cardboard cutout at the TD Bank a few blocks from our house the next time we walk that way).
Me: “yeah. So, you can’t remember anything you guys talked about?”
Mia: “well, she said we had really long eyelashes, that she liked our eyelashes.”
Me: “really? She said that?”
Mia: “yeah. Then she told us that hers were fake”.

Awesome.

We left in a car with hat boxes of girly gifts, the outfits and the sparkly shoes. I’m glad I accepted the invitation to the tea party. The girls had the best time and have been recreating their entire afternoon ever since.

Had a different post planned today, but seemed trivial considering what has happened in the world. Will post tomorrow instead. Was about to go to sleep last night around 2am when I saw the breaking news about the earthquake and tsunami in Japan and of course I couldn’t get to sleep. It feels totally strange to see live broadcasts and videos of destruction as it is happening. Not sure how to feel about that. I hope all our readers and friends in that region are ok. Hope the tsunami waves hitting Hawaii produce minimal damage. Living here in NY, we don’t experience the kind of natural disasters that other parts of the world and country experience (not yet anyway and yeah, well, we have terrorist attacks), so I can’t even imagine living through an earthquake or anticipating tsunami warnings. We’re thinking about you.

Pancakes around our house are always considered a “special occasion” breakfast, maybe because it’s something that involves actual cooking as opposed to sticking something in the toaster or pouring milk over cereal.  The girls always get excited for pancakes. The thing about pancakes for me, however, is that they can be a little heavy and dense. If you have the time to prep the batter for breakfast the night before, you can try this pancake batter recipe which rises overnight in the refrigerator.  They end up lighter and fluffier than regular pancakes and they have a light yeasty flavor. 

Yeast-Raised Pancakes (makes about 10 medium pancakes)

1-1/2 cups warm milk
2-1/4 teaspoons active dry yeast
1/4 cup vegetable oil
1 egg
2-1/4 cups all-purpose flour
3 tablespoons sugar
1 teaspoon salt

Mix the milk, yeast, oil and egg together in a large bowl until the yeast is fully dissolved.  Add the remaining ingredients and stir only until everything is incorporated.  Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and put in the refrigerator overnight.

In the morning, heat a griddle or heavy frying pan over medium heat (we always use a cast iron pan).  Add a little oil to the pan. Spoon in pancake batter to make pancakes of your desired size.  Cook for just about 1-2 minutes per side until golden on both sides and cooked completely through.  Serve immediately.

The light’s changing, you know. You can see it at 5pm, roughly when this photo was taken as Claudine and I were walking home from a playdate this afternoon. We have a new game while walking to and from school. She’s suddenly gotten really interested in learning how to read and spell, so I’ll spell out a 3-4 letter word for her to guess. You can see her thinking and sounding out each letter phonetically to herself till she figures out what the words are. I can almost see her reading simple books by the time she goes to Kindergarten in the Fall (which we register her for tomorrow. Already! She’s a late birthday so she’ll still be 4 when she enters school. Craziness). Looks like she’ll follow in Mia’s voracious reading footsteps.

The coolest thing about all this new reading stuff is her absolute delight when she guesses a word correctly. It makes her so happy. But the cutest thing is when she spells out the names of everyone in our family.

“M-i-a….Mia”
“C-l-a-u-d-i-n-e….Claudine”
“M-a-r-k….Daddy”
“J-e-n-n-a….Mommy”

Argh. Why are kids so damn cute?

Wow, thanks for all the cookie names. I like how some of you came back to make even more suggestions, ha! And amazing that with almost 200 entries so far, there are only a handful of repeat names. That’s crazy. Ok, so we have a lot of names to sift through, and you know what? I realized that we’re less than a week away from our blog anniversary and we always do a giveaway to celebrate, so we’re going to pick 2 winners as usual, 1 random and 1 name winner if we do in fact use a name out of the pool. You get to pick another pack of cookies of your choice to go with your booty, so we’re closing the contest a day earlier since Mark will be baking those cookies Friday and we want them to be fresh. Maybe we’ll throw something else in there as well.

Speaking of fun things in the mail, our friends Nichole and Evan picked up these treats for us on their last trip to Paris (not the candle, the candle is from Target, but Nichole has become my candle pimp. She keeps giving me candles every time we go over to their house). Included in the package was a bar of dark chocolate with pink peppercorns. It reminded her of our pink peppercorn cookies, but we wasted no time in eating that right away, so no photo.

Nicole and I have been trying to go to Paris together for a long weekend, but it doesn’t look like it will happen for Spring as we’d originally hoped. Maybe in the Fall, but the girls, Mark and I are getting really excited about our upcoming summer trips. We’ll go back to Seattle in August as usual, but we’re looping in a trip to San Francisco and Yosemite while we’re out West. At the end of May, we’ll spend 4-5 days in the Outer Banks, North Carolina. We haven’t been there before.

Is it summer yet?

…in naming these cookies. I think we asked for suggestions last year when we first introduced them and believe it or not, we still haven’t properly named them. Ok, so we’re lame, but we’re not exactly great at naming cookies. Look at our shop – everything’s just named after what’s in them. I mean, “Coconut Five Spice White Chocolate Cookies”? What kind of long-winded name is that? Lame. (edit: some people got confused. We’re not trying to rename our Coconut cookies, which is in fact named that ridiculously long name, but the cookies in the photos – see ingredients below).

So what’s in these cookies? Cocoa nibs, macadamia nuts, dried cherries, chocolate chips, white chocolate chips and oatmeal. So far, they’re only available at markets and fleas and they usually sell out. They’re big and satisfying and different than all the smaller, more refined cookies that we sell online, but I’ll tell you what. If you come up with a name that we like, we’ll mail you half a dozen of these cookies, but I can’t promise that the packaging is going to be pretty. We haven’t figured that out yet (don’t worry, we won’t send them in, like, a Tupperware container or a Ziplock bag or anything). They really are best fresh, but we’ve been testing the shelf life and we may be able to ship them. You can be our guinea pig. And if there isn’t a name that catches our eye, we’ll pick a random comment and we’ll send you cookies anyway.

You have until Friday Thursday 1pm EST. Bonus points for sticking “Brooklyn” in the name, though by no means are we totally set on that.
Ok, go (and oh, right….I was reminded, we can only ship to the US, especially these cookies. Sorry!!).

…meeting with people in real life is amazing too. I’m grateful that I have the internet to chat with people all day while I work from home, usually parked on the couch and wearing something that I wouldn’t want to be caught dead in. It’s saved me from isolation and pulled me out of dipping too far into the occasional bout of insanity from being wrapped up in my own head. It’s good to get out though. Maybe it’s because the weather is improving, but I’m making plans again. I met with about a dozen other designers/small business owners over at my friend Re Jin’s place a few days ago and we talked shop for nearly 6 hours.

I’m looking forward to next week too…a book party, two dinners, a coffee or two, and…I don’t even know how to describe this event/thing/what have I gotten myself into…but you’ll see why I say this later on in the week. Oh, MAN.

So as I wrap up one big project over the weekend, it appears I have a rare week off before 3 more projects begin. I’m going to take the time to really learn my new camera. I’ve just been sort of winging it because I’ve needed to take pictures, but I’m actually going to set aside time and read the manual. It’s motivated me learn how to take better photos and that’s exactly what I needed. I have renewed interest in this whole photography thing. We also need to take a lot of new product shots which seems like SUCH a huge monumental task, but we’re going to do it gradually because I feel like we need to step up our game (I don’t look at the “competition”, say on Etsy in particular, but there’s something to be said if a friend emails you because they thought you were on the front page but it actually didn’t turn out to be us. I’ll admit there have been quite a few shops that seem inspired by our products and photo styling since we opened up 3 years ago when there were very few food sellers on Etsy, but I can’t worry about such things. There’s a lot of talk on the internets right now about copying and borrowing from other artists, both from big corporations and other independent artists. I’m seeing it happen to my friends. Sometimes it’s hard not to be influenced by other people that you admire. I’ve been working in the creative industry for 16 years so I know, but in the end imitation isn’t a form of flattery. It’s just laziness. So the only thing to do is just be focused, do your own thing and do it as best as you can. Geez…what a tangent…where did this come from…sorry…).

Anywho, moving right along…