We had a good weekend, did you? The forecast beat all odds and we got the crummy wet weather out of the way Friday which made way to a gorgeously sunny weekend. Mark was back at the outdoor Flea this Saturday and it was packed since it marked the first day of the outdoor season. Sold out of most things and everyone, vendors and flea-goers alike, was so happy to be back outdoors. Nothing beats being back at the original Brooklyn Flea site. It sort of feels like the first day of school where you see all your old pals again. We will, however, be at the new Williamsburg location next Sunday to check it out.

With the Flea over on Saturday afternoon, Mark had a true day off yesterday. The girls were excited to have “Daddy Day” which started off with breakfast, the farmer’s market, then a trip to the Prospect Park Zoo and Carousel. They must have clocked a couple of miles of walking at least. I left the family after breakfast was over and headed to brunch (2 breakfasts!) to meet my friend Amy. We hardly ever go to brunch – previous tight budgeting didn’t allow – but I think we need to start up again. It really is a lovely way to start off a Sunday, isn’t it?

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.

I think you know by now that my bedtime is late. It’s recently teetered over to the ridiculous hour of 2:30am again, sometimes even 3. Insomnia aside, I have a hard time making myself go to bed. I treasure those quiet hours when everyone’s asleep. I get most of my work done then too and it’s been this way for years.

So what happens in the morning? On school days I push my wake up time as late as I can, sometimes to the dangerous brink of being late for school, but in the end we never are. Still, it’s often a mad rush to get the girls fed, dressed, lunches made and out the door in 30 minutes by 8:20am. On days when there is no school, or if Mark decides he can go to the kitchen later rather than the early crack-of-dawn hours that he prefers, I can steal more sleep. I’ll admit there are days when I get up at 9. The girls wake up sometime between 6:30 and 7:30am. Since they share a room, I suspect they wake each other up, though Mia claims that she doesn’t if she sees that Claudine is asleep in her bunk. Sometimes Claudine is awake and playing with with her stuffed animals in bed, but Mia saids she is always the first to climb out of bed.

There’s been a new routine in the morning at our house the last few weeks. By the time I wake up, the girls will have already eaten breakfast. Sometimes the evidence of dirty dishes is in the sink, but often they’re left behind on the kitchen island counter, the dining room table or their art table. Mia’s been making breakfast for the two of them every morning, usually frozen waffles in the toaster, or cereal with milk or granola with yogurt. She’ll pour cups of milk and water for the two of them. She’ll drag a chair to reach the cabinets and the freezer. I know this because when I do get up and wander to the kitchen, the chair will always be left there; she never remembers to drag them back.

Sometimes I think that the kids probably gave up on me in the mornings and got too impatient and hungry while waiting for me to get up. Some mornings I’ll hear one of them come into the bedroom and say, “it’s time to wake up, mommy”, and I’ll mumble something like, “5 more minutes”, and then I can hear her report to the other, “mommy says 5 more minutes!”. But even if I were to wake up earlier and make them breakfast, Mia wants to do this herself. She says she looks forward to it every morning and she likes taking care of Claudine (at least in the morning. Other times? Not so much). It might just be a phase – I remember she started fixing breakfast for a week last year, but if it is, it’s lasted much longer than the first time around. Hey, I’m not complaining. Isn’t this one of those moments we wait for, as parents?

We rarely ever go out to brunch, but we did over the weekend when my cousin was in town for Thanksgiving. Like a lot of other things, eating out for 4 people isn’t cheap anymore. It’s not like grabbing a bite to eat and throwing $10 down at the table. I keep thinking about how we’re going to get around when the kids are old enough to have to pay for a subway ride, which will probably be soon. Actually, they do it by height here which really sucks for tall kids like mine. But with tokens costing $2.25 a ride (ha! I just called it a token! I remember when subways and buses cost 50 cents), it’ll cost us $18 to go anywhere roundtrip. Holy hell!! And that’s with the prices they are now. This is scary, folks. I am all for mass transit since I hate taking the car, but it makes it actually cheaper to drive places. Grrrrr….

Thanks to all who gave us some love on our FaceBook page. Many of you mentioned that you didn’t even know we had a Facebook page. See? I’m so bad at stuff like that, but it feels nice and cozy over there right now. Free stuff does that I guess, which is TOTALLY OK, but it’s so nice to finally meet so many of you. Don’t be strangers here, ok? We haven’t done much with our FB page because it does bug me to see so many company and blog posts in my feed, so we keep it very light and sporadic, mostly with market and event dates and sales notification. I’m not very good about announcing it on the blog so that’s the place we try to do that sort of stuff. (By the way, if you have ever tried to friend me on my personal page, I am sorry if I have not friended you back. I’m not trying to be unfriendly, but FB is the only space that I am keeping strictly to friends and family).

So…December. What the hell? Doesn’t even seem possible that it’s here already, but it’s here. I still can’t gauge yet what kind of holiday season we’ll have. Every year is a little bit different with our very first holiday season being the absolute worst. Seriously people, I thought we were going to die from lack of sleep and exhaustion AND we were just dealing with corporate orders that year, not even retail. Last year was hellish, but better because we were more experienced and Mark is simply faster at doing everything. This year, I don’t know. We are doing more market dates than ever starting in less than 2 weeks for 10 almost straight days, and I’m not quite sure how we’ll pull that off, but I’m just going to hope for the best. The good news is that most of my design work has been delayed unexpectedly again so I’ll have more time to help Mark out. Dude’s been looking really tired already.

I mean this has been a slow summer, right? (though I am working a bit right now). But my mind’s been bouncing around like Pong on caffeine and I haven’t been able to get to sleep til 3am most nights. There are ideas. ALOT of ideas and I’m making connections, some of which I feel will be very important some day, but right now I’m paralyzed by the thought of executing them and I feel like I’m all over the place. I know I over think. I know that I am, still, even after all these years and life lessons learned, crippled by the thought of doing something that is less than perfect. I am a control freak. I know that these are my greatest obstacles, but even the slightest hope that I’ll be able to leave behind the things that I don’t want to do anymore will, in the end, push me through. I *have* to believe this.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the paths that we choose to take in life, whether it was calculated, organic in its progression or accidental. It may not have been completely clear at the time, but I think I’m old enough at this point to look back and see the that each step, each job, each project has led me to where I am. I can pinpoint the exact moment in my life exactly 10 years ago that, had I made a different choice, would have most likely led me down a much different path. I look at some of my friends and classmates and see just how far they’ve risen up in their careers (by the way, DO NOT start poking around and looking up where your friends have ended up if you’re feeling even a little insecure about yourself, because you’re most certainly going to feel like craaaap). Had I made that other choice, I could have been like them. I have worked on some very interesting and high profile projects so I don’t understand why I sometimes feel a slight tinge of career envy when I know that corporate life isn’t for me. It is confusing. Perhaps it’s just human nature to measure yourself against your peers, but this feeling is uncomfortable.

I know I slipped in the line about the “store” rather casually a few posts back. The truth is, we are doing it. I don’t know where, I don’t even know when, but it is more in the “near future” rather than “far”. It is so overwhelming though, you guys. I don’t even know where to start. This may just be the hardest thing that I will have ever done in my life so far.

ps. the J.Crew catalog. I want. Everything. Or maybe I just want the styling. btw, I just saw on the class list that Jenna Lyon’s son is going to Claudine (and Mia’s old) preschool. I promise I won’t start stalking just so I can see inside their brownstone in real life. No. No, that would be creepy and just plain wrong.

Even pancakes. 3 flavors: pumpkin cornmeal, apple and sour milk, and clove and rosewater cooked up by a historic gastronomist in the park near our house.

Also during this busy, spring-like weekend, Claudine learned how to scooter. She went slow and steady while all the other neighbor kids zoomed around her on their razors, but she was so cute that I wanted to constantly go over to her and give her a squeeze.

But I restrained myself.

Aside from her visible excitement over finally learning how to scoot, she looked like a little old granny with that little leg of hers chugging and pushing the ground away with turtle speed.

Another holiday has come and gone. This year’s Valentine’s day really sneaked up on me. I had a busy week before our shipping day, Mia’s birthday, and all of a sudden I was over my head in cookies and cardboard boxes again. But everything made it out just fine – it always does, somehow. Through it all I actually had one or two days that I did not see the kids at all. To make it up to them I promised them a special Valentine’s breakfast, which ended up being these fresh baked muffins with lots of bacon. The sprinkling of coarse sugar on the top gives them a nice crunch.

Cranberry Walnut Muffins (makes 10 muffins)

1-1/3 cups sugar
6 Tablespoons butter, softened
1 egg, plus 1 egg white
1/2 cup plus 1 Tablespoon buttermilk
1/2 teaspoon orange extract
1/3 cup vegetable oil
2-1/3 cups all-purpose flour
1 Tablespoon baking powder
1-1/2 teaspoons salt
1-1/3 cups fresh cranberries
1 cup roughly chopped walnuts
2 Tablespoons coarse turbinado sugar (optional)

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Beat the butter and sugar in an electric mixer until fluffy and well-mixed. Gradually add the eggs, oil, buttermilk and orange extract (they should all be mixed together first). Slowly mix in the flour, baking powder and salt, mix until thoroughly combined. Fold in the cranberries and walnuts by hand. Divide the batter evenly between 10 muffin cups, either lined with muffin papers or sprayed with a nonstick spray. Sprinkle each muffin with a little coarse sugar, then bake on the top oven rack for about 25 minutes, or until completely cooked in the center. Cool for a few minutes before removing from the pan.

Scones have always been one of my favorite breakfast pastries, not just because they are delicious, but also because they are quick and easy – they don’t even require an electric mixer. For that reason I would choose to whip up a batch of scones any time we had guests over in the morning. This is a new variation that I had never tried before – I wanted the taste of a bran muffin in the form of a scone. You will need pure wheat bran for this recipe, not bran flake cereal like so many muffin recipes call for. Pure wheat bran can be found in any health food store and any dried fruit can be added to the mix, like raisins, currants, or cranberries. I used a mixture of chopped up prunes and chocolate chips and I’m happy to report that both kids absolutely loved them.

Bran Scones with Dried Fruit (makes 12 medium sized scones)

2 cups flour
1 cup wheat bran
2 Tablespoons sugar
1 Tablespoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/3 cup dried fruit, roughly chopped if necessary (for larger pieces like prunes, mango, etc…)
1/3 cup chocolate chips
1 Tablespoon Molasses
1 cup plus 2 Tablespoons heavy cream

Preheat the oven to 325 degrees. Combine everything except the molasses and cream in a large mixing bowl. Separate the pieces of dried fruit so that they are no longer stuck together and are coated with the flour mixture. Add the molasses and cream, and stir until a dough is formed. Knead briefly until smooth, then divide the dough in half. Form each half into a circle about 1/2-inch thick. Cut each circle into 6 wedges, and transfer the wedges to a pan lined with parchment paper. Sprinkle each scone with a little extra sugar and bake until completely cooked, about 20 minutes depending on the thickness.

It’s starting out considerably better than yesterday: a sunny, beautiful day and a brunch/easter party for kids hosted by my non-parent friend Christy. Good food, story time, an easter present hunt and confetti. On the way home from Ft. Greene, Claudine proclaimed it “the best best party I’ve ever ever seen”.

Making quiche brings back some not-so-fond restaurant memories. It was at the end of my tenure at the Central Park Boathouse and I was asked to create a quiche for the brunch menu. I made a few versions, but ultimately we all decided on a traditional quiche Lorraine – smoked bacon, gruyere and leeks. I thought my work was done, but it turned out that I, and my staff of 2 others, were going to be responsible for cooking them each weekend. And if you hadn’t guessed, brunch at the Boathouse is pretty busy. It turned out to be a huge hit and we were making over 100 orders…for each day! I needed to go into work at 4:00 in the morning just to have that and everything else ready for the day. I got just a little frustrated with the workload, so it was at that point I started entertaining ideas of finding a new job. It’s hard to believe that was just over a year ago. Maybe it is because of that quiche that I am where I am today (still working my ass off, but for myself). They still have it on the menu there, but here is the same recipe on a smaller scale and with spinach and cheddar as the filling. But really, you can put any filling you like.

A note about the crust: For this, and probably any pie recipe I have ever posted, I always use a recipe from The Pie And Pastry Bible by Rose Levy Beranbaum. Why? She spent years perfecting the recipes, so they are about as perfect as a crust can be. They are pretty easy, the texture is nice, and they taste great. I chose the Flaky Cream Cheese Crust for my quiche this time, as it pairs better with savory fillings.

Spinach Cheddar Quiche (makes 1 9-inch quiche)

For the Crust:
6 Tablespoons cold butter, cut into small pieces
1 cup flour
1/8 teaspoon salt
1/8 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 cup cream cheese
1 Tablespoon cold water
1-1/2 teaspoon apple cider vinegar

For the filling:
4 ounces spinach, chopped
1 Tablespoon butter
3/4 cup milk
3/4 cup heavy cream
4 eggs
2 egg yolks
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon ground black pepper
3 ounces grated cheddar cheese

First, prepare the crust. Put the butter, flour, salt and baking powder into a food processor and pulse until the butter is mostly incorporated. Add the cream cheese and continue pulsing until that is incorporated as well. Add the cold water and vinegar and mix until a dough forms. Flatten it into a circle and refrigerate for a few minutes. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Roll out the dough on a floured surface until it is big enough to fill a 9-inch pie pan. Lay it into the pie pan, making sure to press it into the corners, and crimp the edges decoratively. Cut a circle of parchment or wax paper large enough to cover the crust, and lay it on the top, then fill it with uncooked beans, rice, or something similar (this is called blind baking). Bake in the preheated oven for about 30 minutes. Remove the beans or rice, and bake for another 10 minutes or so, until the crust is completely cooked. Remove from the oven, but leave the oven on.

Prepare the filling while the crust is baking. Melt the butter in a large pan, and saute the spinach for just a few minutes until cooked. Set aside. Pour the milk and cream into a small saucepan and bring almost to a boil. Whisk the eggs, yolks, salt and pepper together in a heatproof bowl, then slowly add the hot milk while continuing to whisk (this is called tempering). Put the cooked spinach and grated cheese into the baked pie shell. Pour the milk and egg mixture over that – it should just fill it all the way up. Return to the oven and bake for about 45 minutes, or until the filling is completely set. Let it rest for at least 30 minutes before attempting to slice.