Oh my, I’ve fallen in love

with a tomato sauce.

I came across this recipe at Orangette, whose blog is now one of my very favorites, and I cooked up a batch tonight for dinner. The utter deliciousness and simplicity of the sauce was stunning – so much so that I repeatedly came back to the pan to sneak little spoonfuls of sauce as it was cooking, burning my tongue three times in the process.

Now, I am a dessert girl – we know this. Baking cookies and cakes and chocolates and pretty much everything else in my kitchen demands a lot of heavy “sampling,” I’ll admit, but it’s rare for an actual savory dish to lure me back, again and again, to, ahem, check its progress. This one did. Also, Mitch loved it: dinner involved a lot of ungraceful slurping of noodles and sauce, and at least one shirt was stained tomato red.

Did I mention that it’s obscenely easy to prepare?

Tomato Sauce

(I am literally copying and pasting this bad boy from Orangette’s blog, so if you like what you see, do visit her: she’s genius.)

• 2 cups whole, peeled, canned plum tomatoes, chopped, with their juices (about one 28-oz. can)
• 5 Tbsp. unsalted butter
• 1 medium yellow onion, peeled and cut in half
• Salt, to taste

Combine the tomatoes, their juices, the butter, and the onion halves in a medium saucepan. Add a pinch or two of salt. Place over medium heat and bring to a simmer. Cook, uncovered, at a very slow but steady simmer, adjusting the heat as necessary, for about 45 minutes, or until droplets of fat float free from the tomato. Stir occasionally, mashing any large pieces of tomato with the back of a wooden spoon. Taste and salt as needed.

Discard the onion before tossing the sauce with pasta.

Yield: Enough sauce for about 1 pound of pasta, or 4 servings

Did I mention that we had an ultrasound?

We did, two weeks ago. Our baby looks like a baby now: a very small, citrus-fruit-sized baby, with limbs and lungs and a visible heartbeat.

Amazing.

What’s better than a box?

A bag, in a box.

It doesn’t seem to matter how many toys we buy our cats, because each and every one ends up, minutes after their unveiling, in some small, dusty corner under my dresser, vanished until the next time Mitch and I decide to actually – ahem – clean under and behind our furniture.

In the meantime, the cats make toys out of bottle caps, toilet paper rolls, baked goods, their own reflection and – my favorite – my hair. The only thing to trump these makeshift toys is that king of makeshift toy-dom, The Box.

They can turn a good box of any size into a shelter, a hideout, a battle zone, but most often one or the other will hop inside the box and just sit there, looking for all the world as though the box is their brand new palace and all the living room outside, the kingdom over which they’ve been called to rule kindly and justly.

The only thing to top that is when I come home, as I did yesterday, with bags of groceries stashed inside a good-sized box. By the time I get the groceries put away, they’ve already got two paws each inside the box, and by the time I relinquish the box to them completely, to do with as they will, one or the other cat has hopped inside a bag while the other bats viciously at their head from outside.

When that novelty wears off, they just sit there, happy as clams, up to their ears in cardboard.

They say California is burning

and it gives me the chills.

Yesterday morning, NPR ran a segment on the families who were allowed to return to their homes, and though I don’t remember the name of the community mentioned, I do remember the tremors in the peoples’ voices as they approached their own street, craning their necks to see which rooftops were still where they ought to be, and which had broken down into a shattered black pile of debris.

One woman found that her house was alright – a bit damaged, but standing – while another family returned to a burnt-black patch of earth, beginning roughly where their front door had stood as recently as Monday. The father, grief-stricken, in shock, said gruffly, “We’ve lost everything – everything. All the pictures of my son, my collection of hundred-year-old Bibles, our home. You don’t think this can happen, but then it does, in a matter of hours.”* He went on to describe how, when leaving for work Monday morning, he’d stepped out his front door to see flames shooting into the sky and to hear his neighborhood screaming. He grabbed his family (his son still in his pajamas) and fled.

Mitch and I lay in bed at six a.m., listening raptly as the commentator described a suburban neighborhood where only a handful of houses remained standing, though none made it through entirely unscathed. The process of returning home sounded not unlike a lottery – residents waiting, holding their breath as they round the corner to stare at their house, or what is left of it.

This forces me to reflect on what it would mean for us to lose everything we own, and though I like to think we don’t have much, I know, in some dimly lit corner of my brain, that that is a lie. There have been times (during Hurricane Karina, or when I hear of a friend of a friend whose house burned down in the middle of the night) that I’ve mentally catalogued our belongings, attempting, honestly, to think about the singular, irreplacable things I would miss most: the letters and cards Mitch and I made each other during our engagement, the baby clothes our mothers saved from both of our infancies, my baby teeth, the few photographs that we have between us, my wedding dress. Those frail evidences of our histories – our journals, the Bibles we’ve inherited from grandpas and fathers.

I am struck my how many things begin to come forward, items tucked away in closets that I rarely look at now but that would be a solid blow to my gut if lost. I am also struck by how many things, how many simple possessions come to mind as well: my guitar, our computers, my books, and so on – things that could be replaced but that might not ever, really, be quite the same.

At this, I begin to wonder to what extent we actually use our possessions, and to what extent we secret them away, for the sake of owning them. Why do I need to own every book that I read, or fill my drawers and cupboards with as much clothes/kitchen gadgets/make-up/books/food as I do? And how hard would I be hit to lose these things, to find myself with only my body (if I’m lucky) and a few odds and ends to my name?

At this point in our life, we don’t own much, but we own more than enough. Let us cling to what we do have loosely, and give freely to those who have lost everything, because I’m learning this much about life: at some point, in some fashion, our turn will come.

*I wasn’t able to find the segment online, so I’m quoting loosely. Please take this as my interpretation of the segment and not as actual fact.

Interesting, interesting

So, I came a bit late into the news of J.K. Rowling’s outing of Dumbledore, and my thoughts on the subject are more literary than, well, relevant to dear Albus’s sexuality, since the entire episode makes me wonder: if it isn’t in the book, then…does it matter to the story at all?

And just in case anybody gets the idea that I’m objecting to Dumbledore’s being gay, I must add that I’d object just as strongly if Rowling suddenly announced that Harry had a long lost sister from whom he’d been separated at birth, or that there was once a fifth founder of Hogwarts who was tragically killed in a broom accident before the school really took off: if she hasn’t said so in seven books, why should it matter now? She missed all seven of her chances.

While pondering this, I came across this article (via Toddled Dredge) which says everything I could hope to say in a very articulate and scholarly fashion. Enjoy.

Had I been a boy, you might know me as:

• Stirling
• Tristan
• Kirkpatrick
• Abdul (I’m not sure I could ever, in any gender, pull off being an Abdul)
• Slade
• Ace
• Biff (seriously?)

Recently my mom stopped by with a couple of baby name books that my parents used while naming both my brother (Ross Myran) and me. My favorite part so far? The lists of potential names that both parents filled out in the front and back of the book.

There were other, more reasonable options listed (like Jared, Adrian or Bryan), but I picked my favorites – the bullets I mercifully dodged – to share with you, though I suspect that, because all the oddest ones are in my dad’s handwriting, most of them are probably a joke (take “Otis Media,” for example, or “Urethra May Puff”). Also, I’m not sure which ones were intended for my brother and which for me.

Some other girl names that were up for consideration? Meredith, Ivy, Beth, Celeste, Hiliary and Rose.

Just think – I could have been Rose Rosenburg!

Official Due Date

May 11, 2008.

This is also Mother’s Day, and the exact same day that Ashley is due. Huzzah!

First cold of the season

Earlier this week, Mitch came down with that awful cold that everyone has right now, and though I specifically warned him not to give it to me, he did, regardless of my grim promise that he would suffer the consequences if he got me sick. (By consequences, I mean that he now has to put up with me breathing like Darth Vader through the entire night, sniffling as though my brain has liquified and is attempting, drip by drip, to make its escape through my nose.)

As a result, I am home from work today, still in my pajamas at four o’clock, and I have watched all of season 3 of Arrested Development, as well as The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Now, under ordinary circumstances, I usually cry during at least three scenes of Narnia, but with the combination of the cold, the hormones and being home by myself, I think I cried intermittently throughout the entire movie, which did not help my congestion. I got choked up as soon as a character I liked walked into the frame.

However, I did muster the strength to bake some bread today, so at least while I was crying and sniffling, I was eating homemade bread. I had that much going for me.

Because, secretly, I’ve always wanted to be a backup singer

This Friday is the official release of Go Slowpoke’s new full-length album, All my Friends are Good People, and it’s up for a free listen at http://www.virb.com/goslowpoke.

You might pay particular attention to the tracks “Goodbye to That One,” “Kiss Now, Drunk Later” and “I Hope Something Happens Today,” in which I contribute plenty of ooos and aaahs, but the whole album sounds fabulous, with appearances from several excellent Bellingham folk like Anna Arvan, Wisconsin Slim and more. I’m especially hooked on “…You Can’t Stay” and “I Used to Give a Shit.”

(I mentioned recording with Peter in an earlier entry.)

To continue our discussion about names…

…I offer you this post, from Alpha DogMa, whose blog I will henceforth be reading regularly.

The Name Game