Sabbath Meals

We saw the penguin movie!

We finally took my two year old to see March of the Penguins. We went to the movie theater after his nap, with an insulated bag full of snacks (grapes, cucumber slices and cheddar cheese). We bought popcorn and bottled water, and sat in the middle of the theater.

Amazingly, my son was able to sit through the whole picture. He did switch laps a few times. He was very excited about the movie. As soon as the penguins appeared on the screen, he began saying "Penguins! Penguins!" and didn't stop for about 20 minutes, maybe longer. Then there was a lull, in which he just watched and ate treats. Then the egg appeared, and he started exclaiming "Egg! Egg!" and then was quiet again until the chicks. The chicks excited him the most, he commented on them and on their parents feeding them, as he does at home. But then, for him, the most exciting part was looking behind him and seeing the movie on the surface of the window of the projectionist's booth! After the picture was over, we asked the projectionist to let us see how the movie works, and he graciously showed us. How much my son understood I don't know, but it was neat.

Let me also tell you something about the movie, especially to my reader Beth who has to wait until it comes out on DVD to see it.  As you probably have gathered, it's a scripted documentary about  emperor  penguins mating and raising young in Antarctica. The film, a full-length feature at 80 minutes, has great pacing. It felt short! The penguins are beautiful, getting to watch them walk and slide over the landscape was incredible. The film editor managed to capture both the sense of the birds' nobility and grace and how comic and cute they are.

Probably the most beautiful thing to watch was the mating dance. The emperors bow to each other, and caress each other with their beaks and heads, before they mate. It looked stylized but also affectionate, if that makes sense. I couldn't tell if I was anthropomorphizing the birds or whether they have the emotions we ascribe to them. It's really hard to raise penguin chicks, there are so many opportunities to screw it up. After the mothers lay their eggs, they have to transfer them to the father's feet. If they fail, the egg will freeze quickly. The cries of the penguins who made this mistake sounded disappointed, they looked sad. Penguin chicks, once they hatch, are similarly vulnerable. The filmmaker captured a mother whose chick had frozen during a blizzard, who then tried to steal another mother's chick. The bereft mother's cries of grief, and then the way that the other mothers prevented her from stealing the chick--it felt biblical to me.

We are definitely going to buy this on DVD because I hope there will be more information about how they made the film. There were some shots of the camera crew in the credits, but not nearly enough.

I don't know if my son will stay infatuated with penguins but I am definitely hooked. I am not the most perfectly religious person, but seeing beautiful things in the natural world brings out my inner believer. The penguins are brave and noble and they cooperate in community, they love each other, they stick together in a crisis. They also fight with each other, slapping each other with their flippers and yelling in their honking voices. They walk funny and they have sweetly funny faces. Yes, yes, just like my people.

Sabbath meals, 7/15/-7/16/05

For Friday night dinner we had lentil soup with Indian spices, which I made a little too salty but was still pretty good. I also improvised a cauliflower dish with dry roasted shallots, store-bought peanut sauce and coconut milk and green beans, and we had boxed couscous.

For Shabbat lunch I decided to try to make a Claudia Roden-style stuffed squash recipe, using the special Lebanese squash my husband bought at the farmer's market. It looked great going into the pot. I hollowed out the whole squash using an apple corer, and stuffed them with a rice and chickpea mixture, flavored with  chopped tomato, fresh mint, and cinnamon. I covered the squash with a sweet and sour tomato sauce, also from Claudia Roden's new Book of Middle Eastern Food. I turned the crockpot on low and let it cook from right before candlelighting until lunchtime.

It was terrible. I have a few guesses why. The main one is, the squash doesn't taste like zucchini. It was so bland and unpleasantly chewy. It was probably also a mistake to use the crockpot. We threw away the leftovers.

The rest of the lunch was pretty good. We had French bread from a local bakery instead of challah, and store-bought baked tofu. I made sunomono from a Mollie Katzen recipe (from Still Life with Menu.) You take mung bean thread noodles, soak them in boiling water, and then dress them in soy sauce, sugar, salt, and rice vinegar, and chill them until very cold. Right before serving you add peeled, sliced cucumbers. It's cool to make and refreshing to eat. I like cooking with bean threads in the hot summer. I also made a big salad with purple cabbage, two kinds of lettuce, artichoke hearts, thawed frozen organic haricot verts. We also had a good amount of leftover cauliflower.

All together, not the best cooking I've ever done, but we ate okay. My friend D. said he made a great  stufffed squash, inspired by my squash of last week. Maybe he will give me the recipe.

More Penguins!

We have not yet seen March of the Penguins, but I have some reviews of the children's books about penguins we have been reading, and a few more penguin sites you might enjoy. The short review of the four books we got is: We like them all. That is good, because we read them a LOT!

We ordered two picture books written for toddlers, Puffins Climb Penguins Rhyme by Bruce McMillan and Busy Penguins by John Schindel and Jonathan Chester.

I ordered the McMillan book first and it arrived last by several weeks! My son likes the toddler books. He immediately began memorizing the McMillan book, which he calls "Penguins rhyme" since, you know, who are these puffins anyway. It has only Gentoo penguins and one species of puffins, and at the end, a compare and contrast list of their characteristics. It's cool (hah!) to have these two sea birds from either end of the globe in one book. The puffins are really beautiful!

I would recommend Busy Penguins as the first book to introduce a child to this subject. It has many polar penguins, the photos are great, the rhymes are actually a bit better than the ones in the McMillan book, and it's a board book, which is easier for most children to keep nice. My son is very good with books, but I think even he has made small accidental tears in some favorites in his eagerness to turn fragile, shiny pages.

The other two books were a little advanced for a two year old. My son is now 29 months and mainly speaks in two or three word sentences. He tends to have patience for books that are a little ahead of him if they are about something that interests him. I think this is not uncommon!

We bought Baby Penguin from Aubrey Lang and Wayne Lynch's Nature Babies series.

This was my exposure to this series. The authors are a married couple, a pediatric nurse and doctor, who have travelled the world taking photographs for nature books for children. Baby Penguin is about an adolescent king penguin chick. King penguins have an enormous rookery and colony on South Georgia island. My husband thinks the photographs look like a Grateful Dead concert. I think some two year olds would be disturbed that the penguin baby book is about how the parents abandon the baby when it's about 13 months old and leave it to fledge with other chicks the same age. The book does show an egg on a parent's feet and a parent feeding a chick...but not a new baby chick, one of these enormous fuzzy bowling ball chicks. Lang tells you that year-old king penguin chicks are "as tall as kitchen tables". We compared my son to the kitchen table and he's the same height as a king penguin chick! In a postscript (one of those "Did you know?" lists) that the king penguin chick "resists starvation better than any warm blooded creature on earth." Well, that's reassuring! My son is not disturbed, he really likes the book and yells out "kitchen table!"

We got a really great price through ABE Books for a brand new copy of Penguin Planet by Kevin Schafer. Schafer also has a wonderful website. This is a shiny book of photographs pitched to readers from about 6th grade through adulthood. We do not read every word of this one. We look at every photograph and either read the captions or summarize them. My son can identify a chinstrap penguin (our new favorite), and other species including adélie, galapagos, king, emperor, and little blue. This book is beautiful and we learned a lot about penguins from it.

We also have some new favorite websites. As always with the internet, there is a whole world of stuff for the eager afficionado. We get a lot out of the Goleta Natural History Museum pages on penguins. This is a one-man operation, not a real museum! This fellow posted his good photos from a trip to Antarctica, but even better, his great sound files of penguin calls that he recorded! I think the gentoo penguin sounds like a Klaxon horn on a vintage automobile.

I have more--I'll do another post later. (It seems weird to say that after editing the post so many times. I am tired and kept forgetting things!)

last week's cooking and a preview of this week

I am quite behind on blogging! I have been looking for a full time job. I have two interviews set up for next week. In addition, I have taken on a second freelance job. Also, and this is crucial, every time that I'm near my computer that my son is awake, I have to look at penguins. I have a lot of new links for my new penguin fan readers. But in this post I am going to try to catch up on blogging my cooking.

Last weekend our family had dinner together, just the three of us, and then we had a bunch of friends to the house for lunch. I baked challah and it was incredibly good and I was not too exhausted to do it and also cook. I am getting into making the pull-apart yud beis loaves. This week I think I'm going to skip baking because it's so hot and I have to get a haircut tomorrow morning so I'll be presentable at my job interviews.

The exciting thing in last week's cooking was making a stuffed zucchini recipe from Fresh from the Vegetarian Slow Cooker. I borrowed the cookbook because I know that my readers are all having the same problems I am making vegetarian (and even omnivorous) cholent. I want to test a lot of the recipes and ideas so I can report back. I tested out this recipe for zukes stuffed with chipotle rice. The recipe was excellent--I mean the rice stuffing was nicely spiced and tasty-- and the cooker worked pretty well. You don't add liquid and the zucchinis sweat water into the pot. My cooker is a bit slow and I also stacked two layers of zukes. I think I need some practice.

This week I am going to do it again! I will be using another stuffed squash recipe. My husband bought Lebanese squash (called koosa) at the farmer's market. I want to make a Middle Eastern stuffed zucchini. The most traditional Lebanese recipe is with lamb and rice. You can find it on the Dove's food website, and also a nice zucchini with cheese dish. But we don't eat meat or cheese, so I'm going to have to improvise and let you know. (I never write about Middle East politics here--I can leave that to the Dove and other voices in my blogroll. They all disagree with each other on major things and are all smart, let them be like the chorus of commentators in the margins of the Talmud. Except more upsetting.)

I also made a very nice cold spinach soup.

Very Nice Cold Spinach Soup
1 onion, chopped
3 tablespoons olive oil
3 small Yukon Gold potatoes, chopped
1 bunch fresh spinach, rinsed obsessively and chopped
2 cups soy milk (or to taste)
salt and pepper

Sauté onion in oil in your soup pot until onion is golden and very sweet, about 20 minutes. Add potatoes and turn in the oil to flavor them. Add about 5 cups water and simmer another 30 minutes or until potatoes are tender. Turn off the heat and put the spinach on top. Stir it in so that it melts into the soup. Take your trusty immersion blender and purée the soup. Add soy milk to make it the right consistency and chill. Season with salt and pepper after it is cold. (It doesn't have to be soy milk, use whatever milky thing you like: rice milk, oat milk, almond milk, cow milk, goat milk, sheep milk, yak milk...whatever floats your boat.)

I also made Kasha Varnishkas, which everyone, but especially my toddler, loves.

Okay, more cooking tomorrow!

Attack in London

I can't believe the news this morning. When I was younger, I always wished to be the kind of cosmopolitan person who knows cities. I think many people all over the world have had that wish, and have decided to learn about London. Now we are all in our private corners of the globe, wondering if this or that person we met in the beautiful city was harmed by a bomb on their Tube carriage. Instead of feeling my fear or grief, I feel cold denial, just as I did when the planes hit the towers in New York on 9/11. I know I'm not alone in these feelings, or in offering prayers for the safety of people I know and people I don't know.