New Year// 2013

I can't even believe its 2013..goodbye 2012 and hello new possibilities? Not really. I have found that I didn't enter this year with the bright-eyed optimism I usually have on the first day of a new year. In fact,  I only see blurry, just barely able to make out what is there but seeing enough to keep moving while squinting for the clarity I once had. Its been this way for a while, I cannot pinpoint exactly when it began but I know for sure now that its no longer just something that's temporary,  I guess this is the limit, my limit. The point that one can only sustain the positivity and belief that just around the corner there is the life I was supposed to have. I have no five year plan, I barely have a one month plan, the uncertainty is heavy. I know, I know..we attach a kind of hyper optimism to our lives to be able to cope with the banality of the everyday, but what happens when the constancy of the everyday is tossed around, when there are just too many factors out of your control and too many relying on you that you can only rely on the little sliver of yourself preserved very deep within but not without question. I want to believe this is a transition, a threshold into something right, we have many of these in life some more dramatic and some less but nonetheless; they become hard lines in the sand of your life but are in the present just plain bitter. I have no resolutions, I am flying by the seat of my pants and that could make for a really tough landing. They say that you must completely hit the bottom to rebuild but gosh, I don't want to see the bottom, I also realize I have a real problem being stagnant and that is the best description for me right now..stagnation. I rapidly moved up in my career at a young age and then did what most of my colleagues would call self sabotage, I had a baby and now after having two, I am a different person. I love my little ones beyond words and felt very strongly about being fully present for them for as much time as I could but in doing so, I have lost the momentum I once had. It could be that with more responsibility, I have put more pressure on myself to be something that there just aren't enough hours in the day to be but I still feel too fragmented to call it anything. I am feeling more like.."hey..its another year(sigh) than..Hey!..Happy New Year. I don't want to sound negative or ungrateful because I am grateful for all I have and that I have so many possibilities for the future, I am just not good at dealing with unplanned, unorchestrated conduct. I need complete clarity and my feet place firmly on the ground to relax and right now I don't have either and its starting to make me a bit motion sick. I used to update my five year plan at the beginning of every year but since I no longer maintain one, I have to get used to going with the flow.  One conciliation is that its only the second day and I spent most of the first day in my pyjamas happily playing with babies so it can only get better right! I hope so..What to expect in 2013? I have no clue but stay tuned it's sure to be a roller-coaster of sorts.

Potato Latkes

So this year, Arielle is 4 years old and very aware of the differences and similarities in life and more specifically her family. She has in the past addressed color.. skin color that is and now has expressed an interest in learning about religion, in this case Catholicism and Judaism. Since she had been attending the Montessori school in our town, she has become more curious and very  opinionated about issues, it kind of scares me sometimes when I see how thorough her thought process is and the way she qualifies and differentiates things, its quite sophisticated. Anyway, we decide that's its no longer acceptable to be "nothing" and have decided to instead teach her background, her black, white, Judaism and Catholicism. She was Baptized over a year ago at the age of 2 1/2 but she really just thought it was like a birthday party! This year we included Santa, the Reindeer's and his counterpart Rosie the elf, lit a Menorah,  ate Latkes, baked holiday cookies, stayed up past midnight to open gift (tradition from my childhood) and had a big Christmas dinner. Although it has been a whirlwind its been good and I love it. I wish we could have included more of the husbands family for Arielle's sake but I have no control over what others chose to do. All in all, I think everyone came out happier and a few pounds heavier! The recipe is from the husband so please reserve your comments..they were good though!

Ingredients
1-1/2 pounds russet potatoes peeled
1/4 cup finely chopped shallots ( or yellow onion)
2 large eggs, lightly beaten
2 tablespoons flour (or more) or matzo meal (during Passover)
1 1/2 teaspoons salt and freshly ground black pepper
Vegetable oil for frying

1. Grate the potatoes in a food processor or using a manual grater.
2.  Line a sieve with cheesecloth and transfer potatoes to the sieve. Set sieve over a bowl, twist cheesecloth into a pouch, squeezing out some moisture. 
3. Add shallots (or onion), eggs, flour, 1-1/2 teaspoons of salt and freshly ground pepper. 
4. Return drained potatoes to this mixture and toss to combine.
5. Preheat oven to 200 degrees. Line a baking pan with paper towels. 
6. In a large skillet heat 1/4 inch of oil over medium high heat until hot. 
7. Drop heaping tablespoonfuls of potato mixture and cook for 3 to 4 minutes a side; latkes should be golden and crisp on both sides. 
8. Eat right away or keep warm in oven. 
9. Serve with applesauce.

Holiday Cheer

Since moving to our current home, we have joined in the tradition of holiday gift giving to the neighbors (some of which have become our friends) but last year I didn't give anything because I was tired and in a funk (and 3 months pregnant). This year, I decided to do the customary cookie gift but thought I would try to make it an elegant cookie gift. I fell for these birch wood boxes at Crate and Barrel and immediately ordered a few of them to hold the cookies. We spent half the day on Christmas eve making four kinds of cookies to put into theses gift boxes. After a few tries and some burning, tossing batter out and buying new ingredients, they came out quite well. Actually even after burning a few batches and some very flat chocolate cookies as well I was happy with the outcome and my baking skills. I had originally planned to make sugar cookies (easy) and Almond chocolate cookies (because I don't really fancy chocolate chip) but after four failed tries at the Almond chocolate, I got nervous. They were too chocolatey and melting into chewy pancakes in my oven. I realized after a few tries that I really needed more flour to give some substance and once I added an additional cup of flour they began to come out better.

As expected the sugar cookies came out great but I felt we had wasted so much of the chocolate batter that we wouldn't have enough cookies to fill the six boxes. Since I had way too many chocolate chips, I decided to add brown sugar chocolate chip cookies to the boxes, figured the kids would like them. As I was skimming through the Food Network 12 days of Cookies recipes, I saw a Shortbread recipe with 4 variations, one of which was the Chai tea shortbread and since I love Shortbread and I had tons of butter, I decided to attempt making them too. I have made shortbread before using a different recipe but they came out horribly but I really wanted to try again.
I actually think what really happened was I got so delirious I just couldn't stop myself from making more and more cookies...I lined the gift boxes with a Mara-mi specialty tissue I found which coincidentally had a red wood grain pattern printed on it, call me crazy but I thought it was very cool..wood box..wood grain tissue..get it?..No..ok!
Anyway, I was a bit surprised when I started putting them together, because I ended having more than enough cookies. All the chaos turned into what I really wanted which was a nice sampler of homemade cookies.
Don't get me wrong, it was fun but this isn't going to become an everyday occurrence because baking is a crazy sport..you can't become distracted for one minute or else something burns and you must be extremely precise while simultaneously being able to improvise and having enough knowledge about your ovens nuances to keep things under control. Between rotating the pan, watching for the slight browning of the edges to develop and taking them out immediately, you must be on top of it. One thing I found though was how inaccurate the cooking times were on the food network recipes, for example, I had to cut the cooking time in half for the brown sugar chocolate chip cooies because they kept burning! 

Modern Family// Christmas and Chanukah

Being the "modern family" that we are..(thats my attempt to be funny), we decided that this year it was time to embrace the goodness and really try to educate the kids about the differences between myself and my husband (besides the obvious..I'm Catholic and he's Jewish) and try to get them excited about them. So last week, he bought a Menorah, candles and started the first night of Chanukah off with some Potato Latkes and a prayer. Arielle was very interested and asked a lot of questions about it, coincidentally, we had been to a rather large Bar Mitzvah the weekend before so she had just been surrounded with hundreds of friends and family to celebrate her second cousin ( who was our ringbearer..)becoming a man!

Anyway, I was pleased with her level of dedication (and that of her dad) and very satisfied anytime the man cooks something..thats tasty. 

Anyway, we had our tree up early in December and as Christmas fast approaches, its filled with lovely wrapped silver presents delivered directly from the North Pole by the Elf who lives on our shelf and a lot of other places these days. I decided to jump on the elf bandwagon because I knew if I hadn't I would revert to just letting sleeping dogs lie and what fun is Christmas without a littlle anticipation, some terror over this elf watching your every move and some discipline on the side. So all in all, we're good with our modern traditions this year!