Christmas is coming...

...in less than a month! I started my Christmas sewing on Saturday, turning some gold-colored brocade from my fabric stash into a tree skirt. In former lifetimes it has been both pillow shams and a valance above our shower. A little Velco, a little gold braid (and a whole lot of calculating and then recalculating the diameter of the circle based on the amount of gold braid I had to go around the circumferance) and voilà! Things old are new again.

Next up: stockings for me and Jim. I made our original stockings back in 1996 and they're just so... 90s. You know, earth-tone red and green plaids with pine trees and hearts. I wanted something a little more expressive of our personalities, so over the last few months I bought some Simpsons Christmas fabric for Jim and sock monkey Christmas fabric for me.

Today I started planning our yearly advent calendar line-up, inspired by this post at Playful Learning. Our annual favorites will be back, including:

• putting up the tree on December 1st
• reading about the history and significance of Christmas symbols such as the wreath, the candle and the star
• making Christmas cookies
• hanging our stockings
• visiting the local animal shelter with donations for needy critters

This year I'll be adding some new activities:

• making Christmas cards for teachers
• reading about the history of the winter solstice
• decorating ice cream cone Christmas trees (instead of the usual gingerbread houses)
• creating ornaments for grandparents

and the one I'm really excited about (because Audrey suddenly has a wild hair that she wants to eat tamales after we learned about them for Día de los Muertos) ...

•  learning about how Las Posadas is celebrated in Mexico and making tamales

So many things to look forward to!

Día de los angelitos

I've mentioned in several previous posts that I have a thing for Día de los Muertos. Yesterday, the day after my baby would have been due, it was comforting to remember that November 1st is Día de los Angelitos, a day to honor children and infants who have died.


Día de los Angelitos

Yesterday
would have been the first day
for me to wrap you in a soft blanket
nuzzle you to my breast
stroke the down
in the warm hollow
at the nape of your neck.

Today
I pray if I cannot hold you
you are cradled instead
in the arms of heaven.

Holy mole (poblano)

At the end of last summer, Jim was flipping channels and came across an episode of "Tyler's Ultimate" about mole poblano. I think I was in the kitchen, or maybe some other part of the house playing with the kids.

"Honey, get in here!"

Jim knows mole is my favorite Mexican dish, and was right in thinking I wouldn't want to miss learning how to make it. Unfortunately, we tuned in about ten minutes from the end of the show, and even though the recipe was online, I wanted to see all the how-to.

So I set up the DVR to record every episode of "Tyler's Ultimate", and then had to spend some time each week culling through all the unwanted shows, until late in the fall I finally got my mole poblano episode.

I've been holding off making it for a while because I wanted to use turkey instead of chicken, which is more authentic. We had turkey for New Year's dinner, and within a week I'd reached my limit with turkey sandwiches and turkey soup. I'd already boiled the carcass for broth, and the rest of the meat languished undisturbed its Ziploc container in the fridge for over a week. Last night I knew it was time to retire the turkey to the freezer before it went bad, or finally give the mole poblano recipe a test drive.

Making mole is a complex process because of the long list of ingredients and the multiple steps that include roasting, grinding, pureeing, and so forth. Everything was going fine until I put the roasted almonds, oregano, cinnamon, sesame seeds and pepper into Jim's spice grinder.

The grinder started to spew out the coarse powdered ingredients, and then suddenly it seized up and started to smell strongly of hot almonds. Not a good sign. I wound up using my molcajete to grind all the spices, which was actually very enjoyable, and contributed to my illusion of an "authentic" experience.

When finished, the mole was flavorful, spicier than I expected (I'm used to the gringo-friendly restaurant version), and absolutely delish. I served it with brown rice and corn tortillas... at least that's how I ate it. Jim prefers flour tortillas. And the kids, well, they had pigs in blankets.

The leftovers tasted even better when I had some for lunch today. This time I added a bit of sliced avocado and lime juice. Mmm.

Now I've just gotta figure out how to de-gunk Jim's spice grinder.

Bread of the dead

I have an on-going love affair with many things Mexican. Mexican oilcloth. Mexican hot chocolate. Mexican history. Mexican culture. Mexican art. Mexican literature. Mexican molcajetes. Mexican music. And, por supuesto que sí, Mexican cuisine. I think my Mexico thing goes back to my BFF in first grade, Susí. She and her family were from Mexico City and she was Just. So. Cool. We spent hours listening to ABBA on the boombox in her bedroom, pretending "Dancing Queen" was all about us.

As I've mentioned before, one of the things that fascinates me most about Mexican culture is the Day of the Dead. I won't go into the boring details but if you're interested, Wikipedia.com has a good explanation of Dia de los Muertos' history and significance. I volunteered to do a small cultural lesson for our home school group this week, and thought the timing would be perfect to spotlight Dia de los Muertos, which is coming up on Sunday and Monday. And not just because I wanted to bake pan de muerto again (though that would have been a good enough reason all by itself!)

My loaf turned out a bit misshapen compared to the real thing, but it tasted heavenly. Yes, technically the sugar topping made it off limits, but I ripped a piece of crust off the bottom to sample (all in the name of quality control, mind you!)

This recipe is easy, absolutely delicious, and the heavenly smell of the cinnamon and anise seeds when it's baking is divine. I had to fight the kids off after their third and fourth helpings so I'd have enough to take home to Jim.


Pan de Muerto (Bread of the Dead)

¼ cup milk
¼ cup butter (half a stick)
¼ cup sugar
½ teaspoon salt
1 package active dry yeast
¼ cup very warm water
2 eggs
3 cups all-purpose flour, unsifted
½ teaspoon anise seed
¼ teaspoon ground cinnamon
2 teaspoons sugar

Bring milk to boil and remove from heat. Stir in butter, ¼ cup sugar and salt. In large bowl, mix yeast with warm water until dissolved and let stand five minutes. Add the milk mixture. Separate the yolk and white of one egg. Add the yolk and the other whole egg to the yeast mixture, and save the white for later. Now add flour to the yeast and egg. Blend well until dough ball is formed.

Flour a pastry board or work surface very well and place the dough in center. Knead until smooth. (I used the dough hook on my stand mixer and kneaded the dough for five minutes, which worked just as well). Return to large bowl and cover with dish towel. Let rise in warm place for 90 minutes. Meanwhile, grease a baking sheet and preheat the oven to 350° F.

Knead dough again on floured surface. Now divide the dough into fourths and set one fourth aside. Roll the remaining 3 pieces into “ropes”. On greased baking sheet, pinch 3 rope ends together and braid. Finish by pinching ends together on opposite side. Divide the remaining dough in half and form two “bones”. Cross and lay on top of braided loaf. (Note: I think the form of the loaf varies regionally. I followed these instructions the first time I made the bread, but the loaf I made today was round, with “bones” on top, modeled after some images I found on the internet).

Cover bread with dish towel and let rise for 30 minutes. Meanwhile, in a bowl, mix anise seed, cinnamon, and 2 teaspoons sugar together. In another bowl, beat egg white lightly. When 30 minutes are up, brush top of bread with egg white and sprinkle with sugar mixture. Bake at 350° F for 35-40 minutes.

Countdown to thirty-nine

That's right: a week from today I hit the big 3-9. Which feels like more than just the runner up for a major milestone, because I'll have less than a year to think about what it means to be forty before it smacks me across the head.

When I hit my last decade marker, I was depressed because I hadn't reached some important goals I hoped to accomplish by that point: getting my bachelor's degree and starting our family topped the list. Fortunately, Jim's birthday present to me was a pair of diamond solitaire earrings, which immediately yanked me back from the brink of despair because, hey, who needs some lousy piece of paper to hang on your wall when you have diamonds, right?

My thirties have had a great run. I did get my degree. I swam, biked and ran a triathlon. I learned (and forgot a lot of) Spanish. I traveled to Mexico. Twice. I read several hundred books. I gave birth to two wonderful children. And I'm still married to the same sensitive, intelligent, generous guy with great taste in jewelry. Oh, and handsome. Did I mention handsome?

I've been pretty introspective about it over the last couple weeks, because I want to be at peace with being forty, which means this is the year to get just a few more things done before the decade ends. I've got some big things in the works, too. Things I've been needing to do, putting off, struggling with. But I can feel it: this is the year.

NaPoWriMo #28: jargon

This week's prompt at Read Write Poem is "jargon". In 1999 I enrolled as a history major at the University of Washington and found myself immersed in a field with its own specialized vocabulary. At the same time I was working at the City of Bellevue in their transportation department, and a huge part of my job was to write newsletters to residents about transportation projects being constructed in their neighborhoods. It was a weird time because on the one hand I had to translate very technical engineering jargon into everyday language at about a sixth grade reading level, and in my after hours I was slogging through obtuse terms like "hegemony", "milieu", and "historiography" and learning how to bandy them about in the many, many, many term papers I was required to write.

I felt like my writing had a split personality, and rather than completely compartmentalize, I started to fuse the two styles. Not that I wrote about the hegemony of transportation. Or dumbed down my research projects. Instead, I tried to resist the urge to be as verbose as many of the historians I was reading; I kept my papers as pithy, interesting, descriptive and fluid as possible, using lingo only where appropriate and necessary. I tried to think about writing my papers in such a way that people would actually want to read them, rather than making myself sound stuffy and academic. Mostly this worked (I got excellent grades and one professor in particular gushed about my writing), but my boss did on occasion send back drafts of my newsletters, telling me I needed to tone down the vocabulary.

History’s Failing

I doubt the Aztecs knew
they were falling to
Spain’s inexorable hegemony or
if the curved-helmed conquistadors
were aware of their driving
force in a colonial milieu
that might have shifted opposite
if not shaped by smallpox
what does it matter for
Hernán Cortés Pizarro
Bernal Díaz del Castillo
Francisco López de Gómara
Bernardino de Sahagún
are on more spines than
Fernando Alvarado Tezozómoc
Motecuhzoma Xocoyotzin
Cuitlahuac and
especially Malintzin
the failing of history is
no terms translate hegemony
into the reality that every one of
Tenochtitlan’s thousand upon
thousand now anonymous casualties
had a face and a name.

NaPoWriMo #9: bones

I've got a thing for the Day of the Dead. It started in middle school when I read The Halloween Tree, by Ray Bradbury. The skeletons creeped me out, but I was morbidly fascinated.

In my college Spanish class I had to do an oral report on some aspect of Hispanic culture, so I chose to do it about the Day of the Dead, and came across The Labyrinth of Solitude, by Octavio Paz. In Paz' treatise on the Mexican psyche, an entire chapter is devoted to the Day of the Dead, and it changed my point of view forever. In further studies in an Anthropology course on Aztec Thought and Culture I learned that the entire ninth month of the ancient Aztec calendar was set aside for honoring their dead, including one day devoted just to remembering children who had died. I don't think this was about compartmentalizing grief to just the observed period of time. Rather, it struck me as being a very emotionally healthy way to normalize coping and grieving.

I've been discussing with some moms in my playgroup lately about when and how to talk to kids about death, be it goldfish or grandparents. It's sad how our Western culture (Euro-North-American) is so paralyzed by its fixation on youth, fed by fear of death. I have great respect for a cultural tradition that teaches about death in the context of its part in a continuing cycle of being. Pardon the pun, but ¡viva día de los muertos!


Día de los Muertos

At first I failed to appreciate the
too sweet savor of a sugar skull
pungent brightness of scattered marigold petals
soft succulent bread with tender anise sprinkled crust
skeletons in frilly dresses riding their bicycles
but it was the ofrendas
oh, the ofrendas
decorated in lavish affection
with best beloved delicacies of those departed
chilis, tortillas, chocolate, tamales
each faded photo bathed in candlelight
they made me yearn to be so joyously mourned
made me see one day a year was not enough
to laugh in the gaping jaw
the hollow sockets of my own mortality
and revel in a comfortingly macabre sensibility
of death as an old friend.