I need to remember that puzzles do almost as much good in terms of babysitting Degen and Maggie for me as TV. Only a little messier. But less guilt!

Heidi ate baby food peas today for the first time. She wasn’t quite as excited about them as she was about the squash, but pondered the first bite for a minute or two before resuming her scream-before-each-bite routine. She’s having a little more trouble eating people food than I recall with my older two. She shakes in excited anticipation of each bite and will only open her mouth for a millisecond for me to put the spoon in, I can only assume because she thinks I’m going to take the food out of her mouth before she gets to swallow it. One big plus this time around–Sonja has her trained to ignore the bib, where my other two tore them from their necks as quickly as I could put them on. Saves me a lot of grubbiness.

Long before I read Seth Godin’s How to Title Stuff or Alex Witze’s SAA: How to title your paper I myself went to college, and there spent a lot of time mocking firsthand the evolution of sassy subtitles.  Back in the day you would write a man’s title for your paper: “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.”  There was only one subtitle, which was “My paper,” and beyond 6th grade it was implied.  Now every paper has a subtitle, and every student apparently plays Rock Paper Scissors to decide on which line to put the real title and on which to put the joke-title.  The youngest undergraduates  have never seen a real title on either line.  The portfolio-generation only knows to put their name and an unpronounceable symbol representing their feelings.  Even the Ph.D.s don’t go beyond “Tom Saw… what?: Visual Imagery in Twain’s Eleventh Book.”  And when those kids get out of school and quit writing papers gratia commentarii, they title everything in the only way they know how.  Grown up they wield a billion dollars to take a drug to market, then name it Abilify or The Purple Pill.  Demonstrative names are passé–marketing requires feelings and impressions.  Cars, chidren, recipes…

Imitating one’s grandma or her pies is old fashioned now. So for every child named “Boyce” there is a correlative apple pie christened “Freestyle Fuji: The Motion Streusel.”  If you look in a recipe book for “apple pie,” more often than not you’ll be sent to the impressionistically “apple pie -ish” section (because who looks under “freestyle”?)  If it’s a hip book, nothing in that section will use the word “pie,” and rarely will it use the word “apple.”  Ask a waitress what kind of pies they have for dessert and she’s just as likely to say “Rustic Autumn” as “apple.”   A bit of that is understandable–specialization generates perceived value, funky ingredients generate perceived value, and everyone wants a memorable name to prove that imitating oneself is the highest form of self-flattery.  The naming schemes that once were reserved for restaurants in San Francisco (“Slalom”, “Maisonchienne”, “Shack!”) have now mated with your friendly neighborhood meatloaf.

As such I remind the world of the following dessert-taxonomy equation from the Bethanyology Manual of Style:

Author + Adjective1 + Main Ingredient by Weight + Adjective2
* There must be at least one adjective, and at least one adjective must reference a desciptor, common to the region, of the style of cooking.

The BMOS taxonomy is what most cookbook publishers use, partially because it allows a lot of leverage.  So “Grandma Becky’s Rustic Rhubarb Flambé” is pretty far out there, but no less legal than “Mary’s fried chicken.”  The moving streusel referenced above is more properly rendered “Slalom’s Fuji Apple Pie.”  (Some restaurant review guides, in 2009, will allow “Slalom presents… Fuji Apple Pie.)  But notice the name, which shows humility because it does not vainly pretend that this is the definitive pie, but Slalom’s entry into an established and rotund corpus.  Subtitles are still allowed, as are descriptors on a menu, so you do have quite a wide range of freedom if your marketing absolutely needs something bastardized.

If you have any questions or are interested in having your menu audited and certified, please contact us below.

I fed my kids and myself waffles for dinner tonight.  Not homemade waffles, which are superior to anything else in every way except prep time/effort.  We ate Eggo waffles for dinner, with syrup on top.  Not pure maple syrup, but a simple sugar syrup flavored with immitation maple flavoring that I made myself a while back. I remember when I was little I always wanted to fill each individual waffle hole with syrup before eating and hardly ever got to do it before Mom or Dad stopped me, protesting the amount of sugar and the number of diners left to share the syrup with.  “Save some fore Virginia!”  Did I do that tonight?  No, but I remembered it while I ate and it made me smile to think that I could do it if I wanted to.

This unhealthy fare was a celebration, or perhaps an adamant denial, in honor of my bloodwork results from my prenatal doctor appointment last week that I found online today when I logged in to my insurance web page for the first time.  My blood sugar was a point over normal on my gestational diabetes glucose one-hour screening test.  Very likely when my OB gets back from vacation tomorrow she’ll be calling me to let me know I have to go in to take the 3-hour version of the glucose intolerance test, and I consider it even more likely that I’ll test positive for gestational diabetes.  And that means no waffles with syrup for a few months unless I’m willing to starve one morning in favor of a few bites of one of my favorite foods.

So, before the diagnosis is official, and before that placenta gets big enough to cause serious blood sugar spiking, I had myself a good stack of waffles.  I miss breakfast food when I’m on a diabetes diet.  For breakfast on that diet, I can have a total meal of about one Eggo with a dollop of Cool Whip (no syrup) if I want to go the waffle route.  Or half a cup of breakfast cereal with half a cup of milk.  I can have all the eggs and bacon and sausage I want, but through some sad twist of irony eggs and bacon and sausage all make me nauseous to one degree or another during most of my pregnancy.  Strawberries and cantaloupe are better choices with larger volumes allowed, but I sure miss those breakfast grains.

I get that an official diagnosis won’t change whether I actually have it now or not.  It’s still not good for me, diabetes or not, to have that much sugar.  And posting this confession will hardly do anything for my arguments against the nearly intolerable fasting glucose intolerance test involving the stupidity of having a possibly diabetic person drink a huge amount of glucose and shocking her sugar-processing system.  But my waffle eating ritual calmed my misgivings about whether I can stand going through this process again.  I really don’t want any more waffles.  I think I can probably actually survive the next six months on a small brownie square interspersed here and there among my healthier alternatives.  I am steeled for the news, prepared as much as I can be.

P.S. I also ate an artichoke with my waffles.  I feel pretty good about that.

So what’s for breakfast?  Wheat Thins.  I’m having room-temperature crackers for breakfast.  Crackers I have to ask my kids for permission to eat.  Degen holds the box, I say “May I please have some more?” and he carefully considers his answer each time before answering “uuuuuhhh..sure!” and handing me one cracker (sometimes one half-eaten cracker).  In all fairness, while I was typing the above he got impatient waiting for my plea and said “You want some more?”  When I answered affirmatively, he of course gave me one more cracker.  He’s really very generous for a three year old.

I’m sitting here trying to think of foods that sound good enough to eat.  Donuts…with chocolate frosting on top.  Strawberries.  Waffles with syrup.  Cantaloupe.  I could probably eat a burrito or chicken noodle soup.  And I can’t think of anything else.  I don’t really have cravings when I’m pregnant–I have foods I don’t hate.  And that list of foods gets smaller and smaller with each pregnancy because the foods I binged on in the last pregnancy are particularly disgusting to me this time around.   Hopefully I won’t have so many kids that I run out of foods to not hate!

I’m not really trying as hard as I “should” to keep the carbs to a minimum right now.  With my history of gestational diabetes I’m sure my doctor would say that putting waffles with syrup or donuts on my list of foods I can eat is totally inappropriate.  And keeping up with my exercise routine would be especially helpful right now, too.  The stress of moving and morning sickness, however, say otherwise.  Maybe I’ll try to take the kids swimming later today…

Today, April 30th, is 31 cent scoop night at Baskin Robbins!  Really!  See their web page here if you don’t believe me.  To honor the nation’s firefighters, selected Baskin Robbins stores sell small ice cream scoops for 31 cents tonight from 5pm to 10pm, and they donate $100,000 to the National Fallen Firefighters Foundation.   Isn’t that lovely?  I’m thinking since they have a no-sugar-added chocolate chocolate chip flavor that just fits into my 30-grams-of-carbs evening snack, we might be on our way over there tonight.

Speaking from some experience with cooking only with stored food, it’s important to store some food and learn how to cook with it.  Even if you only eat out every day and every meal and have a tiny apartment, it’s worth having some backup food just in case you have a natural disaster or unemployment hit your family longer or harder than you expect.  Even when we’re running low on money, I’ve tried to keep a well-stocked pantry with canned fruits, veggies (tomato products are a staple in our house), beans (I try to store a lot of beans since they’re high protein, low carb, and high fiber and our resident diabetic shouldn’t do too much in the way of carbs), and packages of pasta, dry beans, rice, flour, sugar, some dry milk powder, spices, baking powder, baking soda, and yeast.  Some weeks are a lot better than others in our pantry, but I do make some effort.

When we’ve run out of money and had to live on our food storage for a while, the things I miss most are milk, cheese, and eggs.  Powdered milk isn’t as yummy as fresh when you drink it or put it in cereal, though it’s hard to tell the difference when you mix them 1/2 and 1/2, but it’s great in anything cooked.  I’ve never tried to store more than a week or two worth of cheese or eggs, but I recently found out you can buy them dehydrated and would like to get some one of these days. We also missed fresh fruit and veggies, but it helped that we had a lot of canned ones (and things like jello).  Storing things like cake mixes, instant pudding, and other sweets and “comfort foods” helped too, since we only have to survive on food storage when we’re stressed out and having favorite foods around helps make things seem a little less unbearable.

I don’t have a wheat grinder (one of those “someday” items that I’d love to buy myself), but I saw my mom make pancakes with whole wheat kernels in the blender once.  I found a recipe for banana bread today that called for whole wheat flour and I thought “I wonder if I could just blend up some of my wheat in that can in the closet and use that in the recipe?”  I didn’t ever get around to trying it, but while I was trying to look it up, I came across a really neat site called Walton Feed where they sell dehydrated foods and have lots of ideas on how compile a food storage and then use it on a regular basis.  They even have a pita recipe that sounds promising.  Another post on pita coming soon…