A Spectacular Sunday Brunch
Last year for Mother’s Day I hosted my parents at our house for what had been, up to that moment, The Best Brunch I’d Ever Made. I made hashed brown potatoes and scrambled eggs from Ina Garten’s Barefoot Contessa Family Style cookbook, and I’m sure we had bacon. I can’t remember whether I baked something as well. At any rate, it was the first time that everything I made tasted great and it gave me a real boost in the “kitchen confidence” department. Well, yesterday I attained a new “Personal Best: Brunch Category” with the following menu:
Eggs Benedict ala Ree Drummond via The Pioneer Woman Cooks: Food from My Frontier,
an encore performance by Ina Garten’s hashed brown spuds,
fresh fruit via my mother and last but not least:
Cinnamon-Bun Bites from a recent issue of Martha Stewart Living magazine.
I still have a long way to go before I’m an effortless entertainer — I’m talking decades of practice. I spent a lot of time on Saturday night getting things ready in advance, and then I had to spend Sunday morning in the kitchen too. Also, the cinnamon bun bites could have stood to leave the oven five minutes sooner, and it turns out I did not need to double the recipe for hollandaise sauce — Ree says it serves four, but the recipe served up ample decadent sauce for eight Benedicts! Oh, and I wish I hadn’t forgotten about the Canadian bacon warming up in a cast iron skillet in the oven — it was far from “bacon hard,” but it was heading down that road. But the point is that the food turned out great, and I’m going to repeat this menu the next time we host brunch. You’re invited. 
I was too caught up in trying to get things on the table to remember to snap more photos, but I took this one of the cinnamon bun bites:
Like this:
I’ve been loving The Book of Awakening by Mark Nepo since I got it in February. It’s organized into entries for each day of the year — short poetic, “enlightening” messages in bite-sized (i.e. a few paragraphs, not chapters) nuggets. I like to read it before bed because each day’s entry puts me in a thoughtful, uplifted frame of mind. A few examples:
We are all frail. We all make mistakes. We all fall prey to a thousand emotions and exaggerations. But these things make us rich, not weak — if we are wiling to face them squarely. In truth, it is not the tissue of our humanity that defeats us, but rather our refusal to accept who we are and to live accordingly, limitations included.
- From The Book of Awakening, entry for March 19th
The mind is a spider that, if allowed, will tangle everything and then blame the things it clings to for the web it wants to be free of. I have done this with dreams of greatness and hopes of love, wanting so badly to see myself clearly in the water, while I kept stirring. Perhaps the hardest thing I’ve learned, and still struggle with, is that I don’t have to be finished in order to be whole.
- From The Book of Awakening, entry for March 21st
… I have since unfolded the grip in my heart, and humbly, I can see now that the real challenge of surrdender, for all of us, is not just letting go — but letting go of something we yearn for. The truth is that food is everywhere. … For though we stubbornly cling, believing in our moment of hunger that there is no other possibility of love, we only have to let go of what we want so badly and our life will unfold. For love is everywhere.
- From The Book of Awakening, entry for March 7th
Like this:
Gesundheit!
Feeling Full
As I polish off one last square of dark chocolate praline Ritter Sport, I want to share this great article by Anne Lamott on being full. Like Lamott, I spent a lot of my life trying to fill an emotional void with food, shopping, or relationships. Now, in my mid-30′s, my eyes have been opened to filling the void with creative endeavors, contentment in my family and home, and gratitude. I’m still a work in progress — on Easter Sunday I let myself slide into old habits for the day and overindulged on food. I can’t help but think it’s different though, when it’s one or two days a year that I “go crazy” instead of oh, just a Wednesday night because of feeling bored or blue! Anyway, I hope everyone enjoyed the weekend with family of your birth or of your choosing.
My favorite lines from Lamott’s piece are toward the end:
All I ever wanted since I arrived here on Earth were the things that turned out to be within reach, the same things I needed as a baby—to go from cold to warm, lonely to held, the vessel to the giver, empty to full. You can change the world with a hot bath, if you sink into it from a place of knowing that you are worth profound care, even when you’re dirty and rattled. Who knew?
Spring Break in San Diego, Part II
My husband and I toted the kids to San Diego for spring break and we had a fabulous time. The weather could have been a tad warmer, but 65-degrees feels warmer in San Diego than it does in Denver. In Denver on a 65-degree day I enjoy wearing short-sleeves with no jacket — in San Diego on a 65-degree day we went in the outdoor heated pool at the hotel. And the beach. Layering is key — I should have packed fewer warm-weather clothes and more t-shirts to wear under a light jacket. Ah well.
We stayed in an-all suites hotel thinking that after we put the kids to bed at 8:00, my husband and I could get some Indian takeout and catch up on movies from Netflix. It turned out that we went to bed when the kids did! We were wiped out at each day’s end. Hotel sleep is not equivalent to home sleep, and we’d started off the trip with a sleep deficit thanks to a 4AM wake-up time. Anyway, it was still nice to have the extra space of the suite and having a kitchenette was fabulous for washing water bottles, storing leftovers and stashing sandwich-making supplies. I don’t think we bought a single lunch all week!
Highlights of the week included multiple visits to La Jolla Cove where there were lots and lots of seals and dramatic views and sandy beaches:
…and a one-day blast through Disneyland! We made the 1-1/2 hour trek to Anaheim because, well, we were so close – comparatively speaking! A word to anyone considering this schlep — don’t fear the Los Angeles traffic if you are planning to get to Disneyland at opening time (8AM as of last week). We left really really early because a fool at our hotel said we’d need to double our drive time to allow for traffic. Well, I hope that person is suffering a horrible case of hives or some kind of punishment right now, because we got up painfully early and didn’t need to. Let’s just say the parking structure wasn’t open yet when we arrived — and it opens at 6:30AM!!! (Note to self: always get a second opinion!) Anyway, both of my kids loved Disneyland and so did my husband and I. We used The Unofficial Guide to Disneyland 2012 and followed the “Dumbo or Die in a Day” plan, omitting attractions that sounded too scary for the kids (i.e. Pirates of the Caribbean, The Haunted Mansion). I can’t recommend this guidebook enough and will definitely get the Disney World version when we make that pilgrimage in a few years.
Oh Walt, you clever sonofagun, you!
We also consistently enjoyed the sand and surf at Mission Beach. Easy parking, public restrooms close at hand, lifeguards keeping an eye on things — a mom’s dream. We made the best sand castles — our Colorado reservoir outings just can’t even compare. Boo hoo!
Throwing sand is fun!
Sand like brown sugar between your toes.
Awesome shell-hunting at low, low tide.
We had two misses on our trip — the first was attempting to check out the Point Loma tide pools at the Cabrillo National Monument. These were not the glorious feast-for-the-eyes tide pools I’ve enjoyed exploring in other coastal areas where urchins and starfish and loads of other creatures were hanging out in abundance. There were a couple of crabs and three anemones in these tide pools. Maybe it was an off day, or the wrong time of year — anyway, the tide was out but the area for visitors to explore was not very big and the waves were much much much much higher than us. I was creeped out. Hey, I’m a landlubber — and I’ll never apologize for it! Stupid, scary tides. At one point water rushed up high enough to knock my wee girl off her feet and into a large rock — I grabbed her before she was completely submerged, but we were “done” at that point.
The crumbling cliffs at Point Loma are a nervous mother's nightmare.
Another miss was the San Diego Zoo. My husband and I had a fabulous day there about 6 years ago — so… pre-kid. Let’s just say the place is not designed for the 2-child strollers they rent and we were battling crowds on the narrow, twisty, hilly paths all day. And by “all day” I mean the three hours, because that’s all we could handle. We saved the zoo until our last day because we needed to go somewhere between hotel checkout and our evening flight home — somewhere that didn’t involve the kids gaining ten pounds of salt-and-sand weight. I guess we were all too burned out to love the zoo that day. I was irrationally annoyed that many of the animals were off display or hiding. The price for one day at the zoo in San Diego was what we paid for our yearly family membership at The Denver Zoo, and the only animal we saw in California that they don’t have here was a panda. Having said that, we all really enjoyed seeing that panda! I should note that when I was there years ago, all of the animals seemed to be in “performance mode” and it was fabulous.
I would go to San Diego again next week if I could somehow avoid the hassle of flying (oh, and if my funds were unlimited — details!!!). I don’t have any restaurant reviews to share because by the end of our days of sightseeing or beach-going or pool-swimming and car naps (or no naps) plus hotel sleep, my husband and I felt like we’d rather just get something from Whole Foods and save our “good restaurant money” for date nights at home while a babysitter minds our punchy (or grumpy) children.
PS — Totally random, as we waited at the Southwest terminal for our flight back to Denver, whom should we see but Amy Roloff waiting for a flight back to Portland! She was traveling with her daughter Molly. I resisted the urge to bother her, but I did give a little wave and a smile and she was on her cellphone but she waved and smiled back. She probably recognized me from my trip to her farm back in 2010. 
PPS — A churro at Disneyland costs $2.99. A churro at the San Diego Zoo costs $3.75. I know this is totally hillbilly to even put into print, but… a churro at Costco in Denver costs 99-cents.
PPPS — Officially, you’re not supposed to bring outside food into Disneyland. But… I wish we’d smuggled in some sandwiches — the bag inspection was very cursory and I doubt very much that they would have made us toss anything out! Also, my friend Jo was able to bring sandwiches into Disney World with no problems at all.
