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bulletproof chai tea
One month in and I’m black tea addict. It all started when a little girl named Joan began waking up at 5am every morning with the reliability of the garbage man. I needed something quiet to make, that I could have multiple cups of, that I could drink all day.
To make things more fun for myself at this grim hour, I decide to buy solidly indulgent supplies. First I bought a nice raw sugar, brown, grainy and faintly molasses flavored. And I bought two nice strong black teas. Still cheaper than a week’s worth of coffee, I did love loitering in the tea aisle at Whole Foods for awhile and browsing the dreamy marketing. Goodbye Twinings Earl Grey: you simply were not strong enough for me. I would love to get some of Cambridge’s MEM tea next time I’m at a retailer.
Then, last week, I went over to Bridget’s house for a playdate (in which the moms play and the children sit quietly and discuss health trends). She offered us bulletproof coffee, which I had never heard of, and it was delicious! Essentially buttered coffee with coconut oil, grass-fed butter, some cream, some cinnamon, all of it blended together into a latte-colored frothy mugful. Satisfying and quenching all in one.
Bulletproof was developed from the animals-fats-and-cholesterol-make-things-better school of thought, same idea as Nourishing Traditions or Nina Planck’s Real Food. (I probably don’t need to tell you that these theories attempt to fight the blame put on saturated fats from the ’70s that older adults are still espousing to this day. Ideas like “butter clogs arteries,” and “don’t eat too many eggs,” that have since been disproven.)
I would link to the guy’s website who trademarked the genius term bulletproof, but frankly: it’s ugly. And he’s a bit obsessed with butter. Let’s take this in moderation, shall we? This is something to have one cup of, in the morning, to begin your day satisfied.
My question was whether it would work with black tea. I tried it with a chai tea blend. It was quite good.
I would still like to be invited to Bridget’s regularly to have her coffee version, but this was very nice before a blustery Boston morning. My only thought is that you should make the tea stronger than you typically would–maybe three bags worth for 16 oz of liquid.
bulletproof chai tea16 oz water steeped with three black tea bags or chai blend
Spoonful / 2 T unrefined organic coconut oil
2 T butter (grassfed if you can find it, kerrygold is everywhere these days)
dash of cinnamon
dash of creamBlend, in a blender!
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This week
“A portrait of my daughters, once a week, every week, in 2014.”
Joan: where she loves to be, not missing a thing (even football off the internet).
Lux: this week I watched her play, really play and laugh and get giddy, with her friends. -
snacks
Making waffles for your household is a handy habit because they refrigerate well and they freeze very well. They are quite filling and you know exactly what went into them. I was raised to put peanut butter and cottage cheese on my waffles–sounds crazy but it is a remarkably balanced carb-protein snack. If you’re in the market for that kind of thing.
These have no sugar, so that means you can be extra enthusiastic about the maple syrup dipping.
Blueberry syrup was developed for this occasion. I scooped half a cup of blueberries out of the freezer, put them in the pyrex with the syrup and heated them both in the microwave. I wasn’t too convinced by the flavor but Lux thought it was the best thing ever.
Sugar Free Whole Wheat Waffles from Simply in Season, p. 297
2 eggs (beaten)
2 cups plain yogurt
Combine in a large bowl.
1 cup whole wheat flour
1 cup flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
Combine in a small bowl then stir into egg mixture.
1/4 cup oil
Add and stir together until blended; do not over-mix or the waffles will get tough.
Bake in a hot waffle iron.
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This week
“A portrait of my daughters, once a week, every week, in 2014.”
Lux: she wakes up and talks to her animals for ten minutes every morning before calling for us. (Lux is now 2.5 years old)
Joan: she’s only content if she’s in the same room as her sister. Otherwise she grumbles. (Joan is now six months old) -
self care
I’m experimenting with something new: having two hours to myself, once or twice a week. For Christmas my older brother bought me a two month membership to a nearby gym that has childcare. Um, woah. That was a surprise.
The girls are simultaneously in an almost freakish sweet spot where they are perfectly happy in the care of strangers. Freakish to me, after the scenes I’ve been through with Lux at a younger age, that now I wander out with nary a whimper as the door closes behind me.
I confess that I often think, “I’ll just go sit in the steam room and then take a hot shower for an hour. No one has to know that I never actually exercised.”
The gym is blissful spot really. There’s some kind of waterfall behind the front desk so the first thing you hear when you get off the elevator is the sound of falling water. There are walls of freshly folded white towels. A cafe with all the trendy smoothie add-ons I don’t want in my pantry, but I do want to try: maca root, spirulina, bee pollen. It’s thrumming with Boston’s beautiful people steadily getting more perfect. The first day I walked through the primary gym room to find myself a treadmill, I thought “Jeez you all look great. I think you’re doing fine. Treat yourself to a matinee!”
Yesterday I settled onto a wood bench in the gloriously hot and dry sauna. After a moment I noticed that the woman across from me was doing some kind of calisthenics on her bench. She had the look of someone who was older, but her skin wasn’t showing it. Neither was her hair. This must be her secret, I thought. Calisthenics in the sauna. I bet she’s here everyday.
I admire that kind of self care, but this gift is coming at a time when I’ve almost totally dropped that from my register. I’m more likely to have a strong drink in the evenings than take a soothing bath. More likely to collapse on the couch with my phone than do some stretches on the floor. I get everyone ready in the morning and then I dart around for five minutes getting myself ready. I feed everyone well, but then snack on coffee for myself.
Something that I thought about during my yoga class yesterday is the moment when people grab something to cover themselves, to get a little warmer. There’s something so nice about that movement. When a girl drapes a scarf around her head and snuggles into it. When a blanket gets piled on. Watching a man put on his hat and settle it just so, tugging it down over his ears. When you shrug a sweater over your head and continue on, feeling a little bolstered and braver.
It’s self care at its most immediate. I need a little something extra right now—ah, a blanket. Ok, now I’m ready.
Totally coincidentally I undressed in the locker room next to the exact same 70-something-year-old woman that I had sat next to in yoga. We were both very naked, and discussing the amount of clothing we were about to put on. “The difference between us and them,” she said, referring to the southern states in the midst of a deep freeze, “is that we have the clothes for this.” I looked over my clumsy pile of daily gear–the pilling mittens with useful flaps that fold back, a thin yet warm knit hat, a broad scarf, the long jacket already tipped with salt stains–and felt proud. I’m not doing all the nice things for myself that I could be, like most of the people here. But I’m doing a few of them.
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sleep to come
It is my veteran opinion that the conscientious art of sleep training occurs to a mother right around the time she needs it. I’ve seen it in myself, I’ve seen it in other mamas. They get a firm look on their face as they talk about the absurd lengths they’ve recently gone through to get some sleep. And there’s knowledge in their eyes–the infancy period is over and it’s time for the family to have some predictability. There’s a suspicion in the air that everything is being sacrificed for the baby. Dinner, other children, an affectionate marriage, mom’s energy and enthusiasm for life. I personally suffer from a faint sense of bitterness around this time. I don’t ask for it. I don’t want it. But it arrives, lurking in the back of my mind, when one small part of me knows the baby could sleep better, long, harder, deeper, than this. When I know it’s up to me to bring us there. When I know it’s been me that got us into this mess, by feeding willy-nilly at all hours of the day, and letting naps be on the fly or not at all, letting the 2am wakeup slip back in, and then an 11pm wakeup, and shifting bedtimes every day as my calendar demands.
Oh but it’s hard for those few days. When I’m in the moment of it I just want it to end end end. I can tell it is not hunger crying and I don’t want to be counted on to feed at 11pm but my surging hormones want to solve this now. It sounds so wonderful to go in and calm her. But you know if the exact same thing happens tomorrow, and the day after, it will not sound wonderful. And after that heady ten minutes of soothing, I’ll think to myself, what have I done?
And so you have to write a schedule down, or find one in a book, or tell your husband or call your mom. You have do something, out loud, that affirms the logic of it, that reviews and confirms what you’re planning.
With Joan at six months, I’m in this right now. I talked it over with Joe and realized that our day schedule had no predictability for her. As of the beginning of this week, she wasn’t even falling asleep on her own during the day. So I’m fixing that first–paying more attention to the time going by, putting her down for naps, awake, at the same time every day, timing the space between feedings.
And then next week we’ll tackle the nights; and after three or four nights we will all sleep happily ever after. Not really, of course. But I can praise a few of the results for you, from experience: after sleep training you do end up with a baby who can fall asleep on their own, who doesn’t wake up at the slightest discomfort crying out for you, who errs on the side of sleep rather than wake when changes come—like being sick or traveling.
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1/52
One of my favorite blogs on the internet, Che & Fidel (newly named Practising Simplicity) has done a project for the last two years wherein she posts a photo of each of her children every week. I’ve watched as her photography has become better, and eagerly tracked her two children’s growth and change. I’ve admired how she’s coordinated color and captured light. I’ve been inspired by how a week’s worth of development was mulled over and enjoyed.
At the encouragement of my friend Anna, I’m going to take an ambitious leap and attempt the same project this year. I hope to use my real camera most of the time, but I imagine many of them will be iPhone photos, like todays.
Joan: A week short of six month’s old and striving for so much. Batting my water glass out of my hand, crying when I won’t give her my magazine to chew on, lunging for Lux’s toys, is it possible all her teeth are coming in at once? She’s a baby who believes she’s a child.
Lux: Repeating “what you say, Mama?” is how she learns a new word. In the morning we tell stories about what happened yesterday, in the afternoon we tell stories about the morning. This is how the world falls into place for her.
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Holiday Notes
I’m very pleased with this olive wreath. Krissy from Boston Pollen did a DIY event at Anthroplogie and showed us how to simply wrap branches around floral wire and it turned out and dried like so. I hope to keep it up for several months.
Our friend Birgit held what is turning into an annual party–a blind wine tasting potluck. It was so snowy that night, but instead of dealing with the T trains, we snuggled Lux into the stroller and I carried Joan for the twenty minute walk. The city is a wonderful place when you’re walking in quiet snowfall.
And I’ll be damned but a blend won again! Take note–if invited to one these–blends appear to stand out. All of these were delicious, and most priced around $12. Last year, Trader Joe’s Charles Shaw took 2nd place. It was outrageous.
Birgit’s tablescape and the Guinness gingerbread cake that she made. I can’t wait to make that one for myself to eat again, any time of the year!
This stacked crepe cake with whipped cream layers appeared. You can imagine what Lux spent most of the night eating. It reminds me of this recipe by the Beekman Boys that my aunt Anne sent me.
The votes all tallied up at the end of the night..there were so many wines to keep straight as we drank, and obviously, as we grew tipsier. Next year we resolved to make tasting note cards to carry us through.
As I type this, the city is enveloped in snow-fog again! It was supposed to be caroling night with our church, but I wonder if anyone will show up. We head to Chicago this Friday to begin our holiday traveling sprints. We’ll go to the Field Museum to show Lux the awfully complete Tyrannouseous Rex skeleton. I hope she loves it, but I wonder if it will make her stop telling me she is a T-rex. That would be a pity.
We’re only there for 24 hours but I’ve already begun my Foursquare list for easy referencing!
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Advent candles
The light in our bedroom in the morning is so beautiful. Almost every day I try to take a photo of it. Joan actually wakes up before the sunrise but I just turn her over onto her back and let her coo at the ceiling for 40 minutes while I climb back into bed. Funny thing about doing stuff like that with babies: they really don’t mind, you just have to bring yourself to do it. Then I watch the sunrise with her at my side and Joe still fast asleep. From our view, there’s a crane silhouetted directly in front of it, they’re building another high-rise across the way. It will be a luxury building that only a few can afford to live in, but I support the idea of higher concentrations of people downtown anyway, though I wish it had a few subsidized apartments to bolster it. To give it a little heart.
The bricks have puckered up and seem to radiate a chill, just as they radiated heat in the baked summer. As long as I get everyone dressed warmly we can wander just as frivolously as we did in warm weather. This is my new moment of accomplishment, my big inhale of satisfaction: everyone is warmly dressed. It feels like a gauntlet, reaching this place every winter, with mittens, hats, coats that fit, shoes that fit, and everything on all at once. I think of an old country song that is something something We had no shoes in the summer, but NEW shoes in the winter. Yes to that, country mama of old, I know where you’re coming from.
On that subject I really enjoyed my friend Melissa’s rumination on getting everyone dressed warmly.
Warm clothes and clean hair. I’ve come to realize that bathing my children doesn’t come as naturally as the shampoo commercial makes it seem. On top of Lux’s own suspicion of the bath, there is my general forgetfulness that it exists at all. One perk of this is that whenever Lux’s hair is clean, Joe and I can’t get over how nice she looks. Keeps us easy to please.
I find myself thinking of Sylvia Plath. I shouldn’t bring her up as I know almost nothing about her, but like all mothers I encountered in my past, I feel I have wronged her in some way. I misjudged her. I remember thinking scornfully of a woman who would kill herself while her children slept upstairs. The word abandonment occurred to me, of course. And it was, it was abandonment, and reading studies like this that bring up the role of the mother in a man’s younger years, and thinking on how Sylvia’s son killed himself late in life…the implications are undeniable. But anyway, Sylvia had two young children at home, by herself. A single mother trying to make a living with her writing. Her book comes out and it gets crummy reviews and yet she’s still supposed to make oatmeal every morning. I feel very sorry for her now, by herself like that, and think of her.
I guess I’ll have to work my way through all the mothers I ever judged before I had a baby, and quietly apologize. Light a candle for them. I’ve been lighting more candles anyway as each evening now the moment of darkness is creeping further up the clock. It lands at 4:10 now. I wouldn’t mind lighting a candle and having their ghosts keep me company until Joe comes home. Maybe they’d give me a thumbs up on this venison chili that turned out a little heavy on the chili powder. Lux is so into the pink candle on our Advent wreath. She can’t believe we haven’t lit it yet. It must feel like an eternity to her, these two weeks before lighting it.
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plated, a review
My mom is both very generous and very tech savvy. She frequently laments that she does not live closer to help me out more. Thus it was not a shocking surprise but still a super pleasant one when I found a gift for four dinners from plated in my inbox. Mayhaps she had seen a recent Facebook post wherein I basically swore off cooking dinner until Joan was two.
I immediately clicked onto their site and selected two dinners to be shipped for that Tuesday. Lamb burgers with a greek salad side, and broccoli chicken curry. I specifically picked two things that I wish I cooked with more frequently–lamb and curry.
Obviously I was immediately smitten with having everything neatly labeled and divided. I think the cooking channel has made us all long for that:
The only thing either dish needed from my pantry was olive oil, salt and pepper. Both dishes were designed to be prepped in about thirty minutes.
The whole family really liked both dinners and I particularly liked that the easy recipes taught me a few techniques. For example–the lamb burgers came with directions to quick pickle red onions, mix feta into the mayonnaise, and lightly toast the buns beforehand. All of these were easy things that completely upgraded the dish, things that I typically wouldn’t think to do. I had an aha! moment when I read “Wipe pan clean from burgers. Return to heat and briefly toast buns in the pan.” So simple, yet I never do it.
I love cookbooks, I read them all the time. I love trying new recipes. But I appreciated the user-friendly aspect of something like this. I think it’s perfect for people who say “I’m terrible at cooking.” Or for a young single guy who wants to cook at home, but has no idea where to start. You could do a couple weeks of this, and go forth feeling like you know what you’re doing and have some serious experience under your belt. For me, it helped me snap out of the “whaaat do I make tonight?” rut that I was knee deep in.
They ship to a surprising number of places (like, Pennsylvania, Iowa and California!) which makes them a potentially awesome Christmas present.
And for those of you googling this stuff–there is another service out of New York called Blue Apron. Here’s the skinny on a couple of the differences between these competitors. 1/ The menu for plated changes every week, and you can decide your order up to 24 hrs before it ships. 2/ Blue Apron is $3-5 cheaper per plate, but you do not get to pick the food, you just pick whether it is vegetarian or not. 3/ plated has an optional monthly membership that discounts each plate. Blue Apron is cheaper overall, but requires you to receive a certain amount of dishes each week.
I’ve still got two more dinners to order–I’m eyeing those potato goat cheese cakes for next week! This isn’t sponsored, just a personal review. BUT do note: if you use a referral code to sign up, you get two free plates!