I might have mentioned once or twice Ronin’s aversion to vegetables, or frankly, food in general on most days. She eats but sparingly and is very discerning when it comes to, well, I don’t even know what it is that turns her into a sobbing puddle on the floor. When she was very young and only eating purees, she only ate carrots. ONLY. No rice cereal, no peas, no bananas, no nothing else. Just carrots. Luckily she quickly outgrew that but then she also hasn’t eaten carrots since—acts like we’re trying to poison her if we sneak a bit of carrot into her mouth. I’m overjoyed that she often will accept broccoli but I still spend a great deal of time thinking about ways to get other vegetables in her. The answer: through trickery.

This is a recipe I found online but then mangled somewhat (I do this). It’s not necessarily low fat but it is low sugar sort of. Or maybe not. I don’t know. It has a high carrot to flour ratio, which I like.

[Here’s the point where I said to myself, “I should totally blog this,” and ran for the camera. Clearly this is a not-terribly-photogenic step in the muffin process but I cleared the moldy pear out of the way and shot a photo anyway. Here you can plainly see one carrot’s worth of gratings, three unmolested carrots ruefully awaiting their fate, a bowl of flour, and some dirty dishes.]

Ingredients

DRY (mix together dry ingredients in a large bowl)
2 cups whole wheat pastry flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
2 teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon nutmeg
1/4 teaspoon each: mace, allspice, cloves

[Because I am an insane person, I prefer to use a fine grater for my carrots. This grater is great, mostly. I like it because it is ingenious (container below!) and pretty (i.e., SHINY). The part where it isn’t great is that if you grate for more than two or three scrapes in any single direction, it somehow creates a perfect indentation and no more carrot gets cut (grate grate grate slick slick slick). To keep the carrot coming, you have to constantly turn the grater, which is sort of a pain in the ass. It makes me think of how when you are driving down I-5 en route to ANYWHERE BUT THE CENTRAL VALLEY OH GOD and you pass all those orchards with baby trees planted in perfect rows. They are always painted white or else they have white PVC pipe around their spindly trunks and as you pass them at 80mph they move into a perfect line shooting out to the point of extinction. The trees are of course planted in grid pattern and the major rows show up as bold lines but you also see smaller lesser rows as you view them obliquely, and then rows where you can’t imagine how there could be rows, rows within rows within rows and you only have a second to ponder the how or why and then you are like, in Arbuckle.]

WET
1 cup oil (This is what the recipe says but I usually do 1/4 c oil and 3/4 c applesauce)
4 eggs
3/4 cup brown sugar (I know it’s not wet but I’m including it here because you have to mix it with the above two ingredients)
3 cups grated carrot (usually 4 decent-sized carrots)
1 cup raisins (if your raisins are old and crusty, soak them in hot water for 10-20 minutes to plump them up a tad)

[I really need to work on my food porn photography. a. Cool retro hand mixer I got from my grandma Mimi. b. Orange zest would actually be a really yummy addition to this recipe. I didn’t add any—this is an already zested orange that has been living on the counter the past few days, its rind turning into a crisp shell and its interior probably transforming into a funky cider. c. My cell phone: someone might totally try to call me! d. Mmm brown sugar. I confess I only used 2/3 cup this time (I’m turning into my mother). Also I picked through it and ate all those little hard molasses balls.]

METHOD
Preheat oven to 350. Mix the oil, egg, and brown sugar with a beater. It’s a thick scary mess really and highly satisfying to whir all together. Put this aside and grate the carrot. If you happen to have a food processor, well aren’t you fancy and super awesome and I’m not jealous at all; this recipe will probably take you all of 3 minutes to assemble. If you don’t, grate the carrot using a hand grater. If you are crazy, use the fine grate size. My rationale is I’m trying to fool a highly suspicious toddler into eating The Hated Carrot Vegetable. Basically, if they sold powdered carrot flour, I’d pay big bucks for it and save my triceps the hurt.

Dump wet oil/egg/sugar mixture, carrots, and drained raisins into the flour and mix gently (all that baking powder/soda—gotta be careful!).

Portion out batter into muffin tins/cups/whatever it is you use (I have a non-stick muffin tin and a set of 12 silicon muffin cuplets, which are the cat’s ass). I get about two dozen out of this recipe but I’ve stretched it to nearly three dozen (I go for smaller muffins for no particular reason). Bake for around 20 minutes. I do the toothpick test to check if they are done or not. I try to time them on the inside edge of done but I usually overcook them by accident. They are still good. Best of all, Ronin actually likes them.

[This is why my muffins get overcooked. I can’t figure out where anything is and I never remember which direction is more or less heat. Sad. I suck at normal ovens too though so I take it in stride.]

(They are even better iced with cream cheese frosting, but I am a mean mama and typically deny Ronin such extravagances. I usually freeze the ones I won’t use immediately and thaw them on an as-needed basis.)

[In the mornings when I get up early with Ronin, she generally amuses herself by digging through the recycling while I make breakfast and coffee. The other day I turned around to see her lying on the floor amidst various cardboardy debris intently studying a Comcast advertisement.]

I can finally and with great certainty say that Ronin has had her first real cold. I thought she had caught a cold twice before but she really only sniffled and coughed a bit and was in a crap mood for about a day or two. But this, this is a full-on, straight-up cold complete with green snot bubbles when she tries to breathe, a bizarre and adorable nasal twang to her little chirpy voice, an utterly foul temper—particularly in the night time, an unfortunate food strike (I tremble to think that she may never eat broccoli, pasta, cheese, granola, or yogurt ever again), and painfully disturbed sleep. I haven’t had to nurse her four times per night since she was practically a newborn. Now that I’ve gotten a taste of some real sleep in the past couple of months, it’s far too painful for me to even imagine going back. Therefore, now that she is getting better, we’re night-weaning her once and for all. I am a cold wire mommy.

[We recently got back from Arizona where we spent a weekend with my parents. The air was dry and warm and Ronin’s hair turned into dessicated straw. To remedy this, mealtimes were spent rubbing olive oil, yogurt, cheese, risotto, and eggs margarita into her hair. Then she took a nap.]

She has moved into this interesting stage of babbling. Instead of the monosyllabic babble or “DAH! DAH! OOF OOF OOF!” she now natters on with all these weird complex sounds and serious intonation and has animated conversations with her stuffed animals and such. She can clearly understand a lot of what we say to her and it’s kind of awesome to tell her to go fetch something or come here and have her actually do it. Presumably it won’t take her long to realize that even though she understands, it doesn’t mean she has to DO.

[Oma Peggy is not tired of ‘Are You My Mother’ yet. My brother Sage, his wife Elise, and their daughter Riley were also visiting. Ronin still asks for “WILEEE?”]

She is a tantrummer, big time. All you have to do is deny her something, either tell her “no” she can’t do something or move her hand away from, say, the scalding hot cup of coffee, and she completely falls to pieces. She often does this at the park where there happens to be a steering wheel mounted across from the slide. This one little wheel is a major catalyst for strife on the play structure. Ronin, being one of the younger smaller babies, often gets bossed around by the bigger kids who push her aside and take over the steering wheel. As soon as she realizes what is happening, she pretty much loses her mind, crying piteously and yelling at them (cursing them is what it sounds like) in baby jargon. It’s simultaneously tragic and hilarious the way she screams and points accusingly at the offender as I try to reorient her towards the slide. It’s so hard not to laugh at her dramatics. (Cold. Wire. Mommy.)

[Joshua and Ronin during a walk up the road to look at the cows. My parents have a fence around their property, otherwise the cattle that range freely over the entire area would eat all the vegetation, trample mom’s herb garden, and poop on the patio. When we visited, all the little babies had just been born. It was very exciting for Ronin and Riley, and of course Joshua took a billion photos.]

It may possibly be related to her cold, or it may be because in her confidence she moves a lot faster than she used to, or it may just be because her hair is perpetually hanging down in her eyes (she violently refuses all hair management paraphernalia) but she has taken about 20 falls onto the concrete over the past two days. Her palms and knuckles are all scabby, her toes and knees are scraped up, and yesterday evening as she was scooting on her butt down the stairs, she sort of mis-timed the butt and went forward head first down the remaining two steps. She bounced twice on her head and came up with the bridge of her nose all scraped up. And a lot of screaming. Both of us totally freaked and even though she was fine aside from the scrape, we kept checking her pupils and cuddling her and trying to figure out if we could somehow have gotten to her in time to save her the fall. Poor little monkey.

[You can see the massive chunk removed from the bridge of her nose from the step incident. Now I just have to keep her from picking off her scab because that stuff is MIGHTY TEMPTING.]

She’s been on a (solid) food strike the past four days yet I’ve managed to stay surprisingly calm about the whole thing. Today would have been the fifth day but I was able to get 1/4 cup of yogurt, two pasta pieces, 1.5 slices of pear, and 1 broccoli florette in her. This, friends, is a major success (I should be in politics). I had chalked it up to her being sick but as I was nursing her this evening, I noticed that she has her first molar poking through in two spots. Joshua and I have been anxiously awaiting the molars and normally this would be cause for raucous celebration, but honestly she rarely shows interest in food that does not flow through a straw so molars: who needs ’em. And she really only just likes to bite on the straw anyway.

[Someone refuses to wear a hat. This stresses out the mama.]

[To read Part I, click here.]

[All images can be clicked to view a larger version.]

The crown jewel of the Chernobyl tour is of course Pripyat, the abandoned Soviet city. Of course this is not the first large abandoned site ever but it is probably the largest modern-era city standing empty. This is what the tourists come to see, what a city looks like after it has been sitting idle for twenty years.

And it looks… abandoned. Run down. The city is quiet—aside from the dizzying buzz of insects and birds twittering like mad. It is amazingly fascinating and I wish we had a lot more time to explore. Unfortunately, we all had to be out of the zone by 5pm and were on a tight schedule. I want to go back someday though.

(more…)

[You can click any of the images to see the larger version.]

In June of 2005, Joshua and I spent a month and a half in Ukraine and Russia, during which time we visited Chernobyl. I’m a little late with the write-up. Um, sorry about that.

I have always been fascinated with abandoned places. In Spain we were obsessed with Las Abandonadas—ancient rock houses in deserted villages that were sprinkled all over the country, their former inhabitants having either moved to the city or died. In Mexico, we searched out old towns that had emptied after the mines went bust or the money went elsewhere. In the US there are ghost towns (hanta virus! Gak), or more frequently, abandoned factories or warehouses, like those that used to be near my studio in San Francisco (inhabited only by bums and street kids). The places are mysterious, eerie, and very photogenic. A glimpse of post-apocalyptic, science fiction-style doom I suppose. Your imagination tends to run wild when in such places.

The Grandaddy of all the places we ever sought out was Chernobyl (Chornobyl in Ukrainian), the reactor meltdown site and surrounding 30-kilometer radius of no-man’s-land, the “zone.” The reactor itself was interesting and all but what is most fascinating to me is the history and politics surrounding the disaster, and the so-called “ghost town,” Pripyat along with hundreds of small villages that used to exist inside the perimeter but that no longer do.

Getting to the Chornobyl site, in our experience, was actually pretty easy and took but a quick phone call to check our names against a watchlist of International Abandoned Nuclear Reactor Site Spies (or whatever it was they checked). There are a number of agencies in Kiev that arrange tours and they all compete with each other citing this and that difference—of course the prices vary wildly—and they make it sound like it is actually a very difficult and complicated process to get cleared to visit the zone. In addition, they all implied that they themselves did the tours. In the end however, they are all selling you the same thing because all tours within the zone are actually handled from within by a single state agency, Chernobyl InterInform. CII has one set price for everything and in our experience, they were efficient and expedient about processing requests. They pick you up wherever are, take you into the zone, provide a guide, give you a tour, feed you an amazing lunch, and drive you back home at the end of the day. So basically you can skip the Kiev agencies and arrange a visit directly through them. Our guide laughed when she heard the varying amounts we all paid our various agencies to come on the tour and the lines of bullshit we were fed. She said the Kiev Chernobyl Tour agencies are a total racket and I agree. But we did it because we only had one day in which we could fit the trip into our schedule and since that day had been reserved completely by the agency, through the agency we went.

We met up with the CII van outside a bank in Independence Square in Kiev. There were six of us tourists and a driver who spoke only Russian. The guy we sat next to in the van was a Scottish comedian from Serbia who had spent his entire vacation in the far eastern town of Dneprpetrovsk, a large dingy industrial city in the east that holds absolutely no interest for your average tourist. We of course thought he was crazy but then we had just spent a month living in Kharkiv, another large industrial city in the east that has no interest for the average tourist, and we had rather enjoyed ourselves. He had an incredibly high opinion of Bill Clinton (every Eastern European with whom we spoke politics, which is to say nearly everyone we spoke with, did) and an equally low opinion of our then current president, George Bush (as did every other Eastern European—and Western European for that matter). He told us that the purpose of his vacation was to gather material for his comedy act. I always wondered what he took away with him from the Chornobyl tour.

We got to the 30-kilometer checkpoint and stopped. Our driver chatted briefly with the guards. They looked over our passports (like, no big whoop), gave them back, and one told us something in some language that was not Russian or Ukrainian. We stared blankly at him until it was determined that he told us (in English, it turned out) not to take any souvenirs. We were all, OH OF COURSE NOT HA HA all smiles and waves, and then we went on.

(more…)

[At the park. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to get good photos of Ronin as she gets faster and faster.]

Ronin’s latest obsession is the slide at the park. Alberta park has several different slides, from baby-easy to scary spiral straight out of the 80s. Ronin settles for the easier ones but covets the scary slide. She is always making a beeline for the steep ladder and protesting loudly when we deny her. We go down it with her occasionally but it is really unpleasant for larger people to go down. Like tumbling down a narrow spiral staircase until you are dumped out into the bark-a-mulch at the end.

She often makes a little “woo” sound right when she is ready to go down. It’s awfully cute.

Here she is on the fast slide at the school a block away (we have a lot of playgrounds to choose from).

We usually go down the bigger metal slides with her for fear she’ll capsize and bonk her head on the sides. If she’s wearing overalls though, we’ll send her down solo on her back (without overalls, she risks slide-burn, which: oooouch).

[Again! Again!]

So now she’s decided that our yard is sufficiently steep to slide down as well. She sits on her butt at the top, scoots over the edge and (saying “woo”) slides on her butt down to the sidewalk. (She figured this out on her own.) We tried to get her a piece of cardboard to facilitate the slidey part since really, the grass is not terribly slick, but she did not understand what we were getting at and just got pissed off at us for meddling. So, butt slide down the grass it is. Woo!