Kool Kale

I’ve been somewhat into kale for a while, but two new recipes got me crazy for this wonderful vege. Before, I thought it had to be cooked for a long time. And if you’re cooking it in watery substances, it does. However, kale can be prepared with a variety of methods to very different effects.

Kale is excellent in almost every way. High in vitamin A and C, calcium, and lots of other good stuff. It is easily grown. In fact, it’s a weed, so when I see it priced like it’s some sort of boutique vege, it makes me mad. I challenge you not to be able to grow kale. I can do it in my redwood-shaded yard, so I bet you can, too.*

Personally, I think lacinato kale, which you seldom see for sale, is the best. But I’m happy with pretty much any kind, and these recipes are successful with whatever you’ve got on hand.

Kale chips

The first time I had kale chips, I paid an exorbitant price for a small bag in a health food store. Then my sister brought some she’d made, and I went crazy for them. They are easy, they are cheap, and if your kids are like my kids, they’ll love them, too.

Take a bunch of kale and rip the leaves off the stems. Discard the stems. Wash the leaves then spin them in a salad spinner or put them out to dry. They should be pretty dry before you proceed. Rip them into mouth-sized chunks (they will shrink a bit, but if you leave the chunks too big, they will get crumbs all over the place when you bite them). Put them into a bowl and dribble a little bit of olive oil on them. (Not very much at all.) Toss the leaves so the oil is distributed, then arrange them in a single layer on a cookie sheet. It helps to use parchment, but it’s not necessary. Sprinkle them with sea salt. Put them into a 300-degree oven, on convection if you have it. They will take about 15 minutes to dry out. You may need to turn them or spread them part of the way through. If the leaves are at all limp when you take them out, put them back in. They must be really dry or they’ll get soggy very quickly.

There are lots of variations possible: Make them Asian-style with sesame oil and tamari. Make them Italian with some herbs and parmesan. Get more creative if you’d like. I find that I never get around to the creativity because they’re so darn good with plain old olive oil and sea salt.**

Bruised Kale Salad

You don’t have to cook kale to get that deep color and nicer texture. Take kale leaves, sprinkle them with sea salt, and pound them  with some garlic till they get a brighter green color. This breaks down the cell walls, similar to cooking, but leaves all the nutrients. Put them in a bowl with some sort of acid and accompanying ingredients. Here are some good combinations:

balsamic vinegar
olive oil
parmesan
black pepper

rice vinegar
sesame oil
soy sauce

Here are my sister’s more adventurous combinations. Again, the simple version is so good I haven’t gotten around to doing anything this complicated:

rice vinegar, sesame oil, soy sauce, sesame seeds, edamame, arame (soak for 15 minutes before adding)

balsamic vinegar, red onion, olives, leftover chicken w/garlic or chick peas, feta cheese, leftover polenta or brown rice

lemon, red onion, leftover salmon, sunflower or pumpkin seeds, goat cheese

Beans ‘n’ greens

This is actually a cooked recipe, but it’s a big favorite in our house so I’m adding it. Cut kale (or chard) into strips. Saute garlic in olive oil just a bit until it releases its scent. Add the kale and sea salt and saute until limp. If you want the kale significantly more cooked than it is now, add a small amount of water or white wine, cover, and cook until almost done. Then add cannelini beans and cook until they start to break apart, about 5 minutes. Pepper vigorously and serve. Great with pasta.

Notes:

*Years ago, I read an article about the urban gardening movement that pointed out a huge problem that most people don’t know about. If you’re starting a new garden in an urban environment, or anywhere near a road, you should either remove the dirt and truck in “clean” garden dirt, or you should grow a couple of crops of dark-leafy greens and throw them away. That’s right, don’t compost like the good earth-person you are. Dark, leafy greens are fabulous at leaching heavy metals out of soil. If you’re in an urban environment, your soil is full of bad stuff. So don’t eat or compost your first couple of crops. Put them in the garbage!

**About sea salt: My dad the chemist tried to tell me that it’s just plain ole NaCl, no matter where it comes from. I agree, but there’s something different about sea salt. It has a brighter taste, and you need less of it to liven up your food. Try it, I dare you.

Nurturing your inner adult

There are times when I’m sitting with other moms and we’re talking about one of the standard subjects: If there’s a mom with a baby, we’re talking about nursing or sleeping. If there’s a mom with a toddler, we’re talking about a house full of mayhem. Any kid-related topic that comes up gets us talking about that subject, even if we’re long past it in our child-rearing lives.

Those times are wonderful and create such a great bonding experience, especially between moms. But then, occasionally, it occurs to me that we could actually be talking about something else. The thing is, we may know very little about the other parents amongst us outside of their child-rearing lives. Do we know what she thought she’d be doing as an adult when she was a teen? Do we know the bawdiest story she has from her days working as a barrista? Do we know about her former passion for roller derby? Do we have any idea what she used to talk about before she had kids?

That’s why I’m a big advocate of moms getting out of their mom circle and into the wider world. Even if the subject matter still involves kids, being with other adults passionate about the same thing feeds our inner lives and makes us much better parents.

This weekend I went to a children’s writing conference in Big Sur. Now, this may not sound so far from hanging out with a group of moms, and in some ways, it wasn’t. Though the majority of participants were female, and the majority of those were moms (and grandmas), we spent very little time exchanging information about our kids. Number and gender were the most common pieces of information, and possibly an anecdote or two would follow. But for the most part, we talked about our own passion for stories.

Many of the participants were probably like me: I’ve always loved children’s stories, but it was only as a mom that I started getting interested in writing them. But a fair amount of the participants were not yet parents, or were parents whose interest in children’s writing pre-dated parenthood. In any case, it was a weekend of intense talking about something that only tangentially related to our mom-lives, and the combined creative energy was invigorating.

For a few days, I handed my mom life off to my dad (since my mom was off being a mom to one of my siblings) and then my husband. As soon as I stepped out the door alone, I had that liberating feeling of being responsible for my self only. It’s not that I dislike being responsible for my kids, but when I step out of that life I feel like I’m a professional jockey on a horse bareback or a ballerina who kicks off her toe shoes and goes for pure personal expression. Just like the rider and the ballerina, I’m going to come back to my real life. But striking out on my own for a few days reminds me who I am, separate from my kids.

No matter what your interest, I recommend that you make a commitment to get out and do it occasionally without your kids. When you come home, I promise that you’ll be that much better of a parent, and that much happier of a person.

All’s well that ends well so long as you can forget that part in the middle…

Santa Cruzans have been developing a love-hate relationship with our beloved public library. First the budget troubles, which resulted in Friday closures and the threat of closed branches. Then the about-face and the branches staying open, but for weird hours and with apparently new, unfamiliar, and sometimes less than helpful staff at the desk. Then the long lines. Then the short lines at the annoying self check-out stations.

And then there was the new online catalog.

Talk about adding insult to injury. We’d all been sucking it up and saying, OK, so we don’t like change but the library is going to change. OK, so my favorite librarian has apparently been replaced with a blank-faced young man who admits he doesn’t really know how to use the computer system. OK, so now we have to listen to those darn self check-out machines chanting over and over, “Scan barcode!”

I tell my kids it’s rude to chant, then the library undoes it all with a simple labor-saving device.

But the new catalog just about broke the camel’s back. One day in frustration, a friend e-mailed on a local e-mail list that she knows one person who has decided to buy all her books. The shocking — shocking, I say — lengths to which we must go in order to get our books without hassle!

We are big fans of open source everything in this house, and I am sure that the new software will be just fine in the long run, but this was no easy transition. It was a thrill that I could actually log in (I was expecting worse), but finding my way around a site all done in 8-point font isn’t my favorite activity. (Yeah, I know how to increase the font. But I shouldn’t have to!) The stark, dense design is already wearing thin.

And then there were the fees. I started to see the buzz on e-mail lists within days. “I went to the library and found out I had $25 in fees! The librarian said she couldn’t do anything about it.”

Turns out that when the library sent out that e-mail saying that e-mail notifications of overdues and requests would proceed as before, they forgot one, little word. Really, should one word make all that much difference? The one word: EVENTUALLY. No, the e-mail notifications weren’t working (and still aren’t as far as I can see). Apparently, some people at the library thought that this message had gone out to everyone. It hadn’t. Other people at the library thought that all the librarians knew that they were supposed to waive all fees until it was fixed. They didn’t. In fact, the librarian I got (another strange face at my local branch) said, “I’m not really trained to do front desk. I don’t know how to use this computer.” Great.

I love our library, and I love to give donations. But generally I prefer that the donations be a) planned, and b) tax-deductible. Rather than wait for our usual librarian to help (he was busy dealing with a shaggy-haired woman laden with shopping bags who was yelling that she needed the police — apparently someone had stolen her glasses while she was alone in the locked bathroom), I decided to let it slide.

The librarians had enough to do without my $2.50 to contend with.

Things are getting smoother. We’re all getting used to the tiny font and confusing layout, though e-mail notifications aren’t working yet and the system still thinks that my home library is Central. We’re starting to like some aspects of the site, such as the one I tried out today: Bookbag. You can actually save a list of books that you’re planning to check out at some point in your account. This is something I’ve always wanted. Yes, if I decided to check out lots of books about bomb-making and if I joined a fringe radical political group and if we were caught planning to overthrow our local library staff and take over, bombing all the self check-out stations back to the particles they were made from, I might be in trouble.

But since I am willing, always, to give my poor, beleaguered, hardworking, underpaid, understanding, knowledgeable, enthusiastic library staff a break, I won’t join that group… yet. I like to stay on their good side, especially when I’m leaving my under-12 kid alone in the kids’ section (just for a minute!), asking them to recommend readable King Arthur books, and informing them, sheepishly, that a mad woman out front is yelling to the world that the librarians have stolen her glasses.

The importance of buddies

My daughter’s public homeschool program has had a buddy system since we started there five years ago. Since it spans K through 8, there are lots of opportunities for older kids to pair up with younger kids.

I always thought the buddy system was nice—when it worked, my daughter was able to complete an activity that before she might not have been able to. But I didn’t realize just how important the buddy system could be until everything clicked.

Last year, my daughter was pretty much not able to deal with school at all. She tried out two different class days, and finally ended up not wanting to go at all. But the activities she did enjoy, I was surprised to see, were the ones she did with her Big Buddy.

Her buddy is a teenage girl she’s known since kindergarten, a graduate of her homeschool program who now volunteers there as a high schooler. I don’t remember them connecting much when her buddy was younger. But somehow, as her buddy grew from a shy girl into a self-assured teen, a chemistry grew between them.

Last summer, my daughter was so fed up with her inability to handle class days at school that she was insisting she wanted to go to our neighborhood public school full-time. (If that sounds like a weird way to solve a problem, well, welcome to my life!) It wasn’t until she found out that her buddy was going to volunteer at her school on her class day that she gave up on this idea. Suddenly, she wanted to go to school.

Lots of homeschoolers and other “fringe” educators have been talking lately about the importance of mentors, and how our culture has lost mentoring as our society has become more fragmented. Some blame this loss on parents giving up their obligation to educate their kids to the state. As public schooling became more prominent, they say, families stopped thinking that education was primarily their responsibility, and community members stopped feeling responsible for taking youngsters under their wings.

I am less willing to blame public education (which I support) than a variety of cultural trends: Culturally, we are losing a sense of what parenting is. We are less likely to talk to our neighbors. We are less likely to live in the same community we work in. We are fearful of strangers—and even our kids’ baseball coach—as potential abusers. We are the perfect product of tabloid newspapers and sensational TV.

Accepting the importance of mentoring requires us to question our cultural messages. Mentoring requires that we believe that the adults in our community have an obligation and a right to help us in raising our children. Mentoring requires us to allow that our child will go out into the world without our protective arms about them. Mentoring requires adults to express interest in other people’s kids, even though adults have been taught the lesson, over and over again, that if they do that, they’re likely to suffer from our suspicions about adults who actually like kids.

If you look at any successful person, it’s more likely than not that s/he had a mentor, an adult who shared interests and who supported the young person’s learning. Sometimes that person is a parent, but more often it’s someone they came across as they focused on their areas of interest. A mentor is a guide, a coach, and in a gentle way, a critic. Americans love stories that feature strong mentors, but somehow in our culture, we have lost a sense of how important mentoring is.

For my daughter, having someone at school who is there for her and who only wants to support her has been invaluable. The teachers in her program are wonderful, but it’s her buddy she looks up to the most. Her buddy is the reason she can make it through. As she develops her interests and grows, this is a valuable lesson for her and for us. Sometimes it’s not a teacher or a parent that’s needed to help a young person develop her skills.

Sometimes it’s just another person on the path ahead of her. And when that person is willing to look back and lend a hand, the most difficult path is easy to navigate.

Your mom said it first

When I was a kid and any of one my siblings was moping around the house, my mother said what probably countless mothers generations back had been saying to their kids:

“Get out of the house.”

Not, Get out of the house and don’t come back, you morose teenager, but rather, Get out of the house and get your body moving, soak up some sunshine, and think about something other than your problems.

It’s an age-old motherly piece of advice, one that scientists are now confirming with each new study of lifestyle and moods.

This piece outlines four pieces of advice that will boost serotonin levels and set things right in mind and body. They are:

1. Don’t mope about the house!

Even on cloudy days, there is more light outside than inside. Our bodies evolved to need that light for all sorts of things. In this case, sunlight triggers serotonin production. As the writer mentions, sunlight also triggers skin cancer, so we have to balance and think about how we get the sunlight. Best to keep it off your nose and the top of your head (prime areas for skin cancer because of years of accumulated exposure), but let it in for at least a while every day. Kids especially need to be reminded to go outside these days. It’s so easy to spend the day jumping from car to building and back to car again.

2. Human touch is important

The writer points out that the studies have been specific to massage, but I’m guessing that human touch in general is part of a healthy psyche. One of the reasons why solitary confinement is such a cruel punishment is that those confined miss the touch of other humans. And it’s not just prisons. I was shocked when I heard about “no touch campuses” — schools where they’ve made a rule that no one can touch anyone else, ever. Sometimes the gentle touch of an adult is what a child needs to focus and settle her body.

3. Exercise does more than keep us slim, lower our blood pressure, and all those other wonderful things

Getting daily exercise also promotes well-regulated emotions. Study after study finds that kids labeled with disorders — ADHD, especially — show fewer symptoms if they get regular exercise, preferably outdoors. This, again, is something that our modern lifestyles leave by the wayside. When I was a kid, kids walked to school. And if they lived too far to walk, they had to walk to the bus stop. These days, I have to admit, even my family with our emphasis on healthy practices would drive our son to his bus stop, a mile away.

4. Don’t dwell on your problems

Simply thinking happy thoughts actually makes us happier. Yes, we do need to face our problems, but not all the time. As adults, we’ve learned that when we let ourselves get sucked into a sea of bad feelings, it feels almost impossible to drag ourselves out. We can help our kids by teaching them how to pull themselves out by focusing on the positive whenever possible.

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