The Cleaner Plate Club

I whipped up a tasty, kid-friendly egg drop soup last night. There’s a recipe below, if you can hang in that long.

The short version of how this recipe came to be is quite simple: Merrie loves egg drop soup. She adores the stuff. At least three times a week, she begs to go to the local Chinese-Sushi-Korean dive just so that she can slurp up a bowl. This egg drop soup frightens me, however. It is yellow — bright, bright yellow. It is a shade of yellow that shouldn’t be allowed to exist. It is highlighter yellow. Neon yellow. I’m certain it’s filled with food coloring that’s going to knock five points off of her IQ each and every time she eats it.

Seriously. Their soup is so bright it’s almost…radioactive.

Which brings me to the second part of the story behind the soup. As many of you know, I’ve had a couple of bad weeks. Abdominal stuff. Pain. Bloating. Nausea. More recently, I’ve been feeling better. Not yet 100%, but so, so much better. When I was at my worst, my physician had ordered a bunch of tests (my endoscope went fine, thank you, and I have a very pretty stomach interior. I’d be happy to post the photos if anyone wants to see). One of the tests — a scan to see if I have a weak gallbladder — was scheduled for yesterday morning. I didn’t know much about the test beside the fact that I couldn’t eat beforehand.

Blair took the day off to be with me. We had an hour and a half between dropping the kids off and my appointment, so we went for a hike together. It was a beautiful, blustery spring morning, apple blossoms in bloom, gray clouds rolling overhead. Even with the test looming, we had fun. Lots of fun. After a decade of marriage, Blair still makes me laugh, and we still have plenty to talk about.

“We should do this more often,” I said. “We should do this on days when I don’t have to go take a stinkin’ test. We should do this, just the two of us, for no reason, and then go out to breakfast.”

Then, a short time later, we were sitting in a field of grass, looking at an expansive mountain view. Blair told me it was time to head over to the hospital. I sighed, picturing myself in a hospital johnny, lying on a table with a needle in my arm, some high-tech Siemens equipment taking pictures of my innards.

“Okay, but I like this part better,” I said. Then I sighed again. “I really wish we could go out to breakfast.”

Fast-forward 30 minutes. I’m seated in a hospital waiting room with Blair, marveling that there is a 2-year-old Time magazine is still on display (Al Gore: will he run for president in ‘08?). A friendly radiology tech in floral scrubs, cropped hair, us into a windowless, fluorescent-lit room. At the center of this room is an imposing machine. The machine looks like it could eat me. As she sets up the equipment, she asks casually, “and you won’t be around young kids today, will you?”

And I answer, “Yes, I will. I’ve got two.”

She stops what she’s doing, looks me in the eye. “Okay, well, I’m not going to say that you can’t be around them, but you don’t want to hold them in your lap.”

I stare at her. Not hold my kids in my lap? Why would —? Huh?

“You’ll be radioactive,” she says.

I try to make sense of her words. Surely I mis-heard. “I’ll be — what?”

“Radioactive. In this test, we inject you with a radioactive fluid. It will be in your system for 12 hours, during which time you will be radioactive. Please don’t hold your children.”

Blair told me later that at this moment, he thought, “Okay, THIS is not going to go well…” And he was right. Because this, friends, is where I start to panic. I gape at the radiology tech. I am picturing the scene in the opening credits of the Simpsons, the part where Homer gets the radioactive rod of plutonium stuck in his overalls. And I imagine that rod inside of me, lighting up my insides, house, my kids. Gee, kids, doesn’t Mommy have a special glow tonight?

And then the words come. I want to say something logical like, but I’m getting better! Not worse! Shouldn’t making me radioactive be a test of last resort? But I’m feeling trapped, and I can’t stop thinking about that plutonium rod — doesn’t Mommy look luminous tonight? — and panicked tears have started welling up in my eyes. I simply whisper, hoarsely, “This feels wrong.”

The tech eyes me carefully, then goes in search of a radiologist who can counsel me through this panic attack. Suddenly, I really notice all the “Caution: Radioactive” signs that are plastered around the room. But my kids! They’re too little to carry Geiger counters! For Pete’s sake, I try to keep them away from artificial food colorings! And if I’m too radioactive for them, how should I feel about this stuff being inside of me?

The radiologist arrives. Unfortunately for him, it is one of the two radiologists that I know personally — he owns a horse farm on our road, and he trot-trots past our house several times a week. We often chat. He and his wife bought a baby gift for Charlotte when she was born. They let the kids pet his horses. He thinks of me, no doubt, as a waving, smiling neighbor, not a crazy lady who panics in a medical imaging room.

He strides into the room, prepared to patiently counsel an irrational stranger. Then he notices it’s me, his neighbor, and that I’m crying. He is so caught off guard that he literally must turn on his heels, walk out of the room, regain his composure, and come in again.

We talk. “It’s a low risk,” he says. “But it’s not no-risk. Like flying in an airplane.”

I nod and look down at the floor. Gee, kids, isn’t Mommy just da’ bomb?

He thinks a minute. “But listen, if you’re feeling better lately, not worse, there’s really no need to take it today.”

I stared helplessly at him. He is saying the right thing, but I can’t get past the trapped feeling.

Gather ’round, kids! Mommy’s going to lead us in a round of “this little light of mine, I’m gonna’ let it shine…”

“Really,” he says. “Go home. If your symptoms get worse, you can come back. If they keep getting better, then you won’t need to worry about the test.”

The floral-scrubbed radiology tech smiles gently. “It’s okay to go,” she says. She wants to scream it, no doubt: Just go, Nutso! Stop wasting my time! Go! But she is too kind to scream. She’s in a healing profession. She’s a healer. A healer who was prepared to shoot gamma rays into my body. A healer who wields a terrifying medical device. But a healer nonetheless. “You won’t be the first to have decided not to do the test.”

Then I realize: they are handing me a get-out-of-jail-free card. I take it. I go. We thank them, walk out of the room, out of the hospital. We get some breakfast. Just like I wanted.

So then later, after picking up the girls, I’m able to hold them. I’m able to make egg drop soup with them — the first meal I’ve made with them for a while. After we eat, I help brush their teeth, read to them, and lie with them in their beds. On this night, these things feel better, more meaningful, than they do most night. While I do them, I do not worry about whether I should really be at Yucca Mountain (and with that comment I must confess that some Googling revealed that any risk to the kids was probably low, no worse than flying. But still. I never liked flying.)

And the soup? Merrie loved it. Charlotte loved it. Blair thought it was like the Chinese-Sushi-Koren restaurant’s egg drop soup, but “way-better.” It didn’t look radioactive. And you know what? Neither did I.

Here’s my super-easy, super-fast recipe for yummy non-radioactive egg drop soup:

Ingredients:
4 cups chicken broth, with half-cup reserved
2 scallions, chopped, white and green parts separated
1/8 tsp dried ginger
1/8 tsp white pepper
1/2 tsp sherry
1/2 tsp soy sauce
1/4 salt, or more to taste
Few drops of sesame oil
1.5 TBSP cornstarch
2 eggs, beaten

Directions:
Pour 3.5 of the cups of broth into a pan, reserving a half-cup for later. Add the white parts of scallions, the ginger, white pepper, sherry, and soy sauce. Bring to boil and let cook for 5 minutes. Add 2-3 drops sesame oil (a little goes a long way).

Mix cornstarch with remaining broth, and add to pan. Turn heat to low. Beat eggs, then add to broth while stirring rapidly in a clockwise motion. Stir for one minute, until the eggs have cooked and look like shreds.

Sprinkle with the scallion greens. Serve hot.

Note: if you’re not worried about a wee one’s palate, you can slightly increase the quantities of spice. But I preferred to ease into the spices, lest Merrie be turned off and then spend the rest of her life believing that the only good egg drop soup is neon in color.

Big thumbs up from the family on this one. As for me, I’m just glad to be back in the kitchen again.

…to be ill. Not “what’s in your meat” ill. But, like, seriously ill.

It’s a shame. There’s so much to talk about. There’s President Bush advising people to eat locally grown foods as a creative solution to the world food crisis. There’s Expat’s scathing response to his comments, which is basically “hello? That’d be nice, but thanks to our agricultural policy only 4% of the farms in the U.S. even grow fruits and vegetables and meanwhile you’re pushing to convert even more farmland to corn production to boost dubious ethanol production…” There’s the absurd Cookie Diet (thanks to the Ethicurean for the link). There are parts II and III to the food crisis posts — how we can save money on groceries without resorting to total crap — which I’d really like to return to.

I can’t talk about any of that, though. I just don’t want to think about food at all. I’m sick as a dog. Nausea, abdominal pain, dry heaves, all of it. Some funky bug? Who knows. Actually, they thought it might be my gallbladder — they wanted to yank that sucker out of me, and yesterday morning, I even had an IV stuck in my arm in preparation for surgery — but then the ultrasound showed no stones.

(My gallbladder??? But I eat vegetables! I’m the only one I know who can eat a bowl of beets happily! I don’t go on cookie diets!)

So it’s a mystery. And hopefully it’s just something that clears, miraculously, on its own. Like, today. Voila! Poof! Gone! Here’s hoping.

In the meantime, here I am, not eating food, not writing about food, not thinking about food. I got me some apple juice, and that’s as much as I can handle.

A brief haiku for my body parts on this retch-filled Wednesday:

I like my organs.
I’d prefer to keep them, ‘kay?
(gallbladder too. Please).

Meet Pliny. Do you have a Pliny in your life? You should have one. Pliny is an aloe plant, which I picked up about a month ago for $4. Pliny had been neglected in the back room of a nearby florist, and he was a sad, shriveled little specimen. I took Pliny home, and nurtured him with a little water and sunlight, and now he’s back on the road to health.

You should get a Pliny, and you should keep it on a sunny windowsill in your kitchen. And then when you burn yourself pulling a pan out of the oven, you can do more than just curse loudly and hope that the children don’t notice. You can snip off an inch of one of Pliny’s spiny leaves, and drop some of the clear aloe gel onto your burn and feel better (some recommend running cool water over the burn first). But it’s got other uses, too; when you get a runny nose and break out in one of those nasty cold sores, rubbing some aloe gel on will help. Got other skin conditions, like psoriasis? Yeah, it’ll help there, too.

Apparently it’s been used by Everybody Who’s Anybody throughout history —from the Ancient Egyptians to Marco Polo to Roman gladiators to King Solomon to Aristotle to Christopher Columbus. Christ himself was embalmed with the help of aloe. Seriously, it shows up in a veritable Who’s Who of Folks That Matter (indeed, I chose the name Pliny after reading that Pliny the Elder created the world’s first anti-perspirant from aloe. All of us should be grateful for that. Besides, it didn’t seem right to name a plant Jesus).

But here’s the thing: nobody owns a patent on the aloe vera plant itself, so there’s not a whole lot of incentive to do controlled, peer-reviewed, double-blinded studies on the plant. As a result, when you start really looking for scientific evidence, you’ll find that there aren’t many scientific studies either way, and many of them are small or otherwise problematic. Though I suspect that if someone did own the patent on the plant, that would be remedied very quickly; as is, plenty of people are patenting everything aloe that they can — transgenic aloe plants, ointments from the plant, methods of purifying extracts from the plant, and many more. But the raw gel from the plant itself? Not much incentive there.

Here’s what I can tell you: I’ve used it with burns, and it makes me feel better. Also: every time I get a cold, I break out in a very pretty cold sore on my right nostril (lovely right?). The aloe gel is not only soothing, it also heals the sore faster than anything else I’ve tried, including prescription ointments.

Plus, I kill plants easily, and this one somehow is managing to thrive in my care. All it needs is sun, and water, and good drainage. You want to make sure the soil is totally dry before watering again, which is great for folks like me who can forget to water plants for endless amounts of time. When I want another, I will simply take one of the leaves off of Pliny, and drop it in another pot filled with succulent mix. And then I will have a Pliny the Elder, and a Pliny the Younger.

And that, friends, is why Pliney is one of my favorite kitchen things.

Just a quick post to point you to the Daily Green’s Thirty Days to a Greener Diet page. From ditching high fructose corn syrup, to picking your own, to following the Environmental Working Group’s “Dirty Dozen” list about which fruits and veggies are most important to buy organic, this page is gonna’ help you help you ditch the processed foods, and embrace real food, in a mere month. Nice pictures, good links, and I wish I’d thought of it first.

By the way, today — April 7 — is my favorite holiday of all: No Housework Day!

Wait. Every day is No Housework Day in my house. But maybe it’s a special day for you. To celebrate the occasion? You can send an e-card featuring some hunky fellas. Come on, you know you wanna’.

Guess where I’ve been for the last few days? Okay, I’ll give you a few hints.

There are red phone booths:

But no, I’m not writing from a ‘phone box ‘ (or a lorry or a lift or a flat or a petrol station, for that matter) in England, Mate!

There are cute Bavarian-style buildings:

But, nah, I’m not in Deutschland, either, Fruend!

There are haciendas with clay tile roofs:

But I haven’t ventured down the Mexico way, either. Here’s a better hint:

There are crowds. Lots of crowds:

And many very tired-looking people pushing strollers:

Guessed it?

That’s right, Disney. The vacation that children love, and that is just darned exhausting and bankrupting for parents. It’s the kind of thing I would ordinarily avoid, but Merrie’s been begging, and we were down South visiting my mother-in-law, and so Blair and I thought that the Easter Bunny could bring a little something special this year. No, I don’t just mean Peeps, although somehow they found their way into the Easter basket as well:

I mean a note:

It was very exciting to read:

So there it was. We packed ourselves into our rented mini-van, and joined the other 250,000 folks visiting the park this week. Exhausting, yes. Commercialized? You betcha’. Oh, yes. Brilliantly so. As Blair put it, Disney has an absolute genius for separating people from their money.

And the food?

Well, let’s just say that it’s not my kind of food. It’s a quantity-over-quality type thing. Not so good, but it gets served by the bucket. Like, I ordered a mandarin chicken salad one day at lunch, and my plate was larger than my rump:

(my hand is in there for scale, and this is after I’d already eaten a bunch).

Oh, and you-know-who is here. But you-know-who is everywhere:

(can you see that? It’s our friend, the McDonald French Fry, Frontierland-style).

So, yeah. The food. Pretty bad. And it stresses you out some. But then, you see your toddler on her very first carousel ride:

Or your 6-year old on her first roller coaster ride:

And you kind of realize that for this week, you can let it go. That something other than food can be the point. For a few days, at least.

I’ve got a few memes to follow up on. Blogging’s been tough this week but Expat tagged me with one that felt manageable, as I could more or less write it in the span of a single shower. The challenge: write your memoir in six words or less. It’s based on a bet that Hemingway once made — that he couldn’t write a story in six words. He could, and he did:

For sale: Baby shoes. Never worn.

(for the record, he apparently considered it his finest piece of writing).

Smith magazine, not the College’s publication, but the writing ‘zine, offered a similar challenge, by the way. They published the results in a book, and you can read the entries here. But forget them. This one is all about me.

A number have occurred to me, including the self-deprecating:

Other folks are this flawed. Maybe.

Distractable? Nah, I’m just…Hey! Food!

Crack myself up. Laugh alone, mostly.

I also considered the romantic-in-its-own-way:

He loves me. Not clear why.

I’d choose this madness again, Darling!

We laugh often. And smooch…sometimes.

And there is, of course, the vaguely desperate:

Kids holler. Dogs bark. Wine, please.

And the inevitable food entries:

Learned about food. Then about fear.

Shooting for healthy. Kids prefer chips.

Started cooking. Stopped cleaning. Mice thrilled.

But I think the one that feels most right, most honest, is (drumroll, please!):

Intentions good. Reality harder. Hello, Hell!

Now, according to the rules, I have to tag some others with this meme. So, I tag…YOU. That’s right, YOU.

(yes, why are you looking around saying “who, me?” Of course I mean YOU).

Look, here’s the thing: I really think that this is kind of fascinating, like taking a quick snapshot of someone’s brain (”People’s inner workings revealed. But quickly” - look, I can’t stop doing it!). Besides which, I’m not that much of a rule-player (“Forget rules. Never liked ‘em, anyway” Okay, stop it already!).

How would you guys would sum yourselves up in six words? It’s a fun challenge. Plus? You can do it in the shower. And it’s only six words. Unless, like me, you find you can’t stop. (In the shower, six words multiply).

Oh, yeah. BIG HUGE OSCAR WIN for my sister last night. To the so-many-of-you who have sent happy notes of congratulations, my thanks, and hers, too. At some point, I might add to this post a video of me watching her win - but try to imagine me screaming, wide-eyed, “Wooooooooooo! That’s my SISTER! THAT’S MY SISTER!!!!” and you’ll basically get the idea.

(and to all you parents out there: if you’ve got a kid who pretends to do commercials for Wella Balsam shampoo in the bathtub, or who insists on wearing the same Laura Ingalls costume to school EVERY SINGLE DAY of third grade, then cheer. Because you just might see that kid on the red carpet someday).

For Pete’s sake, why do I write these things? Double-dipping? Ten-thousand bacteria?

Forget that last post. Did you know that your body has 20 times more microbes than it has cells? Apparently we need not fear most of them. Instead, we should embrace them. Not all of them. Just most.

(think of all that time we spend trying to scrub the microbes out of our kitchens, off our floors, out of our lives! What a relief to think that maybe we don’t have to!)

Read the Fruitless War on Germs, from Newsweek, and you will begin a loving relationship with the microbes in your life. You will learn all about how microbes act almost as an extension of our own genes — a kind of “virtual organ” — warding off diseases like cancer, regulating our appetite, and even improving our moods. It’s some crazy, heady stuff — they are saying that the germs around you are like a virtual organ! A virtual organ! It is still hard for me to conceive of my own skin as an organ, though they tell me it’s true, that my skin is a weird, stretched-out, organ, roughly 20 square feet in size, constantly shedding to form 90% of my copious household dust. That’s hard enough to think about. But now this! Microbes, these things we try to kill by dousing ourselves with Purell and Germ-X! Microbes serving really important functions. It’s mind-blowing, I tell you.

Then? When you are done with that, jump to this article, Is Dirt the New Prozac?, from Discover Magazine, and you will be convinced. Not only do they help our bodies, they can make us happy, too.

You will want to head outside and dig your fingers deep into the soil. You will want to rub your naked body in mud, porcine style. You may even want to eat from the communal bowl this Sunday. Or better yet, lick the whole thing.

At the very least, you will fear a little less the dirt that clings to the carrots you get at the farmer’s market.

Guess who got an Oscar nomination?  No! Not me! But close!  My sister Cynthia got the nomination, with her film, Freeheld. It’s a beautiful film, and you should see it when you get a chance. But in the meantime, you know which box you should check in your Oscar pool.

WHEREAS, the energy created by dial up-induced aggravation cannot alone power a high-speed connection, and

WHEREAS disappointment can sometimes mask other emotions, like blinding fury, and

WHEREAS if Mohammed won’t come to the mountain bring the mountain high-speed, the mountain will come to Mohammed post a rant about that disappointing jerk Mohammed on her blog,

NOW THEREFORE LET IT BE DECLARED that I am officially disappointed in Comcast.

(Can you feel my disappointment, Comcast? Can you sense shoulders falling? Can you hear my heavy sighs? I’m not sighing because of any abstract discussion of the digital divide. I’m not disappointed in any theoretical notion of the plight of the rural dweller. No, I’m disappointed in YOU. That’s right, Comcast. You.)

To my readers (who came here for food, and are soon to be disappointed themselves), I will explain. We officially got the word from Comcast. They will not deliver cable to our home. No high speed. Not for Ali. Mind you, cable is already on our road. It’s a quarter mile away. They just need to extend it a short distance. But they have informed us, officially now: they won’t.

Does anyone else out there blog with a dial-up connection? I mean anyone? Anywhere? It’s a crazy way to blog. It’s a ridiculous, hair-pulling, tooth-grinding, send-your-blood-pressure-skyrocketing way to blog.

That last post, for example? The one on fish? When I went to load the Create New Post page, it took 15 minutes and 22 seconds to load. FIFTEEN MINUTES AND TWENTY-TWO SECONDS. Actually, it took longer. The first time, I lost my connection halfway through due to a lack of network activity. The second time, it loaded after 15 minutes and 22 seconds of my life had passed by (enough time to change a poopy diaper, wash hands, play “the bear’s gonna’ git you!” several times with the baby, and get myself a snack).

And then? The moment I copied the text into the body of the post? The page somehow, inexplicably — inconceivably, I tell you — jumped to a site called “The Silent The Complete - Modern Ruins in Finland.” I kid you not. As interested as I may have been under other circumstances to read about the bankruptcy of Oy Ha-Te-Ke Ab and its impact on the Finnish landscape, it was not what I had hoped to do, and I was pissed (pardon my French, but that’s the word) that I then had to spend another 15 minutes of my life waiting again for the Create New Post page to load. Just so I could share the good news about how pregnant women can now eat fish-laden-with-industrial-pollution without guilt.

I’ve found ways around it, of course. I have my little tricks (the Edit Page post doesn’t take nearly as long to load, so when I do have access to high speed, I try to remember to create a bunch of blank posts, which I can fill in later under edit mode). There are always wireless coffeeshops. There is always mooching off better-wired pals. But people. It’s 2007. And I am blogging with a dial-up connection.

So let it hereby be declared that I am disappointed in Comcast. And I don’t understand — do not understand — why it’s okay for Comcast to bid to take over the entire service for an area, but then REFUSE TO SERVE CUSTOMERS WHO ACTUALLY RESIDE IN THAT AREA. Now, I’m no Donald Trump. I’m not even an Omarosa. But even I might be able to turn a profit if I was allowed to operate a monopoly and then exclude any customer I chose. It’s like if Old Navy was the only store at the mall (which, truth be told, it basically is here), and then was allowed to bar customers who only bought clothes off the sale rack. It’s like a grocery store saying that only people who purchase the highest-profit-center-aisle junk foods can enter the sliding glass doors.

Comcast, dude. I am just so utterly disappointed in you. And I like to think that it’s not just me that you’re letting down, but also all of the people who are reading this, right now, but who would prefer to be reading about how to turn a healthy food into scrumptious eating, lightening quick. See, Comcast? You’re not just disappointing me. You’re disappointing all of these good folks. You’re disappointing their families, too. GOOD GOD, COMCAST! THINK OF THE CHILDREN!

There may be a last hope. Our local state representative, the artist-legislator Bill Botzow gave us a contact within the Comcast organization who might be able to help. We will petition her next. Perhaps she will be our hero. Perhaps she will restore my faith in the marketplace. Perhaps she will restore Comcast’s good name and ease my RABID, ACHING DISAPPOINTMENT, which right now feels like it might crush me.

(Verizon, don’t think you get off scot-free, either. You should be offering me DSL.).

Food later. I promise. Right now I’m going to go lick my wounds and mutter hostile things under my breath.