The Piccadilly Herb Club

Tonight Laurel picked the recipe for dinner. Chicken and Biscuit Pie. She found it in this cookbook that belonged to me when I was little. A few years ago my mom passed it on to us. I had everything except the can of condensed cream of chicken soup, so I decided to cook up a quick bechamel sauce. When I opened the cupboard door to find some thyme, there was the little glass jar from the Piccadilly Herb Club. My grandmother Norine gave it to me many years ago. The jar had a few little sachet herb packets for cooking. I guess I had used a few of them right away, but after she died I never touched that jar. Sometimes it would surface when I cleaned out the cupboards or moved things around. She's been dead quite a while so I assumed that the herbs wouldn't even be good anymore. I didn't want to throw it away, but I didn't know what I was keeping it for. Tonight I threw the last sachet into the bechamel sauce and there was a surprising amount of flavor still left. 

The children's cookbook is terrible, by the way. I'm not sure they tested the recipes. Their proportions are way off. Laurel was not bothered by it. We'll just experiment with our cooking, she said. Everybody liked the meal, especially the biscuits. They had never seen the kind that pop out of the can before. When I popped the can, Marko was amazed... Laurel and Max were terrified. 

I didn't know what to do with the empty jar. 

I wondered if the Piccadilly Herb Club was still meeting. I thought about the things my grandmother started to do after my grandfather finally died after an agonizing decade with Alzheimer's. Silver Sneakers. Tai Chi. I remembered the first time I saw her after she stopped dyeing her hair and it was all silver. When she gave me her red leather Samsonite luggage, barely used. How she never once asked me when I was going to have children in the years between my wedding day and her death. The pots of African violets on her sun porch. Seeing her standing in the doorway, watching a 12 year old me sit with my grandpa, hazy in the smoke from his cigarette. 

As I get older, I don't find that memories fade, so much as they get shuffled to the bottom of the deck.  Out of sight, out of mind. But then a word or smell invokes them again, and there they are clear as day. 

Spring Sprung

Nope, no way, no, we will not put the air conditioners in the windows until May. At least. This is what I said on Sunday, when it was April. But now it is May, and I am definitely thinking about it. Especially because of the relatively early bedtimes for the kiddos. And the extremely loud motorcycles zooming back and forth on my street.

I used to be very judgmental of parents whose kids missed a lot of school. Sometimes they would have excuses I thought were pretty lame and probably made up. But now that I juggle my kids and other kids I babysit and 4 different school schedules, I can totally feel that mom who would just rather keep a kid home when the transportation gets too complicated. Like seriously, early dismissal for one school throws everybody off. And destroys Max's nap.

The weather was bad today. I don't mind rain, but lightning and falling branches scare the crap out of me, so we stayed inside. I brought out all the cookbooks, even Betty Crocker's Dinner for Two, 1976 edition. I gave every kid a cookbook and some sticky notes and told them to find the most delicious foods. This task kept them busy for a half an hour, which is a long time at 5 o'clock for a 4,5,6,and 7 year old. (Max did not get a cookbook, but I did let him have a sticky note.) It was long enough for me to mix up some flour and water and yeast for pizza dough. I meant to cook chicken chili tonight, but never made it out to get the green chilies. Pizza just seemed easier. I made one cheese, one pepperoni, one peach/balsamic/mushroom and one tuna/caper/ricotta.

Anyway, spring is here. We're going to start Running Club back up this week. I don't think it will get into full swing until school is out, but my kids are eager to run.