This makes me happy.

I don’t often write about food in this spot. Sometimes in an atwitter post. Mostly, I try to concentrate on learning and creativity–but I love how this poster reminds me that food is part of a basic education. That’s a belief that I hold so deeply that I’m going to have this poster mounted so I can hang it in my kitchen.

I bought it at Pop-up Panisse, a little temporary shop that’s gone up next door to Chez Panisse in Berkeley this week, to celebrate the restaurant’s 40th anniversary. There’s a whole lot of hoopla going on locally with that celebration. (We live about ten minutes away from the restaurant.) But it isn’t just local. Did you hear the Alice Waters interview on Fresh Air?

I probably take for granted how much Alice and her restaurant have influenced me, and the way I shop for food and cook. I imagine that I first stumbled across Alice in 1987, in the introduction to The Greens Cookbook, the first real cookbook I bought for myself. I’d become vegetarian a few years before, when I went off to college–if you don’t count a childhood spent pushing meat around my plate as avoidance technique–and I had a thing or two to learn about how to cook for myself and others.

I have an old magazine clipping from Metropolitan Home that must have run around 1990. It’s the story of a lunch in Alice Waters’ backyard, with photos of lilacs and Alice’s now-grown daughter Fanny, as a little girl with bangs and braids. There are recipes for egg salad sandwiches and fava beans with pecorino. I don’t think I even knew what fava beans were at the time. (This was before Silence of the Lambs, if you know what I mean.) The story coincided with Chris’ and my first backyard, and the hand-tinted photos of lunch with rosé in the vegetable garden were all the inspiration I needed.

I found Chez Panisse Vegetables a few years later, and it became, and still is, an education in how to shop seasonally for vegetables, and how to prepare them to actually taste good. (I grew up in the 70s, when vegetable meant microwaved bags of frozen peas and cubed carrots, understand.) I learned from Alice not to buy tomatoes in February, and what to do with a bunch of swiss chard. And how to turn fava beans, once I’d grown them myself, into a gorgeous, garlicky, chartreuse puree that I now crave every year when May rolls around.

I’ve only eaten at Chez Panisse a few times. (I’m a parent. And this is the San Francisco Bay Area! So many restaurants, so little time.) I keep the beautiful menus in my copy of Chez Panisse Vegetables. These are from the summer of 1999, on the occasion of Chris’ and my 11th anniversary. One was for the regular fixed menu; the other the vegetarian version.

We like to imagine ourselves someday when we’re old and all three kids are grown, driving over to Chez Panisse for the Downstairs Monday Night Dinners.

But anyone who pays any attention to food in the Bay Area knows that Chez Panisse is more than just a restaurant.

I’ve read the San Francisco Chronicle‘s food section religiously for more than twenty years now, and I’d bet a cafe au lait that Chez Panisse, Alice or one of her proteges get mentioned in at least a third of the issues. I’ve followed the restaurant’s anniversaries, its movement toward organics and sustainability, and the beginnings of the Edible Schoolyard Project. (I even ate a burrito beside Alice at Picante once. Not that I said anything. But I did point her out with an excited jerk of my head to Lulu, who must have been nine or ten at the time, and I’m proud to say that she actually knew who Alice was when I whispered her name, thanks to her love of the book Fanny at Chez Panisse.)

As Michael Pollan writes in the afterword of Alice’s new book:

“…Alice Waters genius has been to show us there can be no inspired cooking without inspired shopping, and beyond that, inspired farming. It’s become a cliché of restaurant menus to mention farms, but Chez Panisse was the first to share bylines–pride of authorship–with the men and women who grow the food, recognizing that many of them are as gifted as any who have passed through the fabled kitchen.”

I once took a poetry workshop for teachers which was held in the Edible Schoolyard garden at Martin Luther King, Jr. Middle School in Berkeley. We wrote haiku in the shade of young apple trees while anise swallowtails flitted around us. It was a sigh-inducing spot; still I couldn’t fathom that I was sitting in a garden that would soon inspire schoolyard gardens all over the country, and a global revolution for healthy lunches for kids.

My own efforts to get my kids to garden with me, to cook with me, have been mixed. They’ve been happy to interrupt their backyard play to poke a few seeds into the soil, or to pick and eat a few alpine strawberries, but that’s the extent of it. Lulu has loved to cook since she could stir a bowl of popover batter, but her brothers would only join us when the rare whim struck.

But they have a mother who believes that good, wholesome food matters, and you know what? I think that sinks in.

Longtime readers here may remember Lulu’s 100 Years Of Food project, her last big project as homeschooler before she decided to go to high school. That link includes the final section of Lulu’s project: her analysis of what happened with food in the years between 2000 and 2010. Her analysis is full of insight and hope–and it has everything to do with Alice Waters.

And then there was the story that unfolded in our kitchen this summer. My oldest has always been an enthusiastic eater, but he’s also been the kind of kid who wished soda came out of the faucet and that bread came only in sourdough. “Why isn’t there anything to eat in this house?” he ranted last summer. “Why can’t you buy anything without nuts and seeds in it?”

And then he spent a year eating in the dorms of NYU. Apparently the food revolution has not hit the halls of higher education in New York City. H described his freshman-year diet in a single word: appalling.

Some doppelgänger of my 19-year-old son showed up in my kitchen this summer. He wanted to learn to cook! He begged me to buy more vegetables! He refused sourdough rolls and asked for some real grainy bread!

The other night before he left for school, he helped me make dinner. I was explaining how to saute mushrooms, how he needed to give them enough space in the pan or they’d steam instead of brown. And that he needed to leave them alone to sizzle a bit, and not go stirring them up too soon.

“How would I know that?” he asked. The dorm he’ll be moving into this year is apartment-style, with a kitchen, and he is determined to cook for himself.

“You can always call me when you’re cooking something new,” I said. And then I remembered something.

I pulled a copy of Alice Waters’ The Art of Simple Food off my shelf. It was given to me as a gift, and it’s the only one of my Alice Waters cookbooks that isn’t food-splattered and dog-eared. It was written for beginning cooks, and while there are plenty of fine recipes inside, I suppose I am somewhat beyond it. But it explains how to roast a chicken, how to make pesto, how to prepare a chopped salad to your liking.

And it tells precisely how to saute mushrooms.

When I showed it to H his response was simply, “Awesome.”

So the cookbook flew back east in a suitcase and a new kitchen will be born.

Alice Water’s new book, 40 Years of Chez Panisse, is a gorgeous thing. It’s packed with photos and stories of the restaurant’s history. At fifty-five dollars it was a splurge, but I had to have it. It tells so much about the place where I live, and my own coming of age with food.

I especially love the book’s subtitle: The Power of Gathering. That’s the heart of it all. I believe that one of the greatest gifts we can give our kids is time to gather together, over food lovingly grown, shopped for and prepared, with our undivided attention.

It makes a difference.

Happy anniversary, Chez Panisse!

And thank you, Alice Waters.

Over at her Foothill Home recently, my friend Molly posted her summer to-do list. Inspiring. Mr. T had already started his list, so I combined his with mine, and here’s what we have so far.

Swim with friends and family. Often.

Have a puzzle going at all times. (Stolen from Molly. Check!)

Make good things with our homegrown ollalieberries and plums. Use Blue Chair for inspiration.

Collect rocks with Mr. T and learn about them. (And make some heart stones.)

Set up our tent in the backyard.

Visit an orchard and pick all-time favorite fruits–cherries. (Friday, M and A!)

Take out the sewing machine and finish those curtains for the office before summer guests arrive.

While the sewing machine is out, finally make a picnic quilt from the family jeans, saved for over a decade.

Go to the county fair (and spend a little time in my childhood hometown.)

Make stuffed and fried zucchini blossoms with the recipe learned from cute Italian nonna at Spannocchia (and enjoy every fried bite, without thinking of bathing suits.)

Read adventure books to Mr. T (another borrowed from Molly. Suggestions, anyone?)

Get better at pulling my own mozzarella, before the tomatoes come in.

Sketch with T. (Underway!)

Clear those sprawling rose shrubs and finally make a space for a hammock. When it’s hung, christen it by relaxing there with a tall pastis.

Get back in the habit of capturing it all through a lens.

What’s on your summer lists, my friends?

A few things that have me worked up these days:

eggs! They’re wet and just-hunted for in this photo–you may even spy a tiny slug on one or two of them. (Which is what comes of them spending a few pre-dawn hours hidden in the backyard.) We used natural dyes on all of them but those green ones. I do love the pop of that phony green. Looks like it’s egg salad sandwiches for dinner tonight. I’m trying a new recipe, which uses yogurt instead of mayo, and comes from…

super natural every day. I’m loving this cookbook. I have Heidi’s first cookbook, which I’ve enjoyed as well, but this one may be even better. For Easter breakfast we made the Baked Oatmeal with blueberries. Yum. We’ve also prepared and lapped up the Farro Soup and the Harissa Ravioli. I took a big chance on Pan-Fried Mung Beans with Tempeh, knowing that it sounded like something from a 70s commune, but was unexpectedly directed by the resident teenager to please make this again! At Heidi’s signing at my local bookstore, I told her that as a longtime vegetarian, I have my gourmet cookbooks and my hippie cookbooks–and am very grateful to now have her cookbooks, which elegantly combine the two. Heidi knew just what I meant. She was absolutely lovely and gracious.

teenage style. Easter afternoon. Love their independence.

more teenager appreciation. In the form of a note, left on my desk.

ollalieberries and honey in my future. My girls are so busy these days. This one’s working our ollalieberry bushes. I have one strong colony (the swarm I so comically captured last year) and am hoping to catch another.

a simple, tasty recipe for said honey. This one comes from the classic The Cheese Course, by Janet Fletcher. It’s basically honey and walnuts on little Cabecou goat cheeses, but there’s one special, somewhat time-consuming trick, which removes the tannins from the walnuts. You pour boiling water over the walnuts and let them sit for half an hour. Then you put them on a triple-thick paper-towel-lined pan, and bake at 300 degrees for 30 minutes, and for an additional twenty minutes at 250 degrees, until the nuts are dry throughout. You toss them with the honey and drizzle over the goat cheese. I’ve also done the same over gorgonzola; both got raves at parties. Let me just say that when the cheese was gone, fingers were seen swiping plates.

collaborating brothers. My boys have a long history of working together on H’s film projects. I figured those days had ended for the time being, given that H is at school clear across the country. But never underestimate the power of Skype. Last week, Mr. T did some voice work for an audio story for H’s sound class. We loaded up Skype and H sent the script as a Skype transcript. He gave T direction via headphones and I recorded it on Garage Band. It was sweet to see them working together again–and fun to see how H’s direction class has influenced his abilities to get what he wants from an actor. And he’s always baffled at how T manages to nail what he asks for–yet the two of us can’t convince the kid to try acting for others. Someone’s missing his calling.

an alphabet glue winner! The giveaway issue goes to Wendy, who answered my request for a favorite shared book with, “How could i forget one of my all time favorites – barn dance – by bill martin jr. and john archambault. it is like singing a song!” I’ll send your email address on to Annie, Wendy, and she’ll send along your e-magazine. Congratulations! For those of you who missed out on the giveaway, I hope you’ll still check out Alphabet Glue. You can read more on the website, or in my last post. It’s good, book-loving stuff!

So, what has you all atwitter?

There’s so much to set a person atwitter in December.

rendering my beeswax: For the first time I melted down the bits of wax I’ve collected from my girls. I got a nice golden prism–enough to make into two (count ‘em!) candles. I was hoping to be able to make more for gifts, but I’ve decided to save the wax from my abandoned hive for next year’s bees. Stefaneener told me how to keep it critter-free in the meanwhile with the help of a heavy-duty trash bag and a chunk of dry ice. Such smart friends I have! My remaining hive is still going strong, harvesting nectar from my just-beginning-to-bloom-in-California rosemary…

good books: How could I forget how much I love Lorrie Moore’s writing? Maybe because she hasn’t published a book in ten years? Chris gave me A Gate at the Stairs last Christmas, and somehow I didn’t start reading it until now. Dumb move. The book is fabulous. No one manages to be both snarkily funny and lyrical like Moore does. Just appreciate how she writes about a fortune cookie: “I had one elegantly folded cookie–a short paper nerve baked in an ear.” Lorrie Moore, you kill me.

cookies, cookies, cookies! We’ve only just begun (sing along)…to bake! Yesterday Mr. T and I made up the dough for our annual gingerbread tiles, which longtime readers may remember from two years ago as contender for the best Christmas cookie ever. Next up will be the other cookie that tries each year to claim the throne: David Lebovitz’s Almond and Chocolate Chunk Biscotti. (This is the first year I’ve found the recipe online and sharable!) I’m still considering a few upstart contenders for the batch after that. Maybe Remedial Eating’s version of Flo Braker’s Drei Augen (also known as linzer cookies or red currant jam sandwiches)? Or perhaps Orangette’s take on Alice Medrich’s Whole Wheat Sablés with Cacao Nibs? Or maybe her now famous rendition of Peppermint Bark? (Not a cookie, I know, but I wouldn’t kick it out of the cookie jar.) Perhaps you have another stellar cookie to recommend?

thrilling text messages: Not that I do much texting. But when you have a kid in college all the way across the country, you pick it up pretty fast. A few weeks back I received this ebullient message from that kid: “Joel Coen is speaking to my film class!” Wow. Guess all that battling with the college application monster of last December was worth it. (I’m not sure whether I was more excited with the content of the message or the fact that he cared to share it with his mama.)

fast knitting projects: The knitting really slogged this fall. Swimming lessons got me deep into my crazy gold Que Sera cardigan–but then the lace combined with decreases made for not-so-good Park Day knitting and it was as if my production button had gotten stuck on slo mo. With Christmas coming and a cold boy in New York, I put that project aside and started up a scarf–and suddenly we’re in fast forward. The stitch pattern is manly and 18-year-old-guy-approved and it lets the scarf lie gloriously flat. And the whole long thing is almost finished!

decking the halls: The advent wreath is aglow with three candles at this point in the season, but our advent box could use some more slips. (Either we all need to work harder at sharing our light, or we need to work harder at remembering to record it when we do.) The tree is wearing the equivalent of an unadorned little black dress: it’s done up in nothing but lights and garlands. Not that we’re minimalists around here–it’s just that Lulu and Mr. T want to wait for their big brother to get home before breaking out the ornaments. Which is rather sweet. There’s nothing like a Christmas tree to get you all sentimental.

turning turntables: Chris got his old turntable hooked up and is revisiting his old record collection. He only plays Rush when I’m not home to tease him about it. (Sometimes I catch him.) The other morning he cranked up Van Halen and said, “I have a song for you.” And proceeded to blast “Hot for Teacher.” Ah, the man knows all the backstreets into my heart.

You knew I’d ask: what has you all atwitter?

There’s nothing like summer to get you all atwitter! A few things that have me worked up:

Santa Rosa plums. We planted our tree as an afterthought, an espaliered affair that hides behind our outdoor fireplace. But it gets lots of southerly sun, and it’s just above our bees so we got an unexpected bonanza this year. I followed a recipe for Santa Rose Plum Jam Conserve from local jam artisan June Taylor in The Pleasures of Slow Food. Divine! From here on out I will always leave the skins on my plum preserves because they add such twangy tart to all the sweet. (The secret: cut the pitted fruit into bite-sized chunks before cooking, so the skins aren’t too over-sized and off-putting.) Then Mr. T and I made plum ice cream. All the foodies have been blogging about David Lebovitz’s The Perfect Scoop, and rightly so. It’s full of flavors that you know will be wonderful like Pear Caramel and Guinness-Milk Chocolate. Plus all sorts of mix-ins like Buttercrunch Toffee and Candied Lemon Slices. When I brought my plum ice cream to a dinner party, someone called it the bomb. I think he liked it. (Next up: Malted Milk Ice Cream with crunched-up malt balls. Yowza!)

knitting projects. This one still needs button loops, so I don’t have modeled shots or a ravelry update yet. I’d hoped to finish it before our trip so I could wear it; instead I was still working on it on planes, trains and automobiles. It’s Ysolda’s Coraline, but I’m calling it my Smocked In Sweden sweater because I started the smocking during the long drive from Stockholm to the south. There will now always be red farm houses and purple lupine looped into that smocking. The smocking was so fun to knit that I had to remind myself to look out the window at all that gorgeousness.

I’ve always wanted to knit a gold cardigan, and after finishing that one up there, all done up in alpaca and too hot to wear anytime soon, I looked for a pattern that would work in cotton. I stumbled on this version of the knitty pattern Que Sera, and I had to flat-out copy it. All that color! All that texture! And it is the most fun pattern ever to knit while watching swimming lessons. I’m not sure the color will flatter this dishwater blonde, but I’m hoping the sweater will be stunning enough that no one will notice.

honey! Speaking of gold, look what we got. Our first honey harvest, after two seasons of keeping bees. We hadn’t planned to harvest so soon. But we don’t use foundation in our frames (you can read about that here), and sometimes without foundation, bees will build wonky comb. In this particular box, the bees built the comb in perfect rows, but diagonal to the frames. If we hadn’t been traveling, I’d have recognized it sooner, and would have cut out the errant comb or two and refastened it properly with rubber-bands. But left on their own, the colony filled the entire box this way. You can’t pull the frames from the box when the comb is attached at angles, so Chris and I had to remove several frames at a time, destroying the comb and watching honey ooze everywhere. We cut them into a big cake pan, did our best to shoo away the bees, and eventually brought it inside and used the crush-and-strain method to extract the honey. You can see a video of the method here. Basically you crush the wax to release the honey from the comb, and then strain it into a big container.

Now we have about a dozen jars of honey with a very delicate floral flavor, and lots of beeswax for crafts. Since we have two hives and a hillside of blooming lavender, there should be more by the end of the summer. Thank you, girls!

farm city. I knew about this book by Novella Carpenter, about her experiences starting a small farm on a vacant lot in a seedy part of Oakland. You might think I’d have wanted to read it, since she’s local, but I’m not so keen on books in the look-at-the-fringe-thing-I’ve-done! genre. I’ve read 168 novels in 168 days! I dressed in clothing made from trash for a year! The writing in that sort of memoir doesn’t tend to do it for me. But one day I picked up a copy at the bookstore, and was drawn in by the first line: “I have a farm on a dead-end street in the ghetto.” By the end of the first page I was won over by the writing; reading on the back flap that Carpenter “attended UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism” gave some insight into that. It’s a fun tale–despite the fact there’s enough meat-animal killing to make a vegetarian like me wince. Carpenter’s mindfulness about the process makes it readable, though, and thought-provoking. (Quirky discovery: half-way through the book I realized that Carpenter is the sister of Riana Lagarde, whose These Days in French Life flickr photos I’ve followed for a few years. Small world!)

a new blog project. I have big plans for something here in September. It’s a secret for now, but my wheels are spinning.

an anniversary. As of today, I have been married to this man for 22 years. Twenty-two years! Either we are very old, or we married very young. Or both. In the photo, it looks like he’s leading me off to a lifetime of fun. We’re still going. (Happy anniversary, Sweets.)

So you know I’m going to ask: What has you all atwitter?

Remember back in January, when Lulu and I watched all those old commercials, and I told you about her food project? She wanted to learn about food in the U.S. in the last century. Well, she worked at the project for two months, and finally finished it last week for our homeschool group’s history fair. (I wrote about the fair here last year.)

She decided to research each decade since 1910 to learn how food had changed in that decade. The book The Century In Food by Beverly Bundy was a big help, as was the internet.

For each decade she wrote an overview; then she came up with a menu, a few typical school lunches, a recipe and an interesting tidbit from the decade. 

A big part of the fun was deciding how to display her information. There are always lots of tri-fold display boards at these fairs, and Lulu wanted to come up with something more engaging. She decided to put each decade’s information on some sort of food container that seemed emblematic of the decade. 

She put the 1960s on an old Julia Child cookbook.

And don’t you love the 80s presented on a Big Gulp container, and the 90s on a package of Lunchables? (Or maybe I should say: doesn’t it make you cringe?)

She also made samples for visitors to try: a butterless, eggless, milkless cake from the wartime 1940s (surprisingly good!) and a pineapple upside-down cake from the 1950s. And she ran a loop of those wacky old commercials.

It surprised me how hard Lulu worked at this project. She had a vision for it and wouldn’t stop until it was finished. I think the history fair might have been a little disappointing for her–after all the work she did, it seemed that most visitors weren’t able to spend time to really explore her display. Then again, the main reward seemed to be the accomplishment she felt.  If you go back to my last post and reconsider those Dan Pink abilities for the future, I’d say Lulu spent a few months romping in design (how she displayed the information), story (deciding how to tell each decade’s story in a compelling way), symphony (pulling together information from many places and creating something unique) and meaning (this topic mattered to Lulu, which was evident in the amount of time she put into it. Something about it really drove her.)

My favorite part of her display was her write-up of the decade of 2000-2010. Most of the resources she’d used didn’t include this decade, but that didn’t really matter–this was the one decade Lulu remembered herself. We talked about the decade a bit before she wrote, but most of her information came from discussions we’ve had over the last ten years. Lulu gets what’s happening with food in our country these days, and I’m proud of that. I’m not sure that goal would show up on a list of education standards, but it’s pretty important to us.

Here’s what she wrote.

     “In the 2000s, the organic and Slow Food movements started to become popular. These movements brought America back towards where it had started at the beginning of the 1900s, buying fresh vegetables at local markets, cooking meals from scratch and using seasonal ingredients. Over the last century Americans had strayed farther and farther from this sort of cooking, until home-cooking meant heating something up or adding water. With the Slow Food movement, Americans began to cook natural, real health food, not the low-fat, calorie-free food that had been thought of as “healthy” in the past. Farmer’s markets, farm boxes of fruits and veggies and health food stores like Whole Foods are spreading across the country, bringing with them the idea that not only is Slow Food healthy, but it’s also delicious and enjoyable to make. Foods like organic eggs and milk, free-range chickens, grass-fed beef and local vegetables are beginning to appear on ordinary supermarket shelves and become staples in American diets. Restaurants are also following the movement, creating organic and seasonal menus that appeal to the next generation as well as the last one. Even First Lady Michelle Obama has chosen as her cause, while in the White House, to improve the eating habits of American children and bring healthy foods back to schools.

     Even with these movements, America is still very much a country built on convenience foods, but that is beginning to change. And maybe one day in the near future, America will have come full circle, back to the wholesome, homemade foods of the 1910s.”

Hopeful, don’t you think?

I think she learned a lot.

Things have been so dang thinky on this blog lately. I really owe you my chapter-a-month challenge post, but I’m ready for some fluff. Photos! Knitting! Sugary stuff to eat!

I haven’t done one of these atwitter posts in a while. Here’s what has me all worked up these days.

Knitting. Looky! Even though I haven’t posted here, I’ve been knitting. Hats!

This one (ravelry link) is my favorite, ’cause I can pretend it’s the 1930′s and it doesn’t smash my (already plenty flat) hair.

(updated the photo: I felted the hat a bit because it was too big. This photo is post-felting.)

This was my first foray into colorwork. Isn’t it a pretty pattern? I’m a continental knitter, and was hell-bent on learning how to hold both yarns in the left hand. I kept fiddling with ways of stranding the yarn across my fingers and finally figured a way that worked for me. Having both yarns on the same hand made my tension even, I think.

I also knit a pair of super-wooly socks for Chris to wear around the house, but he won’t hold still long enough more me to get a photo. Now I’m swatching for Ysolda’s coraline. 

The girls are back in action! Here in northern California, my plum tree is blooming, the rosemary is draped in blue and my bees are busy. I opened up the hive over the weekend and found lots of capped honey, and saw Queen Bee-atrice strutting around some glossy white larval bees.

Can you see her in the photo, the longer one towards the middle? Yippee! I think we’ll get honey this year!

new blogs: Danielsaurus is fascinating. Here’s a description from the sidebar: “Daniel’s been hardwired to the Internet since he was twelve and spends a lot of time on it finding nifty things to share. Mostly he writes about children, play, kids’ cultures, and the ‘bigger picture’ of childhood in society.” It’s a constant flow of thought-provoking links and wonderings.

Making marmalade. Last summer, stefeneener and denise gave a jam workshop that finally got me past my irrational fears of canning, and at Christmas my parents gifted me with some fine equipment. 

Our satsuma mandarin tree went bonkers with fruit this winter, so satsuma-vanilla bean marmalade was my first canning attempt. Fabulous recipe! It turned out so tasty that I have a big bowl of our last satsumas, ready to make a third batch. Favorite snack: this marmalade with almond butter on Swedish crispbread. Snarf.

New books. I’m still meaning to write a post on Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind, giddy as I am about the ideas in that book. I also read his newer book, Drive, about motivation. It’s also a fascinating book, all about how intrinsic motivation is much more powerful than external motivators, but this one didn’t knock my hand-knit socks off as much as the other book. Because, of course, as a homeschooling parent, I see the power of internal motivation in action every single day. I’ve learned the hard way, as many homeschooling parents do, that my attempts at motivating my kids have not a fraction of the power that their own internal fires do. So the ideas here weren’t new to me, but if you have any doubts about the potential of internal drive and want scientific back-up, or if you want hints for becoming a more internally-driven person, it’s a good read. And, in the section on kids and education, Pink gives a nod to unschooling! Pink’s TED talk on the topic is compelling–it gives you a sense of what the book is like.

And has anyone read 50 Dangerous Things (You Should Let Your Children Do)? I haven’t, but am intrigued. Lots of interesting stuff from the author, Gever Tulley, at tinkering school.

So, what has you all atwitter right now?

A blogging mama meet-up. A while back I wrote about meeting some blogging friends in person for the first time. Well, we did it again, but this time there were seven of us. The photo above is what Mr. T came up with when I asked him to use my camera to take a picture of us lined-up mamas. That’s the back of my head–guess the boy likes close-ups. Tara.mama.wendy’s Finn got a much better one. Maya of Urban Organica did a fun write-up of the day. And Amy of Diary of a Domestic Animal wrote a musing that made me teary. I’m still amazed at how you can find kindred souls via computers. And I’m still feeling the magic of the day.

making mozzarella. Ever since reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, I’ve wanted to try making my own fresh mozzarella. I finally got a cheesemaking kit, and have made two batches. I’m still learning and tweaking, but it’s been fun! Good, local organic milk seems to be key. I’ve used full-fat milk in both batches, but I’m going to try lowfat for my next batch; the locally-made mozzarella that I like tastes like it’s from part-skim milk. And while our tomatoes haven’t gone gangbusters this year–note to self: plant favas and amend soil–we’ve had a steady stream. Perfect with homemade mozz.

new books. Spunk and Bite: A Writer’s Guide to Bold, Contemporary Style, by Arthur Plotnik is very naughtily tempting me away from my essayist for this month, M.F.K Fisher. The book was recommended by my writing friend Carolyn, after reading my E.B. White post, and the comments on Strunk and White’s Elements of Style. Spunk and Bite is the antidote to all the confining rules of Strunk and White. Here’s a quote, showing Plotnik’s response to a quote by White: “Stick to the standard, White decreed, because ‘by the time this paragraph sees print, uptight, ripoff, rap, dude, vibe, copout, and funky will be the words of yesteryear’. That was some thirty years ago–and, dude, those words are still very much around.” Funny. The whole book is written with that kind of wit. Good writing advice that takes its own advice.

making kombucha. Now I’m really going to be accused of going off the deep end of the earth mama pool. But I’ve developed a craving for the stuff. I’ve always been a vinegar fiend, and kombucha is vinegary, fizzy and thirst-quenching. Plus there are lots of purported health benefits, which you can read about online, or in books like Nourishing Traditions. But at $3 and up per bottle, I thought I’d try to make my own. You need a kombucha “mother” to start a batch, which means you need a friend with a working batch, or you can buy one (fairly expensively) online. I’m trying to start my own mother, using a store-bought bottle and this recipe from Paprika. I started mine on 8/25, and it’s just about ready for brewing a first batch. Of course, I think it’s developed especially well over the last few days, because my jar got a new cover. Isn’t it exquisite? It was crocheted by Molly, using thread from her husband’s grandmother. Looking at every tiny stitch in its pattern, I’m awed by the artistry and the fact that it’s been gifted to me. It’s really far too beautiful to be on a jar of kombucha; look at how pretty it looks on Molly’s pitcher. Then again, I kinda like having it over my pet project. Like I told Molly, it’s sorta perfect, resting over something that’s alive and growing and changing–like friendship.

knitting progress. This one’s coming along much faster than my sweater coat. One sleeve almost finished, one more to go. It’s in linen and cotton–perfect for the Indian summer weather we’re having, and I want to wear it now! My version is a bastardization of two patterns. Details here for you Ravelers.

So tell me, what has you all atwitter?

A few things that got me all worked up this month:

A Series of Unfortunate Events. I listened to several of these books on tape with H and Lulu way back when, and have only just started listening again with Mr. T.  I’d forgotten how brilliant they are. They’re hilarious, if you have the warped sense of humor that my family has inherited, for better or for worse. I wouldn’t even consider reading them aloud–not when Tim Curry does it so much better, Mr. Po’s hacking cough and all. And if, like I am, you are a wordlover—a term which here means someone who takes a slightly odd pleasure in the sound and meaning of words–you will appreciate Lemony Snicket’s tendency to employ words and phrases not typically found in children’s books, and also to explain their meanings. You would not believe how these words and phrases managed to creep into Lulu’s vocabulary when she was younger; now I have a seven-year-old son whose conversations are embellished with gems like, “with all due respect” and “dwarfed in comparison”. (Do I recommend these books for other seven-year-olds? No, I do not. As you can see in Mr. T’s drawing, they’re full of death and darkness and malevolent adults. But if you have a seven-year-old with older siblings who is twisted already–enjoy!)

It’s kumquat season. I love having these beauties sitting in a pretty bowl on the counter, and popping them into my mouth as I pass by. An acquired taste, I suppose, but I find them irresistible.

Studying India. Such a fascinating culture, and I’m enjoying every minute of it. We were lucky enough to start our explorations just as the fabulous Story of India appeared on PBS–hopefully they’ll replay it if you missed it. The kids have each come up with a project–Lulu is planning to make an Indian dollhouse, inspired by this stunning Frida Kahlo studio dollhouse. And Mr. T is thinking about making a model of a banyan tree out of Model Magic, with creatures in and around it. Should be fun…

Taking a break from an endless knitting project. So I’ve finished the sleeves and the back of my Sweater Coat with Lace Pattern.

I’m generally a ridiculously monogamous knitter, but I’m taking a break to knit myself a pair of Toasty mitts. I’m adding thumb gussets because I think they look nice and adapting the pattern is good for my math brain.

What’s that you say? It looks like the same yarn as I’m using in the sweater? No, Silly, the sweater is Sublime Kid Mohair, while the mitts’ yarn is Rowan Kid Classic. But it would seem that I’ve fallen into a slate blue, mohair rut and I can’t get out.

Making yogurt. This was my first try, inspired by The River Cottage Family Cookbook. Lacking a pilot light in my oven, I tried to make a “warm place” by putting my crockpot on low, and lining it with several cloth towels. That still seemed to keep the milk too warm, though. The finished yogurt tastes good, but is very runny. My Danish, yarn shop-owning friend–who ought to know a thing about making yogurt–suggested wrapping the warmed milk in towels and just keeping it in a cooler to insulate it while the bacteria develops. I’ll try that with my next batch.

New blogs. A couple of particularly beautiful ones: good + happy day and the habit of being.

So what has you all atwitter this month?

Because that’s just when an older sister will say to her younger brother, “Do you want to make a fairy feast?”

And they’ll go into the garden to gather supplies. She’ll get ingredients from the kitchen; he’ll gather fairies and animals from his room.

They’ll make a salad, a cake and a tiny tart.  They’ll even bake a pizza and a wee baguette.

All the animals and fairies and gnomes will find a place. Well, not all of them. There will be some bickering about who should be invited, and who is the most appropriate. The brother will have to do some cajoling to allow the teddy bear a spot.

And after nearly two hours of efforts, the spread will be divine, enough to impress even a Martha Stewart fairy.

Of course, the brother might have had a better time building a fortress for the fairies, gnomes and their animal friends. He probably would have preferred to have them jump off trees and chase each other under table legs rather than arrange them oh, so elegantly.

But he did like baking those breads and that baguette.

And really, when your 13-year-old sister is bored and offers to play with you for the afternoon? 

You go with it.