Naked Salad

I have a go-to dressing-less salad that I make almost every night for dinner. Fritz and I split it; the kids aren't into salad. I used to use salad dressing, but about 18 months ago I stopped using salad dressing as part of my one ingredient goal. (Mentioned here.) Since then I've been experimenting with ways to make a salad moist without using salad dressing. The best strategy I've found it to grate carrots or (raw) beet into the salad. If given a choice, I always pick the beet: it looks so pretty with the greens! Also, there's something perfect about the way a raw, grated beet is sweet and juicy.

I'm also a big believer that salad aesthetics are important. I like a mixture of color, intentional chopping of vegetables for maximal textural impact, and visibility of the bowl. Food always looks more appealing when it's full of color! Like me, you've probably also read that food with lots of colors is somewhat related to having a good diversity of vitamins and nutrients. That sounds good to me, so I go with it! Especially with fruits and vegetables, they can be unusual, organic shapes or really standard shapes depending on how you chop them (Thank you, Arch 101), so I try to maximize the shapes and sizes of the various ingredients for a bold textural appearance. And after taking care to make a beautiful salad, I put it in a glass bowl so I can see it. Our glass bowls get so much use that I really could replace them with something a little less worn. I guess I'm currently working against myself on this point. Here's my lovely salad in my slightly less lovely bowl:

Ingredients:
1 huge handful mixed lettuces (I buy the boxes of "prewashed" salad because too much fussing with lettuce deflates my enthusiasm for making salad)
1 huge handful baby spinach (Ditto on the box)
3 latitudinally thinly sliced sweet peppers
1 finely chopped slice of onion
1 peeled and latitudinally sliced carrot (or grated carrot)
1 peeled and grated small raw beet (Surgical gloves if red-died hands bother you, alternatively, usually the red beet washes off after about 2 hand washings)
pecorino romano, shaved
handful of raw sunflower or raw pumpkin seeds

Enjoy!

The Power of Humor

This weekend we watched the subtitled Er ist wieder da (Look Who's Back), a German movie that is based on a 2011 book.  The movie has recently been released on Netflix. Over the last two years, I've caught several snippets on German media about the book and then film. The idea explored in the movie is what happens when Adolf Hilter wakes up in modern day Germany. Mostly, I'd heard the book (and the movie) were good satires. I also understand that the significance of Germans laughing about Adolf Hitler. Because basically, they don't laugh about him. At all. Until now. In the current times, Hitler finds his audience as a comedian.

So.... I found the movie PROFOUNDLY disturbing. I haven't read the book, so I can't tell you if they are basically the same or if the movie expands where the book left off. But the movie definitely mixes the fantastical storyline that somehow Hilter just wakes up 70 years later in modern day Germany with recent film footage of non-actor Germans interacting off-script with the actor playing Hitler. It's not reassuring; I, as the viewer, had no idea sometimes where the lines between humor and entertainment and and ratings and politics and reality were.

For all the comparisons between Hitler and the apparent Republican US presidential candidate this year, this movie, for me, drew disturbing parallels. The parallels were not about two people and their fascist ideologies. Rather the parallels were about the way we equate entertainment with being a leader. I think most scholars would agree that in Germany of the 1930s, the aspect of entertainment that lead to Hitler's rise was not humor. But watching this movie and thinking about our current political scene in the US, humor might very well be an aspect of entertainment in which we are still vulnerable. I started to think about how many times I've been sucked into a reading an article about the presidential candidates because, he said/did what now? You can't be serious! Are we separating the ability to entertain from the ability to be a good leader? Even if it makes us laugh?

I sure hope so!

And for me, I hereby refuse to read (click on) on any more political articles for the sake of entertainment.

Morning Birds

Sunday was a typical weekend morning. Trixie woke up at 5:37am, which is the normal time for her. Mattias joined us within 10 minutes. All of our children wake up early. Although, in the last two years, Noah started sleeping as late as 7am. We refer to his current sleeping patterns as sleeping in.

I'm a morning person, so I've tried to be kind and generous about the fact that the children are also morning people. Or it seems they are morning people. But I do resent not having the mornings to myself to go running. I loved waking up in the morning to run. Sigh. That was a decade ago. These days, I run kid interference so that my night owl husband can sleep in. Sleeping in for him means the same sort as Noah: maybe 7am (but not usually as late as 8 am).

The kiddos are hungry right away. No, they're hangry. So I take them downstairs for first breakfast. They will eat second breakfast later. Like hobbits. Or because they've got a healthy dose of Bavarian blood surging through their veins. I hear Bavarians construction workers call it Vesper, which sounds like a prayer to my English ears. After first breakfast and before second breakfast, they'll do some of their best playing of the day. That is when I finally get a few moments of time to myself, but I've already lost my enthusiasm to run.

Over the last decade, we've lived in several areas that are quite densely populated with children. Especially during the winter months, I've noticed there are NOT other lights on at 5:37 am in the morning. So I guess my children are just outliers in the waking up early category.

But I hear that second breakfast is more common.