Seriously, if you can lay your hands to some ripe red Fresno chiles, make this homemade sriracha sauce. Even if you can't, try substituting other chiles: red would be more authentic for flavor, but we made a batch with green jalapenos and serranos too, and it was delicious-if-not-the-same.
If you are using nuclear-hot chiles or have a tender mouth, shake out the seeds before the soaking-in-vinegar stage, and/or leave them to soak in the vinegar for a day or two extra to allow them to mellow.
Double the garlic. Yes, really.
Feel free to substitute in whatever sugar you like: we used piloncillos because I have always found them to resemble palm sugar.
My baby shower was yesterday, which was fun: it's a sweet little women's ritual I've never been through before, as I've never attended one. We had delicious lunch and beautiful cake and I have SO many gifts for the baby and I need to write thank you letters and we played silly games like sniffing melted candy bars in disposable diapers (I won! My perfumers' nose and pregnancy super-senses are verified), tasting commercial baby food (oh GOD! Baby food is awful. Just awful, health-damagingly horrible. I am going to mash up whatever in lieu of feeding him this stuff as often as possible) and unscrambling baby-related word ciphers -- which my natural-cryptanalyst mom, predictably, won. (She got in trouble as a tween for sitting down with her dad's Masons handbook and reading it as if it were any ol' unencoded book... she's really gifted at word scrambles.)
Pat had begged off the baby-shower thing out of purest terror of the "hen party" factor, so we sort of re-capped by having him go through all the bags of tiny-baby clothes and loot after dinner. He was adorable, playing with the little toys, welling up at the bitsy sizes of the clothes, generally charmed. He woke up in full-scale panic; all of this is suddenly frightfully real and he is feeling the weight of responsibility.
Doesn't help that Taxes Were Done this weekend and we owe a ton, I'm sure. :)
Anyway, if you're expecting or know someone who is: try to talk them down out of the trees if they're flipping out. We are all messed up and will all mess up our kids. The goal is to be able to explain that you did it out of love, because you're still talking to each other by the time they figure out how messed up they think they are, right? I think there's no perfect way, but lots of right ways. I hope I still think so in a year, in five years, in twenty-five years. Wish me luck.
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Oh! And P.S. ... I turned in the 24-hour pee collection. Pat, bless him, lugged it through the hospital and earned an honorary sainthood, according to the L&D nurses. Thank goodness I have a partner with a strong back, a willingness to do the ridiculous, and a sense of humor.
Nice written, it was good to me. What game did you play in baby shower?
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Mickey Buarao
Smitten Kitchen has baby food recipes! I don't know that one needs recipes for baby food, but these ones look good enough for grown-ups too.
Also I am totally making that sriracha. I have a bag of Thai bird chilies and I think they will be perfect!
Thank you, Mickey! We played three: 1) we sniffed melted candy bars in diapers (they looked disgusting), trying to guess which was which by their appearance and smell; 2) we tried a baby-related word scramble (words like "baby monitor" and "diaper"); 3) we tasted several flavors of baby food and tried to guess which flavor was from which ingredients. Fun! But also gross.
Emily, I just discovered SK's baby food recipes -- they're awesome! We are thinking of doing something like that... and I love the silicone ice cube trays that she recommended for freezing baby food, too.
I cannot get enough of the sriracha. Yummmm.
Mickey, I just checked out your website -- how adorable! :)
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