Alex would not be described as an outdoorsman. He lands squarely in the home-body category and this includes even staying inside his home. This became a conversation point at a family dinner. We were telling Alex he needed to get out more. Get some exercise. Get some sun. When the sun topic came up, the following exchange took place.

MARTY
You should sit outside everyday for fifteen ...

i've shared our shopping list and menu before. i've not been updating the site's menu pages because since having kids we weren't entertaining as much. but do not take that to mean we abandoned our food planning systems. i think this is probably our oldest joint-list, our most functional list, and the most impactful list to our home (although that seems like a lofty claim so please take it as me saying it's VERY helpful to us). every other year or so marty and i have a full-blown conversation about how people manage this process in their home (shopping and cooking) without a list/plan. we try to remember what we used to do before we started using our process but it's hard to remember because we've been doing it so long. of all the list i have shared and will share, i gotta think this one is definitely one of the most vital and sanity-saving of them all.

below you will find both a pdf and word version of our shopping list template. the word version would allow you to modify the list to your own needs should you be curious to give it a go and not want to start from scratch. marty definitely adjusts ours to match the flow of our grocery store. below those two files is a sample of what one of marty's ready to go lists looks like in action.

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here's a list everyone has, whether they know it or not. and when i say ALL-TIME FAVORITES i do mean all-time as this list dates back to my elementary-school days. some of these pictures are not my own.

MY ALL-TIME FAVORITE RESTAURANTS

(in order of adoration)

Cafe Natasha (St. Louis, Missouri) a friend first took me to cafe natasha in the 90's. he was a vegetarian and liked some meat-free option they had but told me that everyone raves about their kabobs. always ready to listen to a food suggestion by the masses that preceded me i ordered it up. the result: the family that owns this business has since watched my children grow up. i honestly don't know how many years now i have been eating my birthday dinner there but long enough that my children all celebrate my birthday more heartily knowing they have a cafe natasha kabob in their near future (versus celebrating another year of health with/for me—I don't fault them for this and if you tasted one of these vibrant cudgels of meat which simultaneously melts AND explodes in your mouth, you wouldn't either). fact is, i will be eating my birthday dinner there tomorrow night which is fortunate because writing about my favorite meal has sparked the salivary flames.

Jake's Seafood (Portland, Oregon) a work dinner first brought me to jakes. i was not much of a seafood guy at the time and a touch nervous about finding something i'd like. before i had time to figure it out my boss's boss ordered for me. i had no time to act and given the pecking order seated at the table, had no proper out. when the plate arrived i studied it more closely and asked what it was called again. i was told, "it's their stuffed salmon and it's very good." over the next two years i worked in portland for multiple weeks. every night i spent in the city i ate at jakes and the only dish i ever ordered was their stuffed salmon because, yes, as i was told at the start, it was very good. another boon and perk of jake's seafood is it is within walking distance of powell's used book store. my all-time favorite bookstore. this evening combination made my work days in portland agonizing because all i could think about all day was that stuffed salmon, followed by hours of slow meandering through the seemingly endless stacks of used books at powells. i think i may need to find a reason for my new employer to send me to portland just so i can re-experience one of best work-travel destinations this country has to offer (to an introverted, non-drinking, ritual-loving curiousity like myself at least).

Frontier Restaurant (Albequerque, New Mexico) it is possible my adoration for this meal was caused by a hunger-fugue state but given the crowds we competed with to order and find seating, i don't think that was entirely the case. i've always preferred mexican food from the west. the mid-western versions, right down to their grease-laden sopapillas are simply embarrassing. this meal, one of my early yelp-wins, took both my breath and hunger away. it is worth adding that what took me to the frontier restaurant was a memorable friend boondoggle. bookguy called me and said he had to drive from north carolina to new mexico and wondered if he could pick me up in st. louis and have me join him for the rest of the drive west. once there he would fly me back. this is not the first time bookguy and i have shared in such an adventure. for as protective and militant as i am about my time, i will say each of those trips stood as some of my least-productive but most memorable and enjoyed days. life includes lots of funny and unpredictable math.

Panhandler's Pizza (Fort Collins, Colorado) i grew up eating pan's pizzas. their slices were magical then and have somehow only gotten better in time. this privately owned place's ability to grow and compete with the times is almost as impressive as their lovingly and expertly prepared pies. you sometimes wonder how much of a food-want like this is truly taste and how much is sentiment as i grew up eating at pan's on friday nights and for high school lunches as we had an open school-campus. i was affirmed on a recent trip back to fort collins by a friend's experience. before going there he confessed to disliking pizza, all pizza, but would eat there because others wanted to. at the end of the meal, he said that may have been the first good piece of pizza he had ever had. so good food plus boyhood sentiment. all good all the time.

Wong's Wok (St. Louis, Missouri) when i first moved into the community i now live in, there was this hole-in-the-wall chinese place. they shared a galley-area of seating with about four other little eateries. they had a sign taped to their menu board that read, "spicy beef noodle soup - friday and saturday only". and if you ever happened through this area on the weekends, half the tables were occupied by people, mostly of asian descent, hunkered over the large bowls with piping steam escaping their hovering faces. in time you have no choice but to try it. that was more than twenty years ago and i could in no way tell you how many times my head has been one of the many hovering over one of wong's bowls. a few years ago through some scandalous and smarmy business dealings, wong's wok and all of their neighboring merchants were ejected from the space. i was devastated to lose my favorite eatery. but in one of the most fortuitous results, wong's wok found a new storefront and not only is it closer to my home than it used to be, it is the closest food-place to my home. this is one of the rare times in my life where the universe seemed to contort, fully, to my wishes.

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DEFUNCT FAVORITES

(in the order of their closing)

this was the original loaded potato place. and the spud wasn't just an accoutrement, it was the full meal. they would put seemingly everything and anything on a potato. and their potatoes seemed to be grown under nuclear conditions because they were absolutely gigantic. my favorite was called the wisconsin and came out laden, and i DO mean laden, with melted colby-jack cheese, sour cream and spring onions.

spudworks was also the first place i worked. i got the job after our waitress checked in on us after my family had eaten asking if there was anything else she could get us. my dad said, only half-jokingly, "yes, a job for my boy". my mother and i both looked up somewhat surprised. the pert girl said "let me check" and disappeared into the kitchen area. she returned a few minutes later to say they did need a dishwasher. i started a few weeks later, the summer before my 16th birthday.


finding your favorite burger place is a complicated and individual process. it's almost as hard as finding another married couple you and your spouse/partner enjoy equally. first you have the need for the four adults to get along, in all directions (sometimes the married couple themselves possess the disconnect). then if there are children involved you just left basic algebra and entered trig2. burger joints are similar. first you have to find a burger that works for you and if you haven't yet studied the great variety of possible burger styles you might want to block some time for the conversation as it will get a little deeper than you are probably expecting (e.g. fat vs thin, single vs stacked, rare vs cooked, meat to bun ratio, few condiments vs the works, and on). then, of almost equal importance, are the fries that come with it (e.g. fat vs skinny, vegtable or peanut oil, fresh-cut vs pre-fabbed, waffle vs string, and on). i used to work with a guy who would make multiple stops for his family's burger nights. first he'd go to burger king to get the burgers and then go to mcdonalds to get the fries (even the order of the stops was calculated based on which could last longer before being eaten). talk about being committed to getting it right. part of me wants to judge him but another part of me knows he is right and if i could snap my fingers and have that meal presented to me i would, which leaves me kinda respecting the effort he is willing to give for a non-compromised experience (that said, i could never burn the extra minutes to make it happen).

when big V's came to my community i wasn't really eating burgers or fast food at the time. i went there only so i could report on what they were like as lots of people ask me about the eateries that are near my home (as we have a lot of them). so i stopped by one day and ordered a basic combo. i ate lunch there for five consecutive days. it was, for me, the best burger-fry combo i'd ever experienced.

then a sad, nearly impossible, series of events took place that forced the very popular restaurant to shut down waaaayyyy before its time. i'm still in mourning over the loss of my big v burger that was within walking distance of my home.


this was definitely my first culinary love. my mom and i ate here frequently starting in my elementary days. sometimes she would bring food from here home after work and sometimes she would send me up on my bike to get us a hoagie. the owner, frank, from back east, was by my recollection the first adult who spoke to me like i was his peer, and not just a little kid (this is how marty conducts herself with young people too). after i moved away from fort collins anytime i would return, the yellow sub was always one of my stops. i remember how stunned i was when i walked in after having been away for more than five years and frank came out from behind his windowed view of the space to greet me, even sitting down at my table and talking with me at length about what had been happening in my life. these social visits on frank's part were mixed blessings because while i would love nothing more than talk to him for hours and days on end, the whole production line would halt whenever he left his station (and you could see/feel the glares of the other patrons waiting for their food—although i knew part of it was envy that frank wasn't talking to them—true celebrity treatment that).

but frank was certainly the lifeblood of the place and when he finally retired after many decades of service, the community came together to try to save the establishment (one of the new partners was my former art teacher). but even though frank personally trained them how to make all of his perfected specialties, in time the new owners learned that people went to the yellow sub for two reasons: (1) frank's wonderfully simple and consistent food creations and (2) frank himself, the maker of that great food, who after you ordered might, through his windowed perch, give you a blank stare, a friendly nod, or even surprise you with a warm, insightful, or cutting comment about the look of the day or state of the world. but in the end it wasn't the tasty food or macrame-decorated walls people came for, it was the man behind the counter and without him walking the subs and burgers out to the tables, the place was just never the same. i'm thankful i had such a unique and textured boyhood haunt as part of my youth.

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so if you have places you think i should try, anywhere in the country (or world), please feel free to pass them along. nothing like a bonus reason to visit a new place. as with many folks, i'm always looking for that next memorable meal.

speaking of food (yesterday), the fiancé of a good friend of mine just started documenting her nurturing her newfound love of food and food-making. and, it doesn't take long to see that her style of 'documentation' is a bit richer and deeper than most folks form of documentation. the above quote comes from her newly established blog. http://www.kindred-eats.com

and her instagram page should come with a full-on warning as i first looked in on it before bed and can tell you that that is a wicked kind of mistake. https://instagram.com/diana.zeng

and a few days after seeing this alex caught her fiance, and my friend, super-sam, slipping something into our mail slot. upon opening the door and surprising him he confessed that he was dropping off a chocolate bar he just made for us to try out. later, when opening it up for the family to try, i found a personalized note on the wrapper's backside (you're not going to get that with hershey!!!) part of which said:

the other morning in our refrigerator there was a bowl of peanut butter with a dinner spoon sticking out of it. i've learned to not question or challenge such findings. namely because i've never liked where my investigations led me.

later that morning when more people were awake and marty looked in there. she pulled the bowl of peanut butter from the fridge, and asked, seemingly to the contents of the fridge, "what's this?". she then spun and held the bowl out towards anthony who was eating breakfast and said again "what's this?".

he sheepishly replied, "a peanut butter spoon."

now this is where things get interesting, interesting in this case meaning, this is where things go drastically different than i expect them to go, which is why/how i've learned not to run down seemingly simplistic matters, because i've learned there are no simplistic matters.

marty continued, "a peanut butter spoon? a peanut butter spoon? do i need to go over again what a respectable-sized spoon of peanut butter looks like?"

she rakes the spoon through the bowl, lifts it up in example, "this! this is what a proper peanut butter spoon looks like." then showing the boy the bowl adds, "this is like, five days worth of peanut butter spoons."

she then licked the spoon, then drove the spoon back into the sticky mound and tossed the bowl back in the fridge with a conflicted mixture of disgust at the heaping glop in the bowl and the tasty dollop in her mouth which her jowls effortfully worked through.

and if you're wondering what other sorts of culinary options our children are being exposed to, it is not at all uncommon to see anthony arrive to the dinner table with a plate of ketchup, like five hamburgers-worth of ketchup by my meager estimation.

bella's grandma, marty's mom, is a master pie maker. given her years of making them, i reckon a momma-nat homemade pie is about as good as you'd taste anywhere. a few fridays back bella and her grandmother made an apple pie together. on the following saturday afternoon bella walked onto the porch carrying a plate with a slice of pie and some ice cream. having seen her already partake in several sn...

a new TROYSCRIPT was posted today. got milk?

after forty plus years, i've decided to start being smart about what i eat. being far denser about the matter than you can imagine, i did the following:

1. read up on what is recommended.
2. created a system to guide and track my eating.
3. filled out daily (or near daily) how well i'm doing (in an excel spreadsheet i made).

if you're wondering what it looks like, in typical tradition, i'm more than happy to share. as for what i've learned thus far, it's way more difficult to eat a proper diet than i ever imagined it could be. regarding the system, wherever you see a grey box, it means i missed something i was supposed to have had. the colored boxes on the left, denote how i did for the day. i only get a green for a perfect day. a yellow means it was ok, and a red implies i missed by a fair amount. if i didn't consciously work towards a green day, every one of my days would be in the red. it can therefore be said that every day of my life before i began this exercise last summer was a red day. every last one of them. suck!



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a new TROYSCRIPT was posted today. dry meat

i reviewed a deepak chopra book yesterday. deepak chopra has not, historically, been my brand of tea. how i came to own one of his books may be more interesting than the book itself (and the book is quite interesting).

every week i try to eat lunch with someone off the beaten path; former colleagues, friends i haven't seen in a while, people i think i'd like to know better. these lunches ...

i teach a college class. it is called Presentation Matters. it is a class i designed from the ether three years ago. presentation matters is about, in short, applying the traditional creative process, as taught in basic composition and the like, to technology and/or digital problems. this may seem obvious and unnecessary, but i've got a semester-long curriculum backed up by 1.4 trillion bad powerpoint decks and generic files that says otherwise (and yes that was a troytistic!). if i could have renamed Presentation Matters in the second year i would have called it Thought Matters. and, if i could rename Presentation Matters this year, its third, i would call it Focus Matters. what happened to zavisa and the recipe, as detailed yesterday, is what i try to get to happen for my students. his saturday afternoon is a study on the power of passion, intent, and focus. more importantly (most importantly!) is that the experience zavi had can be captured and ridden, like a horse in the wild. one just has to go look for their palomino on the prairies and in the woods.

when we're doing things we don't like, our minds wander, often to things we do like. so if you're able to position yourself doing what you like, good things are bound to come from such focused time. if nothing else, we'll all enjoy our workday a bit more which translates to a little something called our professional lives.

were i saying this to bella, her brow would have furrowed several sentences back. in fact, if she made it through the fifth sentence, i would have been glad to get that far. but odds are she would have held a hand up pausing me long enough to say i was getting "lecturey". if you feel as bella surely would (and surely will again), apologies, but it can't be helped as such things are a passion of mine, they are my horse, and i get excited every time i see one dash by.

if you need further evidence, check out the final product of zavi's passion product which i forgot to share yesterday. hopefully he won't mind that i plundered his facebook gallery for this week's content. i steal only in the name of love and respect.


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i was at a small dinner party of a friend almost ten years ago. while there an older lady struck up a conversation with me. she had a thick accent which she told me was bosnian. she asked what i did for a living and i told her i was in technology, web-technologies specifically. to this she lit up, put a hand on my arm, and asked if i would talk to her son, zavisa, who was in school studying graphic design and had interest in "this web stuff". being part of a burgeoning industry such requests were frequent so i easily said sure, of course i would talk to her boy, knowing that serious inquiries rarely followed, especially ones that began with a mother's nudge.

this was not to be the case here. a few days later i received a message from the lady's boy, zavisa, or zavi to be kind to ethnocentric, american mouths. the message was quite long by today's hurried, email standards. in it he explained his studies and interests. he forwarded me a number of websites he had done for friends and university organizations and asked my opinion about his work. given the effort he put into this message, i replied in kind, reviewing his sites, making notes where i thought things could be improved, and commenting on his work's general strengths and weaknesses. when i hit reply i figured he would deem this mine empty and move on. again, this was not to be the case. he replied with another long email asking for clarification on some points, questioning others and with this our exchanges continued for several rounds. in time he gave me a profuse thank you and that was that.

more than five years later i bumped into zavisa through a co-worker. zavi was doing well in life and work as his earlier, voracious emails would imply such a mind would. he's gone on to become an everyman judge and represents one of my most thorough and eager eyes. at last year's everyman party he and his girlfriend arrived late, coming through the door as marty and i were saying goodbye to what we thought was our last guest. zavi, his girlfriend laura, and i sat by the fire and chatted, catching up. he expressed dissatisfaction in his job. i'm going to blame my severe fatigue at the moment but i fear i came on strong in my response. i all but chastised him for staying at a job he was unhappy in. i listed his many skills, his many gifts and said it was crazy that someone as talented as him do anything he doesn't want to. i even pulled out the dreaded "if i had your skills when i was your age, what i could have done" bit, which in some regards is valid but in so many more is not. again, i was deathly tired. his response was that the market sucked and no one was hiring. to this i said i never knew a passion that waited for a market. passion is passion and if you have it you just do it whether you're paid or given benefits or not. when he left i felt poorly about the conversation. i like and respect zavisa and felt that i was overly heavy-handed with him at what should have been a simple and relaxing social encounter.

a few months later i received an invitation to zavi's thirtieth birthday party. these days i go out a handful of times a year, but he's always been supportive and helpful to me so i decided to turn in one of my few kitchen passes with marty to go to the saturday night event. when i arrived the apartment was filled with people all more than ten years younger than myself that i didn't know. i made my way through the shotgun layout to find zavi and laura churning out custom pizzas for their guests (it was a make your own pizza party). i chitted and chatted with folks practicing my cold conversation skills and then got to catch up with zavi in the back. remembering something he lit up and said he had a cool thing to tell me. it was this. laura was out of town at a conference and he was left alone for the weekend. a friend had asked him for a bread recipe. when he went about getting it together, he had a notion of doing something a little different than just boringly typing out the steps and sending an email and instead spent a few hours of his solo-weekend afternoon making a graphical version of the recipe (shown below). when it was done he posted it to his facebook page. shortly after that it was picked up by reddit. and shortly after that he was contacted by two men asking if he wanted to collaborate on a project with them. when he asked more about the two men he came to learn one of them was an internet pioneer who created a recent-ish technology anyone reading this page uses and benefits from daily.

i'm surely not going to imply that my passion talk in december had anything to do with this success (believe me, i wish i could take credit for zavi's body of work) but this is definitely what my passion-talk was about. kudos zavi for this success and the others that are sure to follow in its wake. beautiful and inspiring stuff.


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yesterday i mentioned some things anthony deems pleasing to the palate, today i thought i'd share some i call tasty. this occurs to me as i recently went out for dinner with a couple of friends and stumbled into an wonderful dish, a cornbread dusted tilapia which is a very pedestrian name for a very tantalizing treatment. with the food still lingering on my taste buds, once home, i searched for a recipe. instead of seeing how to make it myself, i found the very dish i was after being touted as one of the 25 best options to be had in my city. of the twenty-five, as of three hours earlier, i'd only experienced one of them. you should know, i (and/or marty) don't get out all that much.

25 saint louis dishes you need to order now

while i am not someone i would call a foodie, i am someone who makes rich food a part of his routines, so the next logical step was to craft my list of the best eats in stl. they include:

cornbread dusted tilapia at cyranos
i'm going to start here because this is what got the ball rolling. this is a place known for their desserts. their bread pudding has been called one of the best in the country (perhaps because of its mid-west stylings). but their tilapia was easily the best piece of tilapia to ever sit before me.

chargrilled pork at lemon grass
i was introduced to lemon grass by a vegetarian. he told me that even with over sixty items on the menu, he thought that over half their sales were for their chargrilled pork. the first seventy times i ate at there it is what i ordered. then i tried the chargrilled shrimp and now choose between those two depending on my mood.

spicy beef noodle soup at wong's wok
there was this hole in the wall chinese place near my where i lived that served a special dish on fridays and saturdays called spicy beef noodle soup. it consist of a large bowl loaded with noodles and a chunks of seasoned and stewed beef on top. if you went by this place on fridays or saturdays you would always see no less than seven to twelve of these bowls on the tables with ravenous patrons hunched over them, piling the piping noodles onto a large spoon with their chopsticks before eagerly bringing it to their mouth. initially, it was hard to ask what the dish was because most of these folks spoke very little english.

as an aside, the people here have taught my kids several chinese words one of which aleo still uses to send me off in the morning.

mango roll at i heart mr sushi
i've been routinely eating at i heart for about seven years now. at my peak i was eating there three days a week. since their mango roll was first slid before me i've never eaten there since without ordering one.

garlic and onion shrimp at pho grand
the mark of how good this dish is is that all humans you come in contact with for the next three days will know and hate you for having this dish it but you just won't care. exclusion and solitude are a small prices to pay for such a flavorful experience.

shrimp and brie stuffed salmon at mccormick and schiffs
the original comes from jake's seafood in portland but through mergers and acquistions it has been brought to my backyard. surely not as good, but still ridiculously good.

beef kabob at cafe natasha
the people and atmosphere at cafe natasha are wonderful. the kabobs are even better.

whatever they're serving at the farm haus
i've just recently discovered this place but my first experience was over the top. and i have to say whatever they're serving becuase that is how they run the place. you come in for lunch, the only thing on the menu is the blue plate special. it's different every day but whatever it is that day is what you can have, aside from choosing between sweetened or unsweetened tea. i went on a friday which was breaded fish, rice, beans, and hushpuppies. these would be four things i'm not even particularly fond of and my salivary glands are still trying to come to grips with the culinary tryst. decadent. i hope to next go when they're serving bacon wrapped meatloaf with mashed tater tots.

know one i don't, please drop me an email, even if it's from another city as i'm next going to share a few national gems i know of.

while getting ready for bed, anthony pleaded, as he often does, for a quick round of ogre or pillow wars before having to relent to sleep. to raise the stakes, he added the following details: it's hard to say what's more twisted about this little guy, his creative spirit or his culinary proclivities.

there is a question i've been meaning to ask the saint louis crowd for awhile now and after my trip back west, the question has turned to a fiery itch. the question is where can i get a proper sopapilla in this town. the sopapillas of colorado and new mexico are billowy and fluffy and served with honey. the sopapillas of missouri are flat and oil-laden and served with a dollop of ice cream and a layer of chocolate syrup (in attempt to mask their abject terribleness).

the first person who points me to an edible saint louis sopapilla gets a free lunch at that same establishment, paid for by me. a plus side is you'll get to eat lunch with me because once i discover this place, i'm never leaving.

good and proper sopapilla

poor and miserable imposter

marty makes lunch for the kids each morning. she does this while they are eating breakfast. how it works is after they wake up and dress they come to the kitchen and pick their breakfast. once they start eating they are handed the "the sheet". from this sheet they are to pick three items they would like in their lunchbox. they call them out and marty acknowledges the request and busies herself in preparing it. this list deal has been around for years but had to be re-done this year now that alex is going to school with bella. i was drawn to the little pictograms marty made next to each of alex's lunch items. there's far more artistry in there than one would expect for such a artifact. startlingly impressive.

i'll scan it again at the end of the school year so you can see how tattered (e.g. loved) one of these gets from being part of a three-child breakfast bar routine every school day morning.

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for breakfast i usually have a farm-style bran muffin topped with yogurt and fruit or oatmeal. it was recently suggested that i try steel-cut oats instead of the old-school quaker oats i usually have. the reason given was that the steel-cut oats are slightly more nutritious because of how they are processed. the classic oatmeal you and i grew up on is known, technically, as rolled oats because the grains are pressed and rolled to separate the good from the bad. this process burst the plant pod thus releasing much of its nutrients to the airy ether. steel cut oats are readied in a different manner which doesn't compromise the grain nodule to the same degree.

so i tried them and my conclusion is this: if you were running a haunted house and wanted to give people the sensation that they just ate a mouthful of the cartilaginous plugs that squeeze out of blackhead infected pores, you could just have them put a spoonful of steelcut oats into their mouth.

an ancillary thought i had was who in the world picked the oatmeal eaters of america as the demographic that needed their diet improved because their breakfast wasn't as nutritious as it could be. i would think you might target the people buying stuff like OOPS! WE FORGOT THE CRUNCH, ALL BERRIES cereal (which had the audacity to add SPECIALLY MADE FOR KIDS!!! onto the box). that is a real cereal that came from the great and altruistic minds that initially graced our breakfast tables with captain crunch and crunch berries. they must have not been satisfied with the initial impact they had on the blight that is american health.

next month marks five years that walt and i have been planning our family meals a month at a time. in recognition i've added several recipes that have been solid staples on our table. hope some of you get to enjoy them in your own kitchen.

Korean Bulgogi
Salt and Pepper Chicken Thighs
Hot Ham and Cheese Rollup
Spaghetti Bolgnese

as i cut the the french toast into kid-sized pieces i was planning my defense. you see, i've been watching this sorry slice of toast bounce around, unwrapped, in the freezer for almost a week now. several times i found it lazing about in the ice tray to which i'd pinch a hardened corner and wing it to the opposite end of the shelf. other times i'd find it sitting atop the bryer's real-vanilla-bean ice-cream and would send it elsewhere with a flick of my finger.

as i poured syrup over the now bite-size squares, i thought how just six days ago this texas-thick slice was piping hot on the sunday-morning skillet, a butter-pat dissolving on it's face. it could again melt butter thanks to a forty second trip through the microwave. bella had resurrected it, saying it was the one and only thing she wanted for breakfast.

i was certain that when the first bite touched bella's tongue she would animatedly eject it from her mouth, sending it well beyond her plate. she'd yell an exclamation you only ever see spelled-out in the sunday funny pages (and followed by numerous exclamation points). i was sure all of this was moments away, which is why i'd been preparing myself to handle it in a way other than barking, "i told you it would taste like shit, but noooooh, you just had to have desiccated cardboard for breakfast and now you're going to eat it!" but she didn't spit it out and she didn't scream AAARRRGGGGHHH!!!! instead she thoughtfully chewed and swallowed the cudgel, smacking her lips and proclaiming it to be the BEST piece of french toast she's ever had. i sagged against the door-jam and pictured the paternity-test billboard out by the airport, wondering if five-years in is too late to know. my rumination was interrupted by alex, who pointed across the table and said he wanted what she was having. i matter-of-factly explained that it was the last piece and i didn't have one to offer him. he was audibly non-plussed over this truth.

it appears i was preparing the wrong defense on this morning.

sunday morning is 'big breakfast' day in our house. on big breakfast day we make our one stovetop breakfast of the week. typical offerings include pancakes, waffles or french toast, bacon, omelettes, sometimes sausage, fresh fruit and occasionally hand-cut hash-browns. about once a month we look to invite another family over to share in our weekly debauchery. those gatherings are always pajama-friendly and never begin before 11am.

big breakfast is my favorite morning because in addition to lavish vittles this is the one day of the week where i am naturally drawn from sleep by the sound of birds or smell of cooking food. sometimes, on bird days, i might begin to wake and sense marty next to me, warm, close. i might hear bella and alex quietly engaged in a made-up game down the hall. it is here i viscerally know the value of my home.

big breakfast last weekend did not start in this fizzy way. on this day, the first thing i sensed was having my toasty flannel sheets and layered quilts harshly flung away from my resting frame. while my body tensed against the cold morning air and before i could open my lead-heavy eyes, bella excitedly screamed from the side of the bed, "DADDY! DADDY! I CAN SEE YOUR PENIS! I CAN SEE YOUR PENIS! I CAN SEE IT DADDY! ALEX, TELL DAD YOU CAN SEE HIS PENIS. GO ON, TELL HIM!" to which i hear my son obligingly, albeit less animatedly add, "i can see your enis daddy". not birds, not the neighbor's wind chimes and not wafting flapjacks, but instead taunts and heckles at and about my lifeless manhood. and i would say that on this day, at this moment, i also viscerally knew the value of my home which is seemingly about as predictable and hostile as the american stock exchange.

bella has candy hidden all over the house. if we serve a meal she is not interested in, she will sit down at the table, make a face and oftentimes groan in some exaggerated way. soon after this she will ask to be excused. we offer her an alternative such as yogurt, fruit or a muffin to which she will many times decline. we remind her that this is dinner and the kitchen is closed afterwards. she nods in understanding and repeats her request to be excused. we thank her for joining us and send her on her way.

then in-between conversation points you may hear from the next room cellophane being opened or paper being torn. this is bella hitting one of her many candy stashes. we call her back to the table. when she arrives the smell from her sugar of choice is in the air. we explain that eating candy in private is not a healthy or honest choice and that if she is hungry she needs to eat something more substantial. after tolerating the advice, she smiles broadly, claims that she has had enough dinner and confidently asks, can i have dessert now?

this is my third wednesday of eating lunch up at bella's school. now feeling chummy with the crew, i asked if anyone knew what they would be dressing up for on halloween. this question was met with a resounding yes followed by an inventory of characters. i then asked if they knew what joke they would be telling while trick or treating (a definitively saint louis thing). this culminated in a barrage of impromptu knock-knock jokes most of which punch-lined with the word 'dumb-head' or 'poop-head' and as best i could tell i was always the one in the simple/fecal-headed seat. the melee climaxed with this final knock-knock joke which i was actually pretty excited about in the early stages.

VICTOR
knock-knock

TROY
who's there?

VICTOR
for real, you've got spaghetti on your pants.

TROY
for real, you've got spaghetti on your pants who?

VICTOR
no. you really do have spaghetti on your pants. look. (he points under table where i see a smallish pile of meaty pasta resting on my knee)

TROY
oh, dang. i thought that was your knock, knock joke.

VICTOR
i said 'for real'.

TROY
yes you did victor. you did say 'for real'. sorry i didn't pick up on that.

if these youngsters don't get a little more precise in their consumption of food, these wednesday lunches may be short-lived.

walt and i went to a bbq last summer. while surveying the food spread, i saw a stack of plates, quartered heads of iceberg lettuce, a small bowl of white dressing and a large plate of ribs and chicken. it all looked great and i was anxious to get started but was stymied in that there wasn't a sign of any silverware.

the male host walked up behind me and invited me to dig in. i said i was looking for the silverware and he gaped at me like i was mad. "SiLvErWaRe? SILVERWARE!?! THIS IS A BBQ AND I'M FROM TEXAS AND WE DON'T ALLOW NO STINKIN' SILVERWARE!!!" so i did what any scolded and denied adult would do. when he turned away, i walked into his house, uninvited, and went through his kitchen looking for cutlery. no silverware my ass, there were piles of it inside. so i helped myself to a place setting and for my trouble, also took a wacky straw i happened upon (that was just to make a point).

now appropriately equipped, i returned to the food table and prepared my plate. i neatly cut my lettuce, dripped some of the white stuff on it and took my seat. i looked across the table as the sticky-fingered heathen held his iceberg wedge like a football, raked it through the chunky white sauce and raised the full dripping mass to his already smeared mouth. he made an exuberant-scrunched face as his mouth bore down on the roughage. i quietly shook my head at the scene, stabbed a small piece of the lettuce on my plate, dabbed it in the dressing and carefully placed it in my mouth. two minutes later the fork was in the grass and i was cramming the lettuce/sauce mixture into my mouth as rapidly as my two hands could scoop it from the plate. and when the concoction was done i licked the residuals from the folds and crevices of my fingers and palms contorting my wrist and hand as needed to access it all.

texas blue cheese dressing is pretty dang good.

in case you're wondering where your host has been, he's wondering the same thing. i haven't intended to checkout like i have but just got caught in the wake of change. with a new job comes new routines, new people, new focus, new hours, and quite simply just new, new and some more new. now that i'm going through it i realize i was in great need for some more 'new' in my life. and aside from the neglect this part of my world is seeing, things are going swimmingly, i just haven't yet hit on a steady cadence for my days.

last night while i cooked dinner, bella sat at the counter and sketched me (below). the details are great, from the print on my shirt (which is dead-on) to the korean bulgogi in the skillet (which was so good), to my cable-wrap glasses (which are mightily bent right now) to the smile and wide-eyed gaze (sleep deprived delirium) her eye was quite succinct. unfortunately that keen eye had to also nail my flared and stubby legs. dumb luck that.

when bella was about two and eating not much more than a rod of melba toast, we ate out with some friends. during the meal their four year old consumed three plastic containers of cream cheese and nothing else. no bagel. no crackers. no fruit roll-up. just three smallish cups of cream cheese. upon leaving the restaurant walt and i had the 'did you see that kid inhale that bagel spread? my gawd! thank goodness that isn't our kid!' conversation about what we witnessed.

three short years later in our home, a 16 ounce brick of cream cheese is deemed a single serving. a stick of butter a half-serving. and a tub of crisco lard, reserved for special occasions, like saturdays, is considered a family size, although with so many little hands scooping the gelatinous, white goodness out you sometimes leave the table still craving more. and our salt, well, we have to keep that locked up in the home's fire-proof safe with our wills, swiss account ledgers and childhood photos because alex could eat his weight in salt, and that is without a drink. give the boy a simple glass of water and i'd comfortably pit him against a herd of bull elk.