Update

I always start this sort of post feeling rather ashamed. I’m trying to push away my regret for not having posted in, oh, ages and doing a rather terrible job of it.

(Hopefully many of you have been reading my recipes at The Little Gourmande to tide you over?)

I HAVE A NEW JOB! A few readers have asked me what I’m up to since I left my job as a nanny. Besides missing Kai and Amélie like mad, you mean?

I am managing a café. I’ve traded library visits, afternoons at the pool, craft projects, tummy tickling and grilled cheese sandwiches for serving, bussing, making coffee drinks, ordering food and products, scheduling, hiring and banking. Phew! Talk about learning to be a grown-up. My new job is a real challenge, but one that I like and at which I’m eager to succeed. I feel totally unqualified to be managing, but I’m trying to make up for lack of experience by willingness to step outside my comfort zone and learn. My dad, always full of worldly advice and a veteran of the restaurant business, told me that managing a restaurant isn’t so very different than nannying in that I have people for whom I’m responsible, whom I need to tell what to do and make sure that they’re happy all the while. The longer I’ve been in my new position, the more I feel this analysis is a bit of a stretch, but I’m doing my best to remain optimistic and be as good at doing my job as I can be. 

Nonetheless, I miss playtime and my favorite playmates. 

Amélie

Finger Moustaches

Grown-Up Lessons in the Kitchen: Date Night Gift

I was pretty proud of the way this meal turned out. I cooked for the parents of my charges as a Christmas gift, delivered the meal to their door, and whisked the kids off for a night of pizza and movies at my house.

I served rosemary roast chicken on a bed of barley bean risotto with roasted, spiced carrots. I also made martinis as an apératif and added a French bâtard and a bottle of wine. For dessert, crème caramel with a dark chocolate triangle.

I was worried that the chicken would be too dry because even though it was less than 4 lbs., I cooked it for over an hour but basted constantly with butter and drippings. I was really happy with the color and crispiness of the skin and was later assured that it was succulent! I also tried something new, separating the chicken skin from the flesh and stuffing fresh rosemary in between before replacing the skin. The way the leaves showed through the skin was really pretty.

I’d really like to experiment more with crème caramel. It wasn’t actually that hard to make but it took several tries to remove it cleanly from the ramekin. I had to eat about two-and-a-half of them that I ruined. Boy, my life sure is tough.

Every Real Grown-Up Should Have…

… a couple of kids for best friends.

I know I’ve horribly neglected talking about my ever-interesting job as a nanny lately, but I really cannot stress enough just how clutch Kai and Amélie have been in maintaining my sanity level over the past several months.

It’s important for grown-ups to hang out with kids because they don’t take themselves too seriously. Which is not to say that they are not serious. But today when the three of us were working on our Christmas lists (more on those later), and I couldn’t decide what to ask Santa for, Amélie said, “You just have to make up your mind, y’know? Like I did. I just asked for some stuff I wanted.” Gosh, she makes life sound so simple. All I have to do is ask? And Kai really put things in perspective for me today when he added, as a post script to his Santa letter, “It must be tiring.” Yeah, I’ll bet it is tiring to be Santa. After all, delivering toys to the world’s good children must be worse than carrying 18 credit hours and a full-time job, right?

These kids keep it real. They also happen to be well-behaved, loyal, kind and generous, and totally gorgeous. I’m a lucky lady.

Do It Yourself: Fairy Toadstool Pincushion

Okay, so I didn’t actually make this adorable toadstool pincushion all by myself. Amélie helped a lot, since it’s going to be hers (and for the fairies, you know)! She got a sewing machine for her birthday that’s making me green with envy, and it came with a handy little sewing kit but no pin cushion. Well, we weren’t going to stand for that, were we?

A trip to the craft store resulted in a pattern (which we interpreted rather loosely), felt, stuffing, plastic pellets, and a few sweet ladybug buttons. I taught Amélie to sew in a straight line using tiny stitches (she’s a natural but bored quickly so we used the machine for most of it) and how to sew on a button (which I’m proud to say she did all by herself without even poking herself with the needle). Mainly she kept me company and sucked her thumb while I figured out her cute little machine, which earned our seal of approval despite the tizzy we’d worked ourselves into over some bad reviews we read online. By the time we’d finished, Amélie was so pooped that we had to rest and so she hasn’t even had a change to try using the sewing machine. Now that I’ve figured it out, though, I think I’ll be able to better help her learn next week.

I’m really excited to make a pin cushion that looks like a cupcake for myself. That’s coming up soon! Oh, and Santa, if you’re reading this, I want a sewing machine just like Amélie’s for Christmas!

Under the Sprinkler

Kai, Amélie and I were elated to hear that the Yellow Springs public pool, which was supposed to close for the season yesterday, will remain open through its normal closure date on Labor Day. Today, even though it is gymnastics day and we normally rest on gymnastics afternoons, we piled into my mom’s car laden with sunscreen, towels and snacks for a short dip. We were then enormously disappointed to find that, because the public school resumed today (Kai attends private school and Amélie, because she’s just starting Kindergarten, doesn’t start until next week), the pool will open each day at 4 p.m. until 7 p.m. This is, of course, incredibly inconvenient for us because I usually leave them between 3:30 and 6 p.m.

Bummed out, we returned to my house and set up our sprinkler, which hasn’t gotton much use this year. What a blast! We should have been doing this all summer. I’ll be sad when these long days are over.

Let’s Pretend We’re All Grown-Up

Kai and Amélie play make believe a lot less than I remember doing as a kid. Then again, there was a lot of imagination involved in making our toys seems half as interesting as most of theirs, and we could only dream about a computer or a game system.

In one make believe game that they do play sometimes, Kai plays the father to Baby Amélie. The game seems to consist of Kai providing for his daughter, Amélie, who is quite needy. She speaks a broken baby talk and demands things like food, a baby bed and entertainment in the form of toys, all of which Kai lovingly provides.

Invariably, though, Kai gets fed up with Amélie’s constant demands. It must become tiring for him, because the game always ends the same way.

“Amélie, let’s pretend I gave you some magic candy and it made you a grown-up.”

Amélie protests in her Baby Amélie speak, and Kai pushes harder. “No, really, Amélie, can’t you just be a grown-up now?”

“No want grow up, Daddy,” she manages to say with her thumb in her mouth.

After a few minutes of back-and-forth, Kai insisting that Amélie become more mature and Amélie stubbornly resisting abandoning her babyhood, and then the game fizzles out, with Kai turning to his Matchbox cars, which are more obliging than his little sister, and Amélie taps out a song she’s written on the piano with one finger.