Sweet Puttanesca Pancakes

Most people associate puttanesca with a spicy sauce of tomatoes, olives, peppers and such. And rightly so, as those are typical ingredients in an Italian puttanesca sauce. But, did you know puttanesca actually means "in the style of a prostitute"—she's been too busy fucking so she didn't have time to really put together a fancy, composed meal and so she tossed in a bunch of random stuff she happened to have around.

Well, I've been wanting to make healther pancakes for my kid, so that's basically what I did this morning—and actually how I cook alot of the time. For these pancakes, I didn't use tomato, olives or peppers, of course.

I used:

• 1/2 c rolled oats
• 1/4 c whole wheat flour
• 1/4 c white flour
• tsp or so baking powder
• dash of cinnamon
• TB creme fraiche
• couple TBS yogurt
• a little less than 1/3 c of egg whites (or small egg/egg white, or 1/2 egg, the point is some binding protein-like goop)
  
• splash of skim milk, to desired consistency
  
• 1/4 smashed up ripe banana
• honey to taste
  
• handful of walnuts, mashed up pretty good
• chocolate chips

(This recipe makes about six 5-inch diameter—or so—pancakes.)

So, you mix the first four dry ingredients listed, and set aside. You may want to run this through a food processor, depending on how textured you think you'd like your oats in the pancakes. Then mix the wet as listed, up to, but not including the the milk. Then you mix the wet and dry. After that, you add milk little by little til you get a good consistency.

Hopefully you will remember making pancakes from the box mix, like I did, and you can remember the consistency. It's nice if you can pour it, but also OK to plop the batter on the buttered griddle or pan and gently spread. But, we're getting ahead of ourselves.

After you have the basic wet and dry mixed, you can stir in your honey to taste, your mashed banana, walnut paste, chocolate chips or whatever else you want.

Now, heat up a pan or griddle to medium high. (I just use a nonstick pan and make them one by one, keeping each hot under a plate til they're all ready, layering each pancake with a pat of butter.) Butter or oil the pan/griddle a bit and pour or spoon your batter. When you see the pancake bubbling, you can gently flip it. When I am making pancakes, since I make them one by one, I have to turn down the heat about halfway through. You just figure it out and pay attention. It will all work out!

That's how I cook, throwing things together and experimenting. Sometimes its good and sometimes it's not.

I know these pancakes were good (I tasted them) but, truly, 'cause my kid ate them right up!

Train table/block table: Temporarily repurposing furniture for life with kids

Just thought I would share this cool idea I came up with a few years ago. I had this great glass-top coffee table from my past life that was packed away as soon as my kid started crawling and pulling up.

When she was about 2.5, an experienced walker who wouldn't bash her head on the corners, I decided to bring the table back into circulation—sans the still dangerous glass tops.






I cut out plywood the same size as the glass inserts and decorated them as aerial landscapes, with water, bushes, and such. Now she has a totally unique train and block table with room for storage below.



I like the table so much, it's found its way back into my living room, now as a block table. And when she trades in her blocks for bigger kid activities I can pop my glass tops back in, get my living room back and pine nostalgically for the little kid days.

New century eclectic boho kid's room

Style points:

• futon on floor
• mix of fabrics/prints
• bright wall
• corkboard of original art

It's true, I have my own highly unique style (wink wink). It is based in not having alot of money or alot of time to "decorate" but being sort of artsy. It is executed by using alot of what I happened to have around. (We bought the house with a red wall in this room and it just "worked" so we left it.)

The genius of a full-size futon on the floor for a child cannot be overstated. It allowed me to co-sleep until the child was old enough to sleep on her own, while allowing my husband to be undisturbed. It allows me now to cuddle up comfortably for stories and for those nights that I choose to "sleep over." I actually prefer the feel of the floor futon to my own real bed and love the ultra-dark room that we first created to help with baby sleep. Now the child sleeps through anything— til 630 or 7 am rolls around. But back to the fantastic decor...

The mix of bold colored stripes of various weights with the beloved "jaguar" (as in Baby Jaguar) print fuzzy blanket is kicky and fun. The green frog humidifier is a bold contrast to the reds, pinks and purples. The crisp white hand me down lamp from 3 boyfriends ago is clean and modern, placed behind an angular K-Mart night table/shelf for bedtime story books, inflatable frogs and more.

I stole these shelves from what was a sewing room when we moved into our house. They were situated on a table top, but now I use them alongside the futon for books, books, and thangs. You can also catch a glimpse here of my very unique window treatments (and effective room darkening shades). And just to the left is a framed rubbing of the pressed sidewalk of Barcelona's Passeig de Gracia, draped with Tibetan prayer flags and a Nataraja sculpture—I told you it was eclectic!

Other walls of the room have some original paintings (both framed and unframed) that I created when I was pregnant, and also after having my child. The very best part of the eclectic boho kid's room, though, is the original art, by the child herself, rotated on and off of the corkboard!