DADWAGON – Page 20

One Dad’s Kitchen Secrets: Revealed!

Part of last summer's megabatch of corn chowder.

“What’s your signature dish?” my friend Michael asked me yesterday evening. It was close to 7 p.m., and our kids, Sasha and Katerina, were playing together in Sasha’s room. These post-preschool playdates take place once every couple of weeks, when Sasha asks if Katerina can come over, or vice-versa. It’s cute to watch them play together, and we adults get the chance to have a drink and pretend to have a sophisticated conversation.

Often, I cook dinner for all of us. Once I whipped up some Taiwanese lu rou fan, which Katerina seemed to love. Another time, I seared a duck breast, made a salad, sautéed some green beans; Michael seemed impressed. Last night, when Michael asked his question, I had a Moroccan tagine of lamb, carrots, and turnips braising in the oven, and a salad with Sumo oranges waiting to be assembled. You know, the usual.

Of course, I don’t just cook for guests, and as I guess the above paragraph makes clear, I don’t just cook one thing. Sichuan, Korean, Indian, New England—these are on our menus as often as anything else. And god, I’ve made a lot of quasi-bolognese sauce in my time: It’s a standby that’s as delicious for adults as it is for kids. (If anyone wants recipes, let me know.) And Sasha, who doesn’t always appreciate my cooking, will almost always eat noodles and red sauce; it’s even better when we eat it all together as a family.

But back to Michael’s question: My signature dish? “Ask Jean,” I told him, for lack of anything better to say. My cooking is pretty good, though hardly chef-quality, and there was no standout dish that came to mind.

Later, though, when I was stuffed with lamb and couscous, and sipping a nice apricot edelbrand (yes, I am a loathsome yuppie motherfucker, aren’t I?), I figured it out. My signature dish is this: I can consistently put together meals for my wife (and sometimes my daughter) that are balanced, healthy, and tasty—and that aren’t the exact same thing every night. And I can make most of these meals in the span of an hour or so, and without using up too many dishes in the production. (It’s true, Jean, admit it!) In the way-too-busy life of a typical New York family, that’s far more valuable, I think, than any hifalutin gourmet pretensions.

And I wonder, too, if this is another distinction between the lives of single people and married (with children) people. Single people, or younger couples, don’t have to deal with the prospect of day-in-day-out cooking, possibly on a budget, so they can focus on once-in-a-lifetime epic dinners, or work tirelessly to perfect that one signature dish. (This was what was so amazing about the Julie-Julia Project—that it tried to meld the two approaches.) To someone like me (and possibly you), those over-the-top productions feel increasingly like a waste of time and energy. Not that we don’t miss them, or appreciate them on occasion, but consistency and efficiency matter more now. And if we don’t have to sacrifice taste, then that’s something really special.

Tonight’s special, however, is leftovers.

A Meditation on the Mysteries of the Internet

This post was sponsored by Linksys and the new Linksys E4200v2 router. For more information on sponsored posts, read the bottom of our About Page.

Of the three DadWagoners I am by far the least technically proficient. I had to be told, in fact, what a router is. I don’t know overly much about my computer, other than she works generally, makes occasional ominous beeping sounds, and houses all of the most important documents in my life. I know how to use my cellphone only marginally better than my mother. I do not think that Matt should break out his iPad in restaurants in Italy, although I would undoubtedly do the same if I owned an iPad and was fancy enough as a writer to travel to Italy. I don’t fear or loathe technology; I would simply prefer that it function without my having to notice it.

And yet where would I be without our new age toys? Consider my daily habits: I am an avid use of Twitter and Facebook; I have a Linkedin account, although I should find time to have someone explain to me why; I would use Pinterest and Google+ if the thought of having to get up to speed on a new form of social media didn’t make me faint with exhaustion; I don’t get foursquare and I never will. I have a blog, and in other writerly modes, I believe I have written, by this stage, more online than off. I am in the process of building a new website from which I will pimp the sale of my forthcoming book on strange Jews (myself included among them).

This blog, in particular, exemplifies the value I see in technology, which I tend to consider in its personal context. Despite the gracious ministrations of our current corporate sponsor, DadWagon has yet to prove even moderately lucrative venture for Matt, Nathan, and I. It is a hobby, one that at least I do as a way to make and maintain friendships with my co-bloggers. Matt and I were friends before we began this venture, but we are much better friends now. Writing for the site gives us a reason to be around each other, to hang out, to get to know each other’s offspring. I hadn’t met Nathan before DadWagon, and wouldn’t likely have if not for it–and I feel lucky that I did. Our electronic friendship has become a tangible one.

In my world, which is so tightly bounded by the demands of work and parenting, making connections to new, good people is nothing to take for granted, and since most of my contact with Nathan and Matt is of the router-mediated kind, then thank you router, whatever you are.

On Parenting Abroad: The Withdrawal Method

One recent morning, as I walked toward Rangoon’s Shwedagon Pagoda—a Buddhist temple clad in 60 tons of gold and ornamented with precious gems—I was surrounded by children. Goddamn children. Maybe half a dozen of them. All seemed to be about 6 years old, and all were gamboling around, trying to beg money from me, either by selling crap I didn’t want or by offering to change crisp U.S. dollar bills for filthy wads of kyat, the local currency.

For a few minutes I ignored them, then I tried politely to brush them away, and then, when it got to be too annoying, I remembered something. Dropping my voice an octave, I turned to one boy and said, with absolute authority, “That’s enough!” The kid turned away and left me alone.

This was, of course, the same voice I use with Sasha when she gets out of control, when she runs far ahead of me on the way home from school, when she just turns too silly to deal with. In fact, as the Burmese child disappeared into the market area, I wondered why I hadn’t brought out The Voice before, and then I realized: After almost a week away from home, I was losing my parenting skills—i.e., my ability to connect with and manipulate young children.

This, perhaps, was a good thing. As a bearded 30-something man traveling solo in Southeast Asia, I was better off staying away from young children. But after days of being away from Sasha, I missed her presence enough that I started staring at other families—and they back at me.

One afternoon, at an open-air tea shop in downtown Rangoon, I glanced to my left and saw a gap-toothed 5-year-old Muslim girl staring at me. “She is very interesting in you,” said her father, who told me about his work (traveling to Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia) and his homesickness while his kid played Giggle at the Foreigner. When they left, I realized I wouldn’t be home in Brooklyn for another 10 days.

But I didn’t have to wait quite that long for another kid encounter. When I finally boarded my flight home, I was overjoyed to realize that I’d be sitting next to a woman roughly my age—and her 4-year-old son, an adorable, sweet kid deeply addicted to asking “Why?” Yes, I was probably the first human being ever to be happy at the prospect of sitting next to a preschooler on a nearly 24-hour halfway-around-the-world journey, but there it is. For the duration of the flight, I talked to the mom and joked with the well-behaved kid, prompting him at one point to say, “Mommy. Mommy! He’s funny!” At last! Someone to appreciate my sense of humor.

All of which provided a nice easing-back-in when I eventually got home—while Sasha and Jean were out shopping, as it happened. When they, too, returned home, Sasha looked a bit bewildered. While I’d been relearning how to be a dad in mid-air, she now had to figure out how to be my daughter. It didn’t take long.

The iFather

Note: This post was sponsored by Linksys and the new Linksys E4200v2 router. For more information on sponsored posts, read the bottom of our About Page.

We moved last month. Did I mention that? Perhaps not. This is the problem with blogging: I want to blog about things that matter to me, but if those things are as time-consuming and life-dredging as the global suck that is moving apartments, then suddenly I don’t have time to blog about it. Even when the move was over, and I did regain some time to write, I still felt spent and a bit too abused by the process to write about it. God forbid real adversity should ever hit this blog. I might not be able to get off the mat to overshare about it.

That said, moving had its advantages. A smaller apartment now means lower rent: who needs space when the kids mainly just wrap their arms around your legs all day anyway? Less moisture in the home: we moved from an apartment that was half in the basement and therefore jungle-dank, which isn’t that much fun even in a jungle. More light: we are now on the 21st floor, which means we are practically assaulted by the sun (haven’t bought curtains yet). Also, it means that we may not survive a loss of electricity, as we have become weird pod-people who must take an elevator whenever we step out of our door.

The biggest advantage, though, is the opportunity to de-clutter, specifically when it comes to electronics. Over the past six years and through two previous moves, I’ve been accumulating a mass of retro electronic parts. Not original-packaging-Atari-retro. Nothing that I can sell on eBay. Just things like a 12-foot IEEE 1284 Parallel Printer Cable from the days before USB ruled the earth. Or my first personal data assistant, a battered Handspring Visor (with stylus!) from the early aughts.

Now I’m losing the junk and detritus. Technology in general in simplifying: instead of having a cable box (and cable bill), we watch shows over the Internet. Instead of the Handspring Visor, my PDA is now my phone, which is also my camera. It’s the world as Steve Jobs (PBUH) wanted it.

Not that there isn’t a little bit of nostalgia for all those wires and clunky gadgets. You see, I am the I.T. guy of our little domestic corporation. And as any good I.T. guy knows, the secret to impressing your boss (in this case, my wife and occasionally my child) is to make your job look harder than it actually is. Those gadgets and wires, the cables that would fit into certain ports but not others: those all made even something basic like hooking a printer to a computer look baroque, complex. Trying something truly ambitious, like manually swapping out a graphics card on my PC, made me feel like I had just changed the transmission on a muscle car.

Alas, as with cars, which are now diagnosed through a process of one computer reading another, the physicality has all but vanished from being the I.T. guy. So I am changing my tactics. I am learning to exult in completing the automated setup dialogue. I can still hoard information to maintain my I.T. monopoly. That is, our television may now be light enough that my wife can pick it up, but I am still valuable because I alone have the passcodes that let the television communicate with its remote and with the internet and quite possibly (though I haven’t verified this) with the microwave and hair dryer. I volunteer to connect all of her gadgets for her, so that the process stays opaque. Consumer electronics are getting easier, more integrated, more compatible. But I am pretending, in front of my wife at least, that this is not so.

Behold the iFather: frailer, perhaps, than his forefathers, and with shamefully softer hands, but every bit as adept at conniving to defend his territory.