Skipping Town

Lucia and Greta seem to have been conspiring to make dinner-cooking more difficult than usual. As I've said many times, Greta is a fantastic eater--but as she approaches two years old, she's getting just a little more picky. Lucia, always a challenge, generally does eat pretty well, but she's definitely more opinionated (i.e., picky) about what she will and will not eat. The girls have been more or less aligned in their likes and dislikes--until lately. Now, Greta's favorite meal is macaroni and cheese--and Lucia won't touch it. Lucia loves French toast--and Greta, inexplicably, won't let it past her lips. Lucia likes scrambled eggs with cheese; Greta screams at the sight of them. Greta will eat as much salmon as we put in front of her; Lucia will eat it, but each bite is cushioned by five minutes of stalling. Lucia loves sweet potatoes. Greta does not. And on and on. Most of these are basic, basic things--dinnertime staples, the things that I've always been...

Greta’s interest in food has intensified lately to a degree that is almost ridiculous. This morning, Lucia and I were sitting at the table, eating breakfast, and Greta was sitting near us in her activity saucer. She was watching us so intently that she was barely even blinking. Just staring…staring…staring at us as we lifted food to our mouths. Later today, I sat near her as I ate a yogurt, and she looked at me with such a doleful expression on her face that I actually felt guilty for eating it in front of her. And later, as I had yet another snack—this time a meal-snack of two large pieces of quiche—while sitting next to her on the couch, with her propped up on a pillow, she made a lunge for the quiche, so forcefully that she toppled over into my lap. If I hadn’t been right there, she would have fallen off the couch. When I eat in front of Greta these days, I feel like I’m stuffing my face with cake and ice cream and fried chicken and fresh bread while a Dickensian beggar-child looks ...

On Saturday, Andrew and I headed to Napa for a day of paella-making with Beth and Nate and the babies. We had gotten a paella pan and ingredients for a wedding gift, but hadn’t yet put them to use; paella is definitely something you have to make for more than two people. It was unseasonably warm on Saturday, in the high-70s (by “unseasonably” I mean “unseasonably for the Northeast”), but nonetheless Napa was beautiful, with the vines changing to gold and red, set against a bright-blue sky. After some debate, Andrew and I decided to adapt a recipe from Penelope Casas’s The Foods & Wines of Spain for our paella. Friday night, we’d watched a video of the NYT’s Mark Bittman cooking a simple tomato paella, and it looked easy enough—it seemed like the kind of dish that, like a soup, you could pretty much just toss anything into. After a trip to the Napa Whole Foods for provisions, we were ready to begin. In theory and in practice, cooking paella is not that difficult—cook some things in...