Who, Why, and What

This blog was inspired by several different things.  First, Catherine Newman’s fantastic Dalai Mama, which I adore and read religiously every week.  The writing and the food photography are both gorgeous, and everything I’ve ever made of hers has been good.  I cherish a secret hope to someday be her neighbor and absorb some of her combination of warm hippieness and the occasional Velveeta moment.  She’s a woman after my own heart…check her out here. 

Secondly, my friend Mike’s Gay Gourmet.  Mike is a wonderful human being (even if he is an Aries) and makes the most incredible pasta and red sauce around.  When I was pregnant with our second child, it was the only cure for my all day morning sickness…AND his cream sauce recipe is the only way I will willingly eat mushrooms.  I refuse to make it for myself, partly because I know it will never measure up to the way he makes it, and partly because I’m afraid that if it ever did, I would weigh 400 pounds before I could say gay Jewish Italian man.  Check Mike out, too – here.

The name comes from one of my very best friends, who made the assessment (over cocktails at Vesuvio in San Francisco, but that’s beside the point) that I’d grown “domesticated”.  While to him it sounded like a fate worse than death (the man is perpetually 22 years old – sort of a recently-college-graduated Peter Pan, even though he’s four whole years older than me), it’s come to mean something entirely different to me.  Is life hectic?  Of course.  Stressful?  Check.  Am I occasionally beset by the feeling that I know I have a wife around here somewhere because I vaguely remember what she looks like awake and not focused in 12 other directions?  Absolutely.  But when my eight year old starts a conversation on the way home from school with, “Mama, I have a question…”, or my wife’s amazing blue eyes meet mine knowingly across the chaos of the dinner table, or my two and a half year old falls asleep with his head on my shoulder and his hand in my shirt (he nursed until a week before his second birthday and the boobs still have their magnetic force field thing going), domesticated becomes synonymous with nothing short of pure bliss.  Pure, pure bliss.

So – to sum up: the blog came from a woman in Massachusetts I’ve never met, a gay Jewish Italian Aries, my Peter Pan best friend, my wife with the amazing blue eyes, and my two magical children.  And to them, it is dedicated.