Category: Hobbies

Hob­bies such as knit­ting, crochet, house renov­a­tion, garden­ing, reading

Family Fondue

With a picky four-year-old who loves veget­ables but won’t eat much else (she won’t touch pizza or sushi, for example), and an elev­en-year-old who’s only slowly start­ing to appre­ci­ate veget­ables and fruit (but loves both pizza and sushi, as a typ­ic­al Van­couver kid does), meal­times are often a struggle. On a whim a few months ago, I made fon­due and dis­covered how pleas­ant a peace­ful meal where every­one cheer­fully eats what’s in front of them can be.

Cheese fon­due the way we make it is simple, and reas­on­ably healthy, as long as you have no lactose-intol­er­ant or vegan people at the table. I slice up whatever veget­ables and fruit are around, and every­one has some bread and lots of veget­ables or fruit to dip into their cheese. There’s some­thing about the com­mun­al dip­ping that’s attract­ive, the col­ours of the veget­ables and fruit con­trast with the creamy sauce that each piece is coated with, and nobody keeps track of just how much every­one eats. 

Cheese fon­due is laugh­ably simple and quick to make. I make it in the fon­due pot on the stove (we have a gas stove) so there’s less wash­ing-up after­wards, and start to fin­ish it takes about 15 minutes.

I always wash and slice the veget­ables and fruit first. The staples on the table are an apple, some sug­ar snap peas, a bell pep­per (cap­sic­um) or two, some broc­coli spears, some cherry toma­toes. If we have oth­er veget­ables or fruit that won’t fall off a fon­due fork too eas­ily, those go on the table too. A loaf of good hearty bread, or a crusty French baguette, are also de riguer.

The fon­due itself has 400 — 500 g of grated cheese (about a pound) for four people. We like the clas­sic gruyère and emment­al (as well as a mix­ture). Brie is good too (cube it rather than grate it, and toss the rind as it won’t melt). Old ched­dar is a little too sharp for some, a milder ched­dar is bet­ter. After grat­ing, toss the cheese with about 2 table­spoons of flour. Heat slightly more than a cup of white wine (some­thing with some fla­vour that isn’t too sweet, such as riesling, gewürztram­iner, pinot gris, or pinot blanc) in the fon­due pot until it bubbles gently. Stir in the grated cheese + flour, stir until the cheese melts and the fon­due is smooth and reas­on­ably thick, serve.

We’ve tried lots of dif­fer­ent com­bin­a­tions of cheese, wine, and veget­ables. Exper­i­ment­ing is part of the fun.

Coping With a Strong-Willed Child

One of the unfore­seen advant­ages of hav­ing an Amazon affil­i­ate account is the pos­it­ive loop it intro­duces. In this par­tic­u­lar case, I reviewed books about rais­ing chil­dren, people clicked on the links, they bought oth­er books from Amazon that showed up in my reports, I looked at those books, etc. I call it a multi-level recom­mend­a­tion ser­vice; I’m sure there are more “offi­cial” names for it.

Any­way, in this par­tic­u­lar case someone bought Par­ent­ing the Strong-Willed Child: The Clin­ic­ally Proven Five-Week Pro­gram for Par­ents of Two- to Six-Year-Olds, and since my daugh­ter is strong-willed (much more so than her broth­er at that age), I thought I’d take a look. I also ordered When Your Child Has a Strong-Willed Per­son­al­ity from the lib­rary and read both the books at more or less the same time. 

Par­en­thet­ic­al note: are there ever a lot of books out there on how to cope with strong-willed children! 

Both the books have anecdotal/illustrative examples, which mostly served to make me grate­ful for my child. After that, the books have the same basic ideas at the core, but go about the mes­sage in dif­fer­ent ways.

The “clin­ic­al pro­gram” book has an actu­al pro­gram in it that you’re meant to fol­low, which con­sists of spend­ing 10 minutes each day doing the pro­gram for that week, before start­ing the next week on the next phase. This would prob­ably be use­ful if there is a ser­i­ous prob­lem; con­dens­ing the pro­gram and com­bin­ing steps worked out fine for us. The first step is simply pay­ing atten­tion to what the child is doing for those 10 minutes: no ques­tions, no orders, just say­ing “now you’re stack­ing the red blocks” “now you’re col­our­ing with blue cray­on”. The “do you want to try…” etc comes later, after you and the child have got used to the idea of your pay­ing atten­tion to what the child is actu­ally doing rather than what you think they should be doing, for that small amount of time. Per­son­ally I think this is the most import­ant step — it’s so easy as a par­ent to get into the “now we have to do this”, even if it’s under the guise of encour­aging the child to do things “prop­erly”, and fail to take the time to pay atten­tion to what’s really hap­pen­ing. The oth­er steps in the pro­gram are also reas­on­able, noth­ing stu­pendously dif­fer­ent to what oth­er books say.

The “strong-willed per­son­al­ity” book is more gen­er­al and does not come with a 5‑week pro­gram, so is likely less reas­sur­ing if you have a ser­i­ous prob­lem. It points out strongly that the worst prob­lems come with a strong-willed child and a strong-willed par­ent bat­tling and advoc­ates the par­ent to not quibble over small issues, but to seek ways to defuse poten­tial situ­ations, and let every­one save face. 

Both books coun­sel kind­ness and respect for the child’s point of view as ways to defuse con­flict, and give meth­ods or tips to help. Vari­ations on some of the tech­niques would prob­ably also help with deal­ing with co-workers.

Freakonomics

Freako­nom­ics: A Rogue Eco­nom­ist Explores the Hid­den Side of Everything was pub­lished a long time ago, way back in 2005, but it took my book­club until this year to decide to read it. Hey, no point in being too fast, if a book is worth­while it will still be worth­while a couple of years later, right? In this case, it is. There is an updated ver­sion, but even the older ver­sion has a way of look­ing at the world that’s worth pon­der­ing. Wiki­pe­dia and the offi­cial book site have sum­mar­ies, and there’s now a related blog.

The most fam­ous part of the book is the one that asks how far the decrease in crime in the 1990s was due to the poten­tial crim­in­als nev­er hav­ing been born; there has rightly been a lot of dis­cus­sion about that (Wiki­pe­dia has a decent sum­mary of some of the points). That dis­cus­sion has ten­ded to over­shad­ow the oth­er parts of the book, some of which bear more think­ing about. One good example is the way that gangs were organ­ised So how did the gang work? An awful lot like most Amer­ic­an busi­nesses, actu­ally, which, if taken ser­i­ously by people try­ing to get rid of gangs, might lead to dif­fer­ent ways of tack­ling them. The dis­cus­sion about how the Ku Klux Klan was made ridicu­lous by incor­por­at­ing it into the Super­man radio show was good, even if who did exactly what when is unclear. 

Above all, the book appeals if you’re someone who asks wheth­er there are oth­er explan­a­tions for things, past the seem­ingly obvi­ous. Like the book says, con­ven­tion­al wis­dom is often wrong, and it’s refresh­ing to read about some of the ways in which it is. Nor­mally we don’t dis­cuss non-fic­tion books for very long at book­club, but this book was an excep­tion. Most of our dis­cus­sion was along the lines of “does it make sense that” or com­ing up with altern­at­ive hypo­theses to explain some of their data. It would have helped if we’d seen some more of the actu­al math­em­at­ics so we could have been a little more sure of how they did the regres­sion test­ing, but that’s a minor quibble and I’m sure most of the book’s audi­ence did­n’t miss it.

Bangkok 8

Bangkok 8: A Nov­el, by John Bur­dett (his site, Wiki­pe­dia) was the latest book­club read (yes, I know I’ve skipped a few in the middle, I got this one out of the lib­rary and it’s due back next week, which does con­cen­trate the mind won­der­fully). It’s prob­ably not a book many of us would have picked, but all of us enjoyed it, which is rare, and for many of the same reasons.

It’s a detect­ive story set in the pros­ti­tu­tion area of Bangkok, with a hero (Son­chai Jit­plee­cheep) who is the child of a pros­ti­tute, a half-caste who does­n’t fit into Bangkok soci­ety for a num­ber of reas­ons. The story itself was a little weird, with some weak spots, but Son­chai is inter­est­ing. I’ve only ever spent a few days in Bangkok, and that some time ago, but the author obvi­ously noticed some of the same things I did and incor­por­ated them very nat­ur­ally into the story. This includes such things as the Thai belief in anim­ism, as well as some cul­tur­al expect­a­tions that dif­fer between for­eign­ers (farang) and Thai. 

There are lots of amus­ing pas­sages, par­tic­u­larly when Son­chai is talk­ing to and about an Amer­ic­an woman who works for the FBI (so he calls her “the FBI”), and when he senses who or what vari­ous for­eign­ers were in pre­vi­ous lives, which he gen­er­ally does not both­er to tell them, fig­ur­ing that they would­n’t believe him any­way (this is an example of how nat­ur­ally those aspects are brought in, as in gen­er­al West­ern­ers don’t believe that you can look at a per­son and tell what they were in a pre­vi­ous life). 

Over­all it’s a good read and, if you have some famili­ar­ity with Thai anim­ism and have heard of yaa baa, it isn’t too hard to under­stand what’s going on. Hav­ing vis­ited Bangkok helps, but isn’t a pre­requis­ite (for­tu­nately).

A Week in August

It seems that August is con­fer­ence sea­son, at least for me. More pre­cisely, one week in August. First Bal­is­age in Mon­tréal (for which the online regis­tra­tion is clos­ing next Fri­day) August 12–15, and then Vinocamp here in Van­couver, at the UBC Botan­ic­al Garden, on August 16th. I’m speak­ing at the former, and help­ing organ­ise the lat­ter (for which num­bers are lim­ited to 120, so don’t wait too long to register). The premise for Vinocamp is a friendly con­fer­ence about wine, put on by a bunch of tech­ies; this is its first year. Both con­fer­ences should be fun! Enter­tain­ing as well as edu­ca­tion­al, and a cer­tain amount of good food and wine in both loc­a­tions. I can cer­tainly think of worse ways to spend a week in August.

Toddler Books

My daugh­ter is now two, and likes some dif­fer­ent books to the set I reviewed six months ago, although she still likes the Boyn­ton books and Moth­er, May I? by Grace Mac­car­one (I sus­pect because it has a pic­ture of a truck in it, and fea­tures a hug at the end). 

In no par­tic­u­lar order, we have Hand, Hand, Fin­gers, Thumb by Al Per­kins and Eric Gurney, There’s a Night­mare in My Closet by Mer­cer May­er, Dog In, Cat Out by Gil­lian Rubin­stein and Ann James (lots of scope for mak­ing up stor­ies about what’s hap­pen­ing in the pic­tures), Waves in the Bathtub by Eugenie Fernandes (make up your own music for the song, it will sound much bet­ter than the tune in the book), and Where’s My Teddy? by Jez Albor­ough (ours is bundled with It’s the Bear!, which gets nearly equal billing in the tod­dler appre­ci­ation list). These are all books my son liked as well, so chances are good that oth­er tod­dlers will enjoy them just as much. My son did­n’t have Mon­key and Me by Emily Gravett, but my daugh­ter likes it.

And, of course, she also likes any­thing with a pic­ture of a truck in it.