couscous

the other night we saw a movie called la graine et le mulet (http://tr.im/xAYD), which is titled the secret of the grain in the u.s., but should actually be named fish couscous. i really enjoyed this franco-arabic film, even though a couple of scenes were too close, too loud and too long, but realistic nonetheless. it reminded me of my love for couscous, which i developed at age seventeen upon my first encounter with the grain in the south of france.
i was lucky enough to spend my next-to-last semester of high school at a boarding school in sophia antipolis, which is basically le petit silicon valley français. i remember the first time i ate at the cafeteria i had a personal sized bottle of red wine to go with my meal, which would also be my last, and an invitation to the program director's office. when i innocently explained that i just wanted to get some local color, he kindly suggested i get it elsewhere.
it was at that same cafeteria, where most of the food was mediocre at best, where i tasted couscous. most of my female peers abhorred it, preferring instead to eat tuna salad, for which they each brought canned tuna and mixed it with three side salads. for me, the couscous, in its chunky vegetable sauce, was the culinary highlight of the week.
i have not dared try to recreate the dish, for fear of spoiling this very special taste memory, but i do make couscous in the form of a ridiculously simple side dish. so, to celebrate the goodness of the grain, i will share with you a recipe that martha stewart shared with me (and the millions who buy her everyday food magazine). voilà the recipe for chickpea couscous:http://tr.im/xAUF!

bubble friend

panzón, coco and i were recently in san francisco visiting my sister, her husband and their adorable baby boy. during our visit, we met up with our childhood friend, who i affectionately call ñaña, at the california academy of sciences (http://www.calacademy.org/). talking to ñaña on the bubbly green roof of the building, designed by italian architect renzo piano (http://rpbw.r.ui-pro.com/), i felt like we were in one of our childhood make believe worlds and was half expecting spot a grazing my little pony, or two.
at the little french school in guadalajara (mexico, not spain), ñaña and i were instant best friends, immediately becoming uña y mugre, which literally means "fingernail and dirt". we both spoke english and held a firm belief that no one else at the school, except for our sisters of course, could understand us. so, with our english and our imagination, we created a big and soapy, yet delicate, bubble around ourselves, where we had fabulous carrot-juice-in-a-thermos-top tea parties and took really long bubble baths that made our fingers wrinkly. we happily floated together.
ñaña has detailed memories of it all. my memory, like san francisco, is foggy, but, over a thai soup, she patiently reminded me about things that i had forgotten. for example, her eating my unwanted hard-boiled eggs and the time she choked on a piece of food and turned blue and the time i threw a marble at a boy's head.
even though i can't remember exactly what we played, i do remember how we played. peacefully. there was no such thing as a power struggle. we understood each other and always agreed on something. one of the things we agreed on, and this i do remember, was that we would be friends until we were one hundred years old. or was it one hundred and one?

moloko

the moment i looked at this vandalized city sculpture in reus (small city, south of barcelona, where famous architect antoni gaudí was born), i identified myself with it. with her. i was breastfeeding at the time, and let me tell you, it's tough. sure, it's healthy, natural and beautiful, but exhausting and, at times, even excruciating. that is something i was not expecting while i was expecting, during which a lot of my energy, and a little bit of fear, were focused on childbirth.

for the first few days, it was a cup of tea, lovely and sweet. as the hours progressed and the feeding continued, a slight discomfort turned into shut-your-eyes-and-squeeze-someone's-arm-pain that eventually became unbearable pain. after all, a tip of me was being sucked ferociously by a tiny, yet very hungry person.

what did i do? i pumped my way through three months of breastfeeding in a bottle. i did it every three hours, whether at home, in the car, at the museum (in the restroom, of course) or on an airplane. it was physically draining, which is why, when my coco became as plump as a cherub, i gradually stopped my supply. apparently, if i had originally sweated it out for two to four more weeks, everything would have gone back to cup-of-tea mode. unfortunately, i learned this after pumping my heart out.

three-and-a-half years old/ago

panzón and i met when we were three-and-a-half years old. i can't say that i remember the exact moment when we met. after all, a lot was going on in my life.
we had just moved to guadalajara (in mexico, not spain) and were living in a hotel, a tall mirror-paned hotel, mind you. my sister and i had red lunch boxes that were packed every morning by the restaurant staff. we went to a cute little french school, for which we wore cute little uniforms that looked somewhat alpine, kind of like gretl von trapp's outfit. coincidentally, the sound of music was very much a part of my life then, as we owned the videocassette and my sister insisted on playing it repeatedly during this time. years later, when i watched the movie again, i was shocked to learn that it was a story about the holocaust, not just about some singing kids wearing funny clothes.
i would have never admitted this at the time, although i probably did by turning bright red every time someone asked, but i secretly liked two of my classmates. one had freckles, the other was skinny. one was very outgoing, the other was shy. i was skinny and shy, too. we had something else in common: older sisters who liked magic, dress-up and feeding the neighboring cows at school. such was this fascination with dress-up, that they once dressed us up as bride and groom, except that i was the groom. three-and-a-half years ago, we found ourselves dressed up as bride and groom again, except that this time, panzón was the groom.

frozen egg

once in a while, when i don't know what to give coco for lunch, i'll remember about eggs. yes, there are always eggs in our refrigerator, which has, on its door, nineteen little inverted domes to place them in. every time i take an egg, i think about why the designer put nineteen spots instead of twelve or eighteen, since eggs are usually sold by the dozen or even half-dozen, if you buy the organic, free-range, omega-3 kind.
the reason we have eggs is because panzón and i don't really like them. i, who adore pigs feet, escargots and beef togue (in that order), have always found eggs a bit repulsive. during my childhood, i dreaded discovering a tinfoil-wrapped hard-boiled egg in my lunch, its smell penetrating my lunch box and the rest of its edible contents. fortunately, my best friend would quickly take the egg, carefully peel it and gobble it up, for which i am eternally grateful.
all of my life i was a self-declared egg-hater, until i went to mérida, where something changed me forever, a something called huevos motuleños. panzón's sister got married last year at the beautiful hacienda temozón (http://tr.im/xoVM), where presidents bush and calderón had met a few days earlier to discuss... whatever. on the first day, i gathered up my courage and, following my father-in-law's lead, i ordered this famous local dish, that is basically two fried eggs on a tostada with salsa, beans, queso fresco, ham, and peas. i felt the flavors bursting in my mouth: the oozing of the egg (in a good way), the the crunching of the tostada, the POP!ing of the peas. at that moment, i had a revelation.
today, when i took two eggs from the refrigerator to make a couple of scrambled egg sandwiches for lunch, i thought about all of these things. i was actually imagining the deliciously gooey huevos motuleños while cracking the second egg open and found myself waiting for it to slip out of its shell into the bowl. it wasn't until after it plopped out, that i realized it was frozen.

argentina recos

a friend of mine is going to buenos aires and asked me for tips. i actually visited argentina as a child, having family there. i might have been ten years old.

this is what i remember:
1. it's very, very, very far. even farther than france. my my first sony walkman lasted about 1/4 of the flight.
2. it's hot there during the winter. our winter, anyway.
3. people go to bed very late, eat a lot of meat and drink a lot of wine.
4. the empanadas are really good.
5. my mom gave away my my first sony walkman during our trip.
i obviously cannot recommend the best restaurants, bars or sights in buenos aires, but i will recommend the following:
1. hopscotch by julio cortázar (http://tr.im/xoVz), one of my favorite books to date.
2. the soul of tango, greatest hits by astor piazzolla (http://tr.im/xoVC)
3. comfort y música para volar by soda stereo (http://tr.im/xoVH), legendary argentinian rock band. i actually met the drummer by chance at an airport. we were sitting next to each other, waiting for our flight, and casually started talking. he told me he had been in a band for years. i asked politely what band and when he told me, i almost fainted.
4. the empanadas really are good. i would eat as many as possible.

"it's a BINGO!"

my intention was to wait a little longer before speaking of bingo, but i cannot resist, not after what i have just witnessed. panzón, who, by the way, is not at all big-bellied, just has an adorable slightly protruding round abdomen, and i left coco in the care of her loving grandparents and went to a movie.

picking a good movie is essential when you visit the movie theatre maybe once a month. we would have seen district 9, except that it was too big a risk, given the fact that i'm not exactly a sci-fi connaisseuse (i have not even seen star wars). anyway, we both effortlessly agreed on quentin tarantino's inglourious basterds (http://tr.im/xoVv), having loved pulp fiction and both kill bills.

the highlight of the movie, for me personally, was when my favorite character, colonel hans landa, who speaks in french, german, english and italian (brilliant!) in the film, shouts "it's a bingo!". let me just say that it is a glourious time in the history of bingo and i am as proud as ever to be a part of it. *eyes welling up*

you may visit my shop now.

new frog on the block

coco rediscovered one of last year's christmas gifts, a melissa & doug frog pull toy (http://tr.im/xoVu) she likes to call ofe (short for ofelia). yesterday, i walked into our bathroom and found ofe sitting on coco's step stool wearing sunglasses. this afternoon, we took her for a walk around the block because she needed exercise. she would have taken a nice bath afterward, had i not intervened with soapy hands. how do you explain to a toddler that her favorite amphibian can't take a little dip?

surprise! it's a coconut!

my 21-month-old daughter, who refers to herself as coco, which is spanish for coconut, was born by the sea in barcelona. coco came to us as a total surprise, one that i suspected early on, but that was confirmed on the morning before our first wedding anniversary.

at that point, i truly was not surprised, since i had been feeling different for the past weeks. how different? well more tired than usual, meaning that i fell asleep anywhere at any given moment.

for example, my husband, who i lovingly call panzón, which means "big-bellied" in spanish, and i went to paris for the weekend with some friends. we went to visit le corbusier's lovely villa la roche (http://tr.im/xoVc), where i actually took a short siesta on corbu's chaise longue.

i was also extremely sound-sensitive, which was a problem when later that month we decided to go see les falles in valencia (http://tr.im/xoVd). i shuddered every time someone threw a petardo or small firecracker, which was about every five seconds. i almost had a nervous breakdown during the mascletà (http://tr.im/xoVi), a very loud display of explosives that lasts several minutes and leaves you shaking.

about 9 months and many adventures later we met coco, who's head did resemble a tiny coconut with dark hair.

why i was born

i, unlike my own child, was planned. the idea of me came to my mother while at a park in mexico city, like a ball coming from out of nowhere and hitting you in the face with a SMACK!. she watched as a couple of children, who were barefooted and covered in dirt, but happy nonetheless, played together. they called each other carnal, which literally translates to "of the flesh". they were brothers. my mother turned to her own child and saw her playing by herself, longing for a childhood companion. and just like that, i popped into her head.

i am starting to think about having a second child, but there has not been a SMACK! moment. it has been creeping up on me for months, like a vine, slowly twisting itself around my mind...

i am a cluster, we are a cluster

this is my first post.

i am michele and this is my blog about me and cluster design (my online shop that sells bingo, which i design and (hand)make). i will share with you the things that make me a cluster of ideas, people, places, things and feelings. you are a cluster, too. and together, we are a cluster. welcome!