Onecakebaker

On the day after Thanksgiving, I showed two of my son’s friends how to make Macaroni and Cheese. Real Mac and Cheese–white sauce, breadcrumbs, baking, the whole deal. It took an hour, as real Mac and Cheese tends to do, but it was good.

Made 3 frittatas, with 8 eggs each, for the Staff appreciation brunch Nov. 12. Very healthy. Very low-fat. Very pretty.

I’m still on Weight Watchers. I’ve lost 21 pounds, and I’m sort of stuck on that plateau. But life goes on. I’m VP Hospitality for the Palo Alto PTA Council, and cooked a lot of food for the Staff Appreciation Brunch Nov. 12, including a great frittata that I will post the recipe for.

I’ve been on Weight Watchers for the past month. I have lost 10 pounds, but lost my will to cook. So, except for meditations on flaxseed meal as a substitute for eggs, and the merits of hummus made with minimal olive oil, there’s not much to say.

Weight Watchers has several good cookbooks,and I have cooked several good recipes from them. But I miss fat. And refined carbs. And ice cream. And I am sick of salade nicoise. Sigh. I’m so spoiled. Sue me.

Guest Opinion: Working together is not just a robotic thing
appeared in the Palo Alto Weekly, April 9, 2008
by Preeva Tramiel

I am a robot mom.

My sons have been building robots for so long it looks like Fry’s, Halted and OSH have partied in my basement and thrown up. On many mornings, I wake to the sound of metal, plastic or carbon fiber being drilled or cut.

My ongoing questions to my sons are things like, “Why can’t these robots clean up after you?” and “What is a band saw doing under the wet bar?”

So when they joined the robotics team at Paly, I was relieved. They worked on robots at school. The house became much quieter.

I started sponsoring the Paly robotics team in 2005, in a year when finances were especially tight for the team and I had two sons participating in robotics, on at Paly and one on his own. Once I made an investment in Paly Robotics, I looked harder at it. Adviser Doug Bertain really lets the kids figure things out for themselves.

Frankly, this initially annoyed me. I had made an investment, and I wanted the kids to WIN. I have friends with children at Gunn High School, and I always sort of looked at their program with envy. They always seemed to do more, and get more, and have more success. I heard rumors that the Gunn parents spent hours and hours helping their children.

I heard that Gunn parents persuaded their companies to contribute to the team, raising a ton of money. I know the Gunn parents brought their kids dinner after school and let their children dye their hair red, because it was “a team thing.”

Gunn won a President’s award and went to Atlanta one year, and always ended up near the top of the list of teams at the seeding matches at the tournament in San Jose, and went to the quarterfinals and semifinals.

Paly never did anywhere near as well when I was watching. Last year, when the Paly team finished near the bottom at the Silicon Valley Regional, I’d have conversations like this about three times a week with acquaintances from the Gunn community:

“Oh, your kid is on the Paly Robotics team? My kid is on the Gunn team,” they would say.

“Oh, your kid does robotics? Good for them,” I would reply, as I cringed inside, anticipating the next question: “How did Paly do this year?”

“Well, last year they won a first place medal in Vegas,” I would say, knowing that at the Silicon Valley Regional, Gunn was in the top half every year, and Paly was not.

The Gunn parents were very gracious, and said, “Good for them. Better luck in San Jose next time.” Sometimes they added, “Our kids worked really hard on their robot.”

And then, to add insult to injury, the Gunn team had the Capitol Steps perform for a fundraiser last year. I love the Capitol Steps, but because I’d have to face that conversation again and again if I went, I didn’t go.

So I drove down to San Jose State to watch the Silicon Valley Regionals of FIRST (a national program, “For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology”) Saturday, March 16 2008, not quite knowing what I’d see.

I got a chance to see something new and inspiring: The Gunn and Paly robotics teams had joined forces and formed an alliance with a team from Hilo, Hawaii. Together they almost won the tournament.

FIRST tournament seeding is based on points earned in 10 seeding rounds, with six robots in the arena, jostling for points. Each year there is a different task the robots need to do besides just whizz around the track. The task this year was to pick up 40-inch-diameter balls and push or throw them over a six-foot trestle.

Whizzing around the track gets points. Throwing the ball over the rack gets points. Bonus points are awarded if your ball is on the rack at the end of the round, so there is incentive to knock other teams’ balls off the rack.

After the seeding rounds, the top eight teams get to pick two partners, and these teams of three, called “alliances,” face each other in the quarter, semifinal and final rounds.

The alliance that wins the final round gets to go to the championship in Atlanta, Georgia. The team that wins the President’s Award also gets to go to Atlanta.

There were favorites. Team 100, from Woodside High, always does well, and so does the team from Bellarmine, which brings a machine shop to the competition and works with NASA engineers every year. Those two teams formed an alliance with Monte Vista High of Cupertino.

Paly had done a lot of scouting, strategizing and shmoozing, and somehow figured out who was going to ally with whom. Team members talked themselves into an alliance with seeds number 2 (the Warrior Pride from a high school in Hilo, Hawaii) and 3 (Gunn).

From what I saw, Paly team Captain Daniel Shaffer was the one who conducted the negotiations after the seeding rounds.

I saw a whispered conversation, a handshake and a smile. I saw the picking of the alliances, and saw Paly get picked to join the Gunn-Hilo alliance.

And that was enough for me. This had nothing to do with politics, and everything to do with mutual interest fostered by competition. Gunn and Paly allied because they wanted to win, and they almost did.

I think this is the only time Gunn has been in the finals, and the contest was so close it is being re-examined. Gunn and Paly may go to the nationals in Atlanta after all.

There’s a broader context to this story.

I’ve been in Palo Alto a long time. I’ve been at Paly for five years and currently serve as president of Paly’s Parent-Teacher-Student Association.

And I am tired of the inter-school rivalry. The parent communities of the two schools, especially Gunn, are always evaluating the other’s school’s money and position with the district and pointing at imagined inequities.

“Paly got a new pool,” Gunn parents say, ignoring their beautiful new library.

“Paly has a much older donor base, so you can raise more money,” Gunn says, ignoring the fact that after a while, the donor base dies.

“Paly recruits for its sports teams,” Gunn says, ignoring the fact that what Paly does is expect excellence from its coaches, and good athletes flock to good coaches.

At the same time, Gunn comes out on top of Paly in the national and statewide academic rankings, year after year. What is Paly supposed to do, set traps outside the calculus classes and drag the good students downtown?

Any realtor will tell you that Gunn is more in demand as a location to buy or rent.

Yada, yada, the heat goes on.

That is why I was so pleased to see robotics teams cooperate during the Silcon Valley Regionals.

And it hasn’t stopped there. The two PTAs coordinate parent education programs, and the student bodies have held a dance together.

Seeing the robotics teams work together and almost topple the favorites reminds me that we can do more together than separately.

Preeva Tramiel was president of the Palo Alto High School PTSA when she wrote this story. She can be e-mailed at palmpeebs@yahoo.com.

When I was 7, soup came from soup tubes. Not soup CUBES, soup TUBES. That is what my mother called the narrow cylindrical packets of dried grains that Manishewitz (I think) sold. The company called these packages soup mixes, but I think we called them soup tubes because of the space program. I was born in 1958, and when the first astronaut went up into space, we were all SO excited we did things a little differently. At sunset, my father stood by the hour at the window of our 8th floor apartment trying to see the shining speck of light that was the space capsule cross the sky. I put a strainer on my head and my mother called me Little Allen Shepard. My mother called her soup mix “soup tubes” because in those days, astronauts ate their meals from tubes.

They were fascinating to me, these soup tubes. They were pretty. Typically my mother bought the ‘split pea and barley’ variety, and the layers of different pulses and grains were like sand paintings or those decorative jars of foodstuffs you seen in country decor or Italian restaurants. Of course, I tried to mix up the layers of green and yellow split peas, with the barley and rice by shaking the soup tubes as hard as I could, but my mother let me. It kept me busy, I guess. These soup tubes were the basis of a weekday family staple called “mama’s soup.” Mama’s soup was extremely hearty, guaranteed to “stick to the ribs.” It was comprised of 2 or 3 soup tubes, enriched with vegetables, chicken necks, turkey necks, gizzards, leftover macaroni, and whatever else my mother had on hand that was flavorful and looked better hidden by a thick coating of split pea.

Mama’s soup taught me a number of things. First, there was analysis. You had to eat slowly and carefully just to answer the question of “what the heck am I eating here?” Visually, a plate of mama’s soup looked like split pea and barley soup with unidentifiable lumps just below the surface. If there were marrow bones, they stood out pretty well, but the gizzards, necks, rice, Lima beans, vegetables, potatoes, vegetables and whatever else all looked the same. So I learned to use ALL my senses, especially touch, with my tongue, usually, but sometimes I poked at the gizzards with my fingers when my parents wren’t looking. I didn’t mind the adventure of Mama’s soup, because it was sooo good, really very delicious. Today make my own version, with no soup tubes but lots of leftovers, but I could never imitate her soup.

I learned to love humble ingredients from Mama’s soup. Necks, bones and gizzards contain a lot of flavor. I really loved the chicken gizzards, which Mama always managed to cook to a wonderfully chewy texture. I looked forward to eating soup the next morning, because when it was cold, you could cut the soup up into pieces with a knife and go looking for your favorite ingredients. My other favorite ingredient in Mama’s soup was chicken necks, which taught me about persistence. I would spend hours, it seemed, trying to get the meat off a chicken neck with a knife and fork. I could make a meal out of a chicken neck at age 7. My mother would leave me alone at the table and do the dishes. Eventually, I would get down to the bones of the chicken neck, and then I would actually use my fingers, when I thought Mom wasn’t looking, and that was WAY fun.

When we moved out of the South Bronx into the suburbs (Yonkers) of New York in 1969, my mother stopped making her special soup. It might have been out of concern for my manners. A young lady of 11 was not supposed to go around sucking on chicken neck bones. That was reserved for mothers when they thought their children were not looking.

My version of Mama’s soup is very different. It’s not as thick, I don’t use soup tubes, and I don’t use gizzards or necks, but I use leftovers. In fact, since my family is not fond of leftovers, what they get instead is soup, and they love it. Go figure.

INSTRUCTIONS FOR SOUP FROM LEFTOVERS,

OR ‘VEGETABLE SOUP WITH MEAT’,‘MEAT SOUP WITH VEGETABLES’,‘VEGETABLE DUMPLING SOUP’,‘MEAT SOUP WITH COUSCOUS AND RICE’, ‘SWISS CHARD SOUP WITH BEEF’, ‘SPINACH SOUP WITH ROAST CHICKEN’ or ‘Thursday Soup “

Saute one chopped onion in a Dutch oven or medium saucepan. This fools your family into thinking you are cooking something new instead of recycling food.

Eyeball the various leftovers you have in the fridge and try to combine as many as possible Meat sauce, leftover stew and make for a great base . If you don’t have that, use powdered chicken soup mix, or frozen stock if you have it in the freezer. A can of chopped tomatoes is good too. Once you know what you are putting in the soup, add the appropriate herbs and spices. I find basil, salt and pepper go with just about everything, but if you have a lot of leftover turkey, you can add sage. Thyme is good with an onion-rich mix of stuff. Nutmeg goes well with spinach and Swiss chard, and oregano goes with chopped tomato.

If you had stock in the freezer, add that to the onion in the Dutch oven. Add enough water to 4 cups or so, and the flavoring agent (soup stock powder or soup cube or concentrated stock or whatever) and mix to dissolve everything. Once that is done, add your leftovers. If soup is not thick enough, add chopped sweet potato, or some couscous, which cooks very fast, or a package of frozen spinach. Cook until everything in the pot is done.

For an extra treat, make “shlishkes” (free form dumpling, sort of like spaetzle)

1 egg

2 or 3 tablespoons water

1 cup flour

Mix up these ingredients in a glass so you have a thick paste. Slowly tip glass so batter peeks over rim of glass, and use a butter knife to cut that crescent of batter off into simmering soup. Repeat until batter is used up. Shlishkes are done in about 3 minutes, so let the soup simmer for at least that long after you make the last dumpling.