Author Archives: Yvonne

Sunday pool and hot tub time with the Kaia Pookie

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On Sundays when we’ve been in town and haven’t had Sunday plans, I will usually do yoga and cook in the morning while Chris takes Kaia to the playground. Then in the afternoon if she wants, I will either take her to ride her scooter at Lincoln Center, or more often than not, I’ll take her upstairs to our rooftop pool for some puddle jumper time. While she usually has Sunday swim classes, this summer, a wrench kind of got thrown into that schedule, as the pool where her swim classes are is closed for construction/maintenance. So while occasionally she has had double pool time at her lesson, which as we all know, is more “work” and learning, her afternoon time with me is all fun and play. Here, she gets to wear her puddle jumper, which is essentially a toddler “floatie” that has loops for her arms to go through and clips on the back. With this, she can be in the pool without anyone holding her, and she’s pretty self sufficient. We usually have her jump into the pool over and over. She also loves to be twirled and bounced in the water. And of course like all kids, she loves to splash and get water everywhere.

After about forty minutes in the pool, it looked like we were going to have a crowd. We already had two male friends in the pool just chatting and hanging out in one corner. A woman came complete with flippers for both her feet and hands, so she was clearly planning to swim some serious laps. Two other men came looking like they wanted to do laps, but the pool was getting too crowded. Eventually the two chatty guys left, and it was just the female swimmer plus Pookster and me. So after about another ten more minutes, I told Pookster that we had to get out of the pool and would go somewhere else fun.

Pookster wasn’t sure where I’d take her, and she was definitely suspicious, whining and saying she didn’t want to leave. But when I led her to the hot tub and turned on the bubbles, she got really excited. We stepped into the warmth together, and immediately I could see she was happy. She loved the warmth, the bubbles, and all the strong jets shooting water at her from different angles. Kaia giggled and shrieked with delight. And then out of nowhere, she declared, “Ooooh, this is so fun! I want to stay here forever!” She insisted on alternating between sitting in my lap and sitting on her own and trying to “catch” the water from the jets.

These are those moments when I see her experience something new, fun, and exciting that I just want to bottle up. The joy and excitement on her face was so palpable, so innocent and pure and untainted. I just love watching her experience her childhood — it’s almost like I am reliving mine — or rather, living the experiences I never even got to have.

Mosaics across the NYC subway stations – Avenue U at Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn

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It’s a bit hard to appreciate when you are in the daily grind of commuting to and from work on a tight schedule, but one of the things I love the most about the New York City subway, other than the fact that it runs 24/7 and allows me the privilege of not needing to drive or own a car here, is the gorgeous artwork across many of its stations. To be honest, I’ve really only taken more time to appreciate it once the pandemic hit, and ever since I started working remotely and never went back into an office. I remember thinking about it a bit during one of Chris’s parents’ visits pre-pandemic, when he set them up with a NYC walking tour that had them look at subway art across many stations. Since then, when we transit through stations I go to rarely, I take more time to look at the artwork inside. The subway stations in Manhattan that I’ve always enjoyed include the random brass-colored figurines placed in conspicuous (and semi-hidden!) spots at the 14th Street A/C/E subway station, the hat mosaics at 23rd Street N/R/W, the mosaic portholes of different New York City-specific scenes at 8th Street / NYU / N/R/W, the vibrant blue glass mosaic called “Queens of the Night” at the First Avenue subway station, and the many scenes of Harlem history, music, and people across the many uptown subway stops from 125th Street up to 145th Streets.

Today, we spent the day in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, and the subway station from which we exited was Avenue U. As soon as we got out, I noticed the beautiful mosaic flowers that led up to the subway exit. There are multiple pink, red and yellow flowers all made up of glass mosaic pieces, and they are constructed in such a way that they actually look realistic. The flowers appear to be almost climbing up the wall of the subway station. The collection of flower mosaics is called Brooklyn Seeds. After further investigation, it looks like it even won awards for public art back in 2012. You could have fooled me quite easily that it was already 13 years old, as to me, the mosaics were in such pristine condition that I would have thought they were newly put up! This is the free public art across New York City that most people never take the time to appreciate or even notice, but I think it’s a great way to brighten up the stations and make it seem like a fun place to go through.

Family estrangement and how much more common it is than we think

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An article I read years ago stated that in the U.S., family estrangement is actually more common than we think. It affects approximately 27 percent of adults in the U.S. It could mean you no longer have contact with a sibling, parent, uncle, aunt — anyone who is considered “family.” Since my wedding in March 2016 and after I sent a thank-you email to my dad’s younger sister for coming, I haven’t heard from her at all, nor do I have any desire to reach out to her. My aunt tried to bring her fuck-buddy to my wedding, and I blocked it. So she tried to “get back” at me by showing up to my wedding not only late, but also in jeans. It was clear what she was doing and what kind of message she was trying to send to me and my parents. She wasn’t deserving of an actual thank-you card, so I emailed her a brief thank-you note and decided that would be the end of our connection. I knew she wouldn’t respond, and she’s too stupid and proud to reach out herself. She’s already estranged from her only child, his wife, and their two children, so she was just furthering the family estrangement for herself. She has zero contact with either of her two living siblings, and pretty much all of her blood relatives.

While I was at lunch today with a friend, I found out that she is completely estranged from her biological father. She hasn’t had any contact with him since she was about five years old; the person she refers to as “dad” now is actually her mom’s second husband, who legally adopted her after they got married. She said she doesn’t think much of it since it was so long ago, and her dad now is essentially the only dad she’s ever known, and that’s all that mattered. What it made me realize is that the stat from that article is so true: far more of us have family estrangement than we’d believe to be true. I have a friend who was basically abandoned by both her biological parents as a baby and then again by her dad when she was a teen. Another friend of mine only sees her mom about twice a year even though they live within short driving distance of each other because “she really fucked me up when I was a kid,” my friend said. Her mom was physically and verbally abusive towards her and her brother, and they still have whiplash from this from violent dreams they wake up from to this day.

“Family” is being redefined by boundaries that we are all setting to protect our mental and physical health. It is definitely a step towards aiding in our own well-being.

Kaia Pookie’s caring side

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When I picked Kaia up at school today, she immediately asked if “my cousin Harriet” would be at home waiting for her when we got back. I said yes, we’d all be eating dinner together. And then she said she wanted to run into the bakery next door to her school so that we could pick up something for Harriet to eat. Granted, Harriet is only four months old, so she would not be eating any solids yet, but I decided to humor Kaia and pick up a few baozi (including one pork floss bao for her) for Harriet’s parents’ breakfast the next (and their last) morning with us. And I guess indirectly, Harriet would be eating the bao since if her mom eats it, she would get it through the breast milk she is being fed. But we didn’t have to explain that to Kaia just yet!

I love seeing how caring and affectionate Kaia is with others. She’s always thinking about others, and she wants them to eat and be happy. Even though Chris used to joke and say that hypothetically, Kaia would be a very jealous older sibling, I always think quite the opposite: she has shown love, care, affection, and empathy from a very young age. I can imagine her doting on and being a very helpful older sibling if she ever had a younger sibling in her life. I love seeing this side of her come out when she’s in the presence of children younger than her; that’s my sweet baby growing up.

Cousins in town from New Zealand and Pookster’s love and affection for the baby

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This week, Chris’s cousin, her husband, and their four-month-old baby are visiting from New Zealand. They are stopping here for a few days and staying with us before heading off to Paris for a quick stop, then taking a train down to Spain for a long walking journey along the Camino de Santiago.

It’s always fun to have family and friends stay over with us, but in this case, there was the added dynamic of having a baby stay with us, plus Pookster’s dynamic with the baby and the baby’s parents. Kaia has always had FOMO even from an early age, so bedtimes have been a been rougher this week with company staying over. But it’s been really sweet to see her interact with baby Harriet. Every day when I’d pick her up from school, she’d ask if baby Harriet would be at home waiting for her. She’d ask if baby Harriet was okay, if she was eating, and if she would go out and play. She’s even asked to bring food home for baby Harriet to eat. I love seeing this caring, affectionate side of my Kaia Pookie.

Having a baby in the house again has also made me reminisce about the early days of Kaia baby. Luckily, Chris’s cousin is able to nurse her baby…. maybe even a bit too well given the baby refuses a bottle. But it made me think about how much I struggled with breastfeeding, how nursing unfortunately was not the way I was able to fully feed Kaia, even though I very much wanted that to be our life, and how I ended up resorting to exclusive pumping, which was likely the very least convenient and most difficult way to feed.

Nothing ever goes out exactly as you envision it or plan. With Chris’s cousin, she ended up having to get an epidural and then an emergency c-section, neither of which she wanted, but all because in the last moments she developed preeclampsia, and the baby got stuck in her canal. And while she did struggle with breastfeeding in the beginning, she had constant in-person lactation support every single day for weeks (god bless New Zealand’s healthcare system), which eventually got Harriet to feed well despite being on the small side. This locked in her milk supply, and thus their breastfeeding journey. So while she didn’t have the birth she ideally wanted, she did have the feeding journey she so desired. I had the birth I wanted, but I didn’t have the feeding journey for Kaia I hoped for. If only things could go exactly as we all wished!

I love hearing other mother’s birth and feeding stories, though. Today, modern mothers are all about sharing and reducing stigma around the stories of giving birth and feeding our babies, and it helps so much to have that perspective and that story telling continue… because, well, these are ultimately the stories of the beginning of our children’s lives, and the beginning of our lives as mothers.

Olive oil cake with buttermilk and Tunisian extra-virgin olive oil

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Last year, after over a decade of having the famous Maialino olive oil cake recipe bookmarked, I finally made their cake for an extended family gathering at Chris’s parents’ cousins’ house a few blocks away from us. It was a huge, tall cake: nine inches in diameter, over three inches in height. Even with over 15 people in attendance, we had a lot of leftover cake. So, I did take about a third of the cake home. It was a beautiful and delicious cake, but I remember it was quite dense and large, so definitely not an everyday cake that I could just whip up if a couple people came over for dinner. I needed an equivalent that was lighter, fluffier, smaller, and with an airier crumb.

After I made that cake in the spring of last year, I went searching for a different olive oil cake variation, and lo and behold, I found what seemed like the perfect one on Serious Eats (where else?!). The Serious Eats recipe for olive oil cake can be comfortably made in an eight-inch cake pan with a two-inch height (so a lot more doable if we had a party of four or five dining together). It uses just one egg (versus Maialino’s three eggs), and to create a more complex tasting crumb, instead of milk, it uses buttermilk. The whole mixing process from end to end could take just five minutes if you have everything pre-measured out; the entire cake bakes in 33 minutes! This recipe uses 3/4 cup of olive oil, while the Maialino recipe uses 1 1/3 cups (same flavor impact, a lot less olive oil, which when you are buying a premium variety, is very expensive!). Of course, with an olive oil cake, the olive oil flavor is the star of the show, so you want to use the purest, freshest, most delicious olive oil you can get your hands on. I finally pulled out my Terra Delyssa Tunisian extra virgin olive oil for baking this cake. I was excited about Terra Delyssa when I found it at Costco this past spring, and I knew it would be perfect for baking based on how fresh it was (just picked and processed this past February!).

After I baked and un-molded the cake, I loved how light it felt in my hand as I placed it on a serving plate. And when I cut into it this evening after dinner and had my first bite, it tasted like the most perfect olive oil cake: rich in olive oil flavor, not too sweet, a light, fluffy crumb, and extremely moist. I used lemon zest and some homemade rose water for extra flavor, and that extra citrus really complemented the olive oil flavor well. This Tunisian olive oil is rich and grassy — it was really perfect for baking an olive oil cake. Now, my search for the perfect olive oil cake is complete! I won’t be looking for another one again. In the future, I may vary this up by adding a mix of orange and lemon zest, or maybe a couple teaspoons of freshly squeezed lemon or orange juice. There are so many possibilities with this gorgeous cake.

New York City in the summer time

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People in New York love to hate on summertime in New York. They love to talk about how hot, humid, and sticky the city gets, how the summer heat exacerbates the rotting smell of trash and causes the foul odors to spread everywhere. People complain about how hot the underground is when waiting for the subway. They love to say that “everyone” (with lots of money) leaves the concrete of the city for the summer to go off to the Hamptons, the Jersey Shore, or Europe. Not that many people who live in New York have that level of flexibility in their jobs to actually leave the city for an entire quarter of the year, but who wants to question it when someone makes a sweeping statement like that?

I actually love New York City in the summer time. I love all the summer programming that happens that is accessible for people of varying budget levels, like the Lincoln Center’s Summer for the City festival. I’ve enjoyed the free performances that have happened in the park during the summer, like the NY Philharmonic. I love that certain areas feel a lot less crowded, that there are endless nice cafes and ice cream shops that we can go to for enjoying a cold, sweet treat. While we do tend to go away for a couple weeks around Independence Day and to San Francisco, we spend the majority of the summer here. I think summer in New York City is definitely under appreciated and under rated. Why else would so many tourists come during the summer time to enjoy everything we have to offer?

The homemade apple sauce that was not received well

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Kaia has really loved eating whole apples since she was about 18 months old. Sometimes she will eat the slices when we make her eat the apples sliced, but most of the time, she prefers eating whole apples. And when I say “whole,” I mean she will eat about a quarter or a third of the apple, get bored, and then decide she is done and hand it over to us (oh, the toddler stage!). As you can imagine, Chris and I are not fans of this as it’s extremely wasteful, nor do I want to eat her partially eaten apple (but well, I usually do since I’m anti-waste. Chris could care less, so he just tosses it). So whenever possible, we will slice the apple up and make her eat the slices. In the last few weeks, she’s grown tired of apples and has refused them. At school field trips, the teachers will pack lunches for the kids that include a small whole apple, and she has not eaten them. So she brings them home to us. They’ve gone into the fruit bin in our fridge, along with a couple Pink Lady apples Chris bought. I decided we couldn’t waste the apples (I am not the biggest fan of apples, especially in the summertime when there’s so much good warm weather fruit!), so I decided to use the leftover apples for apple sauce for Kaia. Kaia loves apple sauce. She used to have it occasionally during snack time at her last school. I’ve been buying Trader Joe’s organic apple sauce (the only ingredient, supposedly, is apples) in a large jar to use in healthy baked goods for her. Sometimes when we bake together, she will ask for some apple sauce to eat on its own, and I’ll indulge her and give her a small bowl; it’s her “treat.”

I used two types of apples, some water, and a splash of apple cider we had in the fridge. Even after simmering for an hour, the apple pieces had broken down, but there were still some small soft chunks. It was a bit more watery than the Trader Joe’s apple sauce, but I figured it would thicken as it cooled. I tasted it, and I actually thought it tasted better than the jarred apple sauce — as it should, right, because it’s homemade?

I told Kaia she could have some homemade apple sauce yesterday, and she got really excited. When I presented it to her and she took a spoonful and put it in her mouth, Chris said her face immediately turned, and she didn’t seem to like it. She asked for a “different” apple sauce.

I insisted to her that this was “real” apple sauce, and I said the other apple sauce was “fake” (okay, that’s not really true, but that’s what came out of my mouth). As if she knows what any of this means! She then declared, “I want fake apple sauce!”

I’m not buying the TJs apple sauce for a while, so I said no “different” apple sauce.” Chris force fed her the rest of the homemade apple sauce bowl he doled out for her. I ended up eating the rest of the homemade apple sauce, which I actually found pretty tasty. And it acted as a good after bite while eating Xi’an Famous Foods spicy noodles for me!

Cute Kaia Pookie goings-on lately

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Whenever we arrive at our subway station, Kaia likes to go up the stairs and wait for the elevator to get to ground level. When we wait for the elevator, she always checks out all the OMNY card machines, getting her fingers all over the touch screens. She also enjoys peering into the change slots to see if anything is in there. Well, she got lucky earlier this week when through the clear slot, she saw that someone had left their change in there. She shrieked with joy and yelled out, “Mumma, I found money!” I walked over to the OMNY card machine and realized she was right: someone left three quarters in the slot. So I told her she could take the money out, and she carefully held all three coins tightly in the palm of her hand on our walk back home. She was so proud of herself for finding money that she immediately declared it to Chris as soon as she walked through our front door.

What this ended up leading to, though, is that on subsequent waits for the elevator up, she now expects to find money in the slots and gets upset when she doesn’t find any… which is, well, every time other than that one time. On Friday, she said she’d wait at the machine until the money “came.” No way. I immediately whisked her into the elevator to prevent a wait-for-absolutely-nothing situation.

Tonight at bedtime while I told her all the things I say to her before bed, I said to her my usual in English and Chinese, and she finished the sentences: “Mumma loves Kaia more than anything. You are the best thing that’s ever happened to Mumma. Mumma is grateful for Kaia every day. So, every day, mama takes care of you, protects you, and loves you. Did you know? Mumma is so lucky to have Kaia Pookie!” And then she said in response, for the very first time, “And Kaia is so lucky to have Mumma!” I gushed and squeezed her in my arms and covered her face with kisses, to which she giggled endlessly and then gave me kisses all over my face.

And then after peeing in the potty, she proceeded to terrorize me by not going to sleep and playing with literally every toy or stuffed animal in sight until past 9pm before finally passing out from exhaustion.

I love being a mother. I really do. It’s given me so much perspective on life and love and just being. But what it’s also reinforced to me that with everything you love… comes all the things that piss you off to no end. And you really cannot have one without having the other. That goes for pretty much everything in life: your spouse, your kids, your career, your home – it applies to every single thing. The things you love about your spouse are also the things that will make you want to punch him in the face. The personality traits of Kaia that I love are also the ones where I just think to myself, “Can you please just shut the fuck up and go to sleep now and stop being so damn cute all the time?”

Strolling through the Greenmarket with a cooking friend

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There are a lot of generalizations I can make about all the people I’ve come to call friends over the course of my last 39.5 years. But one thing that I can say, with almost certainty, is that oddly enough, pretty much none of them love cooking and think about food as much as I do. I have plenty of friends who cook out of necessity. I have friends who try new recipes when I use them because they don’t want the mental load of coming up with things on their own, so they use recipes or do dishes that I think are easy or tried-and-true hits. I also have friends who are either horrible cooks or leave all their cooking to their partners…. or just eat most of their meals at restaurants or via takeout/delivery.

Then I met this friend at a Hot Thai Kitchen event late in 2023, and I realized I had finally made a real life cooking friend. We hang out about once a month, and she is hardcore into all things health and wellness, including an extremely regimented exercise routine that includes heavy weight lifting, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu (even competitions). She’s obsessed with food and cooking and loves shopping for produce and local, fresh ingredients. So after we met for lunch today, we strolled through the Union Square Greenmarket, and we browsed endless in-season, local fruits and vegetables. We pointed out things that looked really good or interesting. We touched and evaluated some really beautiful, fragrant herbs, tomatoes, and at least half a dozen different types of summer squash in sizes ranging from our thumbs to half the length of a baseball bat. My friend bought a large haul of three bags worth of fresh produce home.

And then something fun happened while we were there. She told me she had recently gotten really into kohlrabi, and I admitted that I had often thought about buying it, but I wasn’t sure what to do with it.

“Okay, well, we’re solving that problem today!” she exclaimed.

She bought four fat kohlrabi and set one aside for me, along with two ears of corn. She advised me to wash and peel it, then slice it thinly or across a mandoline, and dress it simply in white vinegar, high quality EVOO, and a little salt and pepper.

“It’s so simple and so good!” my friend insisted to me. She said it was a really good, healthy snack, and it didn’t take much for its full flavor to shine through.

And as this all unfolded and I neatly tucked my very first kohlrabi into my canvas bag along with my local ears of corn, I thought to myself… Wow. This was so much fun. This is what it’s like to have a friend who is super passionate about food and cooking, and what it’s like to go to a farmers’ market with her! She not only declared something is delicious that she loves, but once she heard I hadn’t eaten it, she bought it for me and instructed me on how to cook it. I need more people in my life like this!