Placenta

A little over a year ago, I wrote The Gross Post, which is one of the most popular things I’ve ever written, apparently (I refuse to think about the kinds of terms people must be typing into search engines to end up at that particular post). Since then, I’ve had ‘Placenta’ as a note in my ‘Ideas for posts’ document, and today I’ve decided to use my ‘small window of blogging opportunity’ to finally turn that note into a ‘full post’ (I’m not entirely sure how or when to use inverted commas). Jill, you’ll be very happy to know that as per your caution, I have not done an image search for ‘placenta’, nor have I included any pictures of actual placentas below. Admittedly a search may have helped me to remember what a placenta looks like, but whatever, I’ve gone ahead and drawn one anyway:

...in case you couldn't tell.

When I was pregnant with Moses I thought a bit about what to do with the placenta after he was born. I found out about lotus births, where people carry the placenta around with the baby until it falls off naturally with the umbilical cord. There were instructions on how to make pretty placenta bags and how to keep it from getting too stinky. It was not for me. I also read about people burying the placenta in the backyard and planting a tree at the site, which is an idea I quite like, except that we were renting and it seemed a little weird considering planting body parts in our apartment block’s small shared patch of grass. Anyway, after a bit of reading on the subject I eventually decided to go with something less strange and just eat the thing.

It made sense to me that the large and sudden drop in hormones post-birth could be mitigated somewhat by eating the placenta, and my nerves about developing post-natal depression made me keen to try anything that may help balance my emotions and smooth out the massive transition from pregnant to birthing to breastfeeding woman. So we brought the placenta home, and then we froze it, and then Alan spent a good deal of time chopping it up into tiny pieces so that I could eat them like little ice tablets (I’d read about people cooking it, but the thought made me feel ill). When I tried my first one, I was stupidly surprised to find it tasted like blood and made me gag. I tried eating a couple more, and then I gave up. We lived with a bucket of placenta taking up an annoying amount of room in our freezer until we moved, 19-or-so months later.

Not one to be deterred, I tried eating Hazel’s placenta (my placenta after Hazel’s birth? I’m not sure who it belongs to), too; when my midwife told me she encapsulated placentas as part of her service, I was signing up before she’d finished speaking. YES PLEASE I WANT SOME OF THOSE. This time they won’t taste like blood so I’ll be able to eat them all and then I will feel happy and everything will be wonderful, I thought to myself. However-many-months later I was passed my container of placenta pills, and I tentatively took one, with a large gulp of water. They didn’t taste like blood!! They tasted like body. Like the inside of a body. Like the smell that’s around when you’ve just given birth. Body-insides smell. I gaggily tried a couple more, and then gave up on them too. We still have the tub in our fridge door, next to the olives.

If there was a lesson to be learned from this post, to wrap it up tidily, it’s one that perhaps most people would already expect: Placenta tastes like blood and/or body. For those who had no idea before now: You’re welcome.

Food fashion

I heard recently that more quinoa needs to be planted to keep up with the new demand for it. Quinoa’s so hot right now. Kale seems to be too, I’m seeing it everywhere. I recently bought a packet of kale chips because they were reduced to a price that was merely three times (rather than seven-ish) the cost of regular potato chips, so I figured I’d give them a burl. They were pineapple and coconut kale chips, and reading the ingredients made my mouth water; alas, upon my first mouthful my taste buds suffered a shock from which they never recovered. I must have thought that kale was seaweed-y rather than spinach-y, and also that the ‘chips’ would look like actual chips, rather than vegetables that had been dried and then vomited on. Both expectations were hastily dashed.

I tried tricking Mo into eating them (“Hey, little buddy! You want some of these super awesome tasty chips I bought yesterday?!”) but he was understandably wary (When does Mum ever save me chips?) and refused to try more than one, so Hazel finished them on her own.

You know what else I’ve noticed? All pork is ‘pulled’ now, and all caramel is ‘salted’. What happened to regular pork and caramel – where are they right now? I miss them. Their adjectivey counterparts are too pretentious for my liking (yummy, but pretentious). Do foods know that their fame will be shortlived, or is it profoundly upsetting for them when their names are wiped from café menu boards and they realise that everyone’s moved on? I worry for them. Is there a Support Group for Foods that are No Longer Trendy (SGFNLT)? A place where sundried tomatoes, cabanossi and pickled onions are currently meeting weekly to cry to and cuddle each other? I hope so.

Food

from here

I’ve become a cranky lady in cafés recently; I’m now the type who looks at a menu and gasps over prices. I paid $6.20 for a regular-(what does that mean, anyway?)-sized milk beverage at an establishment that may or may not have started with ‘G’ and ended with ‘loria Jeans’. SIX DOLLARS TWENTY!!! I could buy six litres of milk for less than that.

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5 things I’ve learned about food:

1. Cookie dough is yummier than cookies.
2. Coriander makes everything taste delicious.
3. Eating a piece of juicy fruit (actual fruit, not the chewing gum) when you first wake up is better for morning sickness than trying to eat dry crackers. Dry crackers when you’re already low on saliva makes no sense at all. Very ripe nectarines are perfect. Oranges are also good, but tend to get stuck in your teeth. (The chewing gum might also be good, but I haven’t tried it.)
4. Cake mixture is yummier than cake. 
5. Jelly crystals are yummier than jelly.

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Three times now I’ve eaten something terrible believing it to be something else: the first time I licked up what I thought was flour and found it was actually talcum powder. The second time I dabbed up some icing sugar from the bench with a moistened fingertip and tasted it, only to discover that it was in fact dishwasher powder.* And then last week I made the icing sugar mistake again, except this time it turned out to be bacon fat instead. Fool me once, icing sugar, shame on you. Fool me twice, and it’s probably time to admit I have a problem. My mum recently ate a cockroach wing thinking it was part of a date, so perhaps it’s hereditary.

 

* For those wondering, the talcum powder tasted just like it smells, and the dishwasher powder was quite sour and a little bit burny.

Alan's 30th

Alan and I went out on Saturday night, for our first dinner out together since my birthday in March last year. It was lovely, and I’m starting to think perhaps we sucked at dating for all those years simply because we didn’t actually need dates then. Now that we feel like we don’t have the time or energy for luxuries such as conversation, it was incredibly nice to sit (or lean on the wall next to us and close our eyes momentarily) and chat and eat good food and drink good wine and nod our heads to good music and enjoy each others’ company. It was also a bonus to realise that this guy sitting opposite me was fun! And interesting! And good looking! And we were already married, so I could have mini naps against the wall because I didn’t have to pretend to be sparkly for him; I look this tired because of his children. He gets it.

I’m looking forward to our next D&M, some time in the early months of 2015.

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For his birthday, Alan requested a cake with smarties, and Moses wanted it to be a chocolate cake, so we turned to google and, after scrolling through the various “smarties on cake” images, were inspired by the simplicity of this one, and decided to make it using this recipe. But we didn’t have the right tin size, so we poured the leftover batter into a square tin, and then, when it came time to decorate, I figured we should at least try to chop up the square one to make a tail, and then Alan suggested we add a couple of fins, and we ended up with this:

It was fun to make and yummy to eat, but now I feel slightly ill whenever I think of chocolate.

Nous faisons

I find it hard to let Moses play or paint however he wants when the way he wants to do it makes no sense/ruins a perfectly good Paint With Water page. I’ve mentioned my issues with Duplo before – if I make a house, I don’t want nobody messin’ with my blocks, mmmkay? I don’t care if you want to build a dinosaur, have you even seen the amazing pattern I’m building into the wall?! That kind of thing.

I know I should be the mature one, being, you know, Mo’s mother, so I let him do what he likes even if it means pulling my awesome house apart (okay, occasionally I find him other blocks so the house stays intact, but usually I let him pull my house apart)(Okay, so sometimes I tell him he has to find other blocks if he wants to build his dinosaur because I’m still building my house, but generally if I can’t bear to pull my house apart I find him other blocks and usually I just let him pull my house apart). On the days when it’s very hard, I wait for him to go to sleep and then I do it properly the way I prefer.

His.

Mine.

You’ll notice I did mine one colour at a time, LIKE YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO.

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In other news, inspired by Todd Sampson, we decided to buy/try a fruit we’d never bought/tried before every day for a week. We ran out after 5 days:

Tamarillo

Coconut

Pomegranate

Blood Orange

Star Fruit

Apparently trying new things encourages creativity (I think that’s what Todd said; I didn’t watch the show) so yay for our brains.

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Speaking of creativity, we’ve decided to make Sundays taste.com.au days, where we choose a new recipe for dinner from the website in the hope of finding another batch of meals to eat until we get bored of them. Last week was our first: San Choy Bau. It’s totally going on the menu, it was GOOD.

(I figure I’m allowed to post photos of food again, since it’s been over a year since the last time. I hope that’s okay with you.)

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Speaking of Christmas, I have only one present to buy this year – I scored my niece in the Secret Santa draw. I haven’t seen her for 2 years (her family moved to England), so I’m slightly worried that what I choose will be met with disappointment and/or tears. By slightly worried, I mean seriously panicked.

I’ve figured that if I include lots of little bits and pieces then hopefully at least one thing will make her happy and she won’t leave our place feeling like she totally lucked out and wishing she got one of her other aunties in the draw instead. Apparently she likes crafty things, so I spent a substantial amount of time on Etsy and stumbled across these colouring books, which I love. And then I realised the shipping was nearly TWENTY DOLLARS, so I decided just to make my own pages.

I won’t tell you how old she is for fear that you’ll write to say that these are completely inappropriate for a 5-year-old. I want to colour them in, so if she does run out crying, at least I’ll have something to do to console myself.

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Speaking of crying, Mo’s started asking for a “farm crab story” from both me and Alan at dinner times – that’s two crab stories we have to come up with per night. He started just asking for a crab story, and then at some point he decided the story should be set on a farm, and now he asks specifically for a farm crab story. Our stories started off pretty well; I reckon we had a few good childrens’ book ideas. At first I enjoyed being forced to be creative, and I’d get right into telling mine, animatedly explaining what Curtis the crab was feeling as he scuttled his way around the barn, etc. Now, 3 weeks on, I have no inspiration left, and Alan’s are getting pretty boring too (truth be told).

It occurs to me just now that perhaps Mo’s not expecting a new story each night; we have read other books thousands of times without him growing tired of them, after all… I’m glad we had this talk, thanks.