New Pantry Chef at Chez Keilholtz

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Oakland, California - Executive Chef Erik Keilholtz is proud to announce the addition to the Chez Keilholtz kitchen staff of pantry chef Amalia Keilholtz. Miss Keilholtz, who began her apprenticeship at the age of about 17 months, and today passed her exams, by helping Chef Keilholtz in a way that actually brought forward progress to the meal, without the need for constant intercession and correction. While she has not yet moved from dull plastic knife to sharp knife, she is making tremendous progress, ably demonstrating her ability to hold it correctly and to properly dismember her plastic vegetables.

The feat that convinced Chef Keilholtz that Miss Amalia was ready to wear a Keilholtz apron was her successful taking apart and sorting (very proud Babbo!) of a large cardoni into sections for various prep treatments.

To help Miss Amalia celebrate her promotion, Chef Keilholtz gave her a tall glass of juice and endured the "Elmo Song" CD for one go around. He drew the line at watching a movie, saying, "Amalia, I am very proud of you, but after all this fun in the kitchen, why would you want to watch the Fishies?"

Miss Amalia, through her PR firm, expressed amazement that Babbo is so excited about her progress in the kitchen, but, hey, he's kind of crazy, and I like all the attention.

Anyway, 26 months and she helped for real in the kitchen, with a tricky vegetable. Babbo is very proud of his little chef!

Two!

How old are you, Amália?

-TWO!

Yep, our little one has officially begun the Terrible Two's, although she has been working on that for some time. I really don't understand the "terrible two's" notion. It would seem that if a parent is shocked by this stage of a child's learning, he was asleep for the prior two years. The desire to define and test limits is really a natural outgrowth of the explorations that started about two weeks after birth (let's face it, it takes about two weeks to catch one's breath after that experience. Then we can start to really take in the world).

We asked Amália what she wanted for her party, and the constant response has been "blue cake." So Melanie has the charge of making blue cake today. I don't envy her this task. Cakes are by nature yellowish, so blue coloring tends to make them, well, sort of dirty teal. We will see tonight what solution Melanie has come up with.

The other request we have been getting fairly constantly is SAUSAGE! So we will have plenty of sausage on the grill.

This weekend we will be in Sacramento for the family birthday party. More Blue Cake, more SAUSAGE!, maybe a trip to the California State Railroad Museum, which to a choo-choo obsessed toddler must be something else. It actually is so great in its choo-choo-ness, that we have been resistant, not wanting to over stimulate with sheer choo-choo delight, but now that Amália is a big girl, we may have to relent.

So, since lunch is fast approaching its end, and I am leaving early today to prepare for the big event, that is all the blog gets from me today!

It seems to be catching.

Last night I went with Jared to Lectura Dantis. We took the BART (regional transit train that goes under the bay, for those of you "not from around here"). When the train came up the first thing in my head was "choo choo! Whooooo! Whoooo! All Aboard!" I guess not having Amália around to say this, I had to fill in myself, or the experience of hearing, seeing, and riding on a train was incomplete.

This morning, though, through all the noise of East Oakland in the morning, Amália picks out the whistle of a distant freight. "Choo choo! Whoooo! Whooo! All aboard!" Ah, how nice it is to hear her say that.

Identity Borrowing?

Warning!

My father has been reading this blog. No problem here. In fact that is great. The problem is that I sometimes read the blog from his computer and have commented from his computer. So, if he comments and does not change the name and all of that, you will think that his ideas are coming from me. Some of them we share, but if it suddenly seems that I am a big supporter of unregulated markets, individual liberties, and Stanford University, don't worry that I have some alter-ego coming through, nor that a vicious hacker has taken over my identity, rather that he is commenting and has not changed the settings.

Of course if he were reading this, he could see this as an invitation to comment, too (not to mention the great silent majority out there).