comfort food

Claire has croup.  She wasn't yet coughing when I took her to see her pediatrician on Friday, so they swabbed for strep (which came back negative) and we went home. 

But Saturday afternoon when she woke up from her nap she had stridor, which is always scary, so we got her into urgent care. The doctor was just great. I love good doctors, don't you?  I always want to hug them, but I refrain.

She's on a steroid for five days, and getting better.  Her fever was gone today, and she obviously felt better.  Her croaky little almost-not-there voice is both cute and sad.

I hadn't suspected croup because I mistakenly thought she was now too old to get it, and she wasn't coughing. Just a high fever (between 102 and 103 since Wednesday night . . . she was getting Ibuprofen every 6 hours to get it down around 100) and very sore throat. When we got to urgent care,  what timing! That seal-bark cough kicked in. (This is good, because it helped the diagnosis.)

To celebrate the breaking of Claire's fever this morning, and a good night's sleep all around, and to entice her to eat, I made the chicken pot pie and the chocolate pudding cake out of this month's Everyday Food. Claire helped me cook.

I recommend both recipes. Super yum! :)

At great peril to my loved ones, I attempted photography while cooking.  I will do this infrequently, because I'm telling you, it will end like Jo in Little Women when she was reading in the kitchen and salted the strawberries instead of sugaring them.  My brain was not made to multi-task.

I made the cake first.

It's full of folded-in egg whites to make it fluffy. It's very rich and very good.

I am always insanely happy when the kitchen smells like onions sauteeing on the stovetop.

Somehow, I'd never worked with phyllo dough before. How I've avoided this is a mystery to me, because I could easily marry a baklava, despite it's tooth-numbing sweetness.  I've watched my mom separate and lay out the paper-thin sheets of dough and knew to be careful (it's very delicate, like handling gold leaf) but I still managed to rip several sheets right in half before I got the pressure of the pastry-brush-applying-oil just right. 

It was really flavorful and I didn't miss the normal doughy chicken pot pie crust at all.

Claire liked it. (That's chicken on her teeth, I just noticed. Hee hee.)