This summer, the filmmaker, producer, newsletter author and former talent agent Priyanka Mattoo added another title to her multi-hyphenate descriptor: memoirist. Her book, Bird Milk & Mosquito Bones, follows a life spent moving from India to Europe, and Michigan to Los Angeles. Its June release meant Mattoo could spend the summer with the weight of impending publication lifted: “I know some authors do a run of events when their books come out,” she says. “I have two kids. And it was summer, so we spaced them all out.” She was able to travel but spent the past week at home in Venice, getting ready to ease back into the routine while putting together her second book — and strategizing for dinner all the way through.
Monday, August 12
We awaken to screaming and the smell of burning hair, which would have startled me before we had kids. They’ve decided to surprise me and my husband with breakfast in bed but miscalculated fivefold how long to microwave a pair of sous-vide egg bites (bulk-bought, Costco). When I finally pry the microwave door open, smoke streams out and the kids run to the front door.
When the stench starts to clear, the 10-year-old swiftly pivots to the toaster oven — “Ten minutes at 350, right?” — and I swell with pride. He also toasts us a batch of bagels, which he now removes with tongs instead of oven mitts. The oven mitts have been inherited by our 5-year-old, who is proudly using them to carry over a cup of (Nespresso) coffee. Happy Monday.
I supplement everyone’s breakfast with a batch of chocolate smoothie: frozen banana, peanut butter, cocoa powder (Guittard Rouge — a pantry essential — because the kids say “it tastes so fancy”), almond milk, vanilla, protein powder. It goes down like a drive-through milkshake and is so filling.
As I drop them off at camp by the beach, I ask the kids what they want for dinner, now that we’re home. Last week was vacation on the lake in northern Michigan, where we ate our weight in cherry pie (Grand Traverse Pie Company, Cherry Republic) and delicious sandwiches (New Bohemian Cafe, Village Cheese Shanty). I don’t cook on vacation, really, and I have a renewed energy for it now that we’re back. The 5-year-old wants “green pasta,” which swims in a sauce of my own invention: I blend up steamed broccoli, spinach, pistachios, Parmesan (or ricotta, if handy), garlic, and olive oil. My son saw a recipe for Instant Pot carnitas I flagged and asks whether we can have that. Okay, yes, this is technically two dinners, but that means two batches of leftovers, which will help later this week.
I am easing my way back into exercise after an Achilles injury. So I go for a vigorous walk, along a beach path and through the Venice Canals, on the phone with my parents and then brother, before spending all day in my office nook at home. I’ve been doing events for my memoir since June, and anything else that isn’t feeding the children has fallen by the wayside. I have to dive back into emails, calls, bills, back-to-school prep, and a billion other things for the coming month. I eat a leftover taco for lunch; the pickled onions are so good today. Then I pick the kids up around three — I have never seen dustier humans — and make dinner while they watch cartoons. The only remnant of this morning’s emergency is a whiff of smoke when I open the microwave.
Tuesday, August 13
The kids are still working their way back from Michigan time, so I feel a tiny hand tapping me on the cheek at 5:30 a.m. I take the lead on weekday mornings, while my husband handles bedtime, so I roll out of bed and make myself a coffee, then a mango smoothie (mango, almond butter, cardamom, almond milk, a little maple syrup) for my daughter, whom I still call the baby and who is extremely vocal about her preference for chocolate and tells me this smoothie makes her “feel weird.” Not me, says my husband, who has three helpings. He is the No. 1 fan of my cooking (even smoothies) and very adorable about it. I slide her some Cheerios with milk and applaud the 10-year-old for making his own breakfast. I feel a little sad, but also … it’s a good thing.
I drop the kids off at camp, which is conveniently located near an annoying hillside staircase adjacent to Santa Monica. I count climbing it as exercise and then rush home to eat the default meal that got me through my memoir: full-fat Greek yogurt, strawberry preserves, and a heaping tablespoon of ground flax and chia, for crunch and, vaguely, health. I wanted to thank it in the “Acknowledgments” and chickened out.
Then I sit down to continue digging myself out of admin hell. By lunch, I’m hangry. I usually hate ordering groceries, but I was in a time crunch the other day, and now I’m paying for it. I want one pound of wild-caught shrimp to make for dinner tonight, and instead I get one pound of “Chesapeake Bay Shrimp Salad,” whatever that is. Annoyed, I stir in some smoked paprika, grainy mustard, and a little nutritional yeast. It’s fine. It’s food.
In the afternoon, I Zoom with a book club about my memoir. One woman apologizes before asking me if I’m on the autism/ADHD spectrum; she is, and parts of the book made her think I might be, too. This isn’t the first time someone’s brought this up, and I say, “Probably,” but the professionals in my life don’t feel the need to diagnose where, specifically. We just tackle my quirks — sensory, neurological — as they come up, if I feel like they’re interfering with my life.
After camp pickup, I make rack of lamb, which seems like a crazy idea. On a Tuesday? But they’re well priced at Trader Joe’s, so I get two racks, trim the fat, and marinate them in red-wine vinegar, olive oil, mustard, garlic, and herbs. After a quick sear on the fatty side, they go in the oven for 25 minutes and the whole family loves them. We eat this with leftover steamed broccoli dressed with lemon, salt, and a glug of good olive oil. I buy five-liter cans via email from Roi and then funnel into a glass bottle as needed.
Wednesday, August 14
For breakfast, we’re back to a chocolate smoothie for the girl, because I don’t want to have a fight about it. The boy has already eaten (again) but allows me to scramble him a couple eggs. After camp drop-off, I run home to work on a pitch document for a new show idea I’m taking out with meetings starting in the next couple of weeks. I have no handle on the buyer environment right now; everything is such a mess. But I love the idea, so we’ll see.
Time flies and then, oops, I realize I haven’t eaten lunch and my brain is no longer working, so I run down and throw together my favorite 30-second meal: baby spinach, cubed firm tofu, and a little Kewpie sesame dressing, all topped with furikake. I have a Zoom with my beloved doctor to go over bloodwork, which is looking good. She’s impressed by my ALAs, and I tell her about the flax-chia situation, because I love getting an A in “patient.” We talk, per usual, about me working more omegas into my diet, and we have a long sidebar about tinned and oily fish, which, frankly, I have not yet tackled, but I enjoy having culinary homework. I crack open Anna Hezel’s cookbook Tin to Table, which might factor heavily into the following week’s meal-planning.
Just before I have to leave for camp pickup, I pull out the Instant Pot to start some turkey chili, which is loosely based on Gelson’s supermarket turkey chili. When I pick up my somehow-even-dirtier-than-ever kids from camp, the little one has hiccups. When we get home, I hold her on the couch while she watches something badly made. Maybe it’s the state of the world or middle age or the intersection of both, but I’ve been acutely feeling the passage of time lately, and my incomprehensible fortune at living where and how I do, so I’m trying to spend a little more of it with my children draped on me.
My husband mentions on a call that he’d like to make dinner, and I tell him I have a whole plan but will step aside for the weekend. He’s an excellent cook, but unfortunately for him I do always have a whole plan and my workplace is 30 feet from our kitchen. I also generally run out of cooking gas by Friday. For now, I top our turkey chili with an astonishing amount of sour cream.
Thursday, August 15
Breakfast is scrambled eggs for everyone, bagels for her, tortillas for him. I have coffee. But I also have a 10 a.m. lunch (sure!) at Surawon Tofu House with my co-writer on a CBS detective pilot, Dana Greenblatt. It’s her first time at what is maybe my favorite restaurant in L.A. Today we have to figure out how our victim dies. A bomb seems too diffuse and hard to pinpoint a target. Guns are overdone (on so many levels). Strangling is creepy. Knives are so London. Is a blunt object too Poirot? These are the questions we ask over bubbling pots of soon tofu. “How can I ever eat anywhere else?” she asks, and this is why I like her.
The kids come home from camp with face paint caked over their layer of Furiosa dust. The 5-year-old’s face is done up like a puppy’s with a little tongue sticking out. She has henna patterns all over her arms and legs under layers of sunscreen and salt. I give her a long, warm bath and scrub most of it away.
A sweet college friend of my husband’s comes over for dinner with her family. I make a big skillet of shrimp seasoned with butter, paprika, and lemon and a salad with arugula, thinly sliced mushrooms, and Parmesan with lots of lemon, olive oil, and lots of cracked black pepper. I cut up some crusty baguettes. Our guests bring cream puffs from Angel Maid Bakery, which is, serendipitously, where we get all of our special-occasion cakes. It’s a family-owned place that does the best sheet cake I’ve ever tasted, and these puffs are so light and not too sweet. As the family leaves, I hand their boy a leftover baguette — because he is a college kid, and I’m an auntie.
Friday, August 16
For breakfast, the kids eat Cheerios and catch up on some school practice. We’ve had a super-lazy summer by design, and now we are rolling back onto the on-ramp of learning. I am generally so very annoying about screen time (“How about we enjoy the real world?!”) that the kids are excited to do their phonics and fractions on a school-recommended app called IXL. It does allow me to have my coffee in peace. I drive them to camp, and it’s my son’s turn to pick the music. He has been playing a video game called Hollow Knight and constantly makes me play the soundtrack, which I mention must have been influenced by Carl Orff. I play him “O Fortuna,” and he loves it, so now we are the weird family rocking out to opera in the car at a beach parking lot.
I head to Kisa Sikdang in Koreatown for lunch with my dear friend Tejal Rao. She’s excellent company even when she doesn’t bring her sweet baby, who is almost 1 and an incredible eater: The restaurant specializes in “taxi-driver lunch,” which is like a giant thali around a center of grilled meat, and she tastes it all! Spicy marinated tofu, a lovely green vegetable called bracken, a soup made of turnip and tofu. I’m so impressed, and it’s impossible to stay on my side of the table and not squish her. I love that my kids are older, because they’re more fun than they are work, but the urge to nibble a baby is never far off. I don’t bite this one, but I do smell her hair when she’s not looking.
I spend the afternoon getting back into my second book, which I’ve mostly set aside for the summer but is due in May. It’s a collection of essays on reconnecting with pleasure without blowing up my life, and so much of it has been about slowing down and examining how I consume things that used to be satisfying. I’m reading books on paper, for one. Listening to entire albums. Monotasking. Making time to sing and dance and see my friends. Flirting with buying roller skates (it’s exercise, right?). Fundamentally, integrating elements of the person I was before I had kids into the person I am now, especially as they grow into needing me just slightly less. It’s been a pleasure to write and opened up so many interesting conversations with people who are reexamining the diminished role that joy tends to take as we grow older.
Dinner is with a couple of close friends I haven’t seen in ages. We go to Oriel, a wine bar downtown I’ve been meaning to try. It’s charmingly under a train track and of throwing distance of the picturesque Chinatown Metro stop. Mashed potatoes are highlighted thrice on the menu, which seems like a great sign. The Niçoise salad, sole (with those potatoes), and chocolate pot de crème are flawless. As night falls, the neon wrapped around the building casts everyone on the patio in a pleasing red-orange light, and I’m reminded of why we go out: because otherwise a decade could pass in a blur of care, feeding, and deadlines. Two hours later, we’re fully caught up on even the most frivolous of subjects, and as we leave, my friend Beth and I make a plan to look up opportunities for water aerobics.
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