A few weeks ago Iris discovered the word “and,” probably about the time the lobster joke started. Now she uses it in ways that would make Strunk and White keel over. Once she gets going with the conjunctions, though, she doesn’t always remember what she’s already said.

For example, those corn pancakes must have made an impression, because today I said something about corn, and she said, “Iris and Dada and Mama and Dada and Iris eat corn kernels.”

**Me:** Iris, are you an original gangsta?

**Iris:** Original gangsta!

(we read books for a few minutes)

**Iris:** Original parsnips!

Cooking dinner for the family is easy. Lunch is hard.

Pre-Iris, I used to eat lunch out at every available opportunity. Beef teriyaki and a couple of pieces of mackerel sushi at Hana. Two slices of sausage and onion pizza at Pagliacci. Chicken peperonata sandwich at Red Line.

Now, lunch out is an occasional luxury, and I don’t have Laurie here to entertain Iris while I get lunch ready, so I’m not going to be in the kitchen debearding mussels. Lunch needs to be ready in ten minutes or less.

The best quick lunch is leftovers, and I do my best to plan dinners that result in good leftovers. If there are a lot of leftovers, though, I’d rather save them for dinner the next day. Sometimes we get takeout–Iris has long been fond of the beef, cabbage, and cheese piroshky from My Favorite Piroshky.

But it’s hard to resist the siren song of convenience food at lunch, and we’ve been known to eat things like frozen lasagna, which kind of sucks. But convenience food covers an enormous range of items from inedible to pretty good. I’ll try to spotlight something on the “pretty good” end of the spectrum from time to time.

At the top of our list is Safeway potstickers, which Iris calls “dumplings.” (I realize there are whole swaths of the country that also call potstickers “dumplings,” so maybe Iris is from New York and we just never noticed.) Made with chicken and pork, scallions and crunchy lotus root, Safeway potstickers are better than plenty I’ve had in actual Asian restaurants. The filling doesn’t have that “chewy hunk of meat” quality–it’s smooth, and the dumpling wrappers gets nice and crunchy. (Iris likes hers extra-crunchy.) They take ten minutes to make.

Usually I serve dumplings with some frozen peas. I nuke them and put on some soy sauce, sesame oil, and black pepper. Until recently, I didn’t realize there were two kinds of frozen peas, petite and regular. Iris and I both prefer the regular peas. I guess we’re just tough characters who won’t put up with this petite vegetable crap.

This is a totally great lunch–today’s lunch, in fact. As I pushed her stroller up the hill from Grandma’s house today, I said, “Should we have some dumplings for lunch?”

“And some soy sauce and some hot sauce,” she replied. “Hot sauce a little spicy.” (Iris likes having puddles of soy sauce and hot sauce on her plate for dipping. Right now we have Frank’s RedHot.)

Of course, there are some things Iris likes even better than dumplings. While we were eating our lunch, I said, “Iris, after we finish our dumplings, should we have some pumpkin ice cream?”

She extracted a half-chewed dumpling from her mouth, put it on her plate, and pushed the plate way. “Iris all done.”

Iris has been hanging out in coffeehouses since she was a week old, when I started taking her to Espresso Vivace. At six pounds, she was too small for even a Baby Bjorn, so I would carry her in one of those precarious-looking baby slings, the kind that make otherwise normal people ask, “Is there a real *baby* in there?” Having a baby in tow is a great way to become a regular; you’re no longer some guy, you’re The Guy With the Baby.

Vivace provides a nice kids’ play area in the back, but Iris has never been that interested in it, because going to a coffeehouse is entertainment in itself. There are weird hissing sounds and coffee smells and a mix of people. Vivace makes among Seattle’s best espresso drinks, so people flock to it from all over town–people in suits, people with a hundred piercings, and every kind of person in between, including plenty of people who, like me, get all their work done in coffeehouses. Quickly I was established as a decaf macchiato guy.

Soon Iris was old enough to taste a dot of macchiato foam. Then I would hand her the espresso spoon, and this was the most exciting thing she’d ever held, even though she was completely unable to spoon anything up with it. We stole several Vivace spoons, so I guess I introduced her to drugs and crime in the same place.

Finally, she was ready to have her own madeleine, which is the perfect cookie for a baby, because it’s so soft and crumbly. Recently Iris was reading the Martha Stewart Holiday Cookies magazine and came across a full-page photo of a madeleine. “Madeleine! Iris eat one sometimes at Joe Bar,” she said. Joe Bar is another of our favorite coffeehouses, and they have crepes. We usually get a lemon crepe with whipped cream. “Sweet and creamy,” says Iris, and this is pretty much her highest compliment.

The New York Times recently had an article about kids gone wild in coffeehouses. There are few enough kids in our neighborhood that I’ve never noticed a problem at any of the coffeehouses we frequent, so I don’t really have an opinion on this vitally important issue. Once, though, we took Iris to a coffeehouse designed with kids in mind: My Coffee House, on Madison. My Coffee House has more toys than the average Toys “R” Us location. Apparently all the kids had been drinking triple lattes all morning, because even the newborns were on a rampage. We haven’t been back to My Coffee House.

Some other Capitol Hill coffeehouses that Iris and I recommend are Red Line (at Denny and Olive), Victrola (on 15th, where I’m typing *right now*), the big Starbucks (which Iris calls Coffeebucks) on Olive, and Cafe Dharwin (10th and Miller). Iris is particularly fond of Cafe Dharwin; it’s near her friend Charlie’s house, and I would drop her off to play with Charlie and his babysitter and then go work at Cafe Dharwin. When I left, Iris would say, “Dada go to Cafe Dharwin, typing on the baby computer.” One morning we were running late, so I asked Iris if she’d like to have breakfast at Cafe Dharwin. Would she ever. We had a lemon poppyseed muffin. “Did that baby just say ‘Cafe Dharwin’?” asked the barista.

I happened to stumble across–okay, I was ego-surfing at Technorati–a post by Orangette (whose blog I have now dutifully aggregated) about sausages and grapes. Judging by the photo, she makes it better than I do.

Sausages and grapes is an Italian dish, often called Tuscan but probably made anywhere they have sausages and wine grapes–that is, all of Italy. I first had it at Al Forno restaurant in Providence RI, and since then I’ve written an article about it and made it at home dozens of times from the recipe in Cucina Simpatica, the cookbook version of Al Forno.

Somehow I never stopped to wonder whether sausages cooked up with other fruits would be just as good. Then Molly Stevens’s All About Braising introduced me to sausages with plums. Her method is a little different. For sausages and grapes, you basically toss everything in the oven, and half an hour later it’s magically transformed into dinner. Sausages and plums is a little more work. You brown the sausages in a pan, saute minced shallot and garlic, add sliced plums, deglaze with red wine, and braise on the stovetop.

This is a perfect use for imperfect plums. A good plum is dangerously juicy. If it were a Holst composition, it would be Plum: The Destroyer of Shirt. This time of year, though, you can get plenty of firm, sour, and thick-skinned plums. Just as green mangoes and papayas make brilliant vegetables, so does an unripe plum in this recipe. When we had sausages and plums for dinner last night, Iris ate all her plums, then announced, “Iris eat some Mama’s plums and some Dada’s plums.” And she did.

A few weeks ago I was at Whole Foods, and I couldn’t find the plums. I asked a produce guy, and he said, “Plums are over.” He said it in the exact tone a teenager would use to say, “Mom, Christina Aguilera is so OVER.” Apparently, by asking for plums out of season, I was not only compromising the Whole Foods mission, but quite possibly hastening the extinction of mankind. Mamster: The Despoiler of Stone Fruit.

So I bought some fresh black mission figs and made sausages and figs, which were excellent.

Whole Foods has an amazing sausage case, with over two dozen varieties made fresh daily. Overall, I gravitate toward their chicken sausages; their pork sausages are too lean and tend to cook up dry if you don’t baby them. Obviously, the chicken sausages are even leaner, but somehow they don’t have the same problem. For pork sausages I like Isernio’s hot Italian, which are sold throughout the Pacific Northwest, Alaska, and Hawaii. Unlike most store brands and national brands like Johnsonville, Isernio’s sausages are free of weird stuff like preservatives and corn syrup, and they even sell them at Trader Joe’s.

Now the question is: Sausages and what?