la femme follette

À la recherche du temps perdu

Earlier this week it rained, so we baked cookies.  I have never loved to bake and am typically mystified by those who do.  Kowalski bakes all the time, which I find terribly appealing, especially now as I live with at least two people who expect me to produce three meals a day with nary a request nor a thank you. 

Kowalski liked to put just one cookie on a plate and bring it to me, while I was reading or studying.  Depending on the time of day, the cookie would be accompanied by either a cup of his excellent coffee or a gimlet.  I loved the look of just one cookie on a plate, it is so tidy and would be almost parsimonious, were it not such an extravagant formality to dirty a whole plate with just one cookie.   

Kowalski said to me, recently while talking about cookies, that he just wanted to see if I ever asked for more than one, but that I never did.  He said that he always believed that this conferred to him some deep understanding of my psyche and my relationship to wants v. needs and nonessentials.  I confessed that I actually do not like cookies.  I do not like to eat with my hands, so I prefer cake.  Or a nice bar.

The children love cookies.  So does Mari.  We here are not an ill-fated couple circling each other, both terrified of being hurt.  We are a family, and so I serve more than one cookie at a time on a plate for sharing.  I still do not love to bake.

   

turn your heartache

 

It is true I have been sulky about the cool spring we have been having.  The rain has been a downer, but the sustained chill of it has been something again.  Then today was glorious, parfait, and I was remembering while sitting outside enjoying it that years previous I have been rustling and mewing because of the suddenness of this region's hot summer temperatures, and meowing on about how I miss the gradual and gorgeous increase of a midwestern spring. 

It would seem this year my wish has come true.  Even better, because there is not all that disgusting mud and the smell of thawed lake water.  I have changed my tune, the rose bloom seems forever, and which Midwestern girl feels entitled to grow eggplants, anyhow?

 

The antidote to homesicknesses real or imagined is always a choking gasoline gulp of the blistering expertise of Kowalski, who has been working on me a little overtime this month and for whom there are never enough socks in the world.  Maybe a little bit of bossy garden design for his cottage will make us all feel better.  I was thinking of something in the way of clematis.   I do not even know what garden zone that is, though surely it will not support the aubergine.

voir dire

If the sun would shine, these babies could go outside already.  Three "Kermit" and three "Rosa Bianca" eggplant.  They are getting a little big for their pots. 

Also, in the category of "babies," there is still an awful lot going on here with mes enfants and the associated strain of it all.  In the midst of all of this strain-combatting interaction,  I can often try to end conversation or skirt conflict or let others save face by shrugging and spreading my palms in a non-threatening gesture and declaring myself a. a simple midwestern girl or b. just a housewife.  It infuriates me that no one falls for this.  In fact, the intended recipient generally scoffs aloud.  These are the people that are on our side.  I am always sad to realize I cannot maintain my low profile and more than that, that people will not just allow me the masquerade.       

love the exception

I am back into the regulation clingy, long-armed knits & low-rise jeans I wear three seasons and have dialed it down to Buffalo Springfield and solo Don Henley.  Don Henley from 25 years ago, not from the recent past where he styles like the male Faith Hill.  Kowalski called me tonight while I was out running errands and told me a funny, sweet story about someone we used to know, a story that is the tiniest bit sad.  I exchanged him, in the light of a sodium vapor lamp, a long confessional of the sort that is his purview.  He was noodling around on the piano while we talked and now I seem to have a thirst for Muddy Waters.  Or Outkast.  Leonard Cohen?  I cannot sort it all out just yet.  Obviously.

The rain continues and the eggplant are still inside, shivering.  If I had known that this spring would be this way, I would have planted spinach when I thought of it.  Sadly, I then considered the season too long in its tooth.  I have spinach from the farmer's market, however, still with its tiny roots attached.  It was being passed off as premium baby greens, but thinning the rows in the garden was my task as a child and I recognized the little roots attached to the babies as more of a waste not, want not situation.  Premium greens makes me laugh a little.

My (s)mother made this soup after Mass every Sunday when spinach was in the garden, which is in the Midwest a very, very long time.  It was always best with the thinned plants; I was happy to have 2 full bags.  It is the only soup I have ever known to be a fine companion to a plain green salad right alongside. 

Lentil Soup

Boil 2 cups French lentils in 10 cups of liquid as desired for soup* until quite tender.  Salt to taste, leave to cool. 

When ready to eat, give 4 to 6 large handfuls of clean, young spinach a quick turn in a 1/4c of butter on high heat, just long enough to wilt.  Pour spinach (with butter) into the lentils.  Puree to about a 70% smoothness, then reheat gently.  Taste again for salt, then add the juice of one lemon.  Serve hot.

I think it is Outkast, definitely.

*Chicken or vegetable stocks work well, although I always use water with 4 ribs of celery and 2 carrots, which I remove when the lentils are done.

some old bed

Early this week, I put Neil Young and the Allman Bros in a very heavy rotation around here, their entire discographies in an alternating fashion and yesterday I was one stick of Juicy Fruit and about 5 degrees from a halter-top.  Ready for summer!  The tomatoes are transplanted!  I might put my panties in yr pocket!  Then today it is about 60 degrees and pouring rain.  Pfft.

There is spinach in our CSA box, though.

This was good.  Like a vegan saag ... uh ... whatever it is.  The very pretty Santos knows.

Spinach with Chiles & Coconut Milk (again, from Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything Vegetarian.) 

Put 2 tsp peanut oil in a large saute pan over medium heat.  When hot, add 5 chiles; 5 whole, peeled cloves of garlic; a tsp of yr favorite curry powder.  Give it 30 seconds before throwing in a pound of whole spinach and a cup (or so) of coconut milk.   

Turn the heat way down and leave it, uncovered, for 30-ish minutes, with an occasional stir.  When it is done (in the photo it is not; creamed spinach is pretty non-photogenic), the liquid will have mostly evaporated and the spinach will be quite soft.  Salt to taste, throw in a bit of butter if that is yr thing.   

cherchez la femme

There are no photographs of the shame & horticultural neglect, but a three-foot-wide, 10-foot-tall section of my Mme Alfred Carrière just fell right from its corset to flop horizontally into the garden.  For months I really could not make time to give a fuck about it (also, thorny!  ow!) and all along the way, it was as if she had been trained horizontally, so she is covered in blooms this year, but only along that section.  Something about the word axial.

I love the flower, have written about it before, the three stages of old Mme Carrière -- the tight pink bud, all flushed at the bursting seam; the ruffly crinoline, chocolate-box-tidy layers of the bloom; the flower at its end, every petal open in every direction, not a trace of pink in sight, just an excellent, slutty, I-don't-give-a-damn mess.  Alfred Carrière must have had excellent taste in a certain kind of foxy firebrand, of that I am sure.

I never cut the flower to bring it inside, however, because the cut flower is so top-heavy on its teensy petite stems and my frogs are none the right size.  I am too distracted to find out from where to get floral foam.  Also, without a bloom, the plant is just this big brambly green monster trying to scale our house.  But this year, I have extras.  So, I just cut a big pile of them and kept cutting away at each one until they could be propped in a café au lait bowl.  I am so glad for my success, too, because it all smells incredible.          

sprung

Stir-fried asparagus would have seemed to me like an awful waste before last night.  Last night, after eating asparagus five of the last seven nights then looking into the fridge to discover there were still three more hefty bunches of stalks rubberbanded together in the crisper drawer, I became deeply exhausted and in need of preparation more dynamic than roast/steam/grill w olive oil and salt.  It was so delicious, we have forgotten we were ever about to tire of asparagus and now only want to know when we can have more and for how long (Thursday, and about another week, respectively).

Stir-Fried Asparagus (from Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything Vegetarian)

Cut 1.5-2lbs trimmed asparagus into 2-inch lengths.  Heat a wok over high heat for 3-4 minutes.  Add 2tbsp peanut oil, wait a few secs, then add the asparagus (at this moment, as per his variations list, I added a couple of thinly-sliced shallots).  Toss, then stir in 1tbsp minced garlic (and 2 dried chiles if you wish).  Continue to cook, tossing, until the asparagus is dry, hot, and beginning to brown.

Add 2tbsp water and the soy sauce and continue to cook until the asparagus is tender, another 3-5 minutes.  (I also added, again as per the variations list, a handful of slivered & blanched almonds)Drizzle with a small amount (1tsp) of sesame oil, salt if you wish, and serve. 

queen amygdala

I bought something like a bushel basket of lilacs last week.  Lilacs are on my radar, people talk about them, Martha Stewart has opinions of them and whole issues of her magazine devoted to their cultivars, and I just bob along, Oh, my grandmother's house had an enormous lilac shrub in the yard.  Kind of seasonal for me to grow, but nice.  Purply! 

I was alone at the market last week and stuck my face inside a bouquet of them and the smell unfortunately & immediately transported me to a vale of memories exactly like a minefield.  For the last decade, the only people related to me by blood that I see are the people who grew inside of me and god, I have lost so much.  I am trying to work through it all, so I filled the house with lilacs.  I do not know how it will work out.  Maybe I will just go insane.

My son has been up to his usual hijinks -- plumbing, plaster, floods.  The kind of careless and clueless destruction that means I can only go on through our days by treating him like the stoner roommate with the psychotic girlfriend who has also stiffed me on the gas bill for the last three months.  I will help you out in a jam, man, but day to day?  We are not pals.  I know this dynamic well, having watched it play out over years as a girl in the tiny and neighboring-to-mine home of a taciturn molecular biologist who loved the smell of Guerlain's Shalimar and ran six miles every day, no matter the windchill.  It occurs to me that I do not know how that all ended -- the roommate relationship seeded in kindergarten, the deranged girlfriend, the habituation, the sense-memory most readily accessed upon exposure to fin de siècle perfume -- but I do know that Facebook is not our vehicle for answers.  Or could it be?