la femme follette

eat drink read clean

Locust trees are pretty, but those glittery little leaves get stuck to everything and will be in your house, too.  Also, pods, wtf?

 
Becky at Suburban Matron (I know, it's all,God, Femme, you got to her weblog in an accident, trying to verify some urban legend you overheard at Pilates Chick's house!  She didn't sign your yearbook or anything!and I know, that is true, however, she has a weblog, which she updates and so there) has once again called the roll of honor to share opinions about eating, reading, watching, etc.  I'm in.

So Delicious Coconut Milk Creamer is good on its advertised own, but also I successfully used it to make a dairy-free ganache, so times a million.

We saw Where The Wild Things Are and it is one of those things where when people talk about it, they reveal instead of report.  I thought the puppeteers and the set design people & the location scouts ruled the universe.  It is a gorgeous enterprise and well-scored, too.  Besides that?  zzZzZzz.  I think it is like if someone made a movie about the evening commute:  people who had not been commuters since 1978 would be spellbound by the exquisite rendering of its terror & tedium, blah, blah, blah.   The film would be engaging! & emo-roco!  For present-day evening commuters?  zzzzZzzz.  I spend all my days with one (1) 10-year-old boy, and one (1) 8-year-old girl.  Every word, every gesture in that movie was but a shred of my own tedium & terror.  zzzzZzzz.  James Gandolfini was excellent in an extended rendition of the time Tony Soprano asked Uncle June "Don't you love me?"

Everyone -- I mean, everyone -- I know is talking about Honeycrisp apples.  On Facebooks!  In emails!  Our tweets!  So, I bought some?  I think they taste just like asian pears, which is fine, but maybe no one ever knew.  They were a damn site cheaper, I will say that.

I finished reading Lorrie Moore's newest, longest novel A Gate At The Stairs.  It was like her biggest short story ever.  I liked it, but I am not too strict about things like plot and forward movement when I read fiction, which is what I have heard people are complaining about.  While I very much enjoyed it, it is not the kind of thing I would press upon other people.  Which I am used to, since the book I finished immediately before Moore's was PT-109: JFK in WWII.  Which is amusing in that when people ask "What's that you're reading?" & I say, "Book about PT-109," they get this look, like potato chips in their gums or pebbles in their shoes.  I know that ...  is that a recalled model number ... a secret operation ... a circus mission???  Then when I tell them, yk, "JFK's torpedo boat"  their relief bowls me over.

FlashForward is a fun show, fun enough to drag me back from a decade of naysaying this racket where a network doles out teevee 45 minutes per week.  So far during every episode, I have thought, "Ok, this is kind of unsustainable, this relationship with this show," and then they end on some high note that makes me wonder what the answer will be, so I will watch the next episode.  Which, when you think of it, is all teevee has to be:  the show that brings you back every week.  And the cast is pretty, every one.  I told the Israeli when I pressed it upon him that it reminded me of 24.  Concept, compelling casting, cinematic, and there is buzz.  

I have been listening to Antonio Carlos Jobim's Stone Flower and Andreas von Wangenheim playing Bach's cello suites transcribed for guitar.  It started out because Garçon's classical guitar lessons require exposure to more than, yk, strumming, but it is kind of impossible to feel harried with Bach playing on the radio, so it has stuck.

Amparo - Antonio Carlos Jobin,...

Although, it is a little weird because sometimes while making dinner or mopping, I feel like I am in some rambling indie movie, like I am The Truman Show, but I forgot about signing the papers or something.

Mopping=Casabella Eclipse.  I bought this because it was a light-duty damp-mopper that used actual soap & water in a world where Method's O-mop a. can hardly be found any more and b. feels too Mop 'N Glo dopey.  Save your money.  Save yourself.  (For regular-duty mopping, Casabella's regular mop cannot be beat.)  

It has to be three meals per week we are eating crustless tarte tatin.  Melt a half- or 3/4- stick of butter in a pan with a lid.  Slice up 4 or 6 apples and throw them in.  Cover.  After 10 minutes on medium heat, add 3 or 4 tbsps sugar.  Pay attention so they do not burn & when they look sugary & glazed (5 or 8 more minutes), put them on top of baked sweet potatoes or steel-cut oatmeal.

Speaking of steel-cut oatmeal.  I hear so many people tell me they love it (I spent some time pressing it into people a couple of winters back), but who has the time?  You do.  Assemble it the night before, in the pot.  Bring it to a boil.  Turn off the heat & cover.  In the morning, give it 10 minutes on medium-heat. 

The kids & I watched Ghostbusters last night, which I had last seen in 1991 in B-10 Commerce Hall.  Be advised, it is racy!  Among other things, Dan Akroyd gets a blow job from a ghost!  You're welcome! 

fondanty!

A confluence of factors came about to remind me of this cake the other day, posted by the lovely Santos a year or so ago. 

 

So I made one, frosted it with ganache.  Meli told me on a ship-to-shore call a month or so ago that she did not know how to make this ganache of which I spoke.  (Actually, it was in a photo of mine & she just had to have the recipe.)  Here it is.

Chocolate ganache
Put 1/2c cream in a heavy-bottomed saucepan with 5oz (140g) chocolate, 1 tsp butter & 1tsp vanilla.  Put heat on super-low, bring it to a bubble -- a slow froth -- remove from heat & whisk & whisk until it is shiny & smooth.  You have to use it pretty much right away because it settles in place in a seamlessness of chocolate.

Also, this is from the NYT the other day?  About Your Hideous, Divorceable Parents?  (Mine, too!)  Then, they put it to the commentersphere on the NYT Blog& WTF?!  It is eleventy billion pages of stories just like mine!  It is a little weird, because I have been reading along (I think I have only been able to make it to, like, page 7), and not only will I see someone's shred that swims to the front of their narrative and think, Holy shit!  My mother lied just like that to all my relatives about me, too!  Yeah!  I'd blocked that!  but also -- with the benefit of some distance from all this world-class insanity -- I can see it kind of fresh & for what it really is, and I can hear Kowalski's head exploding c. 1993, all over again.  God almighty.  Thank the Lord for Billy Bob Kowalski, Dewar's, and my specialest pal, Maker's Mark.

It seems like the Philadelphia Phillies are about to wipe up their real grass with the LA Dodgers in a little bit here.  Which, I mean, fine, but is LA really just going to let them?  They were so much more spunky last year.  I think I have only 5 innings left in the NLCS to finish this cowl! 

beets are deadly serious

I think my desert-island book would be Jitterbug Perfume.  I know that I talk & talk about Love In the Time of Cholera, and I love it, also, but I think that something funny might be nice while stranded on that island.  Anyhow, I was thinking of Jitterbug Perfume this morning because of -- naturally -- the beets that are featured as a character.

And, I would pick it up to read it again today as it is on my mind, but I am already in the middle of a new, and new-to-me novel, Lorrie Moore's new offering to us, A Gate At The Stairs.  I do not know if I love it, I can not promise that I will finish it ... if I do, it will be the first novel I have read to completion in about 2 years.*  I will say that Moore used to make fun of the Midwest --  a sweet, gentle, kind of fun, but fun nonetheless -- but with this book, you can tell she loves.  She loves it, and it is making me the eensiest bit homesick for Dane County.

Anyhow.  Beets.  Yeah, they keep coming in the CSA share and I am hard-pressed to stay on top of them.  So, I made another cake. 

 

This was a flourless cake adapted for extra-beet power.  It is, as with the last beets-included cake, not a reason to go out and buy beets.  But, if you have them to spare, and are not quite ready to put them on the compost pile outright, it is just, uh, fine.  But, otherwise, it is kind of wet (think pumpkin pies), and it sweats pink.  The other one could be put over on people, not so this one. 

Flourless Beet Cake with Chocolate
4 ounces bittersweet chocolate
6 tablespoons butter
1/4 cup sugar
1/4 cup cocoa powder
1.5 cups cooked beet puree
3 eggs


Butter an 8-inch pan, line it with buttered parchment.  Oven at 375F.

Melt chocolate & butter, in the micro, or over a pan of simmering water. Whisk in sugar and cocoa, leave to cool for 5 minutes.

Whisk in beets, then add eggs, one at a time, beating until smooth.

Pour into prepared pan and cook for ~30 minutes, until a toothpick/tester comes out cleanish.

* edited:  I checked and, last July, I read Patricia's Cornwell's umpteenth Kay Scarpetta novel.  But before that failure in judgment, the last novel I read was in August, 2007.  Maxine Swann's Flower Children.  It was so good.  I wrote then, I liked this an awful lot.  Very low on plot, very high on narration and exposition.  It has been a decade that I have read such a gleaming showcase of flawless technique that did not have the writer's ego wanking on every page.  It was tight & textured & lovely.

I forget what 8 was for

Wow, long time.  Just when I had recovered from that tiring chick at the party, those people with their phone calls started with the phone calling again. 

You know ... I do not like to be a whiner.  Then, to complicate matters, I was raised by a sociopath & a narcissist, right?  So, to me, saying WHAT ABOUT ME is kind of anathema, but these phone-callers.  Jesus.  But if I said YEAH, WHAT ABOUT ME, they would be all, Blah, blah, selfish, but no!  I am not selfish!  Like I wanted some bereft, orphan's existence, let alone the one I have that features entitled assholes who singlehandedly built the cradle of my abandonment + intimacy issues occasionally poking their heads in screaming demands by proxy, as if I were not already doing something else. 

I am sorry.  Ugh.  OK.  I see the lifeboat of a list.

 

1. I am making kimchi because the CSA chare has been awash in Napa cabbage lately and I do not feel as though it is interchangeable with Savoy or, uh, green, I guess it is called.  Green.  The whole house smells of kimchi and it is making me delirious with inhalant ecstacy.  While my own childhood home was not a seat of familiarity & warmth, most of my friends' houses were and in those critical, Ophelia-reviving years, two of my BFFs were Korean.  So, my house smells like good times.
   
   
2. Mari and I watched Twilight last week and I loved it.  I admit that it was the night of the last and most ridiculous Phone-Caller Phone Call, and in this time of distress I turned to a root-beer float & an off-label usage dose of Percocet (because! my orthopedist! prescribed 125 of them! at the time of my accident!), so maybe I was unduly influenced by tryptophan & narcotics to feel disposed toward the film, but I am a pretty harsh critic, particularly when I am sleepy, and I really enjoyed it.  Like, really.  It was a good movie!  And my girlfriends keep saying, "Well, I can not believe and blah, blah, blah, and the book."  But I did not read the book.  As my pal The Israeli says, If the book were any good, they'd make a movie from it.  Well, this time they did & I enjoyed it!  So did Mari!  Even in the face of the weird Eddie-Izzard makeup they gave the dude, we have not mocked it once since we have viewed!  I think the real test of our love is:  Will we go see Twilight: New Moon in the theatre, alongside many excited teenaged girls? (Maybe!)
   
   
3. Related to Young-Adult, Vampire-Mashing Fiction, but also (!) about jewelry so, you know, important! (!!)  While we were watching the movie, quite possibly because I was in a state of Cake Mind, I wanted all the jewelry in that movie so so much.  I spent 5 minutes on Etsy and found out there is a brisk trade in Twilight-Movie Reproduction jewelry.  The quality of the materials used is highly variant, but so much of the stuff is right-on gemstone-fabulous & Victorian bling. 
   
   
4. Speaking of shopping, last week CVS had 10-oz bottles of Dawn on sale for $1.  At the same time, you could get a $10 CVS-thingo "cash" coupon if you spent $25 on select Proctor & Gamble products, of which the Dawn special was one.  Also, I had the standard $4-off-purchase-more-than-$20 receipt coupon + a previously-earned $5 CVS-thingo "cash" coupon.  So, I paid $17 for 25 bottles of dish detergent, then received a "cash-coupon" for $10, plus a new $4-off-purchase-more-than-$20 receipt coupon.  So, presuming I use that new $14 in coupons on something I was going to buy anyhow, the upshot is that I got almost 8 quarts of dish detergent (our regular brand, natch) for $3.  If you followed ANY of that, I salute you.
   
   
5. I ran up the stairs today.  Ran!  Mari was leaving and I wanted him to remember something for me, and I took to the stairs one at a time, but at 2-at-a-time speed?  Yesssssssssss.  Because a month ago I will still walking v gingerly and 2 months ago, I was still on crutches.
   
   
6. Speaking of defects:  The news from the orthodontist is sunny & Fille has been upgraded to a 6m interval between visits, plus also is totally out of the Too-Many-Baby-Teeth-Sharkmouth woods, as she has recently become the owner of four very shiny & new, jaggedy grownup teeth.
   
   
7. My method for dealing with the CSA's surfeit of beets thus far has been to parboil them, then put them in the oven for roasting, whereupon I forget about them, overcook them, and wind up putting them in the compost pile at our neighbors' house.  It works out almost as well as simply admitting we do not like to eat them and putting them on the pile straightaway.  Baby steps.

academic

Garçon filled the dishwasher-detergent compartment with dishwashing liquid tonight.  I was not here, but Mari reports that in the child's defense, he very soberly removed the bottle from the cabinet and said, "Dad, it says right here, not for use in automatic dishwashers, but our dishwasher is not automatic.  You have to press the buttons and everything."  Aw, my little guy.

Is that the generation gap?  I mean, to our fin de siècle little boy, of course a machine that washes your dishes and has little lights and touchpads is just oh, so manual.  It reminds me of when we were watching The Jetsons ouevre a couple of years ago, and Fille asked me very nonchalantly, "If this is the future, why do they still have a Roomba?"  LIKE WHOA, DUDE!

I had a real 20thc moment today while I was over on campus -- I stupidly thought that because the students were back, but classes have not started, that it was fine to go over there in the early afternoon, of course not realizing that because classes have not started yet, they are free all day to be milling around en masse opening bank accounts and generally congesting the area with their slow-moving guilelessness.  Slow-moving and also (!) so many of them had septum piercings that I thought I was back home, caught in a field of Guernseys. 

Anyhow!  The point is that I was in the bank, which is so retro, going to the bank building, even though it was filled up with kids who should be able to do all this via their iPhones, which, even as I mused this, I considered that it was an exaggeration of my mind, but!  While waiting in the teller line I was informed via the bank's shifting LCD display that the children can link their student ID card to the bank account and this will be their ATM card.  Seriously?  The only thing we could use our university IDs for was buying beer in the union & library privileges.  And I know I have ceded this category to the next generation, for all I could think was That can not be safe.  I wonder what their parents think?  I am pretty sure I have read that this is the crew that chatters everything in a confession to Mom & Dad.  We are living in the future.

Today was the first day back at public schools here, those old Socialist, Communist, Third Reich, liberal constructs.  Free public education for all!  Balderdash!  Where does that money come from and how will it ever go on?  I will tell you!  I provide for my kids' education, and I think that free, public education is just inappropriate!  How is it the government's responsibility?  What about privacy!  Most Americans are against it, you know!   

Uh ... anyhow, sorry, (ahem), so (!) the children & I talked, while we walked over to the bank, about how to answer the questions people seem to love to ask them about school, which when we are out during the day starts generally with, "Oh, so no school today?"  Their response is usually to stammer out that they are homeschooled, which about 65% of the time leads to a barrage of questions designed to slyly elicit information from them so as to assist the questioner in their evaluation of the Quality of Their Educational Programme.  This does not happen at the library or a job interview. These inquisitive sorts are always, you know, retail-shop clerks. It is tremendously dull. It is just like, Are you trying to provoke some kind of thing with my family? About homeschool? I mean, it seems so strange, people's interrogations.  I mean, usually we are just, you know, hanging out in a peacefully taskmastering way.  They are not arsonists, or inarticulate, like that one little girl that made me so so so depressed about that baby-pageant show. 

For this year, I explored some different answers with them:

• No, no school.  What the questioner is doing, in the outset, is making small talk based on the fact that a school-aged child is before them during school hours.  This answer will satisfy them.
• Why do you ask?  I explained this to Fille -- who was championing "Mind your own business," as her favorite option -- as a way to invite grownups to recognize that they are actually not minding their business, without saying so.
• We have the swine flu, stay back!  This is from a cheeky homeschooling pal abroad, where they have national health insurance, so it is probably funnier there.  My kids are funsters, though, and I cannot be sure they will not crack it open a couple of times, just to see what happens.

There is context, of course -- who is doing the asking and how long will we be trapped by them -- and I did very carefully explain to them that no one wants a child to be rude to them, even if the child just thinks the pushback is setting a boundary (so no "Mind your own business," especially not for an opener).  At the same time, I acknowledged to them that people generally feel pretty free to just get all in the business of children without very much politeness or regard for the boundaries of common courtesy, so this was an area they would have to walk on their own.  It is part of growing up. 

God, omigod (!!) then this super-weird thing happened to us, when we were parking our car closer to campus than walking from our house, but still kind of far from the bank.  I was parking, and the guy parked in ahead of the space I was taking was opening his door, and then shutting it, then opening it and bringing it just to the edge of closing it without pulling it shut, and these kind of openy-closey door shenanigans.  Well, I cannot parallel park behind him and drive defensively at once, so I was waiting and waiting, and I could not tell if he saw me, but was hoping he would figure it out.

He got out of his car, and walked toward us, all the windows were down, and I said, "I was just waiting for you, to get out of the car."  And I was smiling & waving gaily and it was fine with me.  And he thought I meant I was waiting for him to get out of the space, and I said, "No, no, I was waiting to park, I didn't want to pull up next to you if you were getting out."  Ok, emphasis on "park," because now dude is not in his car with his waggly door, and so I could park if only he was not standing in front of my car talking to me.

Then he told me again that he was not going anywhere, that he had gotten out of the car to see what I was doing loitering behind him.  Great!  So, we have that straightened out!  He got back in the car, I pulled up parallel, put the car in reverse, backed up and then just as my front bumper cleared his door, he threw open his door and said, urgently, "I have a dentist's appointment!  And I'm late!"  Then he jumped out and ran off.

We all sat there, stunned, with the car idling, until the children just burst into peals of laughter.  I was all, "Oh my lord, kids, what the fuck?  Wasn't he all I'm Not Going Anywhere Guy a minute ago?"  I mean, we were in a business district.  It is not as though it was his residential parking space and he had to rush off.  He had driven ... well, anyhow.  Super-weird. 

vegetability

Yesterday, the children decreed it warm enough to spend a couple of afternoon hours at the pool.  I helped them pack a meal and sent them on their way; Mari was good enough to drive them over.  When I went to retrieve them later, it was just about 6, they were hanging out together on the dining deck, eating lentil salad, tomato & cuke salad, and watermelon slices. 

Between their table and me was another woman I know, not well, but from around the neighborhood.  She is nice enough, as is also her husband, though one of her daughters steered mine very, very, gravely wrong once on a matter and I think that Fille will never recover from the fallout of that one conversation, as she has ever been lukewarm in the category of the girl. 

Anyhow, on the way to sit with my babies, I made some nice talk and greetings, and then, before even three minutes had elapsed -- oh, and I think that while they were on "vacation" a few months back, she had a boob job, but ok, later -- she said something like, "I am kind of embarrassed about our lack of nutritious dinnertime options," while she waved at the pizza box open on her table and glanced sheepishly toward my children, devouring their pioneer picnic. 

Ladies, do not do this.  It minimizes us all.  Also, can we get past this, at this age of elementary-school mothering?  I can almost excuse the behavior from Mothers of Toddlers, especially the first time, when it all seems so critical, the feeding, and the information from pediatricians is so varied and/or poor, and it is very interesting, surely, to some of us at least -- Are you feeding strictly hypoallergenic?  Do you spoon-feed or encourage self-regulation?  Pretzel Goldfish or Cheerios?  Earth's Best?  Gerber?  DIY, and if so:  food processor or special BabyFood-Making appliance?  Diluted juice or never-never juice? -- and if I may be perfectly frank: our parenting crises are very small, as are the children.

Those days are past us now.  Trust me when I tell you, I do not care what your children eat.  Mostly because I did not have to prepare it.  Additionally -- though I will never explain it, because I am amazed that you, a stranger, would be interested -- my children do not eat pizza or chicken fingers or hot dogs because of either their allergies or their vegetarianism. 

Also, I am an irritating, clean-living, holistic-O, health-nut sort, and plus, we have this whole CSA-Share thing happening?  Which means that twice per week, I get a load of locally-grown, seasonal produce, and we have to stay on top of it.  As my friend Charlie pointed out, it makes you feel like The Very Hungry Caterpillar. 

Please be assured, we in this family have had our share of meals consisting of frozen broccoli served with a side order of potato chips.  And, I am the sort of girl who goes wild & acts out by eating homemade, gluten-free brownies for breakfast.  You see now? 

Additionally, to my friends:  The fact that one or both of my children might eat candy while in your orbit?  Do not fall all over yourselves apologizing for it.  As long as they read the labels and -- again -- it will not trigger their allergies?  I do not terribly mind if they eat candy while at your house, nor if they watch teevee with your girls all afternoon.  I know that you know that we do not have that sort of behavior at my house, but the way I think about it is this:  the deprivation here earns you a credit there.  Be a hero!  SpongeBob and chocolate-covered caramels for everyone! 

I must confess, however, on the eve of the start of school here:  Lunchables make me uncomfortable.  For Uncrustables, my mind is not too narrow; largely because I think it would be cool to be able to eat a round PB&J out of a cello package.  But Lunchables?  Really? Because I know children who are grossed-out by Lunchables, so I feel I must beg you, please, don't.  Think of the children's future, or the Earth's, one. 

You may all keep calm & carry on.   

gangster of love

Things are super-busy and I have so much to keep track of, and mostly, I stay A-OK by listening to Steve Miller Band & dressing super-cute as much as possible and 5 things about August!

1. Fifille got her first pedicure.  Manicures are old hat, since I think they are mostly fun & harmless and not so much with the slavish waiting-on of a pedi, but her toenails were so gross (trust me) from being barefoot all over. The soaking and the digging under the nail and everything did not a. seem appealing or b. seem like something I could do comfortably, in an ergonomic fashion, that is.  I dropped her off and came back later with an iced coffee, but I hear she was enraptured.  I may have been projecting, honestly, but if my job were pedicurista, I would be insulted at having to pedicure a child, so the tip was mighty.
2. I went on a quick trip to NYC for a (freaking excellent) haircut and to get my eyebrows threaded by my leg-waxing gal (just go with it).  Later, I had dinner with the funniest guy at The Onion, who I have for many, many, many years known to be more fun than a wheelbarrrow of sudsy monkeys.  Good times.
3. I vacuumed the first floor of our house and was so happy the next morning when I headed down the stairs -- so happy -- because it was so clean.  I mean, I could tell halfway up from the floor that it was so clean.   
   
   
4. Ok, this is important:  The Israeli and I have figured out that a man cannot be Danny Thomas and Dean Martin at the same time.  A guy has to pick.  If one picks Danny Thomas, fully-squared-off against the powers of Charo, then later, one cannot go the road of Dean Martin, who does not at all succumb to the powers of Charo, but neither resists her, and anyhow, he is Dean Martin.  It all makes sense, really, if you think about this clip, metaphors and also eyelashes.  So that, when a dude is all in receipt of the eyelashes and the femininity and the flattery and the implied/inferred rest, as far as the frisson goes, then the same dude cannot later avail himself of the privileges of neutered touching. Most of the time. Unless he is Dean Martin. We are still working on this discovery, The Israeli and I. I won't tell which he is; I don't think he knows!
5. Frying eggplant seems like a lot of work and why, especially when we are all so happy to just eat it any old way, but it was quite delicious.  Mari is working from home all week this week and I will also be frying this chicken, I think.  I know, I know, I quit chicken.  There is more to that story, but I have no time.  There is more to everything, but a. August has been a great month, all along, but as finally tallied in the end here!  I am so happy!  and b. September starts off strong with physical therapy.  Yes! 

   

sun. rain.

I keep thinking of a poem I wrote a few years ago:  Challenges/pleasures, the smell of death, the smell/of salad, flowers in bloom.  We have all of that, right now.  Also, a lot of summer fruits, which I chop & slice and then tuck into a lasagna pan under a blanket of tomatoes, with the last of last-year's tomato ice cubes chucked in for fair use, also, because it is almost time for the next batch of 31 pounds of tomato-pops to be put away.

I am, I would say, 70% on my formerly-wrecked foot/ankle.  We are, of course, always very busy and I am catching up on a great number of things and also having to let go, because lost time is never found again.

In trying to make up my mind between what to keep, what to scrap, the temptation to want to skip physical therapy is very great.  Two things stop me:  1. the health insurance reform debate, because I have it, the PT is paid-for, and so should I make use of it, and 2. simply walking around forces me to remember it might be nice to not limp for the rest of my life.  So, that!

The beans in the backyard have finally blossomed and there are probably beans, but it has been raining and also humid so that avoiding working the wet vines is not possible and we shall see.  This evening, I hope.  Oh, that lasagna pan gets in the oven at about 350 for 2 hours.  I know!  À bientôt!

le feu

I had to deal with some tomatillos from the CSA box this week.

I have to admit, as embarrassing as it is, that I have not written here because of being somewhat consumed by how unexpectedly not good the sixth Harry Potter movie was.  I mean ... as a movie, I enjoyed it.  Just as the fifth movie, it sort of captured the roiling confusion and shifting certainties of adolescence and early adulthood, and the sweet parts were sweet and in parts it was suddenly intense and also lovely to look at, and some of it was quite funny.

But, as film adaptation, I thought it sucked.   There was so much in the way of character development that was left wholly by the wayside, when almost all of the book was devoted to building the villain as a character and also backfill on the myth of the protagonist, all of which explained the taut hand-to-hand combat between the two and presented the reader, more or less believably, at the grand finale.

I am trying hard not to sound like the commenter I read at the NYT weblog that started off, "I am 11 years old and have read each Harry Potter book five times ..."  Egads.  OK, and that is all I have to say about that.  Days ago, I was feeling much more ridiculously on and on about the topic.

I had my cast off Thursday and have been trying to get around on crutches and a weak foot in a brace.  I saw our osteopath on Monday and he helped a great deal, noting somewhat disapprovingly that my foot & ankle were still torqued at the same angles into which they had been smashed by the crash.  So, he righted them and since then I have been able to hobble slowly with a full (and tender) range of motion.  I guess I start physical therapy next week.

So, I have been at once more and less immobile -- or rather, more mobile around the house.  It has also been halter-top hot, which used to be known -- in a different city, with a different man -- as thrice-daily-paleta-cart hot, and so I was thinking of paletas.  Then, while googling for an italian-ice-at-home recipe (oh, too much work!), I decided to explore paleta recipes, and so here we are.

The only fresh fruit we had in the house were bananas, because Fille loves them and Mari took her grocery shopping and rarely does he tell her no.  The funny thing is that I forgot I am allergic to bananas.  I do not eat them for I mostly do not care for them, and it has been so long that I have eaten one that I did not remember why I do not eat them.  After just one paleta, my back is covered in welts. 

The children have no such problems and are elated to have a creamy treat that is not sickeningly sweet, as were those blasted jello popsicles.  I should have sought to revive the long-lost days of mixing halo-halo in my underwear with my sweetly-exhausted, upstairs medical-resident neighbor, Rey.  Next time.  I should buy an ice shaver right now. 

Banana paletas
Use a large-ish bowl with a pouring lip, if you have one.  Mix 1/2c sugar with 2c milk.  (I chucked in back into the refrigerator and waited for it to dissolve.)  Mash 3 bananas, to make about 1.5c.  Add to bowl.  I used my immersion blender here --  rrr-rrrrr-rrrr-rrrr-rrrr-rrrr -- and then stirred in 2tsp vanilla extract.  Popsicle molds, freezer, etc, you know. 

first things first

Fille was gone today, at a playdate the length of a workday, eating Swedish Fish & watching SpongeBob with her awesomest pal.  As far as I can tell, my son spent the afternoon voluntarily contemplating the error of his misdirection.  I made a cake from beets.  With beets, maybe, is more accurate, but anyhow.  I have no comment, except to report that all beets have been used up in the endeavor.

Then I got busy with a wagonload of Etsy shopping, which was all for stuff I had been meaning to acquire to beautify our life in meaningful ways, etc, but I cannot usually be bothered to sit down & pick + choose and etc.  I succumbed to a mighty 4-strand rose quartz bracelet, a total impulse buy that fumbled its way across my path.  I have been wanting a bracelet for some time, but the last occasion I had to linger over them at a shop, Fifille said, "You have a bracelet tattoo, why do you want a bracelet?"  At the time, it seemed a reasonable question, but since then, eh.

This evening, I spent a little time assembling this at the old 8tracks, a paean to my American childhood in the 70s, with parents who were total party animals that ran in a crowd that all had basements remodeled with wet bars & hi-fis that had speakers facing outside for the backyard in summer.  After we raced around catching fireflies, we would sit as quietly as we could, not even daring to slap at mosquitoes, creeping around in the shadows of the yard -- edging between the margin of the horsehoe pit where our fathers were, and the patios where our moms were, in their halter-necked maxidresses and turquoise jewelry -- so that we could hear everything our parents had to say.  Everyone's father was in law enforcement; there was a lot to overhear.  Fille is a grownup-conversation-listener and I sympathize, but she has to develop a method of stealth, honestly.    

 

Tomorrow, I see the orthopedist.  I do not feel hopeful.  At the same time, I do not know how much of the stiffness I am having is from 6 weeks of immobilization and also the attendant wasting of my right leg.  At at this point I do not care so much, except I cannot drive, and that is weeks away, since my range of motion is about 10 degrees in either direction. 

Walking is great, though.  I am so agile on crutches that if I am not back on two feet very soon, I am going to NYC on two sticks.  It is that good.  My biggest problem is going too fast.  If I get going at a good clip, and the crutches get hung up behind me ... it is the cruelest demo of physics in the land.

So, in that way, I hope I can get free of the things before I kill myself, but otherwise, o, how I laugh at all the times over the winter I fretted about picking up the pace on my upper-body routine.  Hahaha.  I realized today probably for the first time in my life I have a shot at a pull-up.  !!!  I sent the Sadist a little note to the gym last week letting him know that his one-legged deadlifts have never been more appreciated.

hamburgers

Man, having a broken whatever is hard!  It takes me hours just to get up and get showered & get my contacts in and everything.  Not least of all because I have to rest between every step.  Then I have to make certain I have everything before I head downstairs to make tea.  Because I do not want to go back upstairs once I have gone downstairs.  There is an accounting of every step that has to happen and oh.

It is not the going up and down the stairs per se, it is that I do not use the crutches but instead crabwalk up and swing myself down, so have to drag the crutches along, or have a child ferry them to me and, ok enough, this is tiresome to recount & (I would imagine) to read.

I was lying on the second-floor landing, just on the floor, a few days ago, waiting for Fifille to bring my crutches.  She leaned them on the bookshelf next to me & went into their playroom.  I kept lying there, and she came out after a while to ask if I was all right.  I told her I was just feeling sad, not sad that I had to crawl up the steps or whatever, but just sad that I was broken, that I felt interrupted & frustrated. 

She knelt by my shoulder and told me she knew exactly how I felt, that she felt the same when she broke her arm.  I told her that I remembered her feeling that way, but having never broken myself, I had no idea how she was feeling, and now I do.  It was sweet, and it would not have happened with my whole unbroken foot. 

I try to not be too sad or cranky, and mostly it works out.  Unless I get hungry.  If I get hungry, it is all over and much screaming can happen.  Mari observes that it is much like when I was pregnant, where by the time I notice I am hungry, it is too late to escape the raving & shrieking.  I guess it is the rebuilding happening?  Ravenous, is all I know. 

I do have to schedule a little time in every day to cry, like Holly Hunter in Broadcast News.  There is just too much happening and so much of it is slow and the torture of the innocents and I have to be kind & painstakingly informative to children who say "What?" in reply to every instruction which makes me so angry, it just shorts out my goddamn brain just exactly so very much like Sam Jackson in Pulp Fiction & I have to just maintain self-control & not make everyone miserable, so I just keep quiet (except about being hungry). 

But I am getting better, faster on the crutches, and by the end, perhaps I will be sliding down the banister!  (Say what again!  I dare you!  I double dare you!) 

garden state

First of all, I would be remiss if I did not volunteer that I am feeling better.  Sunshiny, even. 

 

When I was a girl, I was acquainted with an excellent sort of a guy -- the best kind really, and probably, though I have long run with a gang of self-styled intellectuals, he is the only true intellectual I have ever known -- who once remarked that any time one got up before 9am, it was going to be a long day.  It struck me then as particularly sharp, and lo these many years I think of him any time I wake before [whatever time] and am as the day wears on in for the confusion of, for example, trying to feed people lunch at 10:30 already, and put them to bed at 4 in wintertime, but never never, not for a decade, has the hour been 9am.

This morning, I rousted everyone up & out (as a threesome, we are early risers, but not very early movers) to pick cherries at the farm.  Cherries were going to be open today, and the farm expected the crop to be fully-harvested by afternoon.

I do not know why I was so excited about cherries.  They are sturdy & so good enough when you buy them in the store.

The relevance and/or accuracy of cherry picking as a colloquialism was not revealed to me during this horticultural endeavor.

I was really motivated for early-morning farmgoing by the one-two punch of rhubarb and cherries.  Rhubarb costs almost $4 per pound at the farmers' market.  Whatev, dudes.  $1.19 per pound if you snap it up yourself.

When we got there, we found out raspberries have just come into season.  Oh, my.  The picking, just at the beginning here, was so easy and a harbinger of a super season to come.  Exciting!

So, I have been thinking of my far-flung, very-fondly-remembered acquaintance today, but trying to figure out a corollary something along the lines of Any time you pick 20 pounds of fruit before you would normally be on your second cup of coffee ... But so far I've got nothing.

persistance. vegetative.

I am fully aware that I am spending long days luring innocent people off the intarwebs to look at food.  Sorry.  I am processing inside my mind important things and it is super-mess, and I do not want to say the wrong thing, even if I knew what to say at all.

This is kohlrabi.  That German Girl and I chatted this morning on a ship-to-shore call and she told me how they do it.  The children did not like it, and I do not like white food.  Except hummous, which I guess is actually beige.  It tasted good and all, but mostly I guess I am glad not to live in Germany.

Speaking of hummous, I was driving down the road today, inexplicably suffused with a proustian swooning about good times & the late 20th century with my pal the Israeli.  Hey, I said, snapping out of it about 3 miles from my house, I smell cigar smoke! 

Evidently, our new mechanic smokes in his shop.  Which is fine & all, it is just that smell is a minefield of who left that just lying around over there?  Then I told Mari about it when I got home & since then he has had the I Dream of Jeannie theme song stuck in his head, humming it without realizing.  Make of it what you will.

greenstuff

Our Monday farm share consisted of 2 heads broccoli, 1 head Napa cabbage, 1 bunch kohlrabi, 1 bunch spring onions, 1 bunch mustard greens, 1 bunch red kale, 1 head green leaf lettuce, and 1 half-pound bag young lettuce mix, not photographed due to a lack of space.

Kohlrabi are fun, and Mari & I have been playing a lot with them this afternoon, because they look just like the aliens in the Claw Game at the pizzeria in Toy Story.  I have zero idea about what to do with them, you know, so far as getting them on the table for eating, and I will have to figure that out.

I have a lot of things on my mind so far this month, there is relentless presentation of one thing over and over and over and I have decided to surrender myself to the Universe's lesson on this point, but OK ALREADY ENOUGH GIVE ME A MINUTE (June is making me v cranky!), for there are a lot of feelings I do not feel ready to feel. So, in the meantime, there is the endless asceticism of grueling workouts, Mr Bikram & his yoga, and (times are this desperate) my old standby, the rosary. Also, a nice 10pm bedtime, in the main. Chin up! (Ugh, Up; I may never recover.)

sixth

You know, so far June is making me cranky. 

I did go to the market today on my bicycle and all by myself to pick up our CSA share.  Then, because it was not enough food, I had to shop a little.  My bicycle is awesome and a little souped up with a back rack thingy holding a milk crate on with a bungee cord.  Mari laughed at me when I got home and complained that putting a bunch of cargo on yr bike makes it heavy and also you cannot go downhill both ways!

This is sugar snap peas, romaine, red leaf lettuce, a tasty bag of young leaf lettuces -- lolla rosa & others -- scallions, zucchini, and rhubarb.  There was a quart of strawberries that I forgot to photograph, but that with the rhubarb went here.

Rhubarb crumble adapted from Nigella Lawson's Feast book.  "Adapted" because it is obviously gluten-free (oat flour), and also because I replaced some of the rhubarb with strawberries.  I have done that a few times now, added strawberries to a rhubarb recipe, but have decided I just prefer the plain rhubarb. 

I also bought 2 bunches of lacinato kale and a few pounds of all-winterlong-cured sweet potatoes.  Ordinarily, I would have been suspicious, but the farm is actually run in part by a neighbor of ours and that is the whole point of all this local food hootenanny.  Where does it come from?  Well, do you know?  Well, I do, or certainly I did this time, anyhow, and it felt good.

Which reminds me -- that this whole thing with the lady filing for warantee protection under California law against the cereal people?  Because she thought Crunch Berries were real fruit?  Ok, I hate to be a killjoy + all serious all the time, but I am disappointed with the judge's dismissal, based partially herein:

a reasonable consumer would not be deceived into believing that the Product in the instant case contained a fruit that does not exist. . . . So far as this Court has been made aware, there is no such fruit growing in the wild or occurring naturally in any part of the world.

First of all, a new goddamn fruit comes out of an exotic location or a laboratory every week, it seems -- goji & acai spring immediately to mind, but also grapples and plumcots and all kind of fruit that did not exist in the grocery store when I was a girl. Then there is the matter of the package labeling calling the "crunchberries" berries on the labeling. 

Ok, sure, it seems ridiculous, cold cereal with red, green, and teal berries, but I know of at least one cereal on the shelves with actual berries -- Special K with Strawberries (which I thought, until Mari told me otherwise, were actually high-rent crunchberry sorts of guys), and for all I know (nothing about cereal), there may be more!  Finally, really, hardly anyone knows where their food comes from anymore or what it looks like or anything. 

For my very best personal example of WTF and what do you see when you read labels? I frequently have grownup people say to me, when they find out the baby & I can not eat wheat, they say, "Oh gosh, so you only eat white bread?"  They are quite serious and I find I rarely know what to say.  Because what can I possibly say to that?  (I say, "you know, we just don't find we care for any bread anymore," which is true.)

There was recently a soft news feature that talked about the writer joshing around with some kids at the Union Square Greenmarket about "What kind of fruit is this?"  and brandishing an apple, and the children did not readily have the answer.  I can say right now that many, if not most, of my children's playmates can not answer questions about where or on what kind of plant or in what part of the world or what time of the year different fruits or vegetables grow.  I know when I was their age, goddamned if I knew -- It comes from the store, I would have said.

I bet Mari that I could stand on a street corner with a flat of blackberries and tell people they were crunchberries and ask them to tell me what they thought of them & no one would bat an eye & say, "Duh, lady, those are blackberries."  Maybe they would say, "Crunchberries?  I thought those were made up by the cereal people!"  But likely as not.  

So, I actually do not think it is so far-fetched that someone would think a crunchberry is a real fruit, and while I am not a jurist, I do think it is a shame that the courts (in California, you know, where they have protected meat) did not take a minute to look at the reality of this sea change. 

It is June, and I am cranky.

no farms. no food.

This week's early CSA share contained one head of broccoli, one bunch purple-top turnips, 2 bunches scallions -- bulbous & pungent -- one bunch purple radishes, one bunch tatsoi, 1 head each red leaf lettuce and butter head lettuce, and one bag of mixed young lettuce leaves.

I picked it up Monday and two meals later (one stir-fry, one of "grown-up" salads) everything but the turnips and the bag of lettuce leaves are gone.  Poof. 

The second farm in which we have a share starts delivering Saturday.  I hope the squash do not fail this year.

evident

Week 2 of our CSA share brought romaine, red leaf lettuce, turnip tops with baby roots, icicle radishes, strawberries, baby mustard greens, and some kind of a mushroom.

I like to take photos of food, but also ... I think it is helpful to document what is real to counteract the mental shorthand I tend to rely on and which is invariably subjective.  About a month ago, I was sulking, "It has been raining every day!"  And clearly, it had not been raining every day, since I had a photo of [something] that I had taken in the last several days, sky clear & blue.

I was getting wound up & mistrustful about my capacity to garden in my dumb old backyard with the recently-busted sod and all the extra squirrels.  At the same time, I happened to be looking through some .jpg files for something kid-related and wound up finding a folder of garden-harvest photos from last year, some of which I posted here.  I was really gobsmacked, because I did not actually recall pulling out such a big bowl of produce every single day from the dumb old backyard, but there was the proof.

So if I try to complain that we do not get enough food in our CSA (and actually, I was thinking last night, the CSA share starts off slow & with leafy greens, but by August, it looks like this), maybe we do or we do not, but I will be able to objectively survey.

The children are not going to camp this year, due to a confluence of factors that made the cost of camp not really a value to me.  We are sad about it, a little, but it was mostly their choice and we are going to instead use the money on a pool membership.  I think.

I mean, I think they are not going to camp.  To me, it is scary, as a homeschooler-mom to say, I will be the ruler of school & the ruler of camp now, too!  Camp was always these past three years like such a freaking m-i-r-a-c-l-e, this being able to send my children somewhere for 8 hours every day.  For six weeks!  And I was always very confident in the capability of the camp to care for them properly and effectively.  Part of me feels sad about not sending them, as if this is somehow a strike against my perceived confidence in the camp matrons' powers. 

I am silly that way, sometimes, and because of this perspective get bound up in a lot of things I would honestly rather not be doing, under the rubric of not wanting to seem as if I am saying something I am not and also keeping an open mind.  So, in this case how that would work is: I feel as if the camp matrons are v capable and so of course I will send them my children for their care because to not do so shirks my civic responsibility of putting my body where the rest of me is.

Seriously, I wind up doing a lot of things I do not want to because I am thinking of grander ideas.  It is not a bad way to live, except that really, no one else is living that way and hardly anyone else even understands the compulsions.  But the ones I know that do have been my fastest friends.

Anyhow, I felt really burned-out a few weeks ago, with my son.  Very many shenanigans and a lot of horrible, horrible behavior.  I felt like I needed a month in a hole somewhere.  Somehow, he has turned his life around & I mostly do not want to smother him anymore.  I think that it was a joint effort and me realizing there are two sides to every story.  Also, a very lot of yoga. 

I still am not really ready to totally commit to having them home with me 24/7 for FIFTY-TWO weeks in 2009, and every time someone does something dumb/"helpful" and then gets belligerent when I try to explain why "helping" means doing what is expected not a New! Idea! cooked up at dinnertime, I am not sure I can do it. 

But they are not all bad.  In a moment of Can-Do last week, I told Mari that I think it could be like when they were preschoolers & we used to have so much fun every day except now they can wipe their own butts.  So, it might be good.  I wish there were a way to photograph all the ways we feel for later objective review.

ripe

We went strawberry picking yesterday. 

The weather was clear & sunny and there was a surprise!  When the farm guy recognized us & greeted us for the new year, he said, "And this year, there is rhubarb."  Oh.  Ok.  Yes, please!

The children are mighty fine fruit harvesters this year.  I am so pleased!  Garçon picked two quarts without complaining or balking.

I spent a little time dawdling in the rows, remembering a year ago our trip to the strawberry fields, how uncertain I was about my future, and the despair I wanted to wither in the sun.  The future is now & I am ok.  Not the same as I was, but when are we ever?  So, as we say back home, good enough is good enough. 

licorice. rhubarb.

So, this is our first CSA week with our spring/summer providers.

No one else wanted their rhubarb!  So, I traded 12oz of mushrooms (whatever, fungi!) and my kale each for a pound of rhubarb.  Then, a head of speckled romaine (cannot make Garcon eat lettuce, unless I braise it like endive & call it bok choy.  it is v tiring, all the subterfuge) I swapped for an additional little bunch of white icicle radishes.  Looking at it now, I should have unloaded those spring onions, also.  Anyhow.

The problem is that our oven seems to not be entirely functional all of a sudden.  Super-annoying, because we just had the ignitor replaced 6 months ago, and now the same thing and the oven is only EIGHT YEARS OLD, but I was just reading something that said the days of a major appliance lasting 30 years are over, due to cheap manufacturing practices, so I guess not so annoying, really. But I have a compelling recipe for a stovetop rhubrab endeavor, so am looking forward to some downtime with that tonight.

We went to a fantastic Greek festival last night when the weather cleared (thank you, St George!).  It was still chilly, but we wore appropriate clothing and had supper outside.  It may be only the Greeks who can corner one so fiercely with cigarette smoke in an outdoor venue that this morning we woke up smelling like we had been out all night in a bar.  A doughnut-frying bar powered by ouzo fumes.  I do not care, to me it was like oxygen for I have been a teeny bit homesick for my hometown lately, with all its casual ethnic interplay & summertime feasting for all.

Mari is not v Greek-savvy.  In fact, it came out last night that he has never been anywhere Greeky except with me.  Chicago has something of a full representation of Greeks, but I can find them wherever we go, like Spidey Sense.  One day last year, I dropped by our local taverna one afternoon -- I was SO RELIEVED when the place opened, like spontaneous generation -- without the kids to get a cup of coffee & a salad and catch up on some correspondence.  The son, who is in his late 20s, was busying himself with a lot of cell phone calls & obviously pre-vacation-departure wrap-up.

I asked him, while I was noodling around at the counter, waiting for my food, "Are you going to Greece?"  He said, "Greece?  No.  If I go to Greece, will you come with me?"  It was like, whoa, dude, go aerial!  But it is super-fun, speaking as a high-stakes flirt, to go over the line & just let it hang there.  So, we admired it, both of us, his nerviness, and then I said something bright & eyelashy, which I think was, "As long as my husband can come, too!"   

Mari never worries about anything anyone says to me, and that is saying something, because Kowalski likes to talk.  But even he was a little "What the hell?"  when I came home.  "Why would he say that?" he said.  I told him, "Because he's Greek.  It is how they say it."  "Well," he was huffy, "how did he know that you would know that it was just because he was Greek?"  I mean, I did, didn't I?  Yeesh.  But my experience is that they are a mighty frank bunch with the ladies.  And last night, with all their ouzoing and man-talking and eating with their fingers, oh. 

A long time ago, when I was living in NYC, I encountered John Stamos.  In a bizarre vignette featuring a lot of hurdygurdy around him being the only celebrity in the room, and me being the only person in the room with no real opinion about this, we made small talk and he asked me a really bizarre question that made me extremely confused.  I ended the exchange shortly thereafter -- and accidentally insulted him in the bargain -- and everyone got back to business and it was my New York Story for about week when we would all catch up.

It was eventually established by People Who Knew that he was hitting on me.  I did not believe it, but by now -- having been hit on a time or two by guys not so much from the straight-talking Midwest (So would you like to go back to my place & meet my dog?  I'll clean off the seat of the truck for you ... you like pancakes? after the first bottle of vodka, is as coy as a midwestern guy gets) -- I have to agree.  But still, I feel the same as I did when I scoffed at the Actress lo, those many years ago:  He is Greek!  He couldn't do better than that?  

Anyhow, we had fun last night, pulling in just in time for an excellent supper, featuring for Mari and I this tremendous amount of perfectly-cooked lamb.  (When Mari & I had been married for about two years, I overheard him say to someone, "I don't like lamb."  I interrupted, "Well, you've eaten it at least once a week since we've been married."  Ahahaha!) 

I thought about having an ouzo, but I did not want to become confused and wander off to dance the syrto in a haze of smoke and with all the other women dressed all in black and with the shoes such that anywhere else at a daytime event, you would look like Sandy in the big Grease finale.   

Fille liked best the plate of doughnuts, pastries, and sweets she shared with Mari.  I had an ill-advised demitasse cup of coffee, syrupy with honey, and did not sleep well at all last night.  My children have reported they do not love the bouzouki, but! I got a schedule of festivals happening this summer in the greater metropolitan area  -- one every weekend until July and then starting in September, one every weekend until November! -- and so I will give them a chance to learn to love it over and over again.  They will have so much to remember with each other when they are grown, ha-ha.   

__cycle

So, everyone living in my house has taken on this zeitgeist's green bullshit with a real zeal, never mind that some of them talk about energy conservation & the planet out of their mouths while they make a freaking mitten of toilet paper to wipe their other ends, ok, ok, I will let that go for the moment. 

Well, I cannot.  Because that is really what it boils down to for me.  I went to school in Madison, Wisconsin, and nominally ran with the hippies.  I kept very much company with men who were survivalist-y, off-the-grid sorts.  All of this conservation, environmental, planet-protection stuff is old to me.  Not to say that it is "old news," but that I know the rules and also I feel old when presented with all this shiny, sudden interest.  I do not appreciate being lectured by children, who leave all the damn lights turned on, and linger moonily before the open refrigerator, about conservation. 

Sometimes when I have had enough, I promise them in a Ralph-Kramden tone, "I swear to God!  One of these days, I am going to make you wipe with old newspaper!  And then recycle it yourselves into more paper for butt-wiping!  Do not start with me!  I know some things!!"

I mean, fine, be green.  Be vegan, or carless, or supertrained, or whatever you want.  Use those fucking light bulbs that save all the energy because they do not give off any goddamn light.  FINE.  But leave me alone about it.  I put the recycling in the recycling pile, but also, I try not to buy stuff that comes in a bunch of fucking packaging to begin with.  We are a non-composting family of four with one cat that puts out one 20-gallon trash can each week for pickup and that is frequently only half-full.  The recycling goes in a 10-gallon bin & that goes out maybe twice a month, now that I no longer get home delivery of the Times. 

So, after that, after the packaging-free shopping & all the goddamn cooking one has to do if they are buying food that does not come in a package and the years of breastfeeding and cloth-diapering and not using toxic cleaners and cloth napkins and reusable cleaning cloths, the seasonal + local food consumption ... After all of this, the fact that suddenly my children can read about not getting plastic grocery bags and so then harrassing me about it, well, it makes me cross.  Not to mention that if I never got plastic grocery bags, what in the motherfuck would I do with the dirty cat litter?  Carry it to the river in my cupped hands to dump it there?  JESUS CHRIST.  Honestly.

But then there is the matter of the car.  I love our car.  I was late to drive, Mari taught me after we were married.  He was a good & capable instructor and I love to drive.  Love.  I love cars, I love driving, I love talking about cars, cars are exciting to me.  That said, I hated living in the suburbs where the only way one can get around is in a car,  even of the distance is walkable, because the intersections & byways are pedestrian-unfriendly, if not dangerous. 

So now that we live in a city where there is transit and sidewalks and walkability, I feel a little guilty for doing as much driving as we do.  But, the reality is that this life is very busy, and we cannot take the time to just walk everywhere.  Transit is always an option, but the cost for the 3 or 4 of us to go somewhere round-trip is, honestly, more than the cost of parking the car.  More even than the parking ticket if I get caught up in the business district or on campus for more time than I thought.

Mari and I talked about this, specifically with regard to weekend outings.  We can walk to all the places we take the children, but our window between lunch & dinner is rather small, and to add in 90ish minutes of round-trip walking, well, that never works.

"If you had a bicycle ..." he averred. 

"UGH, FINE."  I told him.  I mean, really, already.  They all three have their little bikes & ride around, but it is true:  not enough as they would if I had one, too.  I have not ridden on the road in 20 years or so, and that was in Madison, Wis, with all the hippies and soldiers of fortune on the roads, committed to the preservation of carless transit and so they were not trying to KILL CYCLISTS.  Also, it was a world with NO SPORT-UTILITY VEHICLES.  Anyhow.   

So, here it is, after the shopping & building & test-riding.  Readied and souped-up and purchased & home.  Also, if you notice, green.  It is like my own little joke to myself.  Mari & the children totally have this fantasy they are sharpening up every day in anticipation of this vehicle that we are going to ride bicycles all around like the von Trapps.  As I confessed to a pal, I am v much calculating how long I will have to play along with this before I can call us broken-even on the purchase price.

On the other hand, it is very shiny.  And, it has a basket.  Also, the suspension is rather cushy and the profile is upright.  I will keep an open mind (I actually do not have much choice) and maybe I will grow to love riding around everywhere.  The bike gal at the bike store was trying to explain back carriers to me and I was just not having it.  "Let me just start with going places on it.  Like a horse,"  I told her.  "Then we'll see."  Just from the test-riding, I have to say that bicycling is quite a bit sportier than I recall.  Ow.

suspension

Our CSA farmers have a hoop house, and in it they are growing lettuces, which is fine ... for some people, I guess?  But I do not want to eat lettuce in March.  Nor did I in February, January, or December.  Ick.

Mostly, I stir fry it for the children, who gobble it up, presuming it is bok choy & I will never change their minds.  Mari is a guy who likes to eat salad while it is 20 degrees outside.  I am not sure what is wrong with him.

To eat a salad, however, my husband requires salad dressing.  I do not care for the stuff, so I am unsympathetic to his pleas and hardly remember his need for it.  (Plus, as our friend Lillo likes to point out regarding a few things, "He can't find his own way to the store?"  Ha-ha.)  Then, when I do remember it, I just cannot being myself to part with the asking price.  It is just fat & acid in a bottle!  Why is it so much money?  Also, it all tastes really bad!

Then I come home without it and he looks forlorn and then I just make the stuff.  Because it is easy to make and also tastes good.  Well, if fat & acid on forced-season greens is your bag.

Lemon Vinaigrette

3/4c extra-virgin olive oil
5tbsp lemon juice
1/4c minced onion 
parsley
salt
pepper

I put a chunk of onion in the food processor.  Rrrrr-rrrrr-rrr.  Then, I add everything else to the bowl.  Rrrrr-rrrr-rrrrr-rrr-rr.  Et voila. 

This is a boilerplate recipe.  The lemon can be replaced with vinegar, the herb can be any other to taste, the bulb switched to shallots or garlic or whatever.

highway surrender

I paid three dollars for this pepper.  This greenhouse-grown pepper from Mexico.  I was shocked that it cost that much, but also, you know, not surprised.  What did surprise me is that someone can stay in the $3-pepper racket, that it was not some outré item I had to run all round trying to secure at this great expense.  It was just sitting there at the supermarket, for sale, all shamelessly exotic & unseasonable. 

We did not subscribe to enough of a CSA shareholding to feed us exclusively -- it is winter & I forgot we would not have the quotidian supplement of the backyard garden -- so I have to go out & purvey.  I have to go out anyway for dried beans, dairy products, and seltzer, mostly.  Green tea, nut butters.  When I buy produce while at the supermarket, it is generally the same as what we are getting in the CSA box -- cabbage, potatoes, carrots.  No sense in spoiling the children.  

A while back, the CSA box had italian sausage in it and I had taken it out to thaw the morning I went to the grocery store.  Hence, the $3 pepper and its companion, the $2.89 pepper.  Well, maybe this one was the $2.89 pepper.  Anyhow, spendy.  I could have purchased four pounds of locally-grown parsnips with that money.  It would not have been good with the sausage, however.    I am not unreasonable.

gates of love

I am not kidding when I talk about wanting a cigarette.  Everyone on the ground here is amused by my lament, what since I have not smoked in so long that people who have only recently met me cannot even reconcile my countenance with such a filthy, destructive, expensive vice that I swear to God was the key to Eden.

Cake Mind is killing me.  I had to develop Radio Cake Mind to have something to show for it besides prowling & frowning.

We went apple picking, which turned into a nature walk, mostly, since I do not like apples and did not really want any of the varieties available for the picking.

There were two birds' nests, with apples.

Busy, busy, angry, dying yellowjackets.

Soil inebriation.

I was only there for the last of the tomatoes.  Well, what amounted to thirty-one pounds of the last. 

 

Tomatoes can be frozen on cookie sheets into tomato popsicles, then tumbled into gallon-sized freezer bags for the duration. 

When a person cannot fit into their winter warmers because of their cast, it is good they have a mother who can knit a poncho. 

Most on-the-fly poncho, ever.  The basic Rectangle Poncho, in Reynolds Regal Andean Alpaca on 13s.  Crochet edging is Cascade Pastaza.  I did not make the rectangles so that the stitches would be oriented the same way once assembled and Fille had the nerve to detract.  I made that!  With my hands!  I let them cut a hole in my body! to get her out! And this is how she talks to me?

She got a Ponytail-Mom-withstanding-Cake-Mind hairy eyeball that shut! her! right up!  I could do a lot of yoga if they went to school.  One should hope I would spend the time on yoga.  Because Cake Mind has cooked up one hell of a Bloody Mary idea for those tomato ice cubes, I promise. 

room for dessert

One nice thing about our CSA is when they give us lemons, they give us a recipe for lemonade.  Or something. 

I do not actually love bratwurst, or any of the wursts.  Kielbasa and bangers are way more my speed.  But, in the Mid-Atlantic, kielbasa is about as hard to come by as brats, so I took them as they came. I had a recipe, after all.

Then, imagine my good-sporting surprise when -- because we are not in Kansas (Wisconsin) anymore -- I realized these brats were veal.  It was not until I took the first tiny bite and it was like eating plasma.  Thank god my kids are vegetarian and there was plenty of other food. (The mash that turned out underneath the brats was quite delish, also).

Additionally, I spent most of the afternoon baking a pie that I did not love. It had a custard thing working on the inside and bore quite a repulsive resemblance to scalloped potatoes. Better luck another time.

Bratwurst with Apples, Onion + Sauerkraut
from Bon Appetit Magazine
INGREDIENTS
1 teaspoon caraway seeds
1 teaspoon fennel seeds
1 tablespoon flour
1/2 teaspoon ground black pepper
4 cups sauerkraut; rinsed, drained, squeezed dry
1 large onion halved lengthwise, thinly sliced crosswise
3 large apples, peeled, cored, thinly sliced
1 pound bratwurst, pierced all over with skewer
4 bay leaves
1 cup beef broth
2 tablespoons dry vermouth
2 tablespoons ketchup
1 1/2 tablespoons butter, melted
Pumpernickel bread or whole grain bread
DIRECTIONS
Position rack in center of oven; preheat to 400°F. Place caraway seeds and fennel seeds in small resealable plastic bag. Crush seeds with mallet. Add flour and pepper to bag; shake to blend. Spread sauerkraut over bottom of 13x9x2-inch glass or ceramic baking dish. Sprinkle 1/3 of flour mixture over. Arrange onion slices over; sprinkle with half of remaining flour mixture, then lightly with salt. Spread half of apple slices over, then sprinkle with remaining flour mixture. Place bratwurst over apples, then arrange remaining apple slices around bratwurst. Tuck in bay leaves. Mix broth, vermouth, and ketchup in measuring cup. Pour broth mixture evenly over. Cover tightly with foil.
Roast bratwurst 45 minutes. Uncover; brush with melted butter. Roast uncovered until edges of apples and sausages begin to brown, about 25 minutes longer.

and they never never shut up

Friday, I tore out all the nightshades to make room for cabbage transplants and an I-don't-care sowing of spinach.  There were quite a number of green tomato fruits and so I made tomato jam.

If your eyes are closed, it tastes exactly as ketchup.

My end-of-season garden assessment is thus.

• Green beans were a qualified success. I will try again next year with not-green fruits and also a spot less all-day sunny.
• I do not like tomatoes well enough to grow them myself, and they use a lot of garden real estate, anyhow.  Mari and Fille love tomatoes and I do think they are so pretty. I plan to return to growing them in the flower garden.
• I would like to have more flowers in the vegetable garden!
• Potatoes failed.  Also, not feeling optimistic about sweet potato harvest, although will totally try them again (as previously vowed), for they are satisfyingly responsive and verdant & stretchy.
• The zucchini never bore one female flower and I had no idea such a thing could ever happen.
• The eggplant did well; so well that I was a little exhausted of them (and so happy to rip them out Friday).
• I have never personally grown so much basil in my life.  Zomg.

We are about to try winter ("winter."  any time I talk about "winter" I always say "winter" for this is not "winter."  not to be all "I am from the Midwest," but anyhow) gardening for the first time.  As a Midwestern girl, it is somewhat unbelievable to me that anything will be just fine out there growing (or even just holding steady) in December.  

I know in my brain that it will be fine -- for god's sake, it never even snows here in the "winter" -- but it just seems wrong.  This year I have made the cognitive leap that we will never ever have winter and it will always be "winter," so I committed to the project.  Even so, I had to put Garçon and Fille in charge of it, because they are not from around here and realize no boundaries in this regard.  They are also bellyachers wearing starchless shorts who feel entitled to be seen and heard in equal measure, not to put too fine a point on it.   

from the city of kings

Yes, they were lima beans.  Lima beans are situated in the pod in a funny way that made the word "bean" as used to mean "baby" make sense.

They are so wastefully packaged, though.  All that detritus of the pod!  The bowl holding the shelled beans barely holds 10 ounces.  Fillette & I shared them, they were xx-delicious.

Oh, man.  Yesterday, where to start ...

Ten years ago, more or less to the date, I found out I was having a baby, a boy who once born would most closely resemble a ham with a face and a cartoon hairdo.  I rarely write about him here; people who know other of my work have remarked that if you read there, you would hardly know I have a daughter, but in this space, it barely registers I have a son. 

Suffice it to say (and I have said, have written) that I feel my relationship with him more on the inside than I do the mothering of Fillette. She has her ways, though, I say of her, "She could not be the firstborn, so she made sure to leave a scar."  But everything about her is very external, very on-the-job training, very scarring.  With Garçon, I have always felt this parenting, like a heartbeat, like a thing I can hold in my hand.  

Parenting is like customer service.  When everything is fine, it is easy to be good at it, but when the shit goes fucking sideways ... you have to step up, there is no other way.  When Garçon was three years old, things started to not be fine.  The story is long, I dare not start ranting, but I can summarize carefully. 

In the beginning, Mari wanted to do what we were told.  I did not want to do what we were told.  I very rarely want to do what I am told.  In many ways, this was the dynamic of our marriage at the time, a lot of polarity.  In the middle, I relented, very reluctantly, and let the evaluators recommended by our pediatricians take an analysis of him.  Not only were they a. wrong and b. not useful with their analysis, but our son, my baby, stopped talking to us for most of a year after this incursion.  Which had been the well-documented source of my apprehension & resistance. 

Garçon is the way that he is because he is that way.  It fails to impress no one that a 3yo child stopped talking to his family.  Just went mute with rage at our betrayal.  Mari threw up his hands and vowed to never railroad me again on this subject and I, while not satisfied with any of this, was at least relieved to know this would not happen again.  I applied myself, I read big books written for special education professionals, I sought counsel from people who knew, lots of people that I could trust, who knew about which they spoke.  I apologized to him, one day, for letting those people inspect him.  He warmed slowly over the next 5 months.  We have a lot of really good friends, and in this matter of our son, I have not been too shy for the letting. 

csa csi

What are these? 

 

Garçon hates salad, and as such I have amazed Mari with all salad vegetables hitting the saute pan.  Romaine takes a quick turn in a pan of smoking olive oil and a squeeze of lemon plus a sprinkle of sea salt.  Cucumbers are seeded and sliced then cooked somewhat more gently in a couple spoonfuls of butter.  Good thing is when they come and confront, as is with the case from the Farm Pickup, cooking lessens their rather wtfxogh! volume.  Yesterday's csa box had two heads of romaine, 4 cucumbers, and a big bunch of baby kale.  Along with some other stuff, apples, potatoes (which I will also cook, together), etc, and uh, Mystery Beans with Inedible Pod.   

boundlessly

So, I was never optimistic about the success of the green bean project. I think there are no green beans, but I have seen the tiny sweet flowers. Today it occurred to me that this is the Where's Waldo of the garden, yes?  Green vines, green beans.

Genius. Actually, I do not care enough about the endeavor to get out there and go blind looking for beans. Perhaps they will soon become large enough to be seen? I have no idea. Next year, I will grow plants with yellow or purple fruit. I sort of hate when the garden makes me feel dumb.

The CSA box today made me feel not exactly dumb, but I have in the face of its massive glory retreated from thinking that the dearth of beans, zucchini, and cucumbers and plus the relative lack of tomatoes -- this all in our personal garden -- is somehow weather-related, as this is clearly not the case for other local food-growers. Mari says that this is all a sign of the pending apocalypse, holding up as his best evidence our eggplant, which are fruiting miraculously, or as he points out is said in common vernacular, as if there is no tomorrow.  Sure, honey, whatever.

(The CSA pickup was a box + a bag.)

face with a view

Farmers' market, which in our neighborhood is kind of like the keg party where everyone in large part are already acquainted, or even friends, everyone bumping into each other to and from and on the way to the keg and holding the drinks and standing around and trying to get free and clusterfucking in the groups in the usual meet-n-greet stasis, only it is a coffee shop instead of a keg so then $4 coffee drinks instead of beer and there are vegetables distracting the people instead of loud music or even the being on the make and also instead of people boring the shit out of you talking about politics or their departmental hijinks, it is people boring you by inventing witty, singular chatter about children playing adorably, or also, sadly & still --  politics.

Much as it was in the days of the keg party, I kind of float along, greeting everyone by name, but just nice-talking here while my eyes are over there, not really committing. In the same as my flawed analogy, if a person wants to stop me and chat, instead of a two-step, they can always pick vegetables from the same table as me.  I used to so love the keggers at the agriculture frat house.  Everyone was so nice, the house was so tidy, and those boys have strong hands. 

There is a ton of jam-making happening today.  Peaches from the CSA box were judged "too sour" by Fillette, who was the only taker for them anyhow.  Then I bought those 4 quarts of blackberries this morning.  I lazily put the peaches on the boil and started listening to every Talking Heads CD I have while I organized bookshelves. 

I thought of jam as a side project right up until the end of the first hour after Mari & the children left and then realized they will be coming back with a flat of raspberries.  I probably need more sugar.

Speaking of Talking Heads (which I just was), I got pulled over last week for speeding because I opened it up on the old highway while caught up in the quarternion denouement of old Stop Making Sense.  This is exactly what happened to me the last time I got pulled over for speeding, except it was just at the end of "Girlfriend is Better."  This time, "What a Day That Was" had just yielded to "Life During Wartime" and I had been in the zone for a good long time, 21 miles over the speed limit, and then -- whooosh -- blue lights in my rearview. 

I was all ready to just confess and the music and the confusion and the excitement of the childlessness and let the chips fall where they may.  I have never gotten a speeding ticket the other four times I have been detained so bring it, sure, it seems the right time.  I mean, 86mph with no weaving or aggression seems like such a nothing infraction here in the NE Corridor.  Anyhow, the trooper got to my window, I gave him my cards and such, we had the boilerplate exchange which included the admission + the confirmation of how fast I had been going.

He kind of leaned back a little and took it all in, the carseats, the car, the absence of fuzzy dice or raccoon tails on the rearview, no speedballing paraphernalia on the passenger seat, then said, "I don't think I've ever seen this car go so fast before."  This was an opening, and so I walked right in.  I mean, these are my people, these law enforcement guys.  And honestly, once confronted with the exchange and the thing and the trooper hat & the belt buckle, I decided that I did not actually need the Ricky Ricardo act from Mari if I came home with a speeding ticket.  Not to mention the [whatever] on which I would rather spend that money. 

I leaned a little out of the window toward him with big eyes, secretly-thrilled, totally who-me flattered, and said to him,"I don't meant to be impertinent, but that's because you never saw me driving it."  

I have still not yet been issued a citation for speeding in this life.  My record came back clean, he gave me back my stuff and then sent me on my way.  Stop Making Sense has been banned from the car.  My mind has been refreshed of the value of slowing down to see the scene before plowing ahead.  Or speeding along.  Vroom.     

night. shaded.

The blackberry jam turned out fantastic.  Fillette wheedled to have a jar cracked open this morning.  Had I saved it to the apocalypse, I would not have had a chance to care.

In this summer after such a mad spring, jam would not actually be possible without the miracle of camp, which has besides allowing me to regain my domestic stride has also netted me: two cinematic outings with my husband; a trip to Manhattan to be depilated to my favorite + best standard without any rushing plus also same-day favorite outing with favorite + best non-spousal guy; two trips to the spa hidden within the old society matrons' gym for two massages and a lot of steaming + whirlpooling; a lot of coffee breaks with a lot of gal pals; downtown lunch of quiet-homeschool planning leisure + afternoon of shopping district consumption.

Last but not at all in the least, I took off for an afternoon of hardcore, girly-bonding, Korean-bathhouse time with the Actress.  Nothing for a long time has been quite so obscenely luxurious as paying another person to scrub my whole body nearly-raw with a little mitt before I repair to the hot yellow clay room to gossip + giggle + guzzle water with my nakediest pal.  I go for a scrubdown pretty much all the time now, but there is only so long I want to spend in the clay room sweating in silence where it is too dim to read.

There are three more weeks and I cannot wait to see what they bring to me!   Oh, and yes, the children are having fun, too.  They go on field trips and play games or whatever it is 150 kids do en masse.

I noticed this morning while at the farmers' market that no one comparison shops; it is all about merchandising.  I always want to see how much I can get for whatever cash I have in my pocket, since I always forget to bring any, and even though most of the vendors accept cards for payment now, it has become a little game to amuse myself in a way the supermarket fails to provide. 

The obvious downside to comparison shopping is that things can be sold out while I walk around, but this is why we get there early, even on four hours sleep.  Oh, I mean I.  Not we, I.  Oh, I kid.  I have grown to love our see and be a scene farmers' market and would not miss it for the world.  Also, right across from neighborhood coffee shop does not hurt its lure. 

I know, I just Thursday picked up a whole load of gazpacho fixings + two watermelons + four eggplant + also a bag of new potatoes, but it is finished.  Famille Follette eats a great amount of produce, which is why we subscribe to CSA shares from two different farms and still have to check in at the farmer's market.  I do not mind, as I miss the selection of the individual specimens which is absent in a CSA situation. 

The plain fact is (and we knew this would be the case) that even two shares is still not enough to feed a family of four, in which the adults are reasonably committed to local consumption, also a family which does not eat bread, all of whom are in residence for 12 meals per week and the rest represented at 75%.  At most meals, there are three vegetables and every snack is a piece of fruit.  The pressure is really on when half the family is allergic to most of the world's staple grains. 

For $14.10, I came home with three pounds green beans, five pounds of squash, five garlic scapes, a pint of plums, about which I am uneasy (will they be tart? I am iffy on stone fruits!), and those four bi-colored corn guys.  There were no eggplant!  No one thought to bring them!  "Last week," my favorite guy told me, "no one bought them."  What do you mean?  I said.  I bought all you had first thing!  He looked closely at me, then gazed in the distance before making the kind of a face that goes along with the popular cultural ejaculation D'OH.  "Next week," he promised, with a tenor that made me tell him, almost-blushing, "Guy, it is only eggplant."  Which was only about a thin film of propriety, for it is with everything that I await that fruit.