la femme follette

still, life

I bought patty pan squash today at the farmers' market and then was sad to see it going.  I love the shapes and colors of patty pan.  I grew it as an ornamental one year, but that was dumb, and vine borers got them anyhow.

The reason Kowalski called the other day was to sweetly ask after my health and I remembered that I forgot to follow up with a great many people about this development.  Basically, I was a medical mystery for weeks and weeks, then months and months, and in the end it all came down to two diagnoses which are not mutually exclusive, both vague and very subjective in their diagnostic parameters, wildly variant in their clinical presentations.  Also incurable.  One is progressive and can be unregenerate, but also, can be nothing at all, due to the obvious flaws in its unscientific diagnostic process.  There is also a third diagnosis (from a third specialty) that is benign-ish, but not the point.  It was a collateral discovery in all the endless lab work.

So, after having seen all these specialists, hearing about my options, about which thing to sign onto, Mari and I took a week or so of considering it all (not least of which what kind of scam is Big Pharm running in all this), after which  I just said, "Fuck this.  I am not going out like that."  We went on vacation, I am back in the gym, I am taking my vitamins.  I have (have always had) an excellent acupuncturist.  For the moment, I am on a raw diet, as with the last three summers.  Fuck a bunch of being sick.

I learned a lot because of this, chiefly that I do not take care of myself in the same way I take care of others (and I know that as a mother I am so not alone in this).  I definitely do not rest enough (and that it is possible to take a freaking break already).  I was reminded that people really love me and us and and want to do (and will do) what they can to help.  I found out who it is that can be cool, who cannot handle the truth, who wants to play Ryan O'Neal in Love Story, who will raise hell with me, and who just wants me to sit in their metaphorical lap so they can smell my metaphorical hair. Also, who can manage in the face of news and who it is that just vanishes.    

Lisa B-K reminded me that people like the lists.  (I am one.)  When Kowalski got his answers and gave his staunch support to my sassy rebuff of the health-care system, he asked me to give to him the list of songs I came up with for him to consider for the children's session the Kowalski Brothers are recording this summer.  He wanted to pan a few, but I insisted, reminding him that "Froggie Went A-Courtin'" was my idea and it turned out so sexy when they did it.  Who knew?

I just typed & deleted several too-much-disclosure paragraphs about Kowalski & me and music & us, a more-guarded presentation of which can be found here.  Now I am too tired to type a list. 

I went to the shopping district while the children were at camp Friday, and I wanted to have this Lela Lee tote so much.  I did not, because I knew Fillette would want to carry it and it would become complex and exhausting,  So I took this photograph to satisfy myself. 

   

nucleus. numeration. nutriment.

The children just finished a summertime science workshop on genetics.  Fillette was the most confused, having worked out some traits in her class.  Mama, can I see you roll your tongue?  I told her I could not.  She very haltingly blurted out a contradiction to this.  (She and Mari are always doing things like making faces and showing tongues; I presume she was already certain he could not.)  I assured her I could not.  She was stymied by this and did not know what to say.  Also, manufacturing quite a hostile countenance.  I was still trying to read the thing I was reading when she came along with her interruptions, so was slow to figure out that her instructor probably generalized for the class.  "No, no, honey," I assured her.  "You are recessive.  So is your brother."  He is left-handed.  She knew not how to respond to this.  Join the club, love. 

Mari is not always exactly joking when he suggests they cannot be his children, except for that they so, so clearly are.  Honestly, if they had not grown in my belly, I would be suspicious sometimes myself.  She is in the next room right now, declaiming García Lorca poems.  Who else's child would she be?  Plus, thing is, when one has the 10-pound babies, there is very little risk of switching at birth.

Speaking of our jocular disregard for the cultural primacy put upon one's spouse, Kowalski called today.  I was caught a little by surprise, since a. felting, b. midday he is usually otherwise occupied, c. only calls my cell phone when we are having a row, which we are not.  It was a nice surprise, and everything was fine until he reported his re-committing to a project and asked for my assistance.  I had a hazy, stream-of-consciousness narration of having once actually put together a list in service to him, per his request ... but then he said he was all done with the project and then I lost it somewhere ... maybe I threw it away ... 

He reminded me (as if I had forgotten) that he is fickle and distractable, whereupon I exaggerated a throwaway comment in service to humor, and then there we were, arm-wrestling over which of us exactly was the Responsible Party for the ultimate demise of us, in the final analysis.  It was a halfhearted re-match, like Rocky XIX or so, -- I because of the Charo Affliction; he because of the original reason for his call.  In pretty short order I let it go out loud and his last gambit was a taunting, though good-natured, complete rendition of "Maybelline,"  an exponential improvement over what I usually get, which is a yodeling, growling kind of performance of "So Wrong," which slays me every time and I will never let on.  (though I just have, o, internet) I am not knitting any more socks, I swear.  I have repented enough.  Him! 

Then I went to pick up the CSA box. 

Plus, it came with a whole, not-live chicken, and six ears of corn.  I am up to my ears in peaches.  Also, when loading the car's CD magazine this morning, I spaced and grabbed Pete Seeger when I wanted Bob Seger and I was a. wildly disoriented and then b. a little sad. 

juggernaut

I have been dealing with a lot of fruit lately, with the four-plus gallons of blueberries we picked and the 10 pounds of peaches and then all the cherries. 

 

We just bought the cherries already picked.  So many.  Different kinds, too.  I made a cherry crisp kind of a thing last week and then wanted to play around with a New Something today.  I spent some time pitting these (without a pitting thingy) and then realized that they were a. sour and b. we had no sweetener.  Then I remembered our oven is kind of fritzy right now.  So, I just ate them. 

It reminded me of a really colossal snowstorm we got when I was a girl -- really still a girl, a teenager, nothing yet of this Kowalski or opening a bottle of scotch & throwing out the bottlecap or latex dresses or any of that latter-day nonsense.  My roommate & I sat around on the living-room floor with a large jar of maraschino cherries between us, watching Los Olvidados --  the Buñuel film w all the chickens  -- and practicing tying the stems with our tongues.  The determined oral dexterity & girlish perseveration this accomplishment represented may have been the first tiny step onto the path on which I would find myself just a couple of years later.   

I finally got the potatoes in.  Also, tied up the tomatoes, which are sprawling everywhere, in spite of their proper restraint in the outset.  Proper restraint.  Ha.   

I have a lot on my mind.  Like, a lot.  I am wandering around dreaming about drinking gimlets, not really paying attention to anything, and listening to Bring on the Night over and over, which though I have not listened to it since my 17th year, it was once on heavy rotation and yet, it suddenly seems like something else entirely decades later. 

O, I am in a mood of too many feelings --   Felting/is this feeling of so many feelings, rushing to crowd/each other, piling up on the weave of our hearts -- and I feel slightly unhinged and wacky, but intense and filled with flourish, but also easily distracted.  I feel exactly as Charo on The Love Boat.  

I have plans for a day very soon with the Israeli to which I am looking forward with something like great delight.  I just know it will be like the most excellent & aimless snow day.  Like snow-blindness.  Like sub-zero nights when the concrete rings and breathing takes the breath away and everything is so clear.  Clear.

wax

So, everything was tidier in the beginning, which is very much as life is, I guess.

I am impatient with rules, which is not to say honestly that I do not respect the rules, or that I do not know the rules.  It is just that there is more to life than rules.  Also, rules tend to tamp down impulsivity and make me shy away from what I love or find kind of exciting.  With gardening, as with everything else, I feel like if I chuck it out there, it should do fine -- I should do fine.  If it does not, I probably did not want it.  If I do not like it?  I can rip it up.  Oh, there is regret and ambivalence, sure, conflict; like with my Don Juan climber, but bloom where you are planted! 

I may be straying from the topic of gardening, as a matter of fact.

I did not have all of this laissez-faire attitude until I drank a fifth of scotch every day as a girl, and while I am looking back on it, I always realize very little suffered due to my abject neglect (except my reputation!), which is all fine and good because I drank to relieve myself of my calcifying perfectionism.  Relief at that time, not as a constitutional remedy.  I still have to remember it logically to reap its reward.    

The point is that everything is jammed in there, the beans just went in today, I still have potatoes to plant, and the children have dreams of watermelon and also pumpkins, but I am sure it will all do fine.  Even if (to use Daria's phrasing) I will have the Great Wall of Tomato back in the back there by late July. 

  

Back here.  Where the zucchini are sadly not yet large enough to smother out the weeds.  Some day.  But it is then going to be so rampant and smashed together, all of it, in a lushly overgrown extravagance.  Mari said that it kind of reminds him of one of my poems.  Y-E-S!  I cannot wait! 

seedy

I have not been feeling well for months, since March.  Last week, all the weeks and weeks of seeing every specialist under the stars came down to one or two good guesses, but I guess the thing is that I really will never be well again.  Not like the old me.  Sadly, my whole identity has been my whole life bound up in being capable & well. Now, there is this the new me and I have to find new ways to be capable and anyhow, blahblahblah, a whole lot of talk from old Kowalski, for whom there are not enough socks in the world.  I guess I will be ok.  A lot of people love me, more if I would let them.  So much of this is about letting, which is not my best subject.

After Mari and I saw the last specialist, we scooped up the kids and their stack of library books from the waiting room and I asked to go pick strawberries.  It was hot, really, and I was not exactly dressed for the strawberry fields, but it was something I had been wanting to do, and a weekday is a good day for the pick-your-own farm, and I wanted to cross it off my list.

It also occurred to me, sitting in the straw courting a sunburn, that I did not know what else to do and going outside seemed as good as anything else.  It was a funny thought for me to think.  I was raised in the city and had rarely so much as been to a picnic before I went away to university in what seemed to me to be an impossibly pastoral and buggy locale.  Over the last score, especially since I have married an Eagle Scout, I have become more and more of what is called outdoorsy, until it seems a natural turn in times of distress.  Somewhere in my dark heart, I would still prefer a tavern.  Liquor is quicker, mais oui, but it does not involve a lot of grim determination and the doing.  Mari and I are people who prefer doing to saying, but there is now nothing to do and so less to say. 

We picked 10 quarts of strawberries in about an hour and came home to shove the long flats into the refrigerator.  I took them out yesterday to size up what was left (about six quarts) and found myself irritated by them, by what their harvest represented.  At the same time, looking past my resentment, they were so pretty and perfect.  Therein lies the rub.     

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.   

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. 

lagniappe

The reason to grow sunflowers, besides the sweetness of Fillette marveling over a flower that grows bigger than Mari, is that they attract every seed-eating bird in North America right to our yard.  Goldfinches, cardinals, a little red-orange guy that says pip! pip!, so many more than the drab city populace of starlings and sparrows come from what seems like nowhere to hang out in our garden and gossip, flirt, and chirp.  They make a dreadful litter on the ground, but whatever, it is fun.  Also, the field identification of birds in our midst counts for homeschool science.

There was a happy confluence of factors the other day that made for another fascinating & delicious dinner experience.  Just as I was feeling myself get all haughty about the culinary jingoism of this local-food trend -- which was manifesting itself here as I will be motherfucked if I go the rest of the year, let alone my life, without a fucking plate of tostones, bitches -- the NYT Sunday magazine printed a recipe for something called potato tostones.  Hm.  Hmm.  Hm.

I found what was left of the little new potatoes and boiled them in the morning.  For dinner, I squashed them a little in my hand, and fried them as with tostones.  They were good, and while I stood ready to consider them as a kind of substitution (I talk a big game about never giving up plátanos, but really, such a fucking bitch to peel), I was thoroughly distracted by the actual product.  They tasted as no fried potato we have ever had; the children were over the moon with compliments over the flavor.  I was careful to tell them it was the seasonality, not the preparation. 

This morning, I stupidly broke my favorite, sweet, avocado-green Soreno pattern water pitcher by filling it with boiling-hot tea.  This is not the kind of mistake I would make if the children were around, because I am a triple-checker while distracted -- no time for mistakes.  It was the vacant bliss of yet another day in an empty house that made the bottom fall right out of the pitcher, splashing boiling-hot tea right onto my left foot.  This is the third or fourth time in ten years that there was been a boiling-hot liquids spill involving my left foot.  It seems like the kind of thing that I would find out is a universal message to me, but I think I should just stop wearing flip-flops in the kitchen.

Mari comes home from an all-week travel tonight for a longer-than-usual weekend.  Tomorrow, while the children are away, we will sneak off to see the new Bourne.  I have to sort through my project list and assemble my knitting projects (socks, tea cozy, capelet, then back to crochet).  Camp ends a week from tomorrow and I am excited to have my babies back in the house, because doing their chores in their absence is old.  Also, birds to identify + a mother to terrorize into her own safest practices. 

sol. solanum.

I am infinitely accosted by eggplant this summer, every time I turn around.  Tonight I used them to make eggplant fritters, which is just that I subbed in eggplant for the zucchini in my go-to fritter recipe.  I was surprised by the product, since mostly everything frittered away in this manner all tastes the same, and this did not.  The result was shatteringly-crunchy and with an unmistakable eggplant smokiness.  If I had an unlimited array of ingredients to use, I would improve the endeavor by using bread crumbs instead of flour, garlic instead of onions, a handful of freshly-shredded parmesan in the mix, and then top the finish with a tomato sauce -- like an inside-out (outside-in?) eggplant parmigiana. 

Last weekend, before the Harry Potter incident (oh, JK Rowling, how the mention of your name causes John Gardner to spin in his grave), I harassed some farmers into selling me some tiny new potatoes.  I finally got around to having some today for lunch, while the children were at camp -- because I did not want to share and I am not ashamed to admit it.  I steamed them and then tossed them with a few dabs of butter and a large pinch of chopped peppermint.  I sat in my dining room and ate them with some wonder, because they do not even taste like any potato I have ever eaten, nay, like a different vegetable.  This food that has not been traveling & getting old for a week already when I buy it is very interesting.  I wish I could eat corn; I have heard the rumors about brand-new corn, hours-old corn, and I wish I could check it out for myself.  I can proxy with Mari and Fillette, anyhow.  They will be happy because it is rare that I cook food to which half of the household is allergic.

Fillette and Garçon are finishing their camp season with a bang -- Fillette sunburned herself today in a way that reminds me so of Algren that I have to accept that I have once seen a similar sun-distress veiling his thin-skinned, poreless countenance, even though I cannot remember it distinctly, for every time I see her today I immediately think of him, which has been distracting, but led me to this in the grocery store:  Jamaican beef patties.  Yes. 

I used to live (with Algren) around the corner from a Jamaican Beef Patty effort.  Despite the very best pushinesses of our neighbor, I never once darkened the door of the Jamaican Beef Patty storefront because I had a tentative rule (then, as now) that stated that I would never eat anything of which I could not get a reasonable facsimile while anywhere else.  By the time I moved to Brooklyn, I had been burned too many times by unsalvable late-night cravings for such specific & unfindable delicacies as stone crab claws, cheese curds, pumpkin ice cream, fish fries, cantonese steamed buns from the banquet hall bistro at the southernmost end of Chicago's Chinatown, the curious product of my girlhood parish's pancake breakfast, and pizza from a basement outfit near the lake, to say nothing of nearly everything from my mother's kitchen.  Perhaps Jamaican Beef Patties would have been as a single pomegranate seed had I dared, but I think I speak for Algren also when I say thank fucking god I did not. 

Anyhow, tonight after camp at the grocery store, when I was hunting up frozen falafels for the anti-gourmet lunchbucket solution, I saw them in a profusion of forms, the Jamaican Beef Patties, and now, now, I will never have one.  It seems ironic, or something.  Anyhow, it was this confluence of carribean provisions and sun-worn nostalgia plus the children -- the children! -- whom it seems I never see anymore, and it all led to this effusion of affection for which I am not known.  Later, on my cutting board, I found while preparing supper a little note underneath the eggplants.  I was so debilitated by the unrestrained outpouring of fondnesses I did not even ask who wrote on the kitchen stuff with a paint marker.  Or it could be all the endless consumption of nightshades.  I hope I recover soon.