watermelon licuado

Hot and steamy.
In true New England fashion, we have skipped from winter to summer, and as Joey said it so well this morning as he clung to his cup of coffee with a visible desperation that it would open his eyes enough to get to school, "it's hard to go back to spring after this taste of summer."
Memorial day weekend, 2011. A wedding. A farmers market. A work party. Several pimm's cups and a most of a growler of beer. Most of a trellis built for the raspberries. All the beds are grainy from dirty feet that tromped all over the neighborhood. Several tick bites and a little bit of what's looking like poison ivy.  Sunburned necks. Two parades. Lost sunhats, already. Comforters switched out for thin blankets.  And when Joey drove up to get the flat tire fixed yesterday, he called me a bit later, and said, "turns out, I'm in Vermont."  Summer brings out the adventurer in him.
This morning when I stumbled into Rosie's room at 6:30 to see if she was awake, she was staring into space, sitting in her rumpled bed in her tank top and underwear. "I am so, so tired."
Summer is coming. Summer is coming!

Watermelon Licuado

(Do I have to write a little something to entice you to make this? A little headnote, describing it's perfect sweetness, thirst-quenching abilities, and shade of pink? I didn't think so. I'm guessing you already get this one. Are you heading over to your blender? Pulling that leftover quarter of watermelon out of the fridge? Yes! Yes! Yes!)

serves 2

4 to 5 cups cubed watermelon
1 cup vanilla ice cream
1 cup milk

Combine. Blend. Drink.

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why i plant marigolds

The spring of my junior year at St. John's in Santa Fe, I moved into a little house with my friend, Eilen.  We had lived together before in a big house filled with cranky roommates and lots of conflict, and we were eager to set up on our own where we could cook and sing and do anything we pleased.  We found a house on Cortez Street, which was just slightly on the wrong side of the tracks, enough so that there were fireworks exploding in adjacent yards all summer, but not so much that it was too far away from school. The house was a perfect little square with a front stoop, adobe of course, but newly renovated by a St. John's graduate who had stayed in the area, and there was new paint and fresh tile in the bathroom, and the back room had a washer and dryer with a tiled laundry folding table built on top. It was small, which is to say that it was exactly big enough for us, and there was a guest house that shared the property about 20 feet from the back door. That space served as a house and workshop to a crazy old guy named Elliot, and he and his huge and poorly behaved dog made leather goods and drank beer through most of each day.  We would sit in our dusty section of "yard" and he would sit in his, and we would listen to the fireworks explode around us.

I miss Santa Fe.

Diagonally across from the house was one of my favorite restaurants, a greasy green chile spoon called Dave's Not Here. The story, as I remember it, was that the owner, Dave, ended up getting busted on drug charges and going to jail.  The restaurant stayed open, but as an answer to everyone's question when they noticed Dave's absence, they changed the name of the restaurant. The food wasn't particularly good there, but it always tasted good anyway, and the decor reminded me of some kitchen or other from my childhood, and so I always felt so at home there.  Dave's Not Here lived in that space for over 20 years, but now the place houses The Tune-Up Cafe, which I hear from many people is hands down the best restaurant in Santa Fe.

I'm thinking it might be time for a trip back.

Eilen and I lived  happily in that house on Cortez Street. That was the year that she really started writing music, and she had some of her first little shows at the Cowgirl. I met Joey that year too, and even though there was all sorts of drama around the start of us together, enough time has passed that I only remember the happy parts. There was a big plum tree out front, and for some reason we never made it to the fruit on time, but there was a silly satisfaction in stomping all over the rotting fruit on the driveway. Eilen planted tiny tomato plants in the dusty back plot that got munched by the misbehaving dog and never made it to fruition. But in the dry front bed, right between our own section of stone wall and the width of sidewalk, she planted marigolds.

At first I thought that marigolds were not my kind of flower. Spindly and orange, the petals lacked delicacy, and the smell of the plants was acidic and strange. Eilen showed me how to coax the roots out of their ball, and we put compost in each hole and tucked the plants into the bed. It seemed a little mean to put them into such a desert where nothing else seemed to be able to grow. We were in the most extreme level of drought at the time, and we weren't allowed to water.  But Eilen seemed to have faith that they would make it anyway, as long as we gave them what we could from our leftover bath water and water bottles.

They lived all summer, and they filled out the bed with greenery. Every so often, the flowers would get so dry that we'd figure they were done with. but we'd pour our cooled pasta water or some other thing over their parched roots, and they would come back to life. By the end of the summer, I thought they were so beautiful, and I have planted them ever since.

Some marigolds are edible, and others are used for pest management in the garden. If you plant them in the midst of your vegetables, they will protect them from a whole host of bugs.  In Mexico, marigolds are essential for the alter for the day of the dead, and in India, they are considered a holy herb, and festivals are filled with marigold garlands. I love them for their usefulness, but I also just love them for their humble little petals. I love the way the sun seems to shine from them instead of on them.

And with Memorial day weekend comes the green light to plant anything you want, even if you are in New England! Is there any thing you are especially excited to plant this weekend? Tell me! I still have room in one bed...

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rhubarb pop-tarts

This weekend, we made a video.
The thought of this has been hanging around for a while now, between my wonderful agent (who I do my best not to disappoint) and my also wonderful publisher (who, also, I do my best not to disappoint), everyone was excited for a video. This has been one of those things that wakes me up in the night for the last few months--I am deep in dreams and then my eyes open and I see Ina or Giada or Aida well dressed and primped at their butcher block kitchen aisles, and I think, "Shit! How am I going to make a video?"



We gave it a try a while back, and my friends Bruce and Amy came over and Joey and I made pizza crust all day while we tried to keep a straight face. We got some great footage of Rosie torturing the cat in the background, but the sound didn't quite come through, and none of us had any idea of how to edit those hours of pizza kneading and stretching (not to mention cat torturing). And then one day I was talking to my friend Luke who makes movies about how I had to get off my butt and learn how to edit, and he suggested that I focus on the cooking and leave the editing to him.  And so this weekend, his friend and movie making partner Ethan came up with his camera and we shot some footage.


I would like to tell you that I was entirely calm, prepared, and on my game. I would like to tell you that I was totally confident that I would know what to do and say.  I would like to tell you that I knew I would be able to cook and talk at the same time without falling over.


And then I would say, "and so, in honor of how fabulous I am on camera, why don't you make these rhubarb pop-tarts.  Here is the recipe."


Or I could tell you the truth, which, like truth tends to be, is a little more complicated.

For weeks, I've been practicing. I've been making attempt after attempt at bringing my mission and my hopes for all this into a few clear, perfect, and inspiring sentences. I've been talking to myself as I cook, and I've been searching for original and exciting ways to talk about food. I've been staring at my closet hoping that it might spit something out at me besides an old and stained black tee shirt. I've been contemplating buying concealer.  And I have been watching the Food Network, at least as much as the 5 minute clips on their website will allow me.

In short, I've been driving my family crazy.

Between the food network, the cooking channel, and all of the little indie food videos out there, there is definitely a show for everyone. Simple French cooking in 10 minutes? Yes. Hip in Brooklyn with all day to cook? Absolutely.  Midwestern locavore who eats the weeds in his garden? I love him too. Mom in a stained shirt who makes imperfect looking food while her children complain that she's not letting them do all the steps?
Here I come.

This was the project for the weekend: make three different segments--two in the kitchen and one interview. Each would be peppered with shots of me in the garden, me at the market, me out and about.
Ethan showed up on Friday morning as I was arranging bowls on my shelf in a panic, purple circles under my eyes from the sleepless night before filled with phrases that would be the perfect and authentic intro to my recipe. "Today, we are going to make perfect, satisfying, homemade, yellow, astounding butter in your very own satisfying perfect home!" My room was strewn with friends' clothes that I had gathered after my closet refused to offer up anything of use, and I was already shaking from my third cup of coffee. Reality show? Maybe. But I was having doubts about my cooking on camera potential.

At one point last week, I ended up in the kitchen muttering and searching for my lost measuring cups, and when my mother asked me how it all was going, I had to say it out loud:
The more I tried to pin down what I wanted to say, the harder it was to remember what I was trying to say in the first place.

And after all that, with the circles under my eyes and the nervous tummy and the over thinking, Ethan walked into the house and everyone relaxed. The girls fell in love with him, I started to breathe again, and Joey took a nap. We made butter, we walked all over town with the camera, and then,
well, you know what comes next, right?


Then we made pop-tarts.



Like making a video, pop-tarts may be prone to over thinking. It is entirely possible to get caught up in it all, to convince yourself that because homemade poptarts are so amazing and impressive and novel and likely to raise the eyebrows of anyone to whom you might casually drop that you happened to make pop-tarts, because pop-tarts are POP-TARTS, that maybe they are hard to make. It is easy to get tired and overwhelmed before you even begin, because maybe you feel that you are not skilled enough to be someone who makes pop-tarts.  Maybe it seems like all those people on food network have very shiny hair as they lean over their butcher block islands, that they are wearing shirts that never seem to get dusted with flour or smattered with oil, and that they actually would cut these damn rectangles all the same size without having to take out a ruler.  Maybe you're not up for all that.

 

How about we work on this together. How about if we just give it a try. What's the worst that can happen? Your pop-tarts might ooze a little. Maybe they won't be shaped quite right. Maybe I'll look silly on camera.

Hell, at least we'll get a really fantastic snack out of it.

It is almost always easier to do something than to think and plan for and worry about it. Sometimes the ease and (let's go all the way here) pure awesomeness of actually making something, be it a video or a pop-tart, will amaze and astound you. And before you know it, you've done it. You've made something that seemed so hard.

Rosie and I made these pop-tarts because she wanted to practice before we did them on camera. We  filled them with backyard rhubarb, muscovado sugar, and lemon.

They oozed rhubarb, and they were far from perfect.
Although, I guess it depends how you define perfect, right?

 

Rhubarb Pop-tarts
(yes, incidentally, I did write about pop-tarts last year, and looking back at the post, I also wrote about how imperfect they were. But I have to say, these are looking a bit prettier than last year's. Next year? Perfect pop-tarts.)

1 1/4 cup chopped rhubarb (1-inch pieces)
3 tablespoons muscovado sugar (can substitute dark brown sugar)
1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice
1 tablespoon butter
flour for the counter
1 recipe pie crust for a double crust pie (divided into 2 discs)
1 egg, beaten with a teaspoon water

Combine the rhubarb, sugar, lemon, and butter in a small saucepan. Bring to a boil, cover, lower the heat, and simmer for 10 minutes, stirring occasionally, until the rhubarb is entirely broken up. Let the mixture cool.
Preheat the oven to 375 degrees.
Roll the first disc of pie crust out on a floured counter, trying to get as close as possible to a 9x12-inch rectangle. Cut into 6 rectangles and transfer to a parchment lined baking sheet.
Paint each rectangle with egg wash. Spoon about a tablespoon of filling down the center of each rectangle, leaving lots of space on all sides.
Roll out the second disc, cut into rectangles. Lay the second set of rectangles over the filling.
Paint the tops with egg wash. Use a fork to crimp the edges together.  Then prick a few holes in the top of each pastry to allow steam to escape.

Bake for 20 to 25 minutes, until the tops are golden.

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scrambled eggs with morels and violets

I've been shortening my to-do lists and I've been lengthening my to-do lists. I'm torn between the two, and so I spend a lot of time thinking about how long my to-do lists should be.

First, they are short.  I follow those columns in all of the magazines that I am now buying in order to see if I can write for them. They say, go easy on yourself! Know that you are doing your best and that you should set out only as many goals as you can actually accomplish in the day. I say, yes! I love going easy on myself.  So I take out "make croissants".  Those have often been on my to-do list, and I still have never made them. Life is long! I won't stress it. I take out "make orange marmalade that you froze forever ago for that exact purpose". Didn't happen yesterday, and I'm guessing it won't happen today. Buy Sadie new shoes? One more day of squeezed toes won't do her in, and she's so indecisive that we really need an entire afternoon at the carpeted shoe warehouse where everyone walks around with their hair sticking up because of the mysteriously excessive amounts of static electricity. We'll do that one tomorrow. Soon enough, I am down to three or four agenda items that I actually have to do, usually write this, cook this, write that. Thank you Good Housekeeping.

But then I am tempted to lengthen the list just so I can have the deep belly-tingling satisfaction of crossing things off the list. Eat. Change the toilet paper roll. Make the bed. Pencil goes to paper, and I cross, cross, cross! At the end of the day, there are those familiar items still left: write this, cook this, write that.

I think I might be going about this the wrong way.
In the last few years, I have started being late to things. I have started speeding more often, running into meetings or to pick up the girls with an automatic "sorry!" as I careen into the room.

I know that it doesn't have to be like this.  I say, I will slow down! I will stop taking on new jobs! I will take walks. I will drink more cocktails (this one, I'm doing better with). I will fold the laundry right away. I will finally get the girls to clean the bathroom. I will (someday) have the wisdom not to run for public office. I will read novels again. I will breathe several times a day, and I will chew my food.
There I go with the to-do lists again.

I absolutely positively know that I can shift the rhythm of the day with my attitude. The crazier I feel, the crazier I am. It might seem backwards, but I think that's how it works, at least with me. So in my best moments, I exercise my patience muscle, and I take an extra few minutes. I sit out on the porch, or I read a book to Rosie, or I go see how the radishes are growing.

I am pretty sure that the life I want to live is happening all around me.  As soon as I slow down, there it is. And instead of eating crackers and cheese in the car as I speed to a meeting, I'm picking violets in the yard to add to my lunch. Little, little things.

I don't know what it is about foraging, but it makes it all feel a bit enchanted around here. Even if the day is a flurry of craziness and impossibility, finding food in the yard or the woods puts us into a page of My Side of the Mountain, and it makes the day follow a different time. We cooked up Rosie's morels in butter and garlic for dinner, and then in the morning, my mother suggested that  the leftover morels go into eggs with violets and greens. She was off to work and I was off to a meeting, but for the 10 minutes we sat together with our enchanted eggs, it felt just a bit slower and fancier. I'd say that eating wild mushrooms and flowers for breakfast can only make for a better day ahead.

 

Morels are all over New England right now. Some people have secret places to find them, but a search in the woods might reveal a little city of perfect caps. Make sure that the morels are are not false morels--there is a good description of both here. Soak the mushrooms in salt water to clean them, and chop the tops and slice the stems.

Scrambled Eggs with Morels and Violets
(an enchanted breakfast for two)

4 eggs
1 tablespoon milk
salt and pepper 2 tablespoons butter, plus more if needed
1 clove garlic, minced
2 to 3 morels, cleaned and chopped
1 cup spinach or other green
1 handful violets

Beat the eggs in a bowl with the milk, a pinch of salt, and a few grinds of pepper. Set aside.
Melt the butter in a medium skillet over medium heat. Add the garlic, and cook until it smells good, about 30 seconds. Add the morels, salt and pepper, and cook until they are tender and just beginning to shrink, 3 to 5 minutes. Transfer to a bowl and set aside.
Add the greens to the hot pan and cook in the butter and mushroom liquid just until wilted. Transfer them to the mushroom bowl. Pour the mushroom liquid out of the pan if there is any left in there.
Add a bit more butter if the pan seems dry. Pour the beaten eggs into the pan, and as soon as it starts to solidify around the edges, add the morels and greens. Use a silicone spatula to scramble the eggs around the mushrooms and greens, shuffling the mixture around the pan. When the eggs are cooked (but not brown), sprinkle the violets over the eggs, turn up the heat on the stove to high, and watch the eggs plump up and the violets wilt. Transfer to a plate and add additional salt and pepper, if needed.

what rosie found

Rosie finds the most amazing things.

Her eyes are different than ours--we can look all over the house for something that we have lost, and then it is always Rosie who finds it.

"Yup," she says. "I'm a good finder."

In the woods, she is always lagging behind, and when she finally catches up, she is adorned with feathers, pockets filled with magical acorns and translucent rocks.

And did she eat her treasures?

What do you think?

(More for me.)

at the market: the spinach recipe

"And what should I do with spinach?"

That was the question that I heard most at the market last weekend. Makes sense, considering that we had enough spinach on the table to feed a small country. Spinach lovers out there know that the possibilities are endless, but of course to answer that question, I start small, feel it out, try to assess which possibilities will make this one hungry person sing with spinach-induced joy, and if I can't get a read on them, I start out safe.

"saute it?"

On and off today I've been checking in with a workshop that Penny De Los Santos is teaching through creativeLIVE. She is an amazing photographer who works mostly for Saveur these days, but she is also one of those people whose passion is so infectious--to hear her talk just makes me want to take risks. She's teaching a three day workshop, and she invited people to make videos on why they would like to take her course (see my friend Nikki's lovely video here), and she chose 6 people to join her in a room in Seattle, but the rest of the world gets to participate too. Watch some if you can- any length of time with her is a gift.  My favorite thing she said today?

"Self-assign your dream assignment."

Yes!

And that brings me back to the farmers market.  Years ago now, the chance to work for Indian Line Farm at the market got me thinking about food in new ways, and it got me here, too. And I will never get sick of talking with people about how to cook spinach, at least I hope not. And whereas the basic sauteing if spinach with olive oil and garlic might be a standard for some, it is a new recipe for others. It is one of the things I love best about that place- do people ever ask how to cook a vegetable at the supermarket? I don't think so- they reach for what they know.  So I'm bringing the market back in here. It's all far too connected to keep the two worlds separate.

This week, let's saute some spinach.

 

Slice a clove or two of garlic, so that it is in whole little chips. Heat a few tablespoons of olive oil in a big saute pan.  Add the garlic, and cook until the tiniest bit of browning happens. Add a few handfuls of unchopped spinach (leave the stems on if its nice and fresh and not too big), adding more as it wilts and you can fit more in the pan.  Toss as you go- it will wilt quickly, then shuffle it around and add more to the pan. When all of the spinach is in the pan, add 1/4 cup milk. (This prevents the spinach from doing that strange thing where it makes you mouth feel numb.) Cover for about 10 seconds, then toss again and season with salt and pepper. The spinach will be just wilted- stop before it starts to brown. 

And for those who want to find new tricks for familiar vegetables, a few spinach inspirations around the web:

Winnie's baby spinach and violet salad with blue cheese

Joy's kale, spinach and pear smoothie

Heidi's spiced coconut spinach recipe

Jenna's spinach feta turkey burgers

perfect baked salmon

 

I'm going to wish you a happy mother's day today.  Because it's Monday, and maybe no one brought your breakfast in bed this morning. I appreciate you, especially on this day after mother's day.

This is my mother.

 

Beautiful, isn't she?

There she is, 23, after an excessively long homebirthing labor. Her midwife, Elizabeth Davis, long legged with straight hair in a perfect 1978-part, was soon to become something of a star in her field, and my 19-year-old uncle photographed the whole thing so that she could use the images for her book.  Homebirthing was a new/old thing then, and Elizabeth was writing the book on it. He caught the moment right as I came in to the world, and the photo of my emerging head and my mother (in all her glory) ended up on the cover of the book and on the wall of every friend of my grandparents in suburban New Jersey.  Embarrassing as I found it as a child, I am now thrilled that the photo actually inspired people to put a vagina on their wall. But I like this photo better.  I like the look on her face and the way her long fingers just touch the top of my head. 

My mother and I were on our own for a long time. She waited tables and taught exercise classes and found safe places for us to be. Every summer I would go to sleepover camp for long stretches, and she would make calendars for me to take with me. They were on watercolor paper, filled in with thick black ink and tiny details in her style, watercolored leaves with perfect veins and suns with fiery rays expanding through the graph of days. I would go, and she would stay home, and in those times she could be young and go on dates and work and not have to be mom. I would come home expanded and full of stories, and she would be ready to parent again. 

Years later, my mother got married and had another daughter, and soon after, I got married and gave birth to Sadie. Over just a few years, we went from 2 to 7, and now that we're all under one roof we are, as she puts it, one family.

 

Now, we are friends. 

I cook on Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays.  She cooks on Sundays and Mondays. Joey and my stepfather take the other days. The girls like grandma's dinner nights best. She is calm and patient in the kitchen, and she makes just what they want. Soup and popovers. Chicken or salmon baked in tamari and olive oil. Steamed greens.   

Some mornings we sit together before the day starts. She drinks her green tea and I drink my coffee and we talk about the day.

I was talking to a friend today and I asked about her mother's day. "Was it good?" "Yes... well, you know, it is complicated to be with your mother for a whole day."  She paused for a minute. "Or, for most of us, it is."

My mother is a nurse now.  She works harder than she ever did when I was little. She is inspired, and dedicated, and she is all grown up. In the fifteen years that we lived apart, we learned to do things differently from each other. She makes her rice in a pressure cooker. I make mine in a rice cooker. Her beans are on the stove top and mine are in the oven. I like spicy, she likes salt. It's hard to remember a time when our tastes led us in the same direction. It is complicated, of course. It is always complicated.

But I love living with my mother again. I am all grown up, too, but sometimes this is all too much. And the little rhythms of moving around my mother in the kitchen again, they calm me and make me feel safe. There is just more love. There is history to ground us. 

My mother makes the most perfect salmon. People rave and sing about it, and they don't believe her when she tells them how easy it is. No magic. No tricks.

A while back, I finally asked my mother how to do it. Now people ask me, and I tell them that my mother taught me how to make perfect baked salmon. No magic. No tricks. Just my mother's universal rule. Are you ready for it?

Everything is better with tamari and olive oil. Everything. Any thing else is wild experimentation, but tamari and olive oil will never fail you.

I thank my mother for all that love and history, for weaving such a glowing web of calm safety in the midst of so much else. She worked all day yesterday, but when she came home, I had salmon waiting. 

Perfect Baked Salmon

serves 6

2 pounds salmon fillets, 1 to 2 inches thick

juice of half a lemon

1 tablespoon olive oil

1 tablespoon tamari

salt

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper. Lay the fish, unwashed, skin side down on the parchment. 

Squeeze the lemon over the fish. Then drizzle the olive oil, then the tamari. Sprinkle the whole thing with a very light snow of salt. Bake for 25 minutes.