Deer tracks, running the bridge, and olives in the enchiladas.
We’ve been seeing deer tracks in the sand most mornings. Sometimes the prints just end as if the deer leapt forty feet east. A mystery, like the tracks in sand in Denzel Washington’s marvelous early film Mighty Quinn.
I was reading an article from The Guardian on how to deal with Christmas get-together challenges. The author led with “the turkey doesn’t fit in the oven.” [I love that turkey is the English Christmas dinner centerpiece, even though what they serve is a “New World” food, not actually indigenous to Europe. So are tomatoes, potatoes, what we call corn, and many squash and chilis. Often an “ancient” European, middle eastern, or Asian recipe includes an ingredient that simply was not available more than a hundred or a couple of hundred years ago—hardly ancient. When Shakespeare mentions “corn,” he does not mean the New World maize but another grain, probably barley.]
The article about the holiday dinner was funny and also spot on.
Continue readingSince the beginning of the pandemic, and setting aside art purchases, our most expensive budgetary item for the past year has been food. This has been the case throughout most of human history. Food first, but the animals and manner of raising crops changed dramatically. We have eaten organic for years just like my grandparents would have. We prefer fresh or frozen food, strong flavors, and I am a good cook willing to try things.
I began baking bread as a child with my mother. I baked bread in college even as a full time student and working 18-30 hours a week. My studio classes did not meet on Fridays and I usually had that day off. I have always baked bread on occasion, but in the past year I bake weekly, usually sourdough, half whole wheat flour, and no sugar in my bread at all. It takes most of the day to bake sourdough, though less than an hour of actual work. The house smells of healthy yeast and the loaves that come out of the oven are tastier than anything I could buy. It is even convenient to bake it.
Americans eat badly because we have failed to start at the beginning by teaching children to cook.
Many women of my generation were resistant to learning to cook because they were understandably resistant to a sexist notion of a housewife’s destiny. They saw cooking and cleaning as Erma Bombeck did, as a trap for women. My own mother loved Bombeck’s humor (If Life Is a Bowl of Cherries, What Am I Doing in the Pits? etc.), but she knew how to do all those chores of canning and cooking and baking bread. She didn’t like doing any of them.
Continue readingIn the 1980s and 90s, we hosted an Open House on the Sunday before Christmas. For weeks I would make and freeze holiday cakes and appetizers. We cleaned house and invited neighbors, co-workers, and friends. No alcohol was served, which is probably why nothing awful ever happened. Well, there was the incident with the dog . . .
We stopped throwing these parties after the year both my brother and mother failed to attend. It seemed sad to work so hard if my local family couldn’t be bothered.
But I am retired now and I love any excuse to bake. We had talked about reigniting the tradition this year, but then, you know, this pandemic.
No gatherings here or in Portland for Thanksgiving. The up side of this is that I do not have to avoid the foods people do not or cannot eat. I can cook with gluten, eggs, dairy, nuts. I could make my spiced carrots. My pumpkin pie can include cream. There was an article in The New York Times this week about traveling and arriving exhausted and still having to cook, about adjusting to individuals’ preferences and dietary needs, and about having to eat multiple Thanksgiving feasts with each partner’s family. (Gary and I did that until we moved to Oregon.) Apparently other women have found the same silver lining. Less work, less stress when it’s just the two of you. Articles have acknowledged that holiday expectations are especially hard on women, and offered all sorts of suggestions about easing into a lockdown Thanksgiving: cook everything but in smaller amounts for two, cook the one thing you like best, cook nothing and order take-out, or reheat something frozen or just drink.
My solution was different. I am cooking a complete meal in easy stages. One dish a day. I made the wild rice and mushroom casserole a few days ago and we’ve eaten half of it. The rest is for tomorrow. I made twice-baked potatoes with cheese, and we’ve sampled that too. Yesterday I made my regular vegetarian herbed dressing using my own sourdough bread cubes (thank you again, Mary Jo and Dale), celery, onion, parsley, herbs from the garden, homemade stock, and cranberries. We had some of that for dinner last night. I might bake two loaves of cranberry bread this afternoon, but at least the pumpkin pie. (The Delicata squash I am using for the filling was roasted and puréed earlier too.) The trick will be keeping Gary out of the pie—pumpkin pie is the holiday dish he’s most fond of.
Stretching out the Thanksgiving feast preparation has been relaxing. I enjoy cooking, but it’s a lot of work for just one meal. We have enjoyed the Startbefores even more than the Leftovers in past years. It means that tomorrow I will make the apple salad with dates and walnuts first thing in the morning and we’ll have some for breakfast, and later roast Brussels sprouts for the big meal. I only have to reheat everything else.
The next holiday is Hanukah beginning 10 December, and we will burn candles. I was afraid I’d given away all the apricot jam, but after my initial panic, I found there is still one jar for the rugelach.
Then Christmas. The cards are more than half-addressed. I will miss not having Prissy’s wreath on the door, but we have lights and the just-for-show fake tree can go up soon after Thanksgiving. We are not buying a cut tree for the first year ever. (Even during the Big Mess when Gary and I, our two preschool children, and six dogs camped in 500 square feet for nine months including Christmas, we put up a tree.) My collection of clippy glass birds will stay in their boxes. The Swanson-Vance flying animals will hang on the pre-lit white paper “birch” tree from Costco. Just this once.
Another of Gary’s favorites is a Dundee cake, traditional for Boxing Day. My dried fruits—three kinds of raisins, pineapple, mango, and cherries—are soaking in rum as I type this. It only needs freshly grated lemon and orange peel. (I fear it will not be as good as last year when I used Scotch and home-candied orange rind.) There will be no one here to share that rich cake, so I plan to make us a six-inch round, which is still too much for two people.
In recent years our sons and their families have come for Twelfth Night in January. That’s not happening this season either, at least not as a physical get-together.
We are planning Jitsi or Zoom group meetings with family. Gary and I might watch Home for the Holidays, and certainly we will watch When Harry Met Sally. We will not stay up till midnight on New Years Eve—we almost never do. We will manage fine because we have remembered to tell people we love them. They might not be in the room, but there is room in our hearts,
Gary standing in the path he built (and has had to rebuild several times) through the rocks. We hope we will be able to turn the loungers around and safely enjoy a 4th of July fire on the sand. (We half hope someone takes these lounge chairs—one of which we found.) That’s a bit of beach trash in Gary’s hand, a length of plastic pipe he carries to poke at the sand.
Today is halfway through 2020 and it’s a good place to pause and take stock. For many human beings this has already been a tragic year on so many levels, so I feel I need to access my situation.
We are both retired so we’re doing fine as far as finances go. That is, unlike so many who are without income such as one son and both daughters-in-law, we still have Social Security. Everyone in our immediate family is healthy but several have continued working in essential services. We have been isolating since 10 March with one exception: our younger son and his two children visited for a weekend sixteen days ago. We are still healthy because they are still healthy, masking and taking other precautions. Other than that, we have the habit of weekly grocery shopping with the occasional extra trip out to pick up mail or deliver mail to the nearest mailbox.
At the beginning of 2020, I set a couple of goals that are still valid. We gave up seafood from our diet. In six months, no seafood, again with one exception: there is fish sauce in my pantry and I made an umami-rich sauce that I’ve used in bowls with fresh veggies and pasta or rice.
The other goal was to purchase no more than eight items of clothing the entire year. I have bought three garments from Eileen Fisher on steep discount (more than 60% off). EF is a highly responsible company and I am glad to support them. Do the two hair clips from eBay count as clothing? Does the replacement headband for the one I’d worn since the 90s but lost on the beach count as clothing? Either three or six purchases, either I am doing fine or this is not looking promising for the second half of the year.
In the past four months I have cooked angelhair pasta at least a couple dozen times (a simple one-pan meal cooked with vegetable stock and with greens, onions, and/or cheese), baked a couple dozen loaves of bread, made gibassier and waffles and spring onion pancakes. I have made curries and vegetable stews and spiced grains. I discovered that a rich soup can be made with leeks and water and salt and pepper—simple as that. Yum. We have eaten pounds of broccoli and uncounted bags of various greens.
Last month I killed my sourdough starter, but I have grown a new one. It tastes fine once it’s baked, but the smell is rather alcoholic than sour. That’s because the “All-Purpose Unbleached Flour” from Costco has barley mixed with the hard red wheat—I didn’t even notice until a local friend and I were comparing notes on our sourdoughs and she said her sourdough had gone rather alcoholic too. A step shy of beer, but . . .
One of my best discoveries is organic miso available at one of the stores we shop once a month. I now have both white and red miso in the fridge! Also, salad greens sauté well with pasta.
My root canal is still sore. I gained back the four pounds I lost. I am not running. sigh
Three packages that we ordered in May have not arrived and we assume now all three are lost. Gary’s CD of Estonian music and my handmade doll from Russia both vanished somewhere in the Baltic. They left their country of origin and never arrived anywhere at all. And the painting—Oh, that painting I love so much—UPS lost track of it at their hub outside Chicago and has issued a refund to the shipper. The refund has been forwarded to me, and I will do the responsible thing and set it aside toward our property taxes.
This year, I have ordered eleven skeins of yarn. I use fourteen for each warp and that much again in weft. This means that the four seven warps I have put on the loom since January have yielded nineteen and a half shawls so far. I am generally still weaving past 7pm. After six months work and subtracting expenses, selling them all might yield a couple weeks or even a month of minimum wage pay, but who’s counting?
I pieced the top and back of a quilt that is waiting its turn to be quilted.
Butterfly Fontanelle has gone through revision three times and I am halfway through reading it aloud again. Tiny changes this time, little corrections but since I am still finding things to repair, change, and move, I will need another edit when I finish this one. I am always in too much of a hurry to send out work. Did it this time too, but I have sent it to a slow responder that does not allow simultaneous submissions, which will ensure I do not send it out again until winter.
This morning I caramelized my last two onions to top macaroni and cheese made with the last of the Stilton, mozzarella, Parm, and with a scattering of dried cranberries because our taste has shifted to sweet and savory and salty all at once. I had only two cups of milk until our next shopping trip so cooked twelve ounces of pasta. It’s in the oven.
At our next shopping trip everyone in the state is required to be masked. Yeah, July 1st! (And about time.) But neither the local sheriff and nor the parks department plan to do a thing about what happens on our beach on the 4th. The one time we tried calling the fire department about a beach fire that was over twenty feet high (absolutely not exaggerating—it flew up another ten feet), the volunteer fire department dismissed our concern. The local millionaires are allowed. “With the rich and mighty, always a little patience,” according to Jimmy Stewart’s character in Philadelphia Story.
I read the news every day—NYT, WaPost, NPR, Guardian—even on the days I swear I will take a break. I study covid-19 statistics. Gary reads different news’ sources. Between the two of us we cover the world. Apparently we are much better informed than the President of the United States. That’s because we read. I have read 34 books so far this year, including nonfiction, memoir, poetry, and novels. Streaming (no cable) we are currently particularly fond of watching Midnight Diner (again) and we finished Somebody Feed Phil on Netflix, even though Phil eats so much meat! Detectorists remains Gary’s all time favorite. On recommendation of a friend, we tried again to watch it and decided we liked Shitz Creek after all. We look forward to Monty Don and Gardeners World on Friday nights. We paid to stream two current release movies and they each had their good points, but we’ve found better distraction and information and drama via our subscriptions.
The hall where I meant to paint is not finished, but Gary and I are scouring the house for set of essays written by a former student. Gary is not optimistic, but our search will be thorough. I was fond of those essays and kept them and still trust they must be here someplace . . . I hope. In the mean time, searching has forced us both to sort and clean. It wasn’t how we planned to spend the week, but it needs to happen.
There has been a lot of cleaning house going on throughout our nation. Statues of treasonous and racist men are coming down. Men who did nothing for our country other than attack it. Comment on national websites point out that even Benedict Arnold fought for our nation in several important battles, long before turning against our country, and no one celebrates him in a public statue or named a military base after him. Laws are changing. White people are taking long, difficult, honest looks at their own privilege and insisting to themselves and the world that we can do better. As hard as these days are for so many and for so many reasons, this is reason to think we might actually accomplish some good in our nation.
My husband and I still get along fine with one another. We are sad sometimes. We nap too much. We worry about our children and the world. Too much. Half of a year and too much has happened to claim anything except hope. There is hope.
We have rewatched the first seven and a half minutes of the pilot of The Mentalist a dozen times in recent months. “Seriously, it’s not as bad as it looks.” And every time, we laugh.
How could I forget making chutney and two kinds of jam?
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My third day working on the “Carnival” warp with just ten inches woven. (I discovered that the acid green I’d hoped to use was from a very old first dyelot of the color and the yarn itself thicker than the others. I finished off a very old blue skein like that in the recent blue warp.) Twenty or more inches today, I hope, and I will bake bread. We had salad last night for dinner! Such a relief after no fresh greens for a week. Salads for the next couple of weeks, and I have leeks to make leek soup, potatoes to go into the soup or for oven fries, cheese!, green beans I will roast tomorrow. Potato chips are a treat. Continue reading
I just reread my year-end reports from 2018. (I have some work to do.) One of those posts was about what I had read. One of them had to do with paying for college. My mother was famous as a worrier, which was not great but did result in a daughter who was careful about money.
My husband and I have managed full retirement quite well financially. We are maintaining a small reserve in the bank, taking a day now and again to travel nearby and stay the night, and thinking ahead to what we need for the future. We need a new roof and some other major repairs. Our wood-burning stove needs replacing—it’s necessary in a location where the power routinely goes out in the winter, usually for a day at a time, but sometimes for a week. All of this means we have decided to budget more tightly in 2020 in anticipation of these expenses. We got through college without debt and entirely under our own steam because we had cheap habits and careful spending. Some of that is still true. We still do not smoke or use drugs. We drink good coffee and cheap wine. We have not eaten most meat for decades, not because we disliked meat, but because it felt morally wrong the way animals are raised, and increasingly dangerous to our health and the health of the planet. We eat organic food but plan to be completely vegetarian for the rest of this new year, abstaining from our habit of seafood once or twice a week. We’ll see how that goes. But cheese. We both think we will always have cheese.
This past couple of days we had our children and their children here for a visit. The the tea party for the kids was a bust, but we walked the beach and I knit with Ruby. There was a scavenger search around the house with written clues (thank you, Emily), The Family Stone (thank you, Kerris), and eleven for dinner last night. There was a lot of food. My baking and cooking plan included a detailed timeline for chili verde, sautéing mushrooms and onions, roasting various vegetables, poaching salmon, putting together frittatas, frying latkes, Waldorf salad, pumpkin custards, cranberry bread and also orange-cranberry sauce, wild rice, and rugelach. I made vegetable stock. I cooked like a crazy person. Saturday morning, I baked two loaves of bread—which was not even on the list!
We managed. Everyone is gone now because of work tomorrow, and I would be feeling pretty great about now but did not sleep last night.
You do your best, and the best is never perfect, not even close. But you hope that the people you love most in the entire world understand you are imperfect but trying hard.
The last sweet potato latke, with cranberry sauce on a Rainbow Gate plate.
We have family coming for dinner next week, and I am test-driving family recipes and trying out a couple of new things. I hope to serve Waldorf salad (without nuts or brown sugar), cold poached salmon with sauces no one is allergic to, the mushroom-and-wild-rice casserole (without flour or butter or cream), Brussel’s sprouts, and “the chocolate thing” I used always to make for my college classes (without dairy or refined sugars or nuts). And latkes for Sunday breakfast.
IMPERFECT PATIENCE 