Archive for May, 2006|Monthly archive page
On the Brink of Summer
Leave a CommentIt's so close to summer vacation around here that we can TASTE it. What, you might ask, is the taste of nascent summer? Today, it tastes exactly like our favorite late spring/summer frozen dessert, Lemon Ice. Lemon Ice is actually lemon sorbet, but we are fans of things that rhyme with the word rice, because we are fans of Maurice Sendak's towering classic, Chicken Soup with Rice ("whoopy once, whoopy twice, whoopy chicken soup with rice") and so we choose to call our slushy Lemon sorbet, Lemon Ice.
I'll tell you up front that to make this dessert, you have to have an ice cream maker. But don't cringe at that. Like me, you may not know that ice cream makers are no longer the complex all-day rock salt forearm numbing affairs they once were, when the only people who made ice cream at home basically didn't have anything else to do all day. Ice cream makers are pretty simple to use and they don't really cost that much money. Plus, they do that thing I believe I've mentioned before when I've talked about one of the pleasures of cooking: they transform ordinary enough ingredients, in this case, lemon juice, sugar, water and a bit of salt, into something remarkable. I own a Cuisinart ice cream maker. I use it a lot in the spring and summer. I bought it from Amazon — I think it might have been reconditioned, and so quite cheap, but even so it doesn't cost much over $40. My children love it. You keep the freezer bowl in the back of your freezer and it is always ready to go.
Here's what's involved — by way of attribution, I'm pretty sure I found this in the Zuni Cafe Cookbook, because it contains a small amount of flavor-enhancing salt:
This Evening, the Writing Cafe is Serving
Comments(11)
cherries
So we grew together,
Like to a double Cherry, seeming parted,
But yet a union in partition;
Two lovely berries molded on one stem.
–Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream
The Basques of the North
Comments(1)Note added later when I realized how difficult it is to tell that this post is actually a review of a very good book by Henning Mankell called The Fifth Woman: This is a book review.
My mother is Basque. My father-in-law is Swedish. My father-in-law (or possibly his son, my husband) has on occasion described the Basques as the Swedes of the South, as though the Swedes were the first tough, ocean-going, cod-eating Europeans. This is wrong. It was the Basques who figured out how to dry cod, and without that information the Swedes would never have gotten past the coast of Denmark in their ships, because they would have starved. The Swedes, as it turns out, are the Basques of the North.
As far as I know, the qualities that made both peoples fearsome ocean-farers, the kind of people whose idea of a good time is to train for and compete in rock heaving contests (the Basques) and eat really stinky fish during holidays (the Swedes) are not the qualities that create good detectives, a career that requires a subtlety of mind that neither the Basques nor the Swedes strike me as possessing. Anyway, in Spain, the Basques are too busy, well, committing crimes, to have time to solve them. In Sweden, there is no crime, because anyone with even the slightest criminal impulse is in therapy.
After finishing a terrific mystery recommended by my father-in-law, one in a series by a Swedish writer named Henning Mankell (the book is called The Fifth Woman), I realize I have been painting with too broad a brush. Sweden is, apparently, a country riven by a fault line, on one side of which are people struggling to live decent lives, including police detectives, and on the other side of which are discontented, unhappy serial killers and vigilantes. It is a fine place to set a murder mystery.
Memorial Day Dinner
What do you feed eight adults and ten children for dinner? In the seven years we've been going away over Memorial Day weekend with these eighteen people, we've never had to answer that question. We just brought lunch. This year, we were on Saturday dinner duty. We made one decision: The children and adults would eat the same thing. No more pasta and cheese for them.
This is what we made. It is a meal for meat eaters, although there are other things here for those who don't like red meat. I reproduce it in its entirety because it was pretty good. (Grilled steak tips, chicken apple sausages, garlic roasted potatoes and asparagus, salad with really great vinaigrette, brownies, soused strawberries.) In retrospect, I think we'd forego the brownies for dessert and just have the marinated strawberries by themselves or over vanilla ice cream. But the brownies are really good, so that recipe's here too.
Saturday Morning Blogroll Goes Out to Eat
Studying for the bar exam fifteen years ago, I'd take long breaks on the couch. When I wasn't sleeping, I'd read and try to soothe the mental indigestion that came from stuffing myself with endless crimes and torts and estates and property and corporations. One of the things I read that extremely long summer was MFK Fisher. I roasted my first chicken because of Fisher. She also made me see that no matter how much I messed something up that day, I could always begin again the next day with another meal. And then there was this statement, which stunned me then and still moves me and is the thing that made me a convert to the art of eating:
“People ask me, ‘Why do you write about food, and eating and drinking? Why don’t you write about the struggle for power and security, about love, the way others do?’. . . The easiest answer is to say that, like most other humans, I am hungry. But there is more than that. It seems to me that our three basic needs for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it. . . There is communion of more than our bodies when bread is broken and wine drunk.”
M.F.K. Fisher, from The Gastronomical Me
Fisher wasn't a snob. She liked to be surprised. She preferred passion and oddness to coolness and sophistication. The best blogs partake of these qualities. The ones I found on wordpress were right there waiting for me, under the tags "food" and "recipes":
Lagniappe Friday
Yesterday, I talked about making a list of things that represent the kind of open-handedness that leads people to put a 13th cookie in your bag, or to wrap your purchase in beautiful paper and give you a free postcard to go along with it, even though all you bought from them was a cake of soap. As I thought about this, I realized that maybe the reason this custom flourishes in New Orleans long after whatever merchantile calculation at its origin is forgotten, is because the giver enjoys doing it as much as the recipient enjoys getting the extra thing. It's counter-intuitive, but I suspect that you can't feel impoverished when you give things to other people. "Things" would include material things and also things that take time to do, even if they don't cost anything.
A Nice Limber, Expressive, Handy Word
I've been thinking about how it feels when you don't have as much money as you'd like — whether you've just got the change at the bottom of your purse or pocket, or you're down to your last $5 before you get paid in a week, or your neighbors have so much more than you do that whatever's in the bank doesn't feel like it's enough.
Many things conspire to make us feel diminished by this. If you're going to fight back against that — and I think you should, even when your balance sheet shows more money than just spare change — you've got to do a sort of mental shift, an Escher-like move in your head. And then you'll see something where many people see nothing, and you'll be better able to give when you earlier felt you had nothing worth giving. I'm not talking about true poverty, by the way, but about the moments when we feel like we don't have enough, although objectively speaking, we have everything we need (shelter, food, warmth). I'm speaking of a kind of impoverishment that's foisted on us by the culture we live in, a feeling that we're lacking something, which creates the kind of panic that leads us to buy a lot of things at Walmart we don't really need.
In some communities, there are established social behaviors that help people triumph over feelings of impoverishment. In New Orleans, there's even a word for it: Lagniappe. It's a word that sums up a way of operating in the world that's generous and open-handed, even when everyone involved might be described as struggling. The first time I heard it was in 1984, when I lived in a condemned apartment in Jackson Square, not far from the Mississippi River, over a kite shop. I guess it's kind of obvious it was a time when I had more leisure than money. But it was also a time when, between the hours of 4 and 6 in the afternoon at a bar by the river, you could get really good oysters for ten cents on Fridays, simply because it was Friday.
Mark Twain is — as he always is — the best place to get a fuller sense of this idea:
A Day So Happy
Gift, by Czeslaw Milosz
A day so happy.
Fog lifted early. I worked in the garden.
Hummingbirds were stopping over honeysuckle flowers.
There was no thing on earth I wanted to possess.
I knew no one worth my envying him.
Whatever evil I had suffered, I forgot.
To think that once I was the same man did not embarrass me.
In my body I felt no pain.
When straightening up, I saw the blue sea and sails.
Berkeley, 1971
Nun-Chucks and Cat-a-Pults
Pun toys — that's what my boys brought home today from Dark Carnival, our neighborhood fantasy book and toy store. The cat-a-pults, in case you are wondering, are $4.50. So are the nun-chucks. You get four nuns for that price. Their hands wave as they fly through the air. The cats look a little alarmed as they're pulted out of the cat-a.
This Morning, the Writing Cafe is Serving
Sweetness Always,
by Pablo Neruda
Why such harsh machinery?
Why, to write down the stuff and people of everyday,
must poems be dressed up in gold,
or in old and fearful stone?
I want verses of felt or feather which scarcely weigh,
mild verses
with the intimacy of beds
where people have loved and dreamed.
I want poems stained
by hands and everydayness.
Verses of pastry which melt
into milk and sugar in the mouth,
air and water to drink,
the bites and kisses of love.
I long for eatable sonnets,
poems of honey and flour.
Bald Man with Sword Attacked by a Rabid Dog and Bitten by a Snake in the Arm
Librarians — including the ones at the Bodleian Library at Oxford, who wrote this astonishing description — are heroes. Here are a few reasons why:
Around the World with Saturday Morning Blogroll
WordPress could easily have called itself Worldpress – it has a strong international presence and a lot of wonderful-looking blogs from around the world. These days, when Americans should be doing their utmost to reach outward to the rest of the world, worldpress blogs make that easier:
Waking up Twice. This blog is written by a talented Indian photographer and writer. I like the text, and the photos. Some, especially recent ones, are very strong stuff. But important.
Alternatives à Paris. I don't understand a word of this blog. I love it anyway. As I clicked through it, I tried to guess what the author could possibly have been talking about. And then I got carried away making up ridiculous captions for the photos. I think it is the blog of very earnest, very creative, political French people who are brewing up some kind of revolution, in which they protest things they don't like while posing as clowns. (there is a category called "clowns.") Plus, there are pictures of Parisian street life — what's not to like about that?
Chère Dores
My son brought home from his two week stay with a family in another country a suitcase of clothes that were cleaner and better pressed than when he left. His clothes give off the scent of something floral and soapy, which I think in the country he visited, in the home he stayed, is the smell of clean. Under the floral smell, is a very faint whiff of something masculine, cigarette smoke I think. When I hug him, I smell Dores, the mother of the boy he stayed with.
I don’t speak the same language as Dores. My son does. I asked him several times on the telephone while he was gone to thank her for taking such good care of him, but I could tell from the very short sentence I overheard him saying to her in response that he did not adequately convey my gratitude.
If she could speak English, this is what I'd tell her.
They’re Luckiest Who Know They’re Not Unique
By necessity, my mouth is always open when I’m at my dentist’s office. There’s no other way to get your teeth cleaned. So it was a good thing it was already open when my dentist told me his recent news. Had it not been, I might have been unable to prevent myself from responding with the kind of slack-jawed surprise that is the wrong way to react to someone’s good news.
“She’s extraordinary,” he says, holding one of those sharp instruments that command attention. “There’s something about the way she notices everything. It’s very unusual.” He pauses, not looking at my teeth, but into space, into the glorious future. “I think she’s a genius.”
This Morning, the Writing Cafe is Serving
something delicious. And while you’re there, take a look at Wide Angle (it should be read out loud.) This should wake you right up if you, like me, stayed up too late last night.
