Monthly Archives: June 2006

My (Virtual) Friends Friday

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In the last week, I’ve found myself thinking a lot about people I’ve never even seen in the flesh. But their voices are so clear that they seem almost to have a physical presence in my world.

Although it’s almost the end of Friday here in California, I figure it’s not too late to get in a My Friend Friday post. Today, my friends Friday are those virtual friends who’ve been so kind to me this week — either by something they’ve said here, or just by virtue of the interesting, thought provoking, amusing and amazing things they’ve posted on their blogs. Here they are:

A former journalist who writes with real skill about music, languages, British Columbia; an academic whose love for books is inspiring; writers (working on decluttering), writers (working to a distraction), writers who are also tea drinkers, writers from the southern hemisphere, from Japan. Did I mention writers? Web spinners, poets, haiku experts, and people who love poetry. Cooks, foodies, and the uncategorizable but wonderful No Shower Girls. Gardeners, inadvertent though they may be. People who make you laugh and make you think. Magicians with cameras from Missouri, from India, from the Hebrides, from my own back yard, and from France. Women and men whose voices are so funny and real and interesting, it comes as a shock to learn that English isn’t their mother tongue. (Can you imagine what they must be like in their native tongue?!)

And this — believe it or not — only scratches the surface. I don’t know how I managed to stumble into all this richness but I am terribly grateful it’s happened.

Cheers to my virtual friends Friday, BL

Raspberry Jam

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The first time I ever saw someone make jam I was horrified. It was a terribly hot summer day and my jam-making friend, a woman who’d never seemed insane before that day, was boiling great vats of strawberries and sugar at a rate so furious you could barely see the stove for all the steam. Hot fruit was splattered everywhere: walls, floor, stove, people. The kitchen was an inferno of sticky, sweet goo. Hot, sticky fruit hurts. So does the boiling water she used to seal the jars. Jam making looked about as safe as climbing into an active volcano, and about as senseless.

But don’t those raspberries look beautiful? And what can you do when there are so many of them in the market and you’ve eaten all you can every day for weeks? And they don’t cost very much?

It occurred to me about ten years after the jam making debacle, that possibly jam could be made in smaller batches — microbrewed, as it were.

And that is what I do when I make jam. After much experimentation I’ve come up with a few rules:

  • I only make two kinds of jam: raspberry and apricot. Why? Because neither is too sweet and both are absolutely beautiful to look at.
  • I make small batches in a beautiful copper preserving kettle I bought at Sur La Table for the ridiculously cheap price of $49. (It is a lot of money, but not for something you use all summer long, year after year, and to perfect effect.)
  • I do not use pectin. I don’t like the way it makes the jam congeal. I use three ingredients only: lemon juice, fruit and sugar. That’s it.
  • I make the jam in small jars. That way, if I give some away, I’m not giving away everything I have. Plus, it just looks nicer in small jars — more jewel-like.
  • I do not use a hot water bath. I have a secret (well, not so secret, just wonderful) way of sealing it that works quite well.

Here are some specifics. First, the raspberry jam recipe. It comes from a book called Preserving in Today’s Kitchen by Jeanne Lesem. (Ms. Lesem was born in Kansas, raised during the Depression in small towns in Arkansas and, from the book jacket, appears to have been a journalist in New York City. I’d love to read her autobiography.)

Raspberry Jam

  • 3 (6 ounce) trays of raspberries
  • 2 Tablespoons of fresh lemon juice
  • Sugar
  1. Set an open 8 ounce canning jar upside down in the center of a microwavable glass measure or casserole. Distribute the berries around it, add the lemon juice, cover and microwave on high for 2 minutes. (You can also just do this on the stove, heating the berries for a few minutes, to get the juices flowing.) Let stand for two minutes.
  2. Transfer berries and juice to a 1 1/2 quart saucepan, add 3/4 cup (6 ounces) sugar bring to a boil quickly, and boil rapidly until slightly thickened.
  3. Pack into a hot sterilized 12-ounce jar, seal with one of those two-part canning rings you get when you buy canning jars , invert for 5 minutes, then set upright to cool. (You’ll often hear the sound of the jars popping, which is the sound of a vacuum being made to keep the jam preserved.) This is the wonderful method of making the jam air tight, so it will keep for the long winter, when raspberries seem a world away.

That’s it. When I went outside to get the lemons, the bush was a thing of beauty:

You can do this in two parts, by the way. Today, I prepared the raspberries up to the point where you do the boiling. I tripled this recipe (which still isn’t a lot) and then heated them up a bit with the lemon juice.And then I added sugar, put them in containers and stuck them in the fridge. They looked like this right before I added the sugar:


They’re in the fridge now, macerating and gaining flavor. Tomorrow, I’ll boil them for about 15 minutes — nothing too dangerous — and then put them in jars, turn the jars upside down for five minutes and bob’s your uncle.

Next? I’m still determined to do those tea cakes. Plus, I’ve got some awfully beautiful apricots to make into jam.

Part Two can be found here.

Tonight my husband

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burst into tears on our way home from the Mexican restaurant where we had dinner. It was an odd thing for him to do, Scandinavian stoic that he is, since I am the one whose breast cancer biopsy came back positive. And so, as often happens in one’s life, the tea cakes I thought I was going to make this afternoon did not get made. (There are two sticks of butter in that recipe anyway, as Fencer pointed out. Perhaps it’s just as well.) Instead, I find myself making a list of the six most important things to know if you are the friend or loved one of somebody like me who gets news like this.

  • First, don’t cry in the car, if you can help it. It is a time for restraint. You don’t have to be cheery, but you’re not allowed to behave as though you’re at the funeral of someone who is actually very much alive.
  • Second, please don’t avoid the person who has gotten the bad news. It is not contagious.
  • Third, it is a welcome and good thing to ask what it is you might do for the person. When a work colleague went through something like this, only much scarier, she asked me to make chicken broth. It made me so happy to have something concrete to do for her. My husband’s first reaction was not to cry in the car. It was to say, You will have to be very clear about what you want from me. (He is inclined not to hear me the first time I ask for something, because I don’t wave my arms around and shout my message through a megaphone.) This is why I married him — he is a very good man and can be forgiven for a moment of weakness in the car.
  • It is fine to ask how the person is doing. In fact, it is much better to ask. Not speaking about something makes it seem scarier than speaking about it. I’m capable of saying as much or as little as I’d like, but I will not see an inquiry about how things are going as prying or weird. Others might. But I am not that sort of person.
  • Please remember that there are many other things to talk about than this. After you ask how things are going, it’s okay to change the channel to some other station. I have no plans to write only about this. I am still writing a novel (which, by the way, is set in Bavaria in the 1960s. Nobody gets breast cancer in it.) I am still interested in recipes and books and how we pack food for our voyages. I can’t imagine that changing.
  • I still have a sense of humor. It is okay to tell me jokes. In fact, if you can’t think of anything to say, a really bad pun will be just the right thing. For me, anyway.

As it turns out, I have a friend who is a breast cancer specialist at a really fine clinic in Boston. Thanks to him, I am going to a terrific doctor he knows in San Francisco. No more mop closets for this woman. Many women have had similar news after mammograms and biopsies. The cancer looks noninvasive, because it has been found early, even if it was found during what wins the prize as California’s worst biopsy ever. Although things can change on a closer look, for now I’m going to assume that’s what it is. Most of you know someone who’s been in just this position. The survival rate, if things are as they look now, is something like 98%.

I am, my friend told me, the poster child for mammography. There are many things I’ve wanted to be the poster child for — good mothering, fine writing, a decent lawyer and wife. This is not a poster I’d have volunteered to be on. Still, it is good to be reminded that we can’t always choose what is going to happen to us. That said, it is equally important to know that we can choose how we are going to behave along the way. For me, that means pretty much going on as usual, although I might make this news the occasion for dropping out of the more stressful parts of my life and filing up that space with more of the things I love doing: writing, being with my kids and family, cooking, taking pictures and, of course, packing peoples’ lunches for the journey away from home.

Rescued Recipes: East Texas Tea Cakes

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Today’s rescued recipe comes from east Texas, from a gray metal filing box I bought on Ebay. The seller was a woman in Texas, who’d acquired this recipe box at an estate sale.

Early this morning, before going to work, I spread the recipes out (there aren’t a lot of them, maybe twenty) and, after a few minutes of reading through the cards, a picture of its creator began to emerge.

Some of the recipes are written on pieces of note paper from something called the East Texas Salt Water Disposal Company in Kilgore, Texas. What exactly a salt water disposal company does, I cannot even begin to guess. I don’t know where salt water would be coming from in east Texas, one of those piney, swampy places people tend to leave, apparently after they’ve sold things like their mom’s recipe box to a lady who runs an ebay business disposing of the “estates” of women whose children have made a run for it.

The woman who once owned this box preserved some of her mother and grandmother’s recipes in it — she rewrote them on cards of her own, noting the year they’d first been made.

These three women (the owner, her mother, and her grandmother) were clearly southerners. I know that because a few of these recipes deliver the slow, small town world of that time and place with heartbreaking clarity, heartbreaking because it’s a world that doesn’t exist for this family anymore. Once someone gets rid of their family’s history, it’s pretty clear their family isn’t intact anymore.

The recipe we’ll be making this afternoon, when I get home from picking my boys up from summer camp, is for “Tea Cakes or Sugar Cookies.” In the corner of this recipe, you can make out the words “My Mother & My GrandMother. Cir. 1887.”

When I came across this recipe card, two other tea cakes immediately came to mind. First, in Zora Neale Hurston’s remarkable book, Their Eyes Were Watching God, the narrator, Janie, runs off with a man whose name is Tea Cake. And he is indeed sweet. (If you haven’t read Their Eyes Were Watching God, you should. It was written during the Harlem Renaissance, in the 1930s. It is a miracle of a book, giving voice as it does to an African-American woman, Janie, who is one of the finest literary creations I know of.)

Second, one of my favorite cookbook writers from the south (and anywhere for that matter), Edna Lewis, who, like Janie, came of age in a town founded by former slaves, has a fine recipe for tea cakes in the book she wrote with Scott Peacock shortly before her death, The Gift of Southern Cooking. They’re a bit crumbly and very rich and just what you’d be served on the porch with lemonade when you go to visit somebody on a Sunday afternoon. When my great-Aunt Simona died not long ago, I made those tea cakes in her honor. Even though she was not from the south, they reminded me of her world — a sweet one, in which you were always offered something good to eat at three in the afternoon, and coffee, and then you sat down and talked for a while, and you were never in a hurry to leave, and never wanted to leave.

The 1-2-3-4 Cake recipe is something that looks like it’s been around a long time too. The paper’s yellow and the handwriting is a little shaky. You see this cake mentioned often in cookbooks. It’s a pound cake. This recipe involves separating the eggs and mixing in the yolks first and then, at the very end, mixing in the whipped egg whites.

The tea cakes will be served this afternoon at our table under the big blue umbrella. With lemonade or tea. We’ll play Glen Campbell and Johnny Rivers. Look for pictures and a fuller report tomorrow.

And one other thing: Here’s the 1-2-3-4 recipe. Perhaps you will want to make it for yourself and share in some of that sweetness.

1-2-3-4 Cake

  • 1 cup butter (2 sticks)
  • 2 cups sugar
  • 3 cups sifted cake flour
  • 4 eggs, separated
  • 1/4 teaspoon salt
  • 3 teaspoons baking powder
  • 1 cup milk
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla

Directions:

  1. Let the milk, eggs and butter come to room temp for a few hours.
  2. Cream sugar Butter — fluffy
  3. Add egg yolk one at a time. Blend thoroughly
  4. Sift dry ingred. together 3 times.
  5. Add alternately with milk and vanilla
  6. Beat until smooth
  7. Beat whites stiff and fold into first mixture

Bake one hour 350. Apparently, sometimes if you use a different pan for the cake, you need only bake for 50 minutes at 325.

The Golden Notebook

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I have two memories of Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, a novel I read over twenty years ago.  One:  it went on forever.  Two:  The narrator, Anna Wulf, had four notebooks, each one a different color.  Obviously, she was a woman who believed in keeping things separate. 

In case you’re curious, one notebook was for politics, one was for a novel she was writing, one was for her life as a mother — and one might have been for sex.  I can’t remember now.  If there had been a notebook just for sex, it was probably the kind of sex that involved tiresome partners and frustrating interactions — or else I’d remember it better.

The point at which I stood up and cheered was when Anna Wulf threw away her four notebooks — signalling her decision to integrate all the parts of her life.  Hence, the title, which refers to the single notebook she ended up with.  It was the Golden Notebook, of course.  You can tell from the title of the novel and the color she chose for the final noteboook, that Lessing thinks compartmentalizing things is a bad idea.

Which brings me to the advice that you should write about only one thing in a blog.  That probably is good advice — people like to know that when they look you up they’ll find a recipe, or a picture of food, or a book review, or a joke.  I do enjoy that myself.  But I don’t always want that.  Sometimes, I’d rather hear a variety of things:  what’s being planted in the garden, cooked for dinner, waiting to be read.  Often, the people I’d most like to be sitting next to at dinner are the people who can talk about a wide variety of subjects, both things I’m interested in and things I don’t know much about. 

There’s no reason a blog can’t be like that.   It seems to me that the things I love, the things that give pleasure, make up the texture of one life, and they should all be in one place.  Except my weird obsession with packaging food.  That’s got its own home. 

 Let me know what you think. 

Summer Reading Short Stack

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I've pulled together a short stack of summer reading (except for The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which is on hold at the library).

There's one spy book, set just before World War II — by the wonderful Alan Furst. It's called The Foreign Correspondent. There's a lot of fog and cigarette smoke in his novels. Mysterious women and men with interesting jobs. Sex. In Paris. The men are newspapermen, or film makers. Did I mention that the women are mysterious? I could stop reading entirely after this book, and spend the rest of the summer recreating its mood by installing a fog machine, wearing sunglasses at night and calling everyone I know dahling.

And yet, we all know the fog lifts, and we take off our sunglasses and we realize that the foreign correspondent isn't quite everything we thought. And when that happens, you need chocolate. Maida Heatter is an expert in the area of dessert and her Book of Great Chocolate Desserts is a classic. What she does not know about chocolate desserts need not concern us. And Anne Tyler will set you straight about how the heart works, if the chocolate hasn't already, in Digging to America.

The book on the bottom of the stack, which I plan to read as the summer ends, because it is not really a book for the summer, is by Irene Nemirovsky, a French writer who was deported to Auschwitz and died there, shortly after writing what may turn out to be one of the best pieces of fiction to come out of the Second World War. It's called Suite Francaise and has just been published here in the United States.

Those two boxes? They're several of the rescued recipe boxes I've been buying on eBay. You'll be hearing about those this summer. One common thread is that for a long time, and even now, American women lavished an incredible amount of attention on dessert.

That, and the Hitchhiker's Guide, and all of your emails, blogs, poems and stories, will accompany me through what looks like a rich and eye-opening summer. I know what litlove is reading, thanks to her terrific essays about reading American classics for the first time. I'd be interested to hear what's on everyone else's list, if you have a moment to tell us.

Blogevity: Saturday Morning Blogroll Thoughts

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What keeps a blog going? That's what I wonder when I come across the abandoned carcasses of once-loved blogs, sites that simply left off in December 2005 or some other long-ago date, without even so much as a goodbye, as though the writer had been jerked out of his or her chair, with only her jacket left to tell you someone had once been there. You see a lot of blogs like this when you click on the "next blog" button on WordPress.

And so as I've been preparing my Saturday Morning Blogroll post for Best Blog, I've been paying attention to blogs with staying power. I've noticed that the blogs that keep going are the ones that have a few things in common:

  • The writer doesn't have to do a lot of searching around for something to say. Single topic blogs are a good example of this. If you are fascinated by, say, tee-shirts, then it's not going to be that hard to post the tee-shirt you're currently coveting.
  • Blogs that rely on pictures also seem to last longer. Could be because it's just more fun to break up text with a photo. Could be that any anxiety about writing is diminished somewhat by being able to express your thoughts visually.
  • Blogs that are part of a web of contacts — whether the writer is speaking to friends, or is part of a community of like-minded obsessives — seem to stick around longer.

The blog I found today, Beatles Blog, shares all these qualities. He's chosen a single subject, and it's one he loves: one of the greatest bands ever. There are plenty of pictures. Videos. And he sounds like he wants to podcast too. So, he's finding a lot of other mediums in which to express himself beyond words. And he's linked to a lot of other good sites, which indicates he's part of a community of obsessives. He's just starting out, but my bet is that he'll keep going for a good long time.

If you've got some thoughts on how you've achieved longevity — not just in blogging, but in any project you've taken on that requires daily, or at least regular, attention — why don't you say something about how you did that? I, for one, would love to hear about it.

Warning: Breast Ahead

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If you wanted any further proof of the broken American health care system, you should have come with me yesterday to the hospital where I had a biopsy after my annual mammogram showed something troubling.

First of all, the volunteer who checked me in, took my information, my health care card, and had me sign forms acknowledging the receipt of information I had not been given, was in the early stages of Alzheimer's. The signs? Fixation on certain phrases ("why," she kept mumbling, "do they have two pieces of paper when they could have one?"), hostility, lots of fumbling around to explain simple things I already knew, like how to find the parking lot in which I'd just parked.

But the centerpiece of the failure to create a system that works for its patients was the biopsy itself. Continue reading →

A Half Hour of One’s Own

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Half-hour Glass

On the plane home the other day, I was absolutely alone for six hours. I used to be alone all the time and I liked it. And then I married and had children and became like one of those Russian nesting dolls — always surrounded by other people, many of whom look a little bit like me.

I did see the appeal of the 36 Jet Blue channels. Before my life changed so utterly, I would have surfed through them for six hours and thought nothing of it. I don’t do that anymore. Not because I’ve had a sudden infusion of probity, but because a person who is starved enough for the things she loves will resist even the temptation of those 36 channels if it means time to read and write. And so I read (a book called Berlin Noir), and wrote part of the novel I’ve been working on.

I almost never have an expanse of time as endless as the sky across the country to do what I’d like with. Like many people, I have to get my work done: which means I have legal opinons to write, and afterwards, I need to be on time to pick my children up from school. There are dioramas to consult about, and grant applications for the schools to write. I cook as much as I can, and I also market. I pay our bills. I fill out forms and arrange for child care. I make sure people have costumes for school plays, and pumpkins at Halloween. I buy a lot of Christmas presents and I wrap them. Every once in a while I get my hair cut and I try to hike and go to the gym, although that’s not been going well the last few months. There are days when I wish I didn’t have to sleep and there are a lot of days when I don’t have enough time to sleep as much as I’d like. I’m not a martyr: my husband does as much as I do. And we have hired people to do some of the things we can’t get to: our laundry, our general cleanliness, some cooking, help in the garden. It’s a lucky, busy, exceedingly rich life and I know it full well because I did not grow up like this. And I’m not here to complain about it.

What I want to talk about is how, in all this, I have figured out how to make time to write.

Continue reading →

On the Way to Work

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Asian Art Museum
I pass this guy every morning on my way to work. He stands along the side of the Asian Art Museum in the Civic Center, saying something about age and change, if I took the time to think about it.

This lovely museum is across the street from the office where I spend my days. I can't believe I ever complain about having to commute to work.

Rescued Recipes

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Apple Fluff
The other day, I spotted a handwritten recipe on someone's blog. I loved the way it looked. It was wrinkled, and used and real. It occurred to me that what the web needs is more handwriting, less type.

And so, in search of more handwriting and less type, I turned to what we all turn to when we don't know where else to look — ebay. I typed in "handwritten recipes." And then I came across something astonishing.

Continue reading →

In honor of …

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the Summer of the Meyer Lemon, a new look for BlogLily. 

And a link to our favorite new summer drink:  FizzyLizzy.

This stuff is 70% juice — I like that. But I must warn you that this link takes you to a little bubbly introduction, but that doesn't make these drinks any less dixielish, as my friend Debby would say. There's another drink sort of like this called something like Fizze, but I couldn't find it when I looked on the web. Maybe it's the west coast version of the FizzyLizzy, the way you get Hellman's Mayo east of the Mississippi and Best Foods Mayo west of it, but they're still the same mayo.