Category Archives: Cooking

June 15, 2013 · 9:51 pm

A Farm Grows in Brooklyn

Or sometimes Queens.

We had to find our way through a coffeehouse and the winding corridor of a building before getting to the unmarked elevator that led to the roof. Then we knew we had hit pay dirt, so to speak.

Brooklyn Grange is the largest rooftop farm in the country and perhaps the world. Sited atop a building that originated as a furniture factory, it has the space to produce at least three dozen different vegetables and herbs in the course of a season. You would never know it’s there, looking up from Northern Boulevard, a car-choked thoroughfare that muscles its way through Queens, New York.

We were a little early. The volunteers were still bagging up the greens for the CSA as Gwen, a busy farm worker, applied sunscreen to her arms. This is great weather for kale, said Gwen. All the rain makes it really spring up. The farm stand also displayed beautifully fresh carrots, mesclun, scallions.

A farm on a roof has to have all the things a farm has on the ground. Worms.

Compost.

The farm manager, Bradley, wearing a bright green tee shirt whose back was emblazoned with the words, “This is what a feminist looks like,” told me a little about the chickens.

The dramatic white one, he said, was a Japanese silky. I asked him about the manure, so great for vegetables. They have about a dozen birds. They give what they can, said Bradley. He directed the volunteers out among the rows to harvest thyme and flowers. Tourists and photographers were beginning to show up, most with the kind of equipment that views like the Farm’s deserve. This one, taken on another day, is by a photographer named Cyrus Dowlatshahi.

You feel you could leap the distance from the pepper plants to the Empire State Building in one stride – or at least that Philip Petit could make a project of the crossing.

Photographer Rob Stephenson has made some striking pictures of New York’s farms and gardens.

Not just rooftops but the kind of small, intimate plots that can in found in Harlem and the Bronx, and nurture peoples’ souls as well as their stomachs.

Close up at Brooklyn Grange you can see the serious thought behind the endeavor.

The rows of stakes waiting for the tomato’s slow and steady climb.

There are roughly 1.2 million pounds of soil in this one-acre plot. Could the concrete slab roof give way? Absolutely not. All these details and more are readily available on line.

You can book an event at the rooftop, even a wedding. Perhaps guests could weed between glasses of champagne.

Brooklyn Grange is joined by other urban farms in New York: Added Value, Tenth Acre Farms, Battery Urban Farm, Gotham Greens and and Eagle Farm are just a few of these enterprises. One researcher was quoted in The New York Times last year: “In terms of rooftop commercial agriculture, New York is definitely a leader at this moment.”

There is a long history of agriculture in the boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens.

According toRobin Shulman in her lively and informative book Eat the City: A Tale of the Fishers, Foragers, Butchers, Farmers, Poultry Minders, Sugar Refiners, Cane Cutters, Beekeepers, Winemakers, and Brewers Who Built New York, “As late as 1880, Brooklyn and Queens were the two biggest vegetable-producing counties in the entire country.” She cites one observer as saying, “The finest farmlands in America, in full view of the Atlantic Ocean.” Farmers in the boroughs used the manure of city horses to fertilize their crops, which they brought to the Manhattan market by boat.

I’m thinking about farming as I coax my tiny vegetable plot to maturity. My new strawberries have come in.

And some tomatos, the size and texture of an Atomic Fireball – remember those? – though not the color, yet.

But I’m tired of all this just looking at good stuff growing. Where’s the table in the fashionable farm-to-table equation?

One was set for us at The Farm on Adderley, in the neighborhood of Ditmas Park, Brooklyn. There is nothing like a restaurant with a mission statement: it “has evolved to pursue the principles of supporting local farmers, artisans, entrepreneurs as much as possible, making delicious food from that, and serving it in a completely honest way.”

You can get a list of the local farmers who provide the kitchen’s ingredients. But that doesn’t mean anything to me unless I get a plate of food that’s good – as was my red flannel hash, its corned beef colored deeply with beets, and an even deeper burgundy horseradish served alongside. Did it taste better because the beef that was corned had roamed freely? Yes, I believe it did.

The hostess brought to mind a farm girl in her friendliness, and she seated us in the garden, between a towering fir tree and a luxuriant grape vine, next to a wooden crate planted with chard and mint. The sun shone down, and we could have been out in the country. The place hosts events, like a New Amsterdam dinner “curated” by food historian Sarah Lohman, who is an educator at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum and author of a blog called Four Pounds Flour, devoted to “historic gastronomy,”

We were lost in the perfectly crisp, chewy, salty french fries, served with a sultry curry dip.

Couldn’t help, though, but overhear the young couple next to us planning their nuptials. Should we let them know about Brooklyn Grange? There could be worse places to grow your relationship.

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June 9, 2013 · 4:58 pm

A Bookish Brunch

Christina Baker Kline’s book Orphan Train was released on April 2nd by William Morrow, and I was lucky enough to attend a brunch in her honor today. As the intuitive and scrappy Allison Gilbert, our nonfiction-writing hostess, put it, “Writing a book is like pushing a mountain through your head.” An event like this, she said, can show people that a book exists from the ground up. “That’s what we writers do for each other.” Indeed. The house in Irvington, New York was filled with bookish well wishers.

Orphan Train has hit the best seller lists of both USA Today and The New York Times, Goodreads saluted it as a 2013 beach read, and it has been brought out in a special edition by Target, for which Christina had to sign thousands of copies.

She had come in from a meeting with the powerhouse biographer Robert K. Massie and would go off to be the keynote speaker at an event held by Books New Jersey, but spared a chunk of time in the noon hour to describe her book and the process by which it went from Henry James’ “germ of a story” to a full-blown narrative.

Christina stumbled on to the phenomenon of orphan trains 10 years ago.

It seems her husband’s North Dakota grandfather was one of “riders.” Most kids were plucked off the streets of New York between 1854 and 1929 and shipped to the Midwest as free labor for farm families. Ultimately there would be 250,000.

Some of them, actually about 60 percent, were not legitimately parentless, but their single parents, usually their mothers, simply couldn’t afford to feed and house them. Civil War widows, in particular, couldn’t hack the expenses of parenthood, and there were no social programs to help them. Today the original orphans have two million descendants in this country.

Jacob Riis made devastating pictures late in the 19th century of some of these lost New York street children.

The older they were, the more desirable they were for the farmers who took them in. Better workers.

Babies were popular too.

Girls, not so much. A threat to the women in the household. This little girl Riis captured is beyond sad.

Now Christina has taken this powerful material and made a story out of it, centered in the relationship between a troubled 17-year-old girl and an aging Irish immigrant who keeps her orphan train memories in an attic trunk.

Christina and I talked over aspects of bringing out a book, including the fact that we both take a powerpoint with us when we hit the road to talk about our work, something not every fiction writer does but that seems appealing to fans of historical fiction. I liked something she said about the writing process, about creating the structure for a story: “We need to build too much, explain too much, before we take that scaffolding away in the revision process.”

I can’t wait to read Orphan Train, to see what commonalities exist between her children of the late-19th century to the early 20th century and the parentless waifs of The Orphanmaster‘s 17th-century New Amsterdam. Novelist Helen Schulman said Orphan Train “makes for compulsive reading,” and The Orphanmaster has been called “compulsively readable,” so we have a bond. It’s too bad Adam Johnson couldn’t be sharing bagels and lox with us at Allison’s house today.

His book, The Orphanmaster’s Son, won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. I have found myself in the interesting position since the award was announced of having people congratulate me for my “recent honor.” Well… no. But you’ve got to think that this hat trick of orphan novels suggests something in the cultural water. Andre Gide said, Not everyone can be an orphan. I salute Adam, whose book is supposed to be as terrifying as it is wonderful. But for now, it’s just Christina and me in the picture.

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June 4, 2013 · 2:41 pm

Out of Africa

Maud is back from Malawi.

Wearing a chichinge, a wrap skirt of block-printed African cloth. Her resilient muscles are only a little sore, and she seems impervious to jet lag after 20 hours in the air.

Maud and her group from buildOn, working with hundreds of village men, laid a foundation and raised a quarter of the walls for a new school block that will allow the town of Mpandakila to educate its 5th and 6th graders. So that after 4th grade the kids will not drop out rather than hike the six kilometers to the nearest school.

Maud ate nsima — corn porridge — pumpkin greens and soupy beans for 12 days, sleeping on a bamboo mat in a very special homestead. Her hosts were one of the chiefs of the community and his wife and their five precocious daughters. Also grandma, the babies of the two eldest daughters, and a two-day-old goat that cried for its mom all night.

A hen slept in the room with Maud and her friend Claire, laying its eggs while they were sleeping. The chief offered the young women a chicken as they left, which they took and sold to the bus driver who took them six hours back to Lilongue. They fed it ground nuts (peanuts), which they picked fresh from the vine every morning.

Dancing was a big thing in the village, to the pounding of drums and the ululations of the older women. The whole village loved learning the Macarena.

What Maud loved learning about the most was how to carry water atop her head — and dirt, and bricks. A woven circle of straw helped her balance.

It felt so far away, but at the same time there was a human familiarity about it all — a smile as you walked by someone, the bossiness of the sisters. Maud didn’t come away with any answers about the best way to go about helping other countries, without imposing your will or encouraging dependency. What matters is asking the questions, and coming away with more.

Zikomo kwambiri means thank you very much in Chichewa.

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June 1, 2013 · 5:59 pm

Red Is the Color

We were ushered off to our strawberry jaunt by a visitor from prehistory.

A snapping turtle backed herself into a corner of the the vegetable garden when I startled her. She scowled, bit the air and elongated her snake-like neck when her ejection was proposed with a shovel. Snappers evolved over 40 million years ago, so she deserves our careful respect.

It’s strawberry season. But it’s early.

Still, we wanted to pick.

One of my mother’s fondest memories of strawberry picking as a kid is the bluebird she saw on a post, her first bluebird, as she rode into the field in the back of a pickup truck with her sister Sandra and her brother Jere.

No bluebirds for us, or birds of any kind. The berries, clustered under their tents of leaves were largely unripe.

At Grieg Farm, in Red Hook, New York, we had a summer sky, hot blue with hazy clouds. And strawberries, it turned out when we looked, plenty enough for the two of us.

I remember eating strawberries when Gil proposed to me decades upon decades ago. He went into the restaurant’s men’s room and looked into the mirror, then came back to the table and dove in.

Ryan took our six bucks and explained that while the berries weren’t the prettiest, they were just as sweet as if they were perfectly red.

Redder (and pink) were the radishes at the farm stand.

One nurseryman told me that if you harvest the baby radishes with their leaves and saute them together, it results in a dish that is delicious. I have plenty of baby radishes in my garden – until the snapping turtle comes for them – and I’m going to try it.

Red-green rhubarb, to go with my peppermint-striped strawberries.

Maybe preceded by a meal of eggs so fresh their yolks puff up like small islands of saffron?

So the strawberries weren’t red. So what? The barns were.

In the car, driving home with alacrity before my coleus plants wilted, Gil said, Do you know why so many barns are red?

I never thought about it.

Because of the chemical properties of dying stars, he said. One byproduct when stars decay is ferrous ochre. Ferrous ochre is plentiful on earth. And ferrous ochre is what makes paint red. So it’s the cheapest kind of paint.

Okay, I say.

Barns are big, he says. Farmers are cheap.

We have red barns because of the chemical properties of dying stars.

Strawberries are a different story.

Macerated Strawberries with Basil

[Macerate= to soften or decompose (food) by the action of a solvent.]

2 lb. fresh strawberries, rinsed, hulled, and sliced 1/8 to 1/4 inch thick (about 4 cups)

1 Tbs. granulated sugar

2 tsp. balsamic vinegar (alternate: 2 tsp. vanilla)

8 to 10 medium fresh basil leaves

In a large bowl, gently toss the strawberries with the sugar and vinegar. Let sit at room temperature until the strawberries have released their juices but are not yet mushy, about 30 minutes. (Don’t let the berries sit for more than 90 minutes, or they’ll start to collapse.)

Just before serving, stack the basil leaves on a cutting board and roll them vertically into a loose cigar shape. Using a sharp knife, very thinly slice across the roll to make a fine chiffonade of basil. Scatter with the basil to garnish.

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May 26, 2013 · 5:58 pm

Tender Buttons

I’m sometimes scared of mushrooms. Portobellos I like. Cremini, good for risotto. Even the common white button mushrooms. Throw them into a stir fry, they cook up fine. But wild mushrooms, the kind people hunt for in the woods? What if I get poisoned? In my mind I always saw the flaming red with white dots, the poisonous amanita muscaria. There are old mushroom hunters, and bold mushroom hunters, but no old, bold mushroom hunters. As the saying goes.

I thought I’d face my fears in a mushroom walk at Cranberry Lake Preserve cosponsored by a group called COMA, the Connecticut-Westchester Mycological Association, founded in 1975 by a group of amateur naturalists and mushroom enthusiasts. COMA promotes a sense of stewardship of the natural world through the study and appreciation of the world of fungi. It even sponsors a mushroom university.

I got to the meeting place before anyone else. It was just me and the bears and the elves. The sun had broken out and the wind was blowing wildly. So many trees have fallen in recent storms, some shattered to pieces, it seemed amazing there were any left standing.

“Nature alone is antique,” wrote Thomas Carlyle, “and the oldest art a mushroom.” Mycologists approach the forest with a combination of hard-headed method, Zen mysticism and dumb luck. My fellow foragers began to arrive with wicker baskets over their arms and expressions of patient, optimistic calm. Zach, our guide, explained some mushroom physiology, the gills underneath the cap, the veil that falls back as the spores mature.

I met Vrena, a retiree and avid traveler from Switzerland, who described the wild food she had gathered from the forest this spring: garlic mustard, dandelion, dock, bamboo and ramps. Young wild grape leaves, she said, are utterly different, when used to stuff cinnamon-flavored rice mixed with lamb than the chewy, flavorless kind you get from a can. “The leaf is not offensive, because it is tender,” she explained.

It seemed an awful lot like an African photo safari but instead of wildebeests there were wild mushrooms.

Two dozen people moved quietly among the newly leafed out trees, lifting up hunks of fallen bark and other decaying matter to find treasures.

The real gold isn’t the mushroom itself but the vast network of mycelium it grows out of, spreading vastly under the ground. The mushroom is simply the fruiting body of the plant. “Ninety percent of what you’re standing on is mushroom mycellium,” a well-informed mushroomer named Rena asserted. Manufacturers, she said, are starting to use the soft, threadlike stuff as packing material, rather than plastic.

The most common specimen around these woods went by the simple acronym LBM: little brown mushroom.

Just because it was little didn’t make it boring.

There was the crust fungus.

We saw mushrooms growing on top of other mushrooms – called fairy pins, like little black matchsticks, so small as to be invisible without a loup. A carniverous mushroom, devouring the back leg of a certain beetle and now exploding fruitily through it. All sorts of jellies.

We made our way in slow motion. There was time to thrill to the trill of a tree frog. To hold a serious discussion about solomon’s seal. In the middle ages, noted one herb enthusiast, the wild plant was “the herb for women who happened to fall upon the fist of their husband.” In other words a poultice, a balm that fell short of a divorce but was better than nothing.

A baltimore oriole. A water snake sunning itself on the lake shore.

There was so much to learn. Rena: “Every log could be a year’s course of study.” I love that idea.

Zach knew all the proper Latin names for every mushroom. They went in one ear and floated out the other like a puff of mushroom spore. I’d call this one the upside-down-ballerina-fairy-with-her-head-in-the-dirt, if I didn’t learn today that it’s very problematic for people to originate their own names for mushrooms.

Just this year a French scientist and an American scientist separately came up with new names for the morel, and it resulted, according to Zach in problems, “leading to hurt feelings.”

Boris from Bulgaria interested himself in botany as well as mycology.

Plants, he told me, sense a danger from certain aphids, then send a signal to other plants via fungus underneath the ground to warn them about it. Everything is symbiotic, he said. He told me he likes to hike Breakneck Ridge, a practically verticle hiking trail that opens up high above the Hudson River.

“Smell that!” said the expert in medieval balms. She scratched back the bark of a slender branch. The aroma of wintergreen bloomed under my nostrils. “Black birch.” I chewed it as a child, I said. Everyone nodded. So did we all.

This was pretty serious business.

I thought we wouldn’t have collected more than ten specimens, but back at the picnic table people shared dozens. There was cladonia, called British soldiers. “That’s a no-no,” said Zach, referring to the beauteous lichen with bright red spores.

You shouldn’t pick it, apparently, it takes too long too grow.

There were plenty of others.

Some mushrooms looked like babies’ ears, and now babies’ ears resembled mushrooms.

There was a small, complicated gorgon of growths.

So many different textures and shapes.

And finally, for the weary mushroom hunters, some snacks, including the edible variety: a dish of sesame pasta and chicken mushrooms, orange and chewy. And a plastic container of stuffed grape leaves, donated by Vrena. Not offensive, in the least, and tender.

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May 25, 2013 · 3:16 pm

Simple Stock With a Side of Butter

We in the northeastern U.S. have been deluged with a cool spring rain for several days now. Not good weather for adventuring, though I managed to get out and about yesterday and sample some history and some garlicky pork chops.

The weeds are thriving. Our sump pump is heaving, with the Cabin set as it is down into an overflowing marsh. And the room around me is dim and shadowy, a womb of dark lumber. The pictures stare out of the murk.

Chestnut, a building expert recently assured me. The Cabin is built of chestnut logs. How do you know? I asked. I just know, he said. You can see it in the fireplace mantle.

Today is fit for a few errands – dry cleaning, library, Good Will. Then as many rounds of a knitted cowl as I have patience for. Beautifully soft merino wool in a heathery blue-brown. The proprietor of my local knit shop, Flying Fingers, after salvaging yet another botched project of mine, confided that business falls off after the winter, that people seem not to think of knitting as a year-round activity. I immediately bought some new yarn.

I think I’ll take another listen to Barry White’s Ecstasy, which I heard in the car for the first time in a long time. At least 20 years, in fact. Is it still brilliant or is it just me?

Perhaps a chapter of What Maisie Knew, the original by Henry James, which I’m newly interested in after the disturbing contemporary movie version I took in earlier in the week. Perhaps a start on The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner, which just appeared in April and takes place in 1975 in New York City, where a young woman named Reno is intent on conquering the SoHo art world.

I know I’ll make a big pot of chicken soup, and dive into another pot: links I’ve been saving to mull over on a day just like today.

Here are some you can sink your teeth into.

Have you ever wondered about butter sculpting?

Linda Christensen, a master at the craft, typically spends a week and a half in a booth chilled to near freezing at the Minnesota State Fair in order to render likenesses out of 90-pound blocks. An artist friend of mine once imagined making sculptures out of breast milk butter, but it never came to pass.

How about houses so small they can be mounted on grocery carts?

Early water pipes under New York City carved from whole trees.

Archaeologists are finding them now.

Italian prison inmates who make award-winning chocolate truffles.

The question of whether Michael Pollan is a sexist pig – an excerpt from Homeward Bound: Why Women Are Embracing the New Domesticity, a new book by Emily Matchar that sounds an awful lot like my decade-old Made From Scratch: Reclaiming the Pleasures of the American Hearth.

Is it time to order a new supply of Goatboy Soaps, handmade from goat’s milk and shea butter on a farm in New Milford, Connecticut?

The one called Heavenly does indeed have a celestial aroma, I can vouch for it,but you can also choose from among Blackberry Sage, Cherry Almond, Clean Greens, Lavender Oatmeal, Serious Citrus and others, including Red Clover Tea, the company’s bestseller. No breast milk in evidence.

Research showing why the act of pointing makes babies human. It turns out, according to Slate, that “Babies point to refer to events in the past and the future. They point to refer to things that are no longer there. They can figure out, when an adult points across the room toward a group of objects, what exactly the adult is gesturing toward (the toy they’ve previously played with, say). They can deduce that, by pointing, an adult is trying to communicate something specific (find that toy hidden in that bucket). And not least of all, babies point because they want to share their experience of the world—that puppy—with someone else.”

The fascinating blog of an Irishman elucidating a video of Dublin phrases. You’re in for a treat if you make posts from Sentence first a regular part of your day.

A recipe for how to make Mango Sticky Rice, at a site called The High Heel Gourmet, brought to you by Miranti, a young chef who seems to know exactly what she’s doing.

And, finally, a piece so lively it will drive all the rain away (by tomorrow, I hope, when I plan to go mushrooming in the Westchester woods), a photo doc on skateboarding in 1965, courtesy of Life magazine.

I am sure that some of the individuals pictured have traded skateboards for walkers, but then everything was a breeze.

If you wind up wanting to make home-made soup, a chicken elixir, here’s how.

A Recipe for Simple Stock

1 soup fowl/heavy fowl/soup hen

A bunch of chicken feet if you can get them

2 big fat carrots

2 sticks celery

1 large onion

1 large purple-shouldered turnip

1 large parsnip

a bunch of dill if you have it

salt and pepper to taste

Bring chicken to boil in a pot large enough to accommodate all ingredients.

Skim off scum and reduce to a simmer.

Add all other ingredients.

Simmer 3 hours or until chicken starts to fall off the bone.

Strain stock.

Add noodles or matzoh balls, use as a base for leek-and-potato soup, make gravy for chicken pot pie or stir up some risotto. Perfect for anything that ails you. And if you dribble a little over the kibble, your dog will love you for it.

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May 24, 2013 · 7:02 pm

The Danger of Self Discovery

The black iron fence that surrounded the white-folks graveyard was typical of New York City parks – almost.

I don’t know what the danger was, except of self discovery.

I had driven down to the Bronx because I heard tell of a group of elementary school kids there who had stumbled upon a centuries-old, unkempt slave burial ground next to the well-preserved graveyard of the privileged families who owned them. They were trying to reinvest the slave cemetery with the gravitas it deserved. I wanted to see the place, old and mysterious and deep in the Bronx. So Gil and I set off.

The Bronx once had a swellegant reputation, home as it was to distinguished families and verdant farms. It was actually settled by a Swedish sea captain named Jonas Bronck. General Washington marched his troops through on their way to Westchester in October 1776, when no one knew how long the war was going to last.

The cemetery in question, now the center of Drake Park, was originally laid out by the Hunt family – the clan for which Hunts Point was named. The Hunts and the Leggetts ran the local show, along with a few other families and all of them were laid to rest there.

It had been raining for days. Gil and I had the park absolutely to ourselves. We saw an allee of trees running alongside the cemetary.

Weeds had overtaken the park – only three acres – in the middle of the busy commercial neighborhood. Above our heads, a mature black oak, circa 1848.

When the park was landscaped in 1915 the slave graveyard disappeared in the shuffle. Once, in some obscure text, its location was referred to as across a lane — was that the allee we saw? If so, the plot has no marking today but a wire fence.

Teacher Justin Czarka of PS 48 leads the effort to bring recognition to the site — which includes local historians, community organizations, museums, city agencies. To document the final resting place of the slaves of these prominent New York families.

I’m reminded of the fight to commemorate the African Burial Ground in Manhattan, after remains were discovered during the construction of a Federal office building in 1991. In 2003 I stood and watched the processional that led to the reinterrment of 419 sets of remains at the site where they had been discovered. Women and men in brightly colored African garb came through accompanying wood coffins built in Ghana and carved with adinkra symbols.

The ceremony was heady, the effort fraught with tensions, but I find this history in the Bronx unsettling in a more intimate way, the white graves groomed and protected and the black graves lost to time. The students found a photo in the city archives documenting the site at the turn of the century.

A 1913 brochure about the Bronx noted that the remains of colonial soldiers were interred in the Hunt graveyard, along with, nearby, slaves of earlier residents, and also “Bill,” the negro pilot of the wrecked British frigate Hussar.

The kids of PS 48 examined census data, early maps, coastal surveys, wills and early histories and found some surprising details about how whites and blacks lived in early New York. These wealthy coastal families owned quite a few slaves. John Leggett stipulated in his 1777 will that his son Cornelius would inherit “My Negro Man Tite and my Negro boy Ben” as well as “four Milk Cows.” His daughter Eleanor would receive his “Negro Wench Bett” and a silver cup. Laws were passed to prevent slaves’ sedition. They were forbidden to be in the streets an hour after sunset, by an ordinance passed in 1712.

Blacks and whites would not be buried together, at the Hunt and Legett cemetery, but within an interesting proximity.

The park itself was named not after Hunts or Legetts but after Joseph Rodman Drake, who grew up in the Hunt mansion, became a writer-physician and died of tuberculosis when he was 25, in 1820. His most famous poem, “The American Flag” spoke of freedom:

She tore the azure robe of night,

And set the stars of glory there.

She mingled with its gorgeous dyes

The milky baldric of the skies,

And striped its pure celestial white,

With streakings of the morning light…

I wonder what Drake would have made of the Hunts Point neighborhood now, chockablock with auto glass shops and cheap eateries. We left the antique mysteries of the graveyard and re-entered loud, mechanical contemporary New York. I love the signage along Hunts Point Boulevard, much of it a gaudy yellow and red and fancily hand lettered.

Mo Gridder’s is probably the only barbeque joint, at least in New York, with its dining lounge in an auto parts store.

As we approached an intersection a woman actually ran into the street, beckoning us loudly to come get our car repaired at her place. People stood in the gutters, waiting, sentries for their businesses.

Other, more faded signs spoke of years of dreams deferred.

The Hunts Point Market is alive and well, though it was sleeping when we visited – suppliers of meat, seafood and produce open all night long and shut down by day. The air when we passed the fish buildings had the scent of the sea.

It used to be that sex was for sale too, in abundance, at Hunts Point, but that’s changed. A vestige lives on in the unfortunately titled Mr. Wedge. The last of the Mohicans for adult entertainment in this part of the Bronx.

A strip joint you can visit while getting your car’s windshield replaced.

Randall Restaurant is a good place to hear Anthony Santos singing a melodious Como Te Voy a Dejar while chewing on garlicky deep fried porkchops or to just chat with a friend. About the liveliest cafe I’ve ever been in. Everyone is welcome, even turistos like us.

The pernil is supposed to be formidable but they were all sold out by the time we got there for lunch – for the rest of the clientele, lunch comes in the morning, after a shift at Hunts Point. The pineapple cake, though, and cafe con leche sustained us for our trip home in the rain.

Color everywhere.

Yes, indeed, the show that never ends. I’m glad we got there before anyone could scrub off the paint.

I like to think of the surprise — the shock — of our forefathers and mothers in the Bronx had they seen the mixing of colors and cultures we saw today. Yes, it can feel dangerous at times. Gertrude Stein once said, Considering how dangerous everything is, nothing is really very frightening.

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May 23, 2013 · 1:47 pm

Enough to Feed an Army

An army marches on its stomach, said Napoleon, who knew a little something about food as well as armies, if his portrait is to be trusted.

I recently read a profile of a man seemingly born to fill that marching stomach, Derrick Davenport, a culinary specialist who has just triumphed over 17 other gastronomic overachievers to become the Armed Forces Chef of the Year. Parade reports that the competition has taken place for two decades at the Joint Culinary Center of Excellence in Fort Lee, Virginia. It’s judged cooking-show style, after contestants prepare four courses in four hours, taking in hand some challenging ingredients they didn’t count on ahead of time.

Quinoa and arugula salad. Roasted lamb loin in mushroom sauce with butternut squash puree. Edam cheese fritters? These are no ordinary MREs. But the military takes its food more seriously than ever now that troops’ palates have grown more sophisticated. Plus, says an army evacuation medic named Corrie Blackshear, “It’s more than nourishment. It’s spiritual nourishment.”

Nourishment to the tune of 5,250,000 gallons of milk, 448,000 pounds of Thanksgiving turkey and 214,000 gallons of ketchup a year. Fully 24,884,000 pounds of cooked chicken.

This is just part of the 2012 breakdown for all of the U.S. Armed Forces.

I began thinking about gargantuan military food quanities a long time ago when I served as the head of a soup kitchen in Manhattan. I had picked up a copy of the West Point Officers Wives’ Club Cookbook at the Naval Academy bookstore when I was at Annapolis doing interviews for Tailspin, Women at War in the Wake of Tailhook.

It was a spiral-bound community-style softcover of the type I still collect (I have over a hundred) and it had a subtitle I found enticing: Enough to Feed an Army.

I was new to the soup kitchen, which took place once a week at All Souls Unitarian Church on Lexington Avenue, and was known as Monday Night Hospitality. Wandering down to the kitchen one afternoon, just thinking to check out the volunteer options, I encountered a tall, blonde woman with her coat on. I told her I wanted to help. Fine, she said, you’ll cook tonight. I looked around – I was the only one there.

I had cooked for dinner parties before, but the customary crowd at Monday Night Hospitality reached 100 hungry mouths, sometimes more. Don’t worry, said the woman, we have meatballs. And she pointed to the walk-in pantry.

The soup kitchen had always served government-issued meatballs in tomato sauce. Mystery meat. Bad enough to smell, let alone put in your mouth.

That was the only time I served a meal that was not home cooked. I remember trucking in crates of kale from my favorite market Fairway up in Harlem at 134^th Street. The produce manager Jaime saw me coming and would break into a smile.

How much ground beef to make meat loaf for 100? How many eggs? I figured it out. I learned to fry chicken in industrial-size skillets. Not 24,884,000 pounds, but close.

I consulted the West Point Officers Wives’ Club spiral bound. It featured recipes from teachers and parents, officers and their wives (and some husbands). It also contained items like reminiscences of graduations past, and the cadet’s prayer. Finally, and here is where I got some guidance, the mess hall weighed in.

Forty-five hundred servings? Making sloppy joes for 100 was obviously something a person like me could do. I would bring my favorite 8-inch chef’s knife from home, wrapped in cardboard and duct tape. And my well-used apron. Sometimes a pan I wanted to employ. I would put those entrees on the table, whatever it took.

And it was worth it. Often, our dinner was the first time our guests had tasted a home-cooked meal in a long while.

I remember an elderly man who used to grab me by the arm and recall his late wife, the loving meals she used to fix him. A man mountain with a tiny rearview mirror attached to his glasses, dressed head to toe in fatigues, how he chowed down. And an Eastern European woman named Margo, and how she pampered my five-year-old daughter while stuffing buttered bread in her handbag.

I learned that for all the differences, these people were more like me than I had known. The aroma of many was more pungent than I could imagine. A shower at home was a foreign concept. But they ate with the same relish I did. As did the volunteers, who devoured our food and brought home leftovers. The perfect sous chef from the West Indies. The mother who occasionally brought her helpful daughter (at 19, she seemed so old!). The high schooler with the handsome face and a bottomless capacity for doing dishes over the capacious sink.

At the end of four years, I had a personal crisis that made it impossible for me to cook at the kitchen anymore. I had a book on deadline that I couldn’t write. Financial woes I couldn’t solve. And finally a meltdown from which I needed time to recover.

I approached a fellow volunteer, a writer named Alex who had spent many dinners at Monday Night Hospitality slinging meatloaf with me. Could he possibly take over as head of the kitchen? Immediately?

Surprised but gracious, he said yes.

He comes highly praised, does novelist Alexander Chee.

His debut novel The New York Times called “haunting,” and gifted, poetic and elegant are also words that have been offered on Alex’s behalf. His new book The Queen of the Night comes out in February of next year from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt – in it, Alex tells the story of an opera singer in 1882 Paris and a secret past she had sought to keep hidden.

All this time later, the soup kitchen behind me, I realize something important. I wasn’t the only one who could do this thing of feeding folks with dignity. I was just a writer, cooking for an army of 100 people with no place else to go. The “spiritual nourishment” was mine as much as theirs.

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Filed under Cooking, Fiction, History, Home, Jean Zimmerman, Publishing

May 21, 2013 · 8:34 pm

Meatpacking Amble

We started and ended our Manhattan amble in the Meatpacking District, that venerable neighborhood from around 14^th down to Gansevoort Street that has been totally gentrified in recent years. This is a place that in 1900 had 250 slaughterhouses and packing plants lining its streets. The paving stones under the butchers’ awnings used to actually lie slick with lard and blood when I first came to New York in the late ’70s. Now Diane von Furstenberg has a building of refurbished brick with lavender windows and a penthouse that looks like a geodesic glass bubble on top, and there are eateries like Bubby’s opening that pride themselves on their farm-to-table cuisine.

The sign announcing the imminent arrival of the joint puts across it’s down home, wry message: Defending the American Table (also, we steal recipes from grandmas.)

With illustrations around the side that already seem faded as a pair of farmer’s Levi’s.

It reminded me of a sign we saw up in also gentrifying Morningside Heights recently, on Broadway near 125th Street.

There was a man on scaffolding outside and we weren’t sure whether he was taking down an old sign or putting up a new one with an exquisitely vintage look. The sign down below left us equally confused.

Maybe you can figure it out.

Anyway, on from the Meatpacking District to see a movie on Houston Street, at the northern lip of Soho. “What Maisie Knew” is based on a novella written by Henry James in 1897 about a classic dysfunctional family. Sad, sad, film.

It features Julianne Moore as a self-absorbed rock vocalist married to a self-absorbed art dealer played by Steve Koogan. At the heart of the story is their seven-year-old daughter, Maisie, who is being torn apart by the breakup of her parents’ marriage. The two adults literally abandon her places – the story takes place in contemporary Manhattan — when they tire of her. I wondered what James would have made of the profane adaptation.

The novelist was a theater aficionado and aspiring playwright. Couldn’t he be satisfied with being the most brilliant prose stylist of his day? He never got the reception on the boards that he so very much wanted. Movies might really have rocked his world. We think of him as fusty now, but Edith Wharton writes in her memoir A Backward Glance about how much James loved to “motor.” Yes, driving in the new, perpetually breaking-down automobiles, feeling the wind in his pate, was just about his favorite thing.

Making our way north, we grabbed a schnitzel and a wurst at a little German joint. En route, we passed the phenomenon that has been around longer than anything else I know in New York: the basketball game at West 4^th Street and Sixth Avenue, also known as the Cage.

Anybody can play and there are fierce tournaments. The supports for the baskets are actually padded with duct tape to mitigate injury to players who stuff.

Under the High Line, where we had earlier found parking (who said it’s tough to get along in New York? Come with me, I have the best parking karma in the city) night had fallen.

A park so beautiful that even Manhattanites are impressed, the High Line was once quite different. An old elevated freight line for meat packers, built under the aegis of Robert Moses, it ran through the buildings of the district, raised up above the streets underneath. The rail bed had long since fallen on hard times when I first saw it decades ago. It was basically a long, winding, dispiriting field of syringes, condoms and weeds. Some brilliant dreamers fought to bring it back to life as a park planted throughout with native plants, meticulously cared for, ingeniously designed. The first section of the park opened in 2009. Now people throng to it day and night, both to walk and to lounge on the massive wooden chaise lounges found along its length.

Gil climbed the stairs and waved down from the dark trees above. I was content looking up past the old, weathered, still-extant butcher’s awning at the winking moon.

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May 18, 2013 · 11:55 am

Lettuce F*****g Entertain You

Thug politely pledged to test out my biscuit recipe when I contacted him/her/them, that is as soon as the dust settled. (His actual words: I love biscuits and will try your shit out.) Thug Kitchen has after all experienced a viral explosion since the novel cooking site launched in October. Critics call it profane, and profane blended with strawberries and avocados seems to produce a bit of gastric discomfort. Is this some kind of trick? Are we being had?

I call the combination real.

What is it with men and cooking? Top chefs are almost uniformly male. Backyard barbeque-meisters, natch. Boys learn from their fathers.

But those who are not chefs of reality TV or summer parties, the men who man the stove day in, day out, making family meals, making solitary meals, prepping the onions and boiling the rice – still sadly a minority. Even Brooklyn foodies cook less than their wives.

Thug cooks for dogs. Sweet potato jerky treats that Oliver would relish.

The press will tell you different, that hordes of men are cooking now. After all, the men of the fourth estate are different, and they write what they know. Men have of course increased their kitchen activity since, say, the 50s and 60s, since women gave them a shove with the spatula and said, Do it. Make me proud in here. A wee bit. (And truth be told, younger men are stepping up. A 25-year study of Gen Xers found that men were making two-thirds of the meals married women were. Not too shabby.)

Some men today deliver.

Gil, for example, makes a mean green chili. Okay, that’s a typical boy preserve. He can also deliver a whole wheat pizza topped by homemade tomato sauce, fresh mozzarella, baby spinach, bacon and olives. With aplomb. Delicious, I had three slices yesterday.

Both my brothers have achieved local fame over the years for their culinary expertise. I still remember the roast goose Andy put on the Christmas table a couple of years back, crisp and done to perfection, but he also puts his kindergartener’s dinner on family table every day. Peter assembles a crazy raw kale salad. Don’t know where they got the gene, as the sum total of our father’s skill is a perfect hard-cooked egg.

Thug Kitchen unites macho and grilled-romaine-with-a-touch-of-seasalt as easily as a stroll in some vegan park. Saveur called it the number one food blog around.

“ANYBODY CAN GRILL A FUCKING BURGER OR HOTDOG. Elevate your grilling game with something that simpleminded motherfuckers wouldn’t even consider. Grilling veggies is some classy shit and it only takes a few minutes. I am not talking about some played out portabella burger that tastes like a dirty sponge. Eggplant, artichokes, okra, lettuce: all that shit can be thrown on the grill and are in peak form during the spring and summer. People are guaranteed to come correct next time you invite them over. Raise the fucking bar and grill to impress.”

It doesn’t need to be Oscar Mayer any more.

Thug actually is vegan, if you scroll down the site to take a better look, past the blast of biting admonitory locution. No fathers in man-aprons grilling steaks here. Instead, dishes a lady would love: lavender lemonade: “Calm Your Bitch Ass down like a Boss-Drink Some Fucking Flowers” runs the heading, and the recipe advises, “This is some good shit to make when you are feeling bougie as fuck.” Roasted strawberry and coconut salad inspires this heading: “Eat a Goddamn Salad. Fuck it-Eat Ten Then Brag about it.” But TK told the NY Daily News, “You don’t have to be fancy to give a f— about what you eat.”

Thug Kitchen loves moms.

Thug appears to be a collective. I got a note framed in the royal we. (They’re going out with a book, as soon as they get a proposal together. A book we ladies can share with the gentlemen in our lives.) If so, they must be having a blast, sucking down their strawberry-grapefruit margaritas and talking trash.

Can I come out to L.A. for dinner? I clean up nice and I bet you do too.

Grapefruit Guacamole – recipe courtesy of Thug Kitchen

GRAPEFRUIT GUACAMOLE

5 ripe avocados

2 medium grapefruits or 1 big son of a bitch

¼ cup chopped cilantro

¼ cup chopped red onion

juice of 1 lime (about 2 tablespoons)

¼ teaspoon salt

Take the pit out of the avocados and scoop out all the green flesh into a large bowl. Mash it up with fork. I like my guacamole chunky but do what you gotta do. Cut the grapefruit up into segments like you would cut an orange. Remove the peel and cut the segments into pieces about the size of a nickel. Put all the grapefruit into the bowl with the avocado. Add the cilantro, red onion, lime juice, and salt and mix it all up. Taste it and add more shit until you like it. Serve immediately or chill it for a bit. I’m not gonna tell you how to eat guacamole, just follow your fucking heart.

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Filed under Cooking, Dogs, Home, Jean Zimmerman, Publishing, Writers, Writing

May 14, 2013 · 1:57 pm

A Quiche That Stands Up and Salutes

Does anyone besides me bake quiche anymore? Or has this delicious standby been totally ruined? By familiarity, by bad versions, by a laugh line that will never be forgotten?

Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche was a long time ago – 1982, actually. Funny guy Bruce Fierstein popularized the notion that consuming eggs and cream in a crust was unmasculine. Chopping onions, properly women’s work. Ha ha. Or should it be?

It was a time when the idea of men’s and women’s intertwining roles was particularly fraught. Women had, it seemed, gone on the warpath, demanding equal pay, control over their reproductive lives, a break once in a while in their household routines. I worked as an editor at a think tank called Catalyst, where we encountered business male executives’ overheated fears over the inroads of female executives. Scaling the corporate ladder or any other was in the pop cultural air.

There were men who alligned themselves with women. I love this example of how some men came together in 1979 to share the good fight.

Slate’s Rebecca Onion writes that the newsletter’s authors were “group of men based in Berkeley, Calif., who were working for the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment. The sheet was sent to interested activists throughout the late 1970s, as the feminist movement worked to secure the support of enough states to win the amendment’s permanent attachment to the Constitution.”

The group’s acronym stood for Men Allied Nationally for the Equal Rights Amendment. It’s goal, evidently, was “summed up in a motto that mixed arguments based on morality, feasibility, and ego: ‘Stake, Place, Chance, and Strokes.'”

Quiche eaters all, natch. Some were probably even quiche bakers. Quel horreur!

The B-52’s do a mean Quiche Lorraine. It’s about a little dog

dyed dark green.

About two inches tall, with a strawberry blonde fall;

Sunglasses and a bonnet

and designer jeans with appliques on it?

My point, and I do have one… as Ellen Degeneres used to say. In my house, the quiches happen to be my domain, while Gil does the donuts, the paninis and the best molasses cookies ever.

I haven’t given up on quiche. It’s a historic entree, having originated once upon a time not in France, actually, but in Germany, and English versions of custard in pastry go back to the 15^th century. The original rustic Quiche Lorraine was dished up in a cast iron pan. So ours is a connection to a simpler time. I actually impressed myself by making it for the first time in high school, in home ec class.

And it meets my leftovers standard. The egg in a crust you heat up in the microwave the day after (or the day after that) is almost as good as you had it hot from the oven that first night. Crucial in a household of writers who might not want to pause mid-sentence to create a meal from scratch.

Julia Child has been my guide in developing a great recipe, but I don’t have patience with her doorstop tomes.

I think the 107-page Julia’s Kitchen Wisdom: Essential Techniques and Recipes From a Lifetime of Cooking has just about all the information and recipes that are needed to square you away with your pots and pans. I especially like one of the tenets of her quiche recipe: you measure out the proper amount of eggs to cream by cracking the egg in a half-cup measure and filling it with the dairy, continuing in the same way until you get the amount of liquid required.

This reminds me of another egg trick I thought was great when I saw it in a movie. When a recipe calls for a whole egg, you sklurp your finger around the inside of the shell after breaking it to make sure you don’t waste any bit of precious white.

I make what historically has been called a Quiche Lorraine, with eggs, bacon and cream, except I always use cheese, and usually add some kind of leafy greens or broccoli – to make it healthy (!). My crust recipe is tried and true, and I always use leaf lard if I have some in the house.

The recipe may be mustily retro, but let’s call it classic cool. The quiche. A recipe for men and women equally.

A Noble Quiche

Crust:

1 ½ c flour (half and half white and whole wheat)

¼ c butter

1 ½ T crisco (or lard)

½ c cold water

pinch salt

Cut together butter, shortening and flour and salt, then mix in water with a fork; chill an hour.

Filling:

4 eggs

Half and half to fill up a half cup for every egg (you can use heavy cream for a more custard-like or milk for a more omelette-like consistency)

(plus extra eggs/cream as needed to fill your pie plate)

1 large onion, sliced thin

6 slices crisp bacon, crumbled

1 ½-2 c gruyere, shredded

greens or broccolli to taste, steamed

Fry bacon, remove. Fry onion til golden in same pan.

Whisk eggs and cream together.

Lay onions then bacon then cheese in pie shell. Pour in egg/cream mixture. Grind some pepper on top.

Bake at 375 for 45 minutes.

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Filed under Cooking, History, Home, Jean Zimmerman, Writing

May 12, 2013 · 9:08 am

Thug Kitchen: Lavender Lemonade

From my friends at Thug Kitchen, one of the best cooking sites, comes this perfect Mother’s Day refresher.

Thug Kitchen: Five simple fucking ingredients in this bitch….

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Filed under Cooking, Home

May 11, 2013 · 10:54 pm

It Makes Perfect Sense

About to be Mother’s Day. The night before, Saturday night, we go into Manhattan just as the thunder starts to roll. Fissures of lightning streak the sky.

As is my mother’s prerogative, I let Gil do the driving.

We check out a movie not for the weak of stomach.

Then take dinner at Katz’s, founded in 1888 on Houston Street, its threshold long worn-out.

There is really no reason to go anywhere in New York for dinner except Katz’s.

You wait on line for your carver to finish your sandwich and he pushes a hot little slice of pastrami across the counter at you. It makes perfect sense. A morsel to whet your appetite.

David has worked his station since ’02.

The pickles are luscious. Green tomato, sour dill and new.

But they can’t match the pastrami. As Sinead O’Connor sang, Nothing compares to you.

Anyone can sit at the Where Harry Met Sally table. We did. It makes sense to do it if you can.

Outside I was surprised to see a sign on the side of the building that read WURST FABRIC.

Was Katz once in the textile business?  Michael Stern, the road food genius, schooled me.  Fabric is an Americanization of the Yiddish term meaning home-made.

Our pre-mom’s day Gastro-crawl continued on 23rd St. right next door to the Chelsea Hotel, scene of so much poetry and debauch over the years.

Now we have the Donut Plant. Gourmet donuts done right.  Proctology cushions covered with fabric (home-made in yiddish) covered the wall.

Perfect coffee, Mother’s Day specials.

Rose petals in donuts. Could it be a joke?  Yes, but it made a weird kind of sense.

There were in fact petals baked into the dough. I was transported to the Middle Ages. Or the middle of India and its rosewater delicacies.  I don’t know if biting into one made me feel more maternal or just trendy. Anyway, I liked it.

Right across the street, the historic home of the Communist Party in America, 235 west 23 street, was hosting a musical extravaganza.  A group called Legacy Women performed Afro Dominican palo and Afro Puerto Rican bomba for a rapt, folky audience that shushed us numerous times.

These women rocked. One song they announced was for mothers, and they belted out the chorus, mama-ah.  Another sounded like they were singing put your pants on in some native dialect.

Hitting the street again, the rain had all cleared away, leaving things new.

I looked across the street to the Chelsea Hotel,  now sadly being modernized, made into condos, its art collection all sold off.  I thought of Alejandro Escovedo’s song about the Chelsea, Chelsea Hotel ’78.

It makes no sense, he sings, it makes perfect sense.

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Filed under Art, Cooking, History, Home, Music, Poetry, Writers

May 6, 2013 · 4:11 pm

Lavender and Mud

My mint weathered the winter. In fact, it’s so impossibly bushy already I plan to give it regular haircuts throughout the warm weather and make many pitchers of iced tea. Sit in my favorite dilapidated garden chair and watch it grow some more.

Rosemary, sage and the rest are all tucked in place. I put in fringed lavender as well as the commonplace kind. Fringed lavender, also known as French lavender, is the kind you want for butterflies. Also potpourri. And I do want potpourri.

And now my mizuna, radishes, carrots and potatos have sprouted. The potatoes are mucho macha.

And onions. The green of spring onions.

Puts me in mind of Booker T. & the M.G.’s, their Green Onions released on Stax Records in October of 1962. It reached number 33 on the Pop Albums chart in the month of its release but of course is a perennial.

The only sound I can hear now, sitting on my funky old chair next to the potatoes and the onions, is the tiny, crinkling noise of the reeds growing in the marsh. It’s a constant, but you can only hear it if you stay very, very quiet. That and the chip-chip of the cardinals having one of their cardinal parties.

Now if only it would rain. We haven’t had water from the sky in weeks and no one’s sure when it’ll come. A sprinkler’s never the same.

Puts me in mind of these people at The Year of Mud, who make building cob, straw bale and timber frame houses look impossibly glamorous. I might actually like to build a cob oven, like they are giving courses on this coming summer. Gil’s been wanting to bake pizza outdoors. Biscuits from the cob? Sounds impressive. A little smoky, though? With Ziggy as a guide, they’d probably be perfect.

Ziggy (his real name is Brian Liloia, but that’s what he’s called) documented his time building a cob house called ‘Gobcobatron’ at a place named Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage, in Rutland, Missouri.

He says, “I think I have it figured out. I’ve boiled life down to the most elemental action. As I see it now, life is basically an on-going series of moving objects around.” He’s talking about moving clay and sand and straw onto a foundation, moving wood into the shape of a roof, moving soil and compost to make a garden bed, etc.

His place sounds and looks amazing, outside and in.

There might have been mud in the making of it, but now this wonderful dwelling is pristine.

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Filed under Cooking, Home, Jean Zimmerman, Nature

May 5, 2013 · 1:22 pm

All This and a Hand-Crafted Marshmallow Recipe

The day after. All that’s left of the pig roast are the party tulips and the dogwood stars.

And a drawing by doting 6-year-old Jasper for winsome three-year-old Simone.

Oliver was locked away until the waning hours, when he was let out in all his growly glory, with a muzzle and a leash, and petted by the braver partygoers. Says something about the loving spirit of this particular gathering.

The love reached its apotheosis in the marshmallows.

I was almost too busy replenishing food on the buffet to have a conversation, let alone to document anything, and the hours of the pig roast sailed by in something of a haze. Josefa gave me this photo of my salmon, thickly coated with rich horseradish mayonnaise and scales of radish and cucumber. The fish, not the photo.

The signs we put up around the property are taken down.

The Spa, of course, which Gil had dug out of the swamp. As far as I know, unutilized for a mud bath. ‘Round the Horn, where you could hike around a promontory, past the pachysandra groves, and wind up back at the Cabin.

Human gatherings are so ephemeral. Did you talk to so-and-so? No? I had an intimate conversation with him I didn’t intend upon. Little epiphanies, most of them forgotten by the next morning.

Gary found a skull.

Rat? Rabbit?

The music boomed, especially near the speaker, which hovered in a window above the food. George Jones’ essential question: Who’s gonna chop my baby’s kindling when I’m gone? Who indeed?

The rum was drained.

You would think that after the huge smoked brisket, the salmon and the cripy pig, the fava beans and asparagus with Pecorino, and the spicy blue cheese slaw, people’s stomachs would be full to bursting.

Gil, down in the Pit, pulled the pig off the fire at just the right golden moment.

And the biscuits. I took a gamble on whole wheat biscuits this time. I think they disappeared even before the rest of the platters were set down. A sparkling day builds an appetite. And shoe golf.

That’s Josefa’s picture. Somehow she caught the shoe flying through the air on its way to the hole, a plastic bin set some 10 yards away. Far enough to make people look ridiculous taking a shot at it. Even college students lowered themselves to try.

But the marshmallows. It was as if people had never seen a marshmallow before. As if they had never seen food before. You can make those? I never knew.

We had cut young green branches up in the woods yesterday morning, and now all the adults were acting like kids, standing over the fire and toasting Gil’s home-made marshmallows with glee.

Everyone had drips of white around their mouths.

Grown men made s’mores. (Gil concocted his version of home-made graham crackers, too.) We layered in slivers of salted caramels.

Our friend Stu left us with a mix-cd that has party tunes, including Ray Wylie Hubbard with the lyrics: Only two things that money can’t buy, that’s true love and home-grown tomatos. I would add a third, hand-crafted marshmallows.

Hand-Crafted Marshmallows

6 packages gelatin (the unflavored kind, GoBio has an organic product)

2 cups icewater

3 cups granulated sugar

2 cups corn syrup (Wholesome Sweeteners organic brand has a little vanilla in it)

½ teaspoon salt

2 tsp vanilla extract

½ cup confectioners sugar

½ cup cornstarch

(Optional flavorings: almond extract, lavender drops, orange extract, etc)

In the bowl of an electric mixer with a whisk attachment combine the gelatin with half the ice water.

Combine in a saucepan: the rest of the ice water, the sugar and the salt. Using a candy thermometer, cook until mixture reaches 240 degrees (soft-ball stage). Remove from heat, pour into bowl with gelatin and whisk on slow speed to combine. Increase speed to high and whisk for fifteen minutes. Add vanilla and optional flavorings at end and whisk for a minute to combine.

Pour into greased 9 x 13 pan that’s also well dusted bottom and sides with the half-and-half mixture of the confectioners sugar and cornstarch. Spread evenly with a lightly oiled spatula. Let stand uncovered overnight.

Turn out onto cutting board dusted with the confectioners sugar and cornstarch. Cut into cubes with a pizza wheel dusted with the confectioners sugar and cornstarch. Dust with the confectioners sugar and cornstarch (mix up more if necessary).

Makes about sixty marshmallows. Enough for a roiling pig roast.

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Filed under Cooking, Dogs, Home, Jean Zimmerman, Music, Nature, Photography

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