The Leaves that are Yellow :: {Frontier Pie}

The Very Strange Tree

We have a very strange tree in our back yard.  I think it's a baby tree because it has a slender trunk, but the leaves are the size of umbrellas.  I've tried to find out what kind of tree it is, but the closest picture I can find is in a Dr. Seuss book.  The leaves are already starting to turn yellowish brown and wrinkle up a bit -- a sure reminder that it is, indeed, September, if only the beginning. 

We had a mulberry tree in our backyard when I was growing up.  It was a good for nothing tree, which killed the grass with its stinking, fermenting berries in the summer.  The most dreaded summer chore (second only to deadheading my mother's sticky petunias) was sweeping, nay, smearing, the fallen berries from the center garden path.  You had to hold your breath while you did it, to save yourself from the smell of rotten fruit.  To further recommend this tree, it lost its leaves all at once.  They didn't even change color first.  One day they were on the tree, green and waxy looking, and then next morning they'd all be yellow and on the grass.  My brother and I would be sent out that very day to rake them.  They weren't lovely and crisp like autumn leaves should be, nor did they rake into a big puffy pile of wonderful colors.  They stuck to the rake because they were still moist, they smelled like old socks, and they sat in a great heavy heap on the grass.

My autumn fun not to be stymied by this tree, however, I always jumped into the soggy pile and happily flopped about.  Every year, my brother went lumbering off to tinker with something more interesting, leaving me to imagine the leaves into confetti, a cloud, a dune.

The last fall I ever jumped in the leaves was the year my brother came lumbering back, apparently having found nothing more important to do other than shatter my illusions.  "Phe," he reported with a convincing amount of conjured wisdom and self importance, "There are probably slugs stuck to the bottom of those leaves.  They'll go down your shirt, and then you'll have slugs down your shirt."  And he went lumbering off, smiling, I'm sure, as I catapulted myself out of the leaves and started shimmying and squealing.

This fall both of us are doing, more or less, the things we did then.  My brother is starting a weekly radio talk show on NPR where he'll relay facts to the listeners about where they live and what they might want to do about it.  It probably won't have much to do with slugs, but knowing my brother and his limitless capacity to find interesting nuggets of life everywhere you least expect it, slugs could very well be featured.  As for me, I'm still imagining things, but this time I'm going to do something about it.  See?  Not much has changed.

Frontier Pie

I figure if shepherd's pie is made with lamb and cottage pie with beef, then if you use bison meat it must be....frontier pie!!  Of course, you can adapt this recipe to use any kind of ground meat.  Bison is becoming increasingly more available, tastes great, is lower in fat than beef, and is grass-fed and humanely raised.

{serves at least two very hungry grown-ups and one toddler, with leftovers}

Coat the bottom of your pot or large skillet (a deep cast iron skillet works brilliantly) with olive oil and place it over medium to medium-high heat.  While the oil is heating, chop one onion, two stalks of celery, and two large carrots into small dice (about 1/4 inch squares).  Add this to your hot oil and saute, stirring frequently, until your veggies start to develop some nice color and your onions go translucent.  Strip the leaves off about five twigs of fresh thyme or a teaspoonful of dried thyme and add this to the pan.  Season with salt and pepper and empty the contents of the pan into a bowl and reserve.  Add a bit more oil to your pan and when it's hot add one pound of ground bison meat.  Season with salt, pepper, and a few splashes of Worcestershire sauce, breaking up the meat with your wooden spoon and moving it around the pan until it's nice and browned.  You might need to turn the heat up a bit to get some nice color on your bison.  When it's lovely and brown, add your veggies back to the pan, and a giant heaping spoonful of tomato paste, and stir and fry to caramelize everything.  Sprinkle over a heaping tablespoon of flour, and cook this, stirring, for a minute or so.  Now add your liquid.  You'll need about a cup and a half of wine, broth, water, beer, or a mixture.  I used wine and broth.  Turn the heat to low and simmer while you make your potatoes. Taste and season with salt, pepper, or more Worcestershire sauce if you need to.

Now, I had an epiphany about potatoes as they are concerned with pies like this.  You need a fairly dry mash so that it holds up as a nice crust when you serve it, but you don't want the mash to be dry for lack of unctuous dairy and butter.  Here's my solution: bake (don't boil!) your potatoes.  You can either do this ahead in the oven, or at the last minute in the microwave.  I never use the microwave for real cooking, but in this case it's absolutely forgivable -- just remember to flip your potatoes half-way through cooking.  You'll need about 4 large russet potatoes for this dish.  After you've baked or microwaved them, cut them in half and scoop the flesh into a large bowl.  Add about 2/3 of a stick of butter, a splash or two of milk, and two heaping spoons of sour cream and mash until smooth.  Season with salt and pepper, taste, and adjust.  The consistency of these potatoes should still be quite dry.  They should look almost unappetizing.

Transfer your meat to an ovenproof dish (if you've used cast iron, you're all set!) and dollop the potatoes on top.  Smash them around until they're more or less even and all the meat is covered.  Now take the tines of a fork and rough up the top surface -- this will give you lovely little crunchy bits.  Put a few little pats of butter on top.

Bake in a 375 degree oven until everything is bubbly and the top is beginning to brown, about 15 minutes.  If the top isn't browning well, you can broil it for a few minutes at the end of the cooking time.  If you're more patient than I am, let this sit for about 10 minutes after you pull it out of the oven -- it will hold together better while you're serving.

The rosy mist of memory :: {chick pea curry}

Yesterday the weather was Roman.  The sunlight seemed more golden, the air had a whisper of dust in it, and the the crushed basil leaves in my hand didn't hurt either.  I love it when the conditions are just right so that if I shut my eyes, I can go somewhere else.  Not that I didn't want to be in my garden with the basil leaves, but that I might rather be in Rome.  The layers of history, the vivid people, the fabulous food.  In Rome, poppies grow out of rocks.  It's an impossibly magnificent place.

We took Ducky with us on our trip and he posed in front of all the big attractions.  We hope that someday Heidi will be amused by these pictures we took on her behalf.

It's nice to know that I've now reached an age where I can be in a Less Than Ideal Situation and be absolutely certain that this is something I'm going to laugh about later.  To be certain about this almost allows me to laugh about the Situation in the moment.  Almost.  The particular situation I'm thinking of now is the unfortunate hotel I booked for our stay in Rome during our we-lived-in-England-for-two-years-and-haven't-yet-been-to-the-main-continent-and-will-go-even-though-we-are-expecting-a-baby-and-it's-financially-foolish trip.  All I saw, after hours of scouring the internet for hotels, was "Vittorio Emanuele," and thinking it was that big monument with the horses on top (that you seem to always end up at no matter where you go), and thinking that this was just where we wanted to be, I booked it.  Well.  It turns out that there's also a very dodgy street, several miles away from the monument, that shares the same name.  This Vittorio fellow must have been pretty influential.

We walked for those several miles until we got there.  I was pregnant and my husband was carrying all the bags (and would have been carrying me, too, if I'd had my way).  All we'd eaten was some salami and bread on the train from Switzerland.  Tired, achy, famished, hot, and (not least of all) confused, we arrived at our hotel.  To call it a hotel is an overstatement, but they were calling it a hotel, so for the sake of consistency, I'll call it one, too.  The graffiti smeared doors had been broken into several times, it seemed, as evidenced by the big chunks that were missing and the business end of several locks that were dangling down.  Somehow the door was, in fact, locked, so we selected what we thought might be our hotel from the very large list of indiscernible door bell buttons.  The door unlatched and we entered a large entry way that smelled of minerals and worse.  Ahead of us was the kind of elevator that should have someone there to help you operate it, with cages and unmarked buttons.

Somehow we ended up where we were supposed to be, even though the alarmed look on the concierge's face, followed by a lot of bellowing in a foreign language (not of a remotely Italian persuasion), might have made one think otherwise.  We waited in the "lobby" for what seemed like ages, and what was in fact almost an hour, until the flushed concierge re-emerged and showed us to our room.

Now, in Europe, you book rooms by the number of people, so, naturally, I had booked a double room.  What we ended up in was a room with a double bed in it.  I'm not sure how they managed to fit a double bed in a room which had clearly not been intended for one, because as we opened the door, we nearly fell on top of it.  On the other side of the bed was a wall with a window (through which we could see laundry that had no business hanging on a clothesline) and under the window was a Hole.  This place wasn't a hole-in-the-wall.  It had a hole in the wall.  This was a Less Than Ideal Situation.

Nonetheless, we stayed there.  There were nightly gripes concerning the quality of the place, or lack thereof, and we felt totally robbed.  We both knew that we would look back on this, one day, and have a great laugh about it, but we certainly weren't laughing then, as we gripped our passports in our sleep.

Chick Pea Curry with Potatoes and Green Beans

When it comes to spices, buy them at an ethnic grocery.  You'll get big bags of spices for a fraction of the price, and you can keep them in your freezer so they stay nice and fresh.  I like to grind my own spices in an old coffee grinder because you really do get a better flavor out of them.  If you've only got one coffee grinder, you can easily get the spice smell out of it by pulsing a piece of soft bread a few times.

You can use any curry powder of your choosing here, but here is my recipe (adapted from Mark Bittman's hot curry powder recipe in How to Cook Everything).  Combine the following in your coffee grinder and grind til you have a nice powder: 2 small dried chilies (or the equivalent amount of red pepper flakes), 1 tablespoon black peppercorns, 1 tablespoon coriander seeds, 1 teaspoon cumin seeds, 1 teaspoon fennel seeds.  Add 1 tablespoon ground turmeric and 1 tablespoon ground ginger and pulse til mixed.  Store in a jar or a ziploc bag.

Coat the bottom of your pot or large skillet with coconut oil or any mild oil and place it over medium to medium-high heat.  While the oil is heating, chop one onion, 3 cloves of garlic, a half-thumb-sized piece of ginger, and half a chile of some kind (I've been known to keep pickled jalapenos in the fridge for emergencies), and add it to the oil when it is hot.  Stir and fry this, making sure nothing burns, while you dice two or three potatoes and trim and cut into thirds three handfuls of green beans (or use frozen peas).  When the onion is translucent and the ginger and garlic are fragrant, add one heaping soup-spoonful of curry powder.  Stir this, making sure it doesn't burn, until it is very fragrant.  After a minute or so, add half a can of tomatoes with their juice, breaking up the tomatoes with your hands as you add them.  Stir this around until the tomato juice begins to cook down.  Add your potatoes, a can of chick peas (drained and rinsed), and a can of coconut milk or chick pea can-ful of water or stock.  Turn the heat to low and partially cover your pan.  When the potatoes are almost tender, add your green beans, uncover and cook til your green beans are tender and the liquid has reduced to the desired consistency.  If you didn't use coconut milk, stir in three big spoonfuls of yogurt and continue to cook down for a minute or two.  Season to taste with salt, pepper or cayenne, and lemon juice.  Serve on top of rice, or not, garnished with yogurt (optional) and chopped cilantro (not optional for me, but it might be for you).

Sometimes we over-think things :: {lentil salad}

A one-minute sketch of a fleeting moment.

Some people go to spas to have their bodies wrapped in seaweed.  I went into the backyard, put my toddler in a tub of water and propped my feet up on the side of it.  Now, the Sometimes Goal of mothering is to relax with a cup of tea and know that you won't have to spring into action, leaving your tea to get cold.  Usually, a tub of water does the trick, but to be doubly sure that Heidi was as enraptured with this activity as always, I needed to show her that there were as yet undiscovered properties of water.  What we needed to learn about water today (aside from the well-known fact that water makes an excellent cup of hot tea) was that things can float on it.  I scattered a handful of sage leaves from the nearby bush into the water.  The silver-green boats bobbed across the surface.  She plucked one from the surface with careful pudgy fingers and draped it across my foot.  One by one, the leaves made their way from the water to my legs and then back again.  I watched her play with sage in water until the slice of light that was bathing us began to shrink and it was time to fix dinner.

Sometimes we over-think things.  Watching our childrens' rapidly expanding minds make sense of the world around them is dizzying and wondrous and gives us the daunting task of guiding, nurturing, and stimulating.  We spend too much time worrying that we're stunting the growing brains in our charge, and forget that everything we need is right around us.  All we need to do remember to look at everything with fresh eyes like they do; float a leaf in water, put a dried bean in an empty salt shaker, put a tea cozy on your head, have your legs wrapped in sage leaves.

Lentil Salad, lots of ways

Turns out, a bag of dried lentils makes a LOT of lentils.  If you made too many, you can freeze them and have them ready to throw into soup later.  Not only are lentils cheap and healthy, but they're one of the most "green" foods you can eat -- it doesn't cost the environment much to grow them.  The trick for keeping blandness at bay is a delicious dressing and getting different textures into the mix.  

Boil half a bag of brown lentils according to the package directions (15-20 minutes, usually).  When they're as tender as you like, drain them, and dress them with one of the following while they're still warm.  They'll absorb the flavors best this way.  Each of the following will dress about a third of your batch of lentils.

French-style: In an empty jam jar, shake together a small spoon of Dijon mustard, a crushed garlic clove, a pinch of salt, a grind of pepper, 5 spoons of olive oil, 2 spoons of red wine vinegar, and a splash of maple syrup. Dress the lentils with this, and a diced carrot, 2 diced radishes, 2 or 3 sliced scallions, a big handful of chopped parsley, and a twig or two of thyme leaves.  You can eat this as is, or serve it on a bed of greens with some toasted walnuts and crumbled goat's cheese on top.

 North African-style: In an empty jam jar, shake together a big spoonful of yogurt, 2 small spoons of lemon juice, 2 small spoons of olive oil, a small pinch each of cinnamon and ginger, two big pinches each of coriander and cumin, a pinch of red pepper flakes, and a crushed garlic clove, salt, and pepper.  Dress the lentils with this, and any of the following: diced carrot, half a diced zucchini or cucumber, some chopped roasted red pepper (or not roasted), a dozen or so halved cherry tomatoes, finely chopped red onion, and a handful of chopped mint.   You could easily mix in some cooked grains here, too, like cous cous or quinoa. 

 Sweet and Sour: In an empty jam jar, shake together a small spoon of Dijon mustard, a splash of apple juice, a large glob of honey, 2 spoons of apple cider vinegar, 5 spoons of olive oil, a small pinch of allspice, salt, and pepper.  Dress the lentils with this, and toss with some diced apple, sauteed sweet potato chunks, toasted walnuts, crumbled goat's cheese, and crumbled bacon.  (Or use the rendered bacon drippings in place of your olive oil.).  I'd serve this warm, on a bed of spinach.

Things left undone :: {refried beans}

One of my sincerest regrets is not finishing my creative non-fiction class in college.  Regret is probably the wrong word, since withdrawing from that semester was not a bad decision, but a necessary one, as I was unfocused and, to boot, had tonsils which had become veritable anthills in my throat, complete with a civilization of hardy bacteria.  I had to get those cut out, and also had to find focus (which I eventually did, through a year away from school spent interning at a great graphic design firm and learning to tango dance).  Life went on, I went back to school, studied art, got married, lived in England, had a baby.  I never got to finish my story about Clarence, though, and I think about it all the time.  Really, quite often.

The assignment was to interview a more-or-less stranger, and then write about whatever we talked about.  As a Very Shy Person, this was a horrifying task.  I finally settled on Clarence, our neighbor across the street, who was an easy target because I had seen him around, and, more importantly, he was even shyer than I was.  I had my mother set up the interview.  Clarence was a real life Carson McCuller's character: a bit trampled by life (and wife, I daresay), with hobbies that existed out of his generation and vocation, and with a smile like a pleased little boy.  We especially saw the smile when he would offer us whole Shoo-fly pies, convinced that somewhere along the line we had told him that it was our favorite.  (It wasn't.).

Clarence and I lived on the street between Apple Tree Alley and Pear Tree Alley. (image from google maps).

We sat at his tidy kitchen table, me with a notepad, and both of us with a sugary drink.  The conversation was halting at first, me unsure of what I should ask, and he baffled at the idea that he would have anything interesting to say.  I don't remember asking him for his life story, but he gave it to me, because it was probably the first time in his life that he guessed someone might be asking.  He told tales of cooking on the back of a truck during World War II, how he started knitting, his special technique for apple pies.  He went on and on, occasionally getting up to tend to the canary in the window or to bring his wife a plate of food.  Clarence never knew that he was a great character, really his own person.  He just gently went through life, taking care of his rotund and infirm wife, and one day quietly passed away.  I wish my notes from his narrative hadn't been lost and that I could share his apple pie recipe with you.  It wasn't the best apple pie, but Clarence had spent years perfecting it, and that was Something.

 Best-ever Refried Beans

This isn't Clarence's apple pie recipe, but something equally as humble, and good whenever you need something comforting.  This is my favorite way to make refried beans.  It's probably not at all traditional, and that doesn't bother me a whit.

 {makes enough for about two bean-centric meals for two grown-ups and a toddler}

If you have time and foresight, you can put about 2/3 of a bag of black or pinto beans in your slow cooker with some water and salt and cook them til they're very tender (you will be mashing them, after all).  If you don't do this, use one big can or two small cans of beans.  I think black are the best here, but pintos are a close second.

Chop an onion, a 4 inch piece of Spanish-style chorizo, and a poblano pepper into smallish bits and add it to a medium-hot pan with a pretty generous coating of neutral oil.  You're not sweating the onions here, but properly stirring and frying them.  The chorizo fat is going to render out and the paprika in the chorizo is going to turn everything a very appetizing red color.  When you're almost happy with the tenderness of your onions (you don't want them crunchy), add a clove or two of chopped garlic.  Stir that around, being careful not to let the garlic burn.  Turn the heat down a bit and add a generous teaspoon* of cumin.  Stir it around to get it a bit toasty and then add your beans.  Add a small amount of water, bring everything to a bubble and start mashing the beans with a potato masher.  Add more water if you need to, just to get the consistency of a nice pasty bean mash.  Taste for salt, and if the flavor needs a bit of brightening, add a squirt of lime (or lemon, in a pinch).  I always end up adding lime, because I love it so.

Ways to use these beans:

• Piled in a bowl, garnished with cilantro, jalapenos, crumbled cheese, hot sauce, sour cream, or whatever you fancy.  Eat with spoon while playing with your baby on the floor.
• My new favorite burrito is a spin on a Mark Bittman recipe: beans, wilted kale (Try it! You don't even need to bother seasoning the kale because the beans are so awesome.), cheese, and salsa.
• My other favorite burrito is a spin on something the Hollins University cafeteria used to serve up (inspiration can be found anywhere): beans, mashed sweet potato, cheese, salsa, sour cream.  If you happen to bake a few sweet potatoes at the beginning of the week to have on hand, this comes together so quickly.
• As a side dish with whatever, even breakfast!

 * This I have corrected the amount of cumin because an unfortunate reader with very large hands said that a "palmful of cumin" rendered his beans inedible.  Thanks for the correction!  We're really only aiming for about a teaspoon and a half.

Yearning :: {green pesto}

A typical summer evening in 1984.

When you've lived in more than one place, you always miss the other place when you're not there.  And when you're there, you miss the first place.  I can't think of a time where I've felt such a distinct emptiness, a hole that I know can be filled by being in that first place. That picture up there is where I spent my first six years, playing amongst the lines of drying laundry in the sheep pasture, cooling off in cow fountains, eating purple clover in the meadow, going with my brother to collect the evening milk in our pale green bucket with the red wooden handle, our mother skimming the cream off the top.  The cream tasted like the wildflowers I would gather by the armful everyday. 

One summer evening, when the hills made undulating shadows fall across the meadow, I followed our cat into the apple orchard.  My back toward the house and my face toward the darkening forest, I imagined myself an orphan, miles from home, following this cat as my guide.  I trudged up the hill behind him, the breeze quickening, and a tingle of danger swirling around my insides. The cat leapt up a tree and I huddled at its base, ready to sleep there. I started wondering how cold it would get in the night, if the cat would leave without me, if....and just when my imagination started to get the best of me, I turned around to the winking lights of the farmhouse, and saw the outline of my brother against the lights, swinging the milk bucket in his hands.  "Phe," he shouted, breaking my reverie, "Mama says it's time for dinner."

I know the yearning has gotten especially poignant because I want to share this with my daughter.  I want her to see cows and sheep and wide open spaces everyday.  I want her swimming pool to be a fountain in a pasture, and I want to feed her cream that tastes like flowers.

A word about my cooking, since this is the first food post (from here on out consider yourself warned): I don't follow recipes, and therefore I'm not going to be able to tell you in tablespoons and pounds how much of anything goes into anything.  All you have to do is pay attention to what you're doing, and think about what you're doing, the flavors, the textures, etc., and you'll be fine.  Really being present when you cook is what makes it so enjoyable and rewarding, anyway.  Enjoy this part of your day.

Green Pesto with Whole Wheat Pasta and Zucchini

Think about pesto this way: you know how in the winter you use up all the odds and ends in your fridge in a big pot of soup?  What vegetable soup is to winter, pesto is to summer.  Think beyond the basil, parm, pine nut version and use (almost) whatever's in your fridge.  Throw some vegetables in the pasta pot like the Italians do.  Is there a better reason for doing anything?

{Serves at least one adult and a toddler.  Easily doubles/triples.}

Put your big pot of pasta water on to boil.  Salt it.

Now make your pesto.  I had some spinach that I needed to use up, and I have a huge shrub of neglected basil in a pot by my kitchen door. You'll need three generous handfuls of green stuff. Rinse it and toss it in your food processor/hand blender cup/mortar and pestle. Don't worry about drying it off because the water actually makes it nice and creamy. We'll add more water later, in fact. When you're selecting your greens, keep your flavors and pungency in mind. Mint, for example, is delicious in pesto, but you'll want it at about a 1:2 or 3 ratio to something else, like arugula, or even peas.  Now throw in a couple cloves of garlic.  I used two small ones.  Next come nuts.  I used a handful of pistachios.  I've also used walnuts to great effect.  I never use pine nuts because I'd rather spend that amount of money on wine.  This line of thinking stops when it comes to Parmesan, though.  Don't bother with anything but the real thing.  If you don't have/want Parmigiano Reggiano, then by all means try something else in your pesto.  Feta would be delicious with the arugula and mint version we were talking about earlier.  You'll need a big handful of cheese, whatever it is.  Add several healthy glugs of olive oil, just enough to get your blades moving through all your ingredients.  Now if your pesto seems dry, add some more olive oil.  Leave it just a bit dry, though, so that we can add some of the pasta water at the end.  The pasta water is the trick.  Taste and add salt if you need it and pepper if you want it.

Your water should be boiling right now.  Add about third of a box of your pasta of choice.  I like the corkscrews because they catch a lot of the pesto.  Some Italians also put a cut up potato or two and green beans in the water to cook with the pasta.  I didn't have either of those things, so I grated half of a medium zucchini which I added raw when I tossed everything together.  Don't overcook your pasta.

Before you drain the pot, get a ladle and add a splash of the pasta water to your pesto.  Give it another pulse to bring everything together.

Toss your pasta and veggies (now would be the time to add raw stuff, like the zucchini I did, or tomatoes would be great, too) with the pesto.  You can serve this with extra cheese on top, or not.

Big fork, little fork.

Page Two

I've always had a problem starting, let alone filling, a beautiful sketchbook, so I bought an ugly one and had a lot more success with it.  I even managed to not tear out a single page.  Since the book was homely and really not that special, I started writing inane things down, things I had to do, to not forget.  Bad ideas, and some good ones, too.  The Homely Book went everywhere with me.  It took me a year to fill it, and now when I page through it, between the garlic sketch and the pretty coffee stain, lovely remembrances of everyday life crop up.  But the book itself was ugly.  I took issue with this.

The next sketchbook I bought was beautiful.  I spent about 45 minutes choosing it, waffling between the utilitarian ones with scratchy paper that I knew I could fill and the exquisite one that I wanted to fill.  I brought the New Book home and felt its quiet pages.  I fiddled with the ribbon that tied it shut and wondered if I had made a mistake.

What I wanted to see when I opened up the New Book was this:

Three Studies of a Dancer by Edgar Degas

so I left that first page blank.  A blank page doesn't aspire to be a Degas sketch, afterall.  Before I knew it, I was pages deep in food label musings, lists of imaginary places, sketches of my dream chair, you name it.

Sometimes a grocery list even sneaks in, because, you know, you should never work on an empty stomach.

The First Post