•greenbush•

When I lived in Madison, my favorite dinner was bread and olive oil. There was a restaurant called "Greenbush Bar," under the Italian Workman's Club on Regent Street. Low lights, candles, and a regularly-changing scotch and wine menu. We couldn't stay away. The staff treated us with decency, giving us tastes of new things when we were skeptical, even though we were obviously twenty-somethings with barely enough money to make rent. Their food was basic and delicious. Addictive. One famously creamy linguini had flakes of smoked trout and a high lemon flair. My custom was to agonize over the menu until I finally ordered a small salad and a loaf of the white peasant bread they baked in house. The olive oil came on a little white plate, and a shaker of parmesan sat on every table. Mound the cheese in the center of the pool, swipe the bread into the mouth. Repeat until you need a new loaf. It was the best, most divine, most devastating comfort food I've ever obsessed about, and I just recreated it by accident. Here's the recipe: a Sweet Batard from Acme Bread Company, Spectrum Organic Mediterranean Olive Oil, and shredded Asiago in bulk from my beloved Co-op. That combo will set you back a bit more than a nightcap at Greenbush, but the olive oil is a proper investment. It's drinkable, and holds up to high heat. xox

•food boast•

In case I get whine-y and complain, let it be known that today was a good food day. Pumpkin bread was baked with coconut oil & delivered to friends. A persimmon was et. After a run, two soft eggs went down with water. "Soft egg" is what Penn calls a soft-boiled egg, and I like the convention. Okra was breaded with korma spices (and whole coriander!) and fried in olive oil whilst I endured the final presidential debate on the radio, and warmed up Christmas soup. Note: actual soup frozen in December is especially delightful to discover in October. Ten months, well-spent! A pumpkin beer from Uinta Brewing Company helped a great deal. Dessert was a pomegranate.

Today, the forecast was tornadoes. Nicely averted.  xox

•fall•

I don't care how August you are. If the night air smells of molasses cookies and a kindergartener just had his first day of school, then, my friend, you're Fall. Nail in the coffin was that split pomegranate on the curb this evening. File that under "seasonally appropriate." Autumn starts now.

What Matters

Up late working to the sound of crickets, frogs, and the night breeze, and I suddenly felt the need to note it here. Just to document the moment, the loveliness, the gratitude I feel for it, though my body hurts, and the week's been hard, and I'm way behind on way too many things.

But none of the hard stuff really matters.

I have a screen door that leads to a world of nighttime spring breezes, the sounds of crickets and frogs. Tonight, when I was unable to concentrate (for the quadrillionth time of late), I got up and spent a few hours making myself food for the week: I washed and dried two heads of lettuce so it would be ready for salads. I hard boiled eggs and baked some chicken. I roasted tiny new potatoes with carrot chunks and cauliflower, salt and olive oil. I made tomato-y curried lentils to eat with toasted cashews and yogurt and chutney. I cut up three apples and doused them with lemon to keep them from browning. I talked on the phone with one of my most beloved people, and it was more like having her in the kitchen with me while I worked--sometimes, we were just there, on the phone, not talking, each absorbed in our own moment, but present with one another nonetheless. There I was, nourished in all ways.

My dogs had a good day. This afternoon, I set up an extension cord and took my computer to the little table on the back patio, where I sat and worked for several hours while my dogs ran around the enormous yard with my landlords' two dogs. They're the best of friends now; they all get excited when my dogs arrive each Monday morning--quivery doggie play-date joy. Today, one dog went to the water bowl and the rest followed, and then each dog drank from the bowl in turn, while the other three stood around politely waiting their turns--they almost queued up; it was hilarious.

One of my landlords just cleared an enormous space out back so that I can start a garden--he's planning to have it tilled for me when the ground is dry enough. My other landlord, his wife, is planning to grow a couple of tomato plants out there too, but mainly, the space will be mine this summer, and I hope I can grow enough to supply them with plenty of produce all season long (not really much of a challenge around these parts, where everything grows like weeds).

My life is filled with small joys that are actually enormous, and I'm surrounded by beauty all the time. I have good work to do, and people who love me with all their hearts. And people I love with all my heart. And the hard stuff is hard, and it makes me tired, and my body often hurts.

And none of the hard stuff really matters.

The lizard who indulged me by sitting quite still
for a portrait session for quite a long time.

Bunny (baby? it was very small) in the front yard late yesterday

afternoon. Edited all soft and romantic-like, because...BUNNY.

•might as well•

The phrase "might as well be" is on the block.  What a funny group of words.  To mean nearly.  Not, but almost.  I peer closer.  I prod with my knife's tip.  This might as well be champagne.  There might as well be stars encircling my head.  She might as well be a ghost.  I'm not in an eviscerating mood, but if I do a small dice, I get "might" and "as well."  A further mincing makes ownership-- "my" from "might."  I like to take things for my own.  The size of the cut does matter; tone changes taste.  Well.  Let's pair these words, then, with a thick slice of choice.  Flip!  Sizzle, sizzle.  What might as well be, now, is.  This, first day of 2012, is perfect.  

(Tahoe National Forest, December 30.  Might as well have been January.)

•shh, shh, little kitty•

Well, shame on me. Nothing soothes the soul like actually voicing one's concerns--and having them put to rest. I spoke with the director of Penn's preschool, and not only are those offending un-foods *not* being served, they probably aren't even the property of the school. Ahem. < chagrin! >


This is a developing story... but I wanted to do a teeny post to make up for completely flying off the handle on Friday. So charged, these issues of food in our day and age. So available, these bloggish tools! (So, too, like a double-edged sword.) I am humbled by the kindness of others who, in spite of my hot-headedness, took the time to comment, to take my side, and to subtly tell me to stand down. xox

•poison apple•

They're baa-aack! And just in time for Halloween! To my utter dismay and horror, Otterpops and Skippy Peanut Butter have returned to Penn's preschool. So now, since I'm no longer on Prozac, do the gloves come off? Do I merely protest by making all of Penn's snacks again, or do I pull him from school? Do I get all the parents to sign a petition, entitled For The Love Of Common Sense, Please Don't Feed Our Children Poison And Tell Then It's Snack?

I asked an afternoon teacher today, point-blank: does she feed them Otterpops. Occasionally, she said. I clarified: Instead of snack? I mean, as snack? She hesitated. Yes... as a treat. When it's hot.

We live at the mouth of the Central Valley in California. It's hot. A lot. You're telling me when the temperature spikes, instead of the usual afternoon offering of water, milk, plus green beans or cheese, they're substituting a 25-calorie frozen stick of high fructose corn syrup and chemically-derived food coloring? What about vodka? Would they feed them vodka, if I put that in the snack-donation box?

I'm seriously heartsick over this. I don't know what to do. Are my only options to remove Penn from the school, or alienate him by Penn-only snacks, or take money I don't have and buy all the right snacks, crowding as best I can everyone else out of that damn snack-donation box? Just the idea of having to have another conversation with the director about why this is important, or even why I won't let Penn eat that garbage, makes me want to crawl into bed, cover my head, and sob for my son's future. How on earth is a child to learn healthy habits, if school teaches you that brightly-colored water is food? Unschooling should not be the only sane option. xox

•not your mama's apple•

Photos taken at Full Belly Farm on October 1, 2011.



A half-assed Happy-o-versary to us, to us! And to you lovely readers, thank you. Our first post was also about pomegranates... in a way... :) Thanks for making all of this possible.

Pomegranates. Not my native apple. A seedy, grainy, medieval French pain in your ass? Maybe. (I know a secret for opening these. Think water birth.) When I was growing up in New Hampshire* in the 80s, pomegranates were expensive and misunderstood. Now they grow like weeds on the walk to and from Penn's preschool.

What's weird to a native New Englander is that *apples* don't do well in Northern California. Macintosh at the grocer are bruised beyond recognition, and there are no real tart options beyond Granny Smith, and her tarted-up cousin, the (unbelievably hued, yes) Pink Pearl. Pomegranates, on the other hand, grow magnificently in the Mediterranean clime. They're everywhere, including hedgerows meant as boarders. Throw-aways. In the same way rosemary is grown as a landscape feature, pomegranates are low-maintenance shrubs. They don't like much water. They love sun. And pomegranates are ripest when they split (and look over-ripe). Kinda a cool signal: they flash their ruby jewels to the world. That means you need to live near a tree, for close monitoring. Lest you miss it. (All the poms in the pictures above are still ripening. Note the one with the hexagonal flower opened, vs. the closed-flower orbs...)

Now, a simple recipe:

Maple Pomegranate Cocktail

rum
cognac
pomegranate juice
maple syrup (grade b works)
a lime
a few pomegranate arils, if you have the means

In a shaker, put 3 ice cubes. Cover with one ounce cognac, one ounce rum, about a half-cup of pomegranate juice, and 1-2 teaspoons Grade B maple syrup. Squeeze a quarter of a lime o'er top, and shake the beeejeeezus out of it for at least 7 seconds. Strain into an up-glass, with pomegranate seeds in the bottom. It is worth making one serving at a time, but I'm sure a pitchered approach would work.

Currently in the oven: granola with pomegranate pulp. There's a company based in Sacramento that makes granola using fruit juice in place of oil, and I've wanted to try that at home ever since I sampled the results. Pomegranate juice yeilds a lot of pulp: the chown up bits of aril and seed casings, plus bits of juice. What a perfect reason to stir with oats, maple syrup, vanilla and...?? I don't think I included anything else. Although pecans would have been nice. Stay tuned! Update: that granola was spectacular. Next time, I'll add unsweetened coconut!

xox

Gluten-Free Challah

L'shanah tovah! I really should have posted this earlier, but whatever--challah is necessary year-round, right? I also wish I had a picture of this bread for you. Perhaps I'll bake some again soon and take a pretty picture to place riiiiiiiight...

here.

While I don't usually blog about food, it's a pretty big part of my life. I teach cooking classes and have been creating recipes for those classes for over a decade. And this recipe is certainly seasonally appropriate.

I created this challah for one of my gluten-free bread classes. If you're a regular baker of gluten-free bread, do try this trick of adding protein powder to your recipes--about the ratio I use here should do the trick. I happen to use rice protein of this brand, and they happen not to be paying me to say so. You want the plain stuff--not chocolate or vanilla or whatever. You will not believe the difference it makes in your bread recipes. All the structural benefit of the bean flours, without the awful taste! Yay! Softer, lighter, moister, breadier bread.

This particular recipe does rely heavily on starches, and I get questions about that all the time. But my general theory on gluten-free baking is this: Baked goods are a treat. They are not meant to be all-the-time food--not even if you can eat glutenous baked goods. Is it possible to make healthier versions of baked goods? Absolutely, and I do have a lovely seeded teff-buckwheat bread that contains less starch and more whole grain goodness. I'll post that at some point.

But while I don't follow a gluten-free diet myself, I believe it's sometimes important to have a slice of bread/a cookie/a cake that tastes precisely like what you remember from before you went gluten free (and I think that's especially important with a food such as challah, which is so rich in ritual, spiritual, and cultural associations). And so that's what I aim for in my recipes--I want people who don't follow a gluten-free diet to want to eat my food. And they do! But often, in the baking style I generally use, that means adding some starches to get the right texture. This challah is very close to my favorite all-purpose (wheat) flour based challah recipe in both flavor and texture.

You could definitely modify this recipe to include more whole grain flours, or some flax meal, or almond meal, etc. Please feel free to do so! Just understand that your results will be quite different from what this recipe will yield as written.

(And incidentally, if you'd like to be able to take challah and make the blessing when making this bread, or to say hamotzi over it before a meal, technically you'll need to incorporate [certified gluten-free] oat flour into the recipe. My advice would be to substitute the oat flour for both the millet and sorghum, though you'll need to decide for yourself/with your rabbi if that's enough quantity for this recipe to meet the requirement. That one substitution shouldn't change the bread drastically. Again, you can increase the amount of oat flour, but that will change the bread drastically. It's a trade-off. And not to get too halachically specific, but because the texture of this bread "dough" is really much more like a cake or quick bread batter, that may affect your decision on whether or not challah should even be taken. And if I'm forgetting any other critical information people might want to know, do feel free to chime in in the comments.)

Now, if you'd like a great source for entirely wholesome, entirely starch and grain free, and very well-done gluten-free recipes--baked goods and much more--check out Elana's Pantry. Elana's recipes are fantastic, and she has several delicious looking cookbooks out now. (And if you're in need of more holiday recipes, Elana also happens to be Jewish, and she often puts together mouthwatering recipe lists for the holidays. I love to look at her blog for festive inspiration.)

I generally bake this recipe in circular cake pans, though you can, of course, use a loaf pan. Better still, check out this braided loaf pan! And this circular braided pan, perfect for Rosh Hashanah! (Once again, these people don't know me from Eve, and they couldn't care less that I think their loaf pans are adorable.) I haven't got one, but it really is the perfect solution, since it's absolutely impossible to braid this bread for real.

(That, by the way, makes me sad. I get a tremendous amount of pleasure and spiritual sustenance from the kneading and forming of regular challah, and I wish that were an option in the gluten-free world. Alas, it's either edible gluten-free challah, or braidable gluten-free challah, but I'm afraid the two seem to be mutually exclusive.)

If you have questions, do feel free to ask them in the comments. You can certainly also use the blog email there off to the left-hand side, but you're much more likely to get a timely response from the comment section, as I don't check that email every day.

Gluten-Free Challah

1 cup water

a pinch of sugar

2 1/4 teaspoons yeast

1/4 cup sorghum flour

1/4 cup millet flour

1/2 cup plain, unflavored rice (or other) protein powder

2 cups cornstarch

1 cup tapioca starch

1 1/4 teaspoons salt

4 teaspoons xanthan gum

2 teaspoons baking soda

1/4 cup brown sugar

4 eggs (plus an extra to be used as an egg wash)

2 egg yolks

1/4 cup melted butter or Earth Balance Buttery Sticks (for a meat meal, or in case of dairy sensitivity)

5 tablespoons honey

3 tablespoons vinegar

Optional: 2 teaspoons lecithin granules

Optional: a healthy pinch of saffron, crumbled in with wet ingredients

Optional: Raisins, chocolate chips, etc. as you prefer.

Grease and flour two medium-small loaf or cake pans.You can also line the pans with parchment paper cut to fit them--this will guarantee that the bread won't stick, though it's not generally a problem if you've greased and floured them thoroughly.

Stir the pinch of sugar into the water and sprinkle the yeast on top. Set aside to proof for about five to ten minutes. Proofing--or giving the yeast a chance to prove that it's still alive--is important! Make certain that your yeast is bubbly/foamy and alive, or your bread will not rise. I'd encourage you to incorporate this step into all your yeast recipes--some recipes will tell you to stir the dry yeast granules directly into the dry ingredients, but I don't recommend that, since you won't be able to tell if your yeast is dead.

Meanwhile, mix all the dry ingredients together in a small bowl.

Mix the wet ingredients in the bowl of a heavy-duty mixer (including lecithin and saffron if using). Add the yeast water, and stir everything together.

Using the paddle attachment, and with the mixer on a LOW speed, begin to add the dry ingredients a little at a time. When you’ve added all the dry ingredients, mix at high speed for two to three minutes. (Add a little more water or flour at this point if you think the bread needs it.) If you’d like to add raisins or other add-ins, now is the time to stir them in.

Spoon the batter into the greased pans and gently smooth the top of the loaf with wet fingers. Brush the top of the loaf with an egg wash—one egg beaten together with a few teaspoons water. (You can also sprinkle the top with sesame seeds if you like.) Cover the bread with well oiled plastic wrap, and allow it to rise until it has almost doubled in bulk—about an hour, but if your house is on the cooler side, it may take longer.

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees about five minutes before the bread is ready to go in. Bake the loaf for about 15 minutes, then turn the oven down to 375 degrees. Bake the loaf until the crust is nicely browned and the loaf sounds kind of hollow when you tap it on the bottom. If the loaf seems to be browning too much, you can cover it with a piece of aluminum foil. (This loaf may fall slightly in the middle as it cools, but it will still be delicious.)

•if it's from the curb, is it ok?•

It's true, I loathe dyed confections. But sometimes things come into my life, and I have a hard time batting them away. (Penn loves the word "dumpster," and I am sort of proud.) Plus. A little neon dino-sprinkle goes a loooooong way.

Happy Friday, everyone! Share a link to your moment in the comments? And pour a little out for Amanda Blake Soule, who came up with the share-a-photo-every-friday idea. xox

•a very merry HA birthday•

Turns out the age for which you must get the birthday cake right is 4. Any variation on the theme, no matter how delicious, will be rejected--nay, rewarded!--with apocalypse now, toddler edition. Complete with hyperventilation, and outbursts so simultaneously piteous and hilarious you will be unable to stop laughing. Which won't help matters.
But there are no strawberries!!!! < sob sob sob >
Where is the....fraaaaaawwwww-ssssssting!!!!?
The earnestness. The confusion. The terrifying (if it weren't so adorable) rage. To be fair, it was his last night of toddlerdom. Perhaps he realized he ought to go out in style.

What I did next was, perhaps, not my finest flourish. But it had been a week of napless, back-to-school madness. And we were celebrating with an all-adult birthday dinner (save the guest of honor, of course) in our friend's extremely echo-y, amplifying living room. Oh, honey, you thought cake and candles were tonight? Actually, that's tomorrow. We'll have cake with frosting and strawberries and candles on your real birthday (thankgoditsnottoday). Tonight's cake is just a nice dessert for after dinner... That's right. I groveled.

And then I regrouped.


The next morning, I gathered my triage materials. Frozen cake, leftover frosting a friend made, strawberries, jam, old cereal bag for piping on accents. Things were looking good. And then I started to go a little nuts. Turns out, there are a great many images on the Interwebs of various "bus cakes." Inspiring. Could I free-style a bus that would meet with the child's approval? Could I, in fact, half-ass it?


Fortunately, my ambition knows no bounds. And I had a few hours o' free time.



I started to lose it a little with these strawberry "bushes." Not an essential feature, but...



It worked in my favor. My son appreciated the sugary offering, and accepted the whole monstrosity as a "fire bus." He even forgave its chocolate exterior. (Note to parents: white frosting is like gold. If you attempt a four-year-old's birthday cake without enough of this stuff, tread lightly and prepare for war.)

Turns out, if it's worth doing, it's worth over-doing. Within half-assed reason, of course. xox


©2011 Lis Harvey

•when up is down and down is up•

In spite of the relative bubble of wealth, education and privilege that insulates our little town of Davis, my son's preschool served Otterpops instead of afternoon snack last week. Yesterday, one of his teachers told my husband she believes raw cashews are poisonous (their shells are, but they don't make the raw nut toxic). I'm starting to get a little disheartened.

If you read no other blogpost for the rest of the year, please look at this brilliant one from KristenM at FoodRenegade.com.

•sparkle•

Sometimes, the glass makes the cocktail. In this case, it was both the glass and the rhubarb-raspberry gastrique (with a little help from rum, seltzer and tarragon). I have a weakness for shiny things. xox

•my maine point•

I kinda grew up here. I'm a vacationer, sure, but I have been for 33 years. It makes for some interesting emotions.

In the past 10 years or so, I've transitioned into a forager. From a folksinger to a mother to a grocery-store employee, sure, but really: from a citizen to a forager. It started with second-hand clothes. Then expanded into appliances, instruments, bread and vegetables. Then it was fruit. Now, it's shellfish. And I'm right back where I started, on the coast of New England.

Today was the first day of sun on our Maine vacation, and the toddler responded by puking all day (possibly because he caught a rotovirus from his cousin Ruby). I responded by picking up a couple of chicken lobsters at the local lunch n lobster--a place I'm shocked I didn't take advantage of until now. $5.99 a pound isn't bad for a half mile down the road.


Cooked the lobsters.


Cracked and ate them.

Popped their shells in with some chives, chipotles, and white wine. What amounts to 1.5 cups of liquid is now in the fridge, waiting for me to come home tomorrow with an adequate amount of cream and sherry. Cross your fingers. :)

Meanwhile, I'm experimenting with mussels. Are they actually good, foraged from the cove in which you sleep? Hmm... a blog post from a quick search recommended (!?) manky-smelling mussels, specifically from coves in Maine. And repeat rinses with salted fresh water. We shall see what happens. (Gotta love a guy who calls himself a "DB" (douchebag).)


The puking toddler sleeps.
The mussels, sans wine (because I drank it), are forthcoming. xox

•high fructose preschool•

Warning, Gentle Readers. I'm on a tear. Emotionally-charged food issues ahead.


It shouldn't be this hard...

Last year, when Penn started preschool, I had some misgivings about the food he was being offered at snack-times. Those misgivings have blossomed into concrete-and-rebar road blocks over the course of the past 48 hours. What finally pushed me over the edge? Not sure. The Otter Pop incident was last month, and I spied the Skippy Peanut Butter on the counter a couple weeks back. The preschool kitchen is no stranger to trans-fat and sugar-saturated muffins, cookies, etc. I've sat on my hands all year, comfortable to be privately horrified, so why now? Maybe I'm just that slow. I suppose I finally took a minute to think. Anyway--today I brought in some "snack alternatives" for Penn, in a little container. Almonds, apriums, bananas to offer, instead of... what, exactly? This morning, "crackers" and "peanut butter" were set out for snack. Sounds benign, but I want Penn to take a break from Goldfish and Jif. (I cannot believe I have to say this out loud, or out blog, or whatever/wtF.) So now. I'm tasked with figuring out how to convey a set of standards, a set of guidelines, to help his (otherwise amazing) teachers keep him from eating junk. Don't feed Penn anything that isn't a whole food... don't let him have anything with added sugar... are these clear-cut enough parameters? I okayed cheese. But now that I actually think about this, I'm not sure cheese means cheese to everyone. If Fla-Vor-Ice made it through the castle wall, what's to stop Cheez Whiz? *strangled scream of frustration*

Does Penn ever eat processed food? Sure. But we, his parents, prefer to say when, how, and what. Unmitigated sugar intake leads to cravings for sugar, which leads to poor relationships with food. Poor food management is the reason for obesity (in 1/3 of Americans these days), inattentiveness, and myriad other maladies. The percentage of obese children in this country is higher than that of adults. Blah blah, everyone knows this, blah--but that means it's on us to teach the littles about food. It's our job to provide them with healthy stuff to munch. (Am I crazy? I feel like I'm in the twilight zone, with everyone insisting day is night and night is day.) Here we are, by the way, living in an educated, affluent part of California. Penn's school is private, rather expensive, and the kind of place that ought to know better than to serve kids a giant tube of frozen water and high fructose corn syrup. (Right???) Why, my boss rightly asks--why, oh, why are they feeding the children poison?

I don't know. And I suspect I'm going to make myself really unpopular, least of all with my poor son (who loves sugar just as much as the next human being). THIS SUCKS. It has been so much easier to roll my eyes and kvetch and not actually do anything. Packing date rolls and almonds and little carrot-chip-and-peanut butter sandwiches isn't hard to do, but it singles Penn out. And me. And now we're the hippies (we're the hippies?? Are you kidding me??) Did I mention I think this is ridiculous? On the bright side, the kid. My kid. Loves fruit and vegetables. He will survive. And it's summer. Apriums, berries, snap peas. Figs to the rescue.

This should be easy. This should be a no-brainer. I should be pulling myself up by the boot-straps. I should be in fine form (mountain pose, grin-and-bear-it, come on, Harv). I'm not.

This feels about as good as standing in the middle of the highway at dusk. Blinking, stupid, too scared to run or cry. xox


What I'm up against.

•sick day•

We should be miserable.


He had to miss "sharing circle."
I've gone a whole week without wily coworkers.
But the sun has been so strong...



There were blackberries today! I know, I know. These are not quite. But only because we'd snozzled every dark one, before I managed to retrieve the camera.

We did pause before the first, to offer a few words. To the Universe, I explained.
"I love you," said Penn, to the berry. Then he gobbled it.
xox

•rhubarb•

Rum-Rhubarb Sauce
(a light topping for pancakes, yogurt, toast... or stick a spoonful in the center of your unbaked muffins, for a surprise!)



Prep:

Wash one thick, ruby stalk of rhubarb, making sure all leaves are removed. Chop into various sizes (think nickel, penny, quarter) until you have one cup of fruit.

Rinse two kumquats and quarter them lengthwise; poke out the seeds with a paring knife. Chop coarsely.

Toss rhubarb and kumquat with 1/2 cup sugar and a 1/4 teaspoon salt in a small saucepan. Stir in 1/3 cup water, bring to gentle boil and simmer for 10 minutes. Add a teaspoon of rum. Stir, taste, adjust, serve.



Breakdown:
1 cup rhubarb
2 kumquats
1/2 cup sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon rum

I've never been a mixer of strawberries and rhubarb. I like the latter by itself and the former raw. You? xox


Pacific Star Gardens...

•tickle tickle•

"{this moment}: A Friday ritual. A single photo - no words..."
Tagging along with Amanda Blake Soule today. xox

•California disbelievin', take two•

By what dumb luck did I arrive here, exactly?

Remind me, because I'm too dazzled by the shades of pink and orange and gold to know much of anything this week.

xox

The Way Home

At midnight, in a gentle rain, I snipped cuttings from the giant geranium in my old front yard. Inside the house, I gave an overgrown pathos a haircut. A few snips from a giant jade plant, bits that will never be missed.

Back at the house where I'm staying, I placed the cuttings carefully in water, the jars a small jumble of sizes and shapes, some with labels on. Anything looks beautiful with a plant in it. I placed the jars on a small wooden book shelf--the lightweight, fold-out kind I've loved since college. This particular shelf holds classic vegetarian cookbooks, not my copies, but many that I own.

There's something about this setup that reminds me of who I am, what I love. What I've always loved: The unexpected contrast of green leaves and flowers in a glass jar with a scrappy old label. The simple shelving I can carry by myself if I have to. Vegetarian cookbooks. The whole thing has a homey, earthy, Laurel's Kitchen vibe that soothes me. A wood stove would complete the image--maybe topped by a Dutch oven full of soup or stew. Maybe the Turkish Spinach and Lentil from Sundays at Moosewood, yes? Loaves of bread and jars of homemade yogurt off to the side, rising and fermenting in the warmth, each according to its preference.

Now the plants will grow new roots, and so will I. One pot of stew, one loaf of bread, one jumble-jarred batch of flowers or yogurt at a time.