Author Archives: Claire

About Claire

I am a filmmaker, illustrator, graphic designer and copy editor.

Tart with fennel, tomatoes, olives, and many cheeses. And hereing.

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The hereness of dusk in the hereness of my bedroom.

The other day Isaac asked me how to spell “hearing.” Because he and I never give each other a straight answer, I told him h-e-r-e-ing. The more I think about it the more I like the word, and I’ve been thinking about it a lot. I woke up in the middle of the night recently and felt perplexed. I thought about all of the places people live, all over the world. I imagined you could cut away the sides or tops of houses and apartment buildings and tenements and you could see the people inside, living their lives. I hoped they were being kind to each other and their children and their dogs, but I middle-of-the-night feared that many were not. I was bewildered by the thought that I could be anywhere, but I am here, in the same small city I’ve lived in for 20 years.

It bears repeating: it’s been an odd odd year. We were all stuck in the same place, our own space, our here. We were relentlessly here, relentlessly hereing. I think (and write) so much about time passing, about marking it and being aware of it. It’s mildly discombobulating to think about space and place as well. And small wonder that after a year of hereing we’re imagining other places and visiting them in our dreams.

All of this hereing conjured the phrase “hereness of dusk,” which has been in my mind ever since. It is, of course, from Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, and is from one of the most beautiful passages of literature I have ever read.

…as though even here in the filtering dusk, here beneath the deep indigo sky, here, alive with looping swifts and darting moths, here in the hereness of the night not yet lighted by the moon that looms blood-red behind the chapel like a fallen sun, its radiance shedding not upon the here-dusk of twittering bats, nor on the there-night of cricket and whippoorwill, but focused short-rayed upon our place of convergence;

…And my mind rushing for relief away from the spring dusk and flower scents, away from the time-scene of the crucifixion to the time-mood of the birth; from spring-dusk and vespers to the high, clear, lucid moon of winter and snow glinting upon the dwarfed pines where instead of the bells, the organ and the trombone choir speak carols to the distances drifted with snow,… But in the hereness of dusk I am moving toward the doomlike bells through the flowered air, beneath the rising moon.

The narrator knows he is in trouble, that he’s about to be expelled from college, and he imagines himself in another place and another time. But he’s almost painfully (though beautifully) aware of the space and time he is moving through. In these dreamlike moments, the here becomes the now, the space becomes the time. He is occupying, moving through, taking up space in the dusk. He is hereing. It bears repeating, “In the hereness of dusk I am moving toward the doomlike bells through the flowered air, beneath the rising moon.”

From the sublime to the tasty. This is what I made us for my birthday meal. I love love love fennel and it’s not universally adored by the family, but I took the excuse of birthday brattiness to go heavy on the fennel in this one. Fennel, tomatoes, and olives, with herbs from the garden is a perfect combination to me. They are all strong, assertive flavors, but they work beautifully together. I also used several kinds of cheese. The parmesan and cheddar I grated so they blended right in, but the fresh mozzarella and goat cheese I just roughly crumbled, so that you encounter them in pleasant pockets of soft cheesiness throughout the tart.

Here’s Stand by REM. Think about the place that you live, wonder why you haven’t before.

And Places and Spaces by Donald Byrd.

Recipe after the jump!

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1000th Ordinary Post! And semolina ricotta gnocchi

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My favorite field. I would build The Ordinary here.

This is The Ordinary’s 1000th post! That’s 1000 recipes, ramblings, stories, songs, and utter utter nonsense. Looking back over all the posts, it’s funny how The Ordinary has become a place in my imagination, a place of my imagination. The Ordinary has hallways and corridors, underground labyrinths, cobwebbed attics, secret gardens, hopes, follies, a wood between worlds with pools leading to other worlds. Balconies, towers, porches, ramparts–such a view! We have institutes! The Ordinary’s institute for analysis of vocal inflection, The Ordinary’s technological institute for the technological advancement of the study of technology, The Ordinary’s anti-boredom institute, The Ordinary’s institute for cheerfulness studies, an institute devoted entirely to the study of winter light, and an institute entirely devoted to the study of time passing.

It’s a vast expansive place, so full of memories, bewilderingly full of memories. Ghosts and dreams swim through slanted lights and shadows, pockets of coolness and warmth, floating in the ocean near shore at the end of summer.

Of course it’s not any of that. It’s just blog, it’s just an ordinary ordinary blog, which probably shouldn’t have recipes, or should only have recipes and not the ravings of a madwoman. It’s just a bag of words, a shabby bag, worn with so much usage, torn through with the spiky awkwardness of all of the shambles of words thrown into it. Too many words, probably, but here we are, 1000 posts later. I’ve got a birthday next week. I’m between jobs with no hint of a career, we’re all just surfacing from a pandemic. I’ve got a lost-at-sea feeling. But I’m glad to have The Ordinary, for now. I’m grateful for anyone who has taken a minute to read any of the nonsense or try any of the recipes. I hope that someone has discovered a song or a movie or an artist or a good book because of The Ordinary. Thank you, Ordinary Friends!

Here is a playlist I have put together of songs I love to cook to. Songs to get you dancing and singing as you’re standing over pots and pans in your kitchen, or scrubbing pots and pans in your kitchen. I will be adding to this as the songs pull on my coattails, so stay tuned!

I think I may have invented this recipe! I’ve seen (and made) ricotta gnocchi. I’ve seen (and made) semolina gnocchi, but I’ve never seen them combined like this. These are light, tender, and flavorful. They’re simple but a bit of a production. But it’s all fun. You can put them with any kind of sauce you want. I like a light tomato sauce. I think later in the summer I’d do a roasted tomato and pepper sauce. Last night we had them with a hazelnut rosemary white wine sauce, also good, but not as pretty.

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Rag & Bone and The BEST crispy baked tofu

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Those masterful images because complete
Grew in pure mind but out of what began?
A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,
Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,
Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut
Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder’s gone
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.

The last lines of one of Yeats’ last poems. The Circus Animals’ Desertion is a beautiful and sad poem written by an old man regretting his lack of inspiration and imagination. He’s tired, and he claims to have nothing left to say. Old-old-old-old-old and raving.

You learnt a great deal, Louisa, and so did your brother. Ologies of all kinds from morning to night. If there is any ology left of any description, that has not been worn to rags in this house, all I can say is, I hope I shall never hear its name.

Mrs. Gradgrind, on her deathbed, regretting that she has raised her two children with only facts and no imagination.

I can’t remember which reminded me of the other, but for some reason these two works are so beautifully melded in my mind at the moment. I just finished re-reading Hard Times, which I might not have read since middle school. (There’s so much about it that’s deliciously Dickensian, and so much that, I have to admit, I don’t love. For some reason I thought it was one of his earliest works, but it is not.)

In Yeats’ poem, his imagination is represented by circus animals. These inventions and spirits and characters of his creation through most of his life, “Winter and summer till old age began, My circus animals were all on show,” And for Louisa, the circus is a forbidden place of wonder and mystery–a break from the relentless grind of facts…

“He had reached the neutral ground upon the outskirts of the town, which was neither town nor country, and yet was either spoiled, when his ears were invaded by the sound of music.  The clashing and banging band attached to the horse-riding establishment, which had there set up its rest in a wooden pavilion, was in full bray…Phenomenon almost incredible though distinctly seen, what did he then behold but his own metallurgical Louisa, peeping with all her might through a hole in a deal board, and his own mathematical Thomas abasing himself on the ground to catch but a hoof of the graceful equestrian Tyrolean flower-act!

…

‘In the name of wonder, idleness, and folly!’ said Mr. Gradgrind, leading each away by a hand; ‘what do you do here?’

‘Wanted to see what it was like,’ returned Louisa, shortly.

Louisa has an unmanageable mind, as she describes it, she can’t help but wonder and imagine, and see cities in the fire.

‘Have you gone to sleep, Loo?’

‘No, Tom.  I am looking at the fire.’

‘You seem to find more to look at in it than ever I could find,’ said Tom.  ‘Another of the advantages, I suppose, of being a girl. … Except that it is a fire,’ said Tom, ‘it looks to me as stupid and blank as everything else looks.  What do you see in it?  Not a circus?’

‘I don’t see anything in it, Tom, particularly.  But since I have been looking at it, I have been wondering about you and me, grown up.’

‘Wondering again!’ said Tom.

‘I have such unmanageable thoughts,’ returned his sister, ‘that they will wonder.’

But after a lifetime of being discouraged to register anything but facts, her thoughts come out twisted and malformed. She’s tired and frustrated with herself, with everything. She talks about the garden she should have in her heart, “‘How could you give me life, and take from me all the inappreciable things that raise it from the state of conscious death? Where are the graces of my soul? Where are the sentiments of my heart? …What have you done with the garden that should have bloomed once, in this great wilderness here?’ Said louisa as she touched her heart.” 

Yeats has spent a lifetime in the circus of his imaginings, so that the creatures he’s dreamed up become more than real to him. They take all of his love. But now he’s tired, too. Mythology, allegory, dreams, have all left him. He’s lost his ladder, and now lies where all the ladders start, in the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.

It’s strange to me to think about what Louisa would have been like if she’d been allowed to let her restless imagination loose, and if she’d been born a boy–if she’d built the city in the fire into something as full of life and light and as real as Yeats’ circus. It’s strange to think about Yeats YEATS feeling tired and discouraged and lacking in imagination. And of course the world he creates to describe his lack of imagination is the most frighteningly beautiful and inspired lament to loss of beauty and inspiration I can imagine. Because he may have lost the mythology and the lofty imagery, but he hasn’t lost the love or the language, he’s just brought them down to earth. He’s using them to make the ordinary beautiful–rags, bones, broken bottles. And things as extraordinarily ordinary as aging, as remembering. He must be satisfied with his heart.

Here’s Belle and Sebastian with My Wandering Days are Over.

Left the town with the circus boy
The circus boy got lonely
It's summer, and it's sisters song's 
Been written for the lonely

The circus boy is feeling melancholy

This is THE BEST crispy baked tofu in THE WORLD! It’s madly adaptable. I always make it when I make my version of vegetable fried rice, which is a thing Isaac loves. But if you want to just make it like chicken nuggets, you could add a little garlic salt, omit the sesame oil, and dip in bar b que or whatever sauce you like. Also, you can make a sauce to toss these in. I’ve done tamari, honey and chili, but you can go crazy!

There are a couple of things that make this good and easy. One that makes it good is freezing and thawing two times. One time makes it a bit crumbly, but two times makes it not the spongey mess that is normal tofu, and helps it to absorb the marinade. The other is the use of a container to coat the tofu. I do this for pretty much anything I make that’s coated these days. I don’t have patience or counter space for a bowl for flour a bowl for egg a bowl for crumbs kind of production. One big container with a lid (tupperware or otherwise) is all you need. Just don’t shake too vigorously or the tofu will break. And finally this could absolutely be vegan. I add mayonnaise as a sneaky way to make the marinade stick to the tofu, but vegan mayonnaise (or no mayonnaise at all) would probably work just as well. And I add about half an egg because I use the other half for the aforementioned stir fried rice, but I’ve made it without any egg and it’s still good.

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Mulberry Galette

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While I was picking berries for this galette, on a cloudy morning on a busy towpath, a young man rode by on a bicycle. He said hello as if he knew me, which he didn’t, and he asked if I had a cigarette. I said, “Sir, do you not see me here, foraging for berries? Do I look as though I have a cigarette?”

I like the idea of foraging, I like animals who forage, I like stories about foragers, but I rarely forage myself. I did manage to get a good cup and a half of mulberries, though I tossed every third berry to the geese swimming impatiently in the water below.

Some scenes about foragers:

I love his gentle, beautiful footage:

“The important thing is to get so far away from civilization that I can be completely alone…”

I wanted to keep this very simple, so that the flavor of mulberries would shine through. I just added a little sugar and lemon to the berries. The crust is almost like a shortbread cookie crust–just flour, sugar, vanilla, and butter. You can adjust the amounts according to how many berries you manage to forage. As I mentioned, I had about a cup and a half. I washed the berries in a couple of changes of water, and you will have to pick off the little stems from each berry one at a time. Your fingers turn purple, but it’s not unpleasant.

This turned out really tasty. I’m not sure I’ve ever eaten mulberries before. They have a very soft, juicy, indescribable taste, not quite like any other flavor I can think of. This was good with whipped cream lightly sweetened with maple syrup and a dash of vanilla essence.

And here’s Culture with Alone in the Wilderness. What a beauty.

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Using up take-out condiments part 1: Curry takeaway. And some thoughts on birds and dreams.

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There’s a sort of cliché that it’s boring to listen to someone describe their dreams. It seems strange that it should be so, considering dreams exist in a bright, perplexing, logic-defying world. A world where anything and everything is possible; where fears, desires, and memories mingle. A world where you can create anything you can imagine, you can create things you can’t even imagine. A world where you can fly!

I was thinking the other day that it’s a little like that with birdwatching. When you see a certain bird, it seems like the most important moment in the world, and something you should tell everyone about, but maybe nobody wants to hear about it.

So I won’t tell you how every morning in May we wake up early (I do not love waking up early) and we go to a different place so beautiful I feel lucky to live where I do. And we walk slowly, haltingly, stopping at every shifting leaf or burst of song, while the world and the field warm up, and the sun brings out the sharp sweet smells of grass and nettles, multiflora rose and honeysuckle. After so many years we know who to expect in each place, certain birds come back year after year. But in May–in May–the warblers pass through. Where are they coming from? Where are they going? They never tell us! Canada to Mexico? Farther? Some stay with us for the summer, but many only stop by for a day or two, so to see one is remarkable, a bit of grace. They’re small and bright and feisty and busy. They each have their own song, which we to learn again each year, which comes back like the memory of a dream. A yellow warbler sings Sweeta Sweeta Sweet Sweet Sweet from the treetops, a blue winged warbler hides in the dappled leaf-shade, and has a song like a sigh, inhale/exhale.

By mid-June it’s the old familiar birds, we hope to see them–we expect to see them. David loves to hear the wood thrush and the veery, who both have songs you almost feel more than hear. The sound is moving on a different level from any other bird song, from any other sound in the world. I love the indigo bunting. A top-of-the-tree singer. Dark and unremarkable in certain lights, but when the sun hits him just right he’s the most beautiful, glowing, singing blue–shifting cerulean, lapis, indigo. I love anything that changes depending on the way you look at it.

And of course it feels more valuable to see a rarer bird. A blue jay or a cardinal is as pretty as a tanager or an indigo bunting, but we see them all the time, so we’re not as grateful to see them. But maybe we should be. Every starling or pigeon or crow, all of the baby house sparrows using our yard as a playpen, they’re all remarkable creatures: each a perfect combination of feathers, soft warm perfectly-weighted body, and their very own song. They’re all from a bright perplexing world of their own, a world they see from above, a world where they can fly.

Here’s Patti Smith’s dreamy, otherworldly, strange and beautiful Birdland

Do you ever order takeout food, and then the condiments sit in your fridge in their tiny containers? Do you ever think, if there was just some way I could use up that condiment and get it out of my fridge, because I hate throwing away food? Well, here you go! This first installment is for the two condiments you get from an Indian restaurant in America. One is a cilantro-mint sauce, the other is a sweet tangy tamarind sauce. No real recipes here, just suggestions. And these are just to get you thinking about other ways you can use these condiments. Stay tuned for other takeouts, other condiments.

Sort of Guacamole. For the mint & coriander sauce, Smush up a ripe avocado and tip the whole container of sauce in. Mash up. You can add a squeeze of lime, a shake of chili powder, or whatever else you like, but it will be very flavorful as is!

Sort of Raita. Mix plain yogurt and grated cucumber, and tip in the coriander mint sauce. You can add a squeeze of lemon or lime and a dollop of tahini.

Sort of Humus. Blend chickpeas with the tamarind sauce, plus a little olive oil and a smushed clove of garlic. (This actually works for the mint sauce as well.) You can use any beans in your cupboard rather than chickpeas.

The tamarind sauce is delicious mixed in with any kind of vegetarian chili, it gives it a mysterious kick.

Tamarind sauce is good mixed with diced juicy tomatoes, parsley and/or basil, and lots of fresh pepper. Minced garlic, too, if you’re in the mood.

The Affrontery

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We’re going to start a restaurant called “The Affrontery.” It will be a place you can come to be mildly outraged at things you don’t really care about. A place you can loudly air your imaginary grievances. And you can share your outrage with other people who also pretend to be affronted by the same things, and you can build off each others’ offended sensibilities, until your anger starts to feel real to you. And you can all feel clever when you ALL use the exact same phrases, as devoid of meaning as your anger is devoid of feeling, until the words somehow become a homing signal to the outraged. You and your new friends can fuel the fire of your ire by telling each other shocking things you mis-read on social media or half-heard on Fox News, where feeding manufactured outrage is the only form of discourse, the lowest form of discourse. And what begins as mild irritation at people who frighten you because they’re slightly different from you in any way at all, will grow and build into a real terror that civilization as you know and define it, is at risk. Though, of course, you’ll know it’s not true, not nearly true. It’s just that the anger is so addictive, so infectious, the feeling of being included in this gang of self-righteous haters so delicious, that you’ll tell yourself you believe it.

And the waiters will run, screaming, to the exits.

Of course there’s no need to start such an establishment, because we already have the Internet. Maybe people have always been this way; but surely the ease of talking on the internet, the shallowness of connection, and the anonymity of the speaker contribute to the cruelty of the rhetoric. In my own town, people are unfailingly kind when they meet in person, but unnervingly abusive on the community Facebook page. Somehow, reasonable adults are turned into middle school bullies, or maybe it’s just that this sadly-human instinct is given room to grow. The sickening feeling of join-or-become-a-target is depressingly familiar.

Perhaps the saddest thing is that this false fury belittles actual anger. In a grotesque twist, this mock outrage is often directed at people who actually have something to be angry about. Because real anger is powerful, and that is frightening to people trying to cling onto whatever power they feel they are entitled to. Real anger is an agent for change, so they try to subvert it and represent it as hysteria or categorize it as nonsense. Women and other marginalized people recognize this treatment (Side note! “I’m not hysterical, I’m angry,” from the latest episode we’ve watched of my current favorite show. Call My Agent). The anger of the Black Lives Matter movement was seen as revolution or worse. But on January 6th an insurrection fueled by ignorance and affrontery–was described as a pleasant tour through the capitol building by very fine people. The entire history of our flawed nation, so grotesquely, predictably skewed; the false anger that has sustained us for as long as we’ve existed desperately trying to cover the devastating depths of justified anger we are terrified to acknowledge.

I love something I saw recently, a lot of people have seen it, but it’s so beautiful I will share it here. I saw an interview in which these beautiful girls described the incident that inspired them, and they said “We were really angry so we decided to write a song about it.” That’s what we need, really angry people who are angry about actual injustice, to write, sing, paint, and yell about it. Pure anger, pure, joyful, change-the-world anger. (Another side note: I know that anger doesn’t need to be this sweet and beautiful. I know that true righteous anger can be frightening and ugly and still valuable and still beautiful)

Almond-raspberry cake and the mulberry geese

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I walked along, thinking about how I hate hateful people (because I’m self-aware like that) and gathering evidence of hatefulness-for-no reason, in my busy brain. And then, in these thoughts almost myself and all of humanity despising, happly I happened upon **the one thing we’ve all been waiting for, for more than a year.** It’s the mulberry geese: of course it is. Along the towpath there grows a mulberry tree, which somehow stretches through a stone wall to spread its beautiful, mossy, glowing green branches across the canal, almost to the towpath. It creates a beautiful green world, with light from the water casting rippling gold on mossy branches. And when the berries ripen and fall, the geese and ducks gather below and race each other to catch every plump berry that plops into the water. THIS IS MY FAVORITE THING IN THE WORLD RIGHT NOW!

Last year when I was feeling a little down, for all the reasons everyone was feeling down last year plus a few more, I passed the mulberry tree, with its canopy of beautiful leaves and its battalion of hungry waterfowl. I felt, for the first time in a long time, a kind of love for a moment or a place or an inanimate object that actually elevates your spirits. I felt it irrationally and physically in that part of me that people once foolishly described as their heart. I can’t quite explain the reason I love this mulberry tree so much. It is an undeniably pretty part of my favorite place in the world. (my towpath). Isaac says I use the word “love” too much, and I know I do. I know I’m soft in the head and the heart. But I do genuinely love the geese, the ducks, the tree, the berries, the moving light, the water, the time of year, the mossy wall.

Years ago I wrote a children’s story about the mulberry ducks (and illustrated it a bit too!) and there’s something about spring that makes you want to wake up and create things again. The mulberry tree evokes the happiness of writing that story. In the story the young ducks are waiting for the berries to fall until some clever crows show them how to hop on branches and knock the berries off. They get so full they feel ill, and decide to go back to swimming in the cool water, waiting for the berries to fall on their own. On the one hand it could be seen as a condemnation of ingenuity and ambition, which is probably not the best message for children. But I prefer to see it as a mediation on knowing the value of having enough. Of having the patience to allow things to happen in their own time, at their own pace.

But mostly I love the beautiful hopeful gesture of the geese and ducks, waiting for the fruit to drop in a beautiful place on a beautiful day. They look up at you with their sweet faces if you throw the mulberries from the path to them, and they swim in a pretty flurry if you shake the branches so the berries fall. I am currently between jobs and entirely without a career, but I can’t think of a better way to spend my time than swimming beneath the spreading green world of the mulberry tree, waiting for the berries to fall.

I made this cake for our 25th wedding anniversary. It’s like a miniature version of a wedding cake. Very simple, very easy, very pleasing in every way. I made the whole thing in a food processor, which meant that it went quickly and produced a very very smooth, fine-crumbed cake. And you can’t beat raspberry and almond for good flavors. It’s quite a small cake. You might think you won’t be able to slice it across in half, but it does work. It’s almost like a very large soft cookie. It’s good with coffee in the morning, tea in the afternoon, or red wine after dinner.

Here’s Al Green with Here I Am. It’s been in my head for over a week, but I don’t mind, cause it’s so good.

Recipe after the jump.

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Smoked mozzarella and mushroom tart (in a poppyseed buttermilk biscuit crust) & Vaccination Ruminations.

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What’s down the road?

When we got the first shot I felt a little weepy. Partly it was the idea that more than a year of constant stress and worry could be on its way to some sort of resolution. But mostly it was seeing this coordination of humans working, through fear and worry, towards something for the better of each of us and all of us. For as long as I can remember the idea of big groups of people working together towards a common goal has inexplicably made me weepy. Political demonstrations, marching bands marching, cross country meets. I don’t know why it does but it does. And this time the sense of being part of something bigger than any of that, something global, well, that made me a bit of a puddle. We were at a drive-through clinic in an unremarkable suburban community center, but it glowed with all the concerned cheerfulness of the volunteers and nurses and medics and people about to get a shot. I thought about how several of my ongoing worries (Malcolm’s first year of college, the La Liga season) would be resolved by the time we got the second shot, their stories wrapped up: I didn’t know now, but I would then. (Malcolm’s first year of college very very good, the La Liga season not so good, if you’re wondering)

We drove to the second shot through sun-baked fields surrounded by trees shimmering with the songs of cicadas, out of the ground for the first time in 17 years. How the world has changed while they were underground growing, never knowing all the strange busy-ness of people above the ground.

To be honest I was worried about the side effects of the second shot. People would say, “I just started to feel like myself again” when they described recovering from the aches and pains and fatigue, as if being ill made them something other than themselves.

For me the only side effect from either shot was a sore arm and middle-of-the-night thoughts on the strangeness of time passing. The strangeness of the human body, of my own blood moving through my veins. The strangeness of disease, and how it has taken on a personality in this last year, become a character in a story: mercurial, unpredictable, ruthless. The strangeness of medicine, how the things we once believed to be true we no longer do, and the things we now believe one day we won’t. What we worry about now some day we won’t. Old stories will be resolved while new ones are begun, new characters introduced, for everyone, all over the world, humans and cicadas alike. We don’t know now, but one day we will.

Mushroom, ricotta and smoked mozzarella tart with a poppyseed buttermilk biscuit crust.

In my mind I invented this buttermilk biscuit crust. It’s got about half the butter of a regular pastry crust, so in theory it’s a little healthier. It’s more crumbly than flaky, but it’s tender and tasty, and very easy to work with. You can roll it out or just press it into the pan with damp hands. I added ground pepper and poppyseeds to this version because I thought it went well with the smokey cheese and smokey mushrooms, but that’s up to you. If you don’t have buttermilk, you can make substitute milk soured with a bit of lemon or vinegar till it gets lumpy. In the olden days I would roast or pan fry the mushrooms first, but this time I just coated them in olive oil and piled them on top, so they would retain some of their juiciness.

Predictably, this makes me cry.
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Umami Linguini and juvenilia

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Among my juvenilia. I found this cat and mouse I made when I was in high school, maybe? Malcolm made me this Clio and alien sculpture when he was in high school, maybe? Crazy, right?

My parents dropped off 7 boxes full of dusty and brittle testaments to my enduring madness. Letters, full notebooks, empty notebooks, postcards, photographs, random notes from friends, fortune cookie fortunes, yellowing newspaper articles, ticket stubs, an award from my college dorm for being “least likely to be functioning in reality at any given moment.” And stories, so so many stories.

It’s a discombobulating experience to sift through relics of different periods of my life with my boys looking on: Journals about how confused and lonely I was at Isaac’s age, notes and letters from people who were so important to me at Malcolm’s age–people I think about often but never speak to any more. Strange to see myself from outside, in a way, as a person or even a character in the story of my life. I’m so accustomed to the view from inside my head as I wander through life as a collection of worries, hopes, dreams, appetites, and fairly constant confusion. Digging through the layers of my years brings alternating waves of thinking I liked myself as a person and thinking what a precious fool. It’s a disarming feeling of self-consciousness I rarely feel any more, and an odd echo of so many of the questions I had as a youth.

Here’s an excerpt from a sort of journal entry written on January 23, 1989 at 3:36 p.m. “I like people right now. Almost all of them. It is usually all or none. I’m going to stop worrying about being one.”

Here is an excerpt from a fairly long story I wrote. Parts of the very long story are dreadful, parts of it are appealingly Kafka-esque, and I think I like this bit of nonsense that is almost complete unrelated to the rest of the plot, inasmuch as there is a plot at all.

“The weather had changed, and by the time he reached the gates to the park, his coat seemed too heavy and made him feel stodgy. In the park he was suddenly aware of the sighing, sweet, wet smell of thawing things. The strong colorless light made everything stand out so sharply that Paul could almost not bare to look, though he felt a pain at the thought of missing anything touched by this pale glow. Paul began to run, and felt the cool wet leaves slap again his face and tug at his coat. The path grew narrower and more overgrown. Finally Paul stopped and sat on a bench on a muddy bank leading to a pond.

Paul tilted his head back to feel the sun glow through his eyelids. he breathed deeply of the murky pond smell and looked into the bewilderingly, jumpingly blue sky. The only perfect view. As he did so he noticed he was not alone, and he drew his coat together.

Standing not far from the bench and staring at him very intently was a boy with straight back hair, and very pale skin, smoothly patterned with turquoise veins. His eyes were brown and the sun shot back into the small hollow of his iris, resonating beneath the shadow of his lashes.

‘Seek not…’ he began in a clear voice.

‘God, you surprised me!’

‘Seek not to be…’

‘What are you doing here? You really…I didn’t hear you at all.’

‘Seek not to be understood but to understand.’

‘What?’

‘Seek not to be loved but to love.’

“What are you saying?’

‘Dunno.’

‘Did you invent it?’

‘Dunno. No.’ He glanced at Paul from the side of his dark eyes and then looked away quickly again. ‘Look, ducks.’ He stood to climb down to the pond but Paul put a hand around his frail, pale wrist.

‘What did you say? Where did you hear that? What does it mean?’

The boy’s arm became tense in Paul’s hand and he looked down at his feet.

‘Did you say seek to understand? Do you mean that? Someone told me not to understand, to appreciate, perhaps, I was thinking, but you said…do you think it’s true, what you said?’

‘You got any gum?”

And that’s enough of that self-indulgent nonsense! Apologies for the nostalgia-steeped rambling!

A housekeeping note, I will be moving my crush-of-the-day brand of nonsense to Facebook. Here’s the page.

This pasta came about because I wanted to make a pasta sauce freed from the shackles of expectation. I didn’t want to make an Italian-style pasta or an Asian-style pasta, but one that combined elements that taste good together. The result is this spicy, smokey, nearly meaty dish. Very simple to make, completely open to variation (for instance, I had a little thai red curry paste in the fridge, so I threw that in, but if you don’t have it, still yummy). I forgot to take a picture of it till it was mostly gone, and it went very quickly! If you want it to be vegan just leave out the butter and parmesan, it will still be good!

Here’s A Roller Skating Jam Named Saturdays by De La Soul. Beautiful song, beautiful video.

Recipe after the…JUMP!

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French Lentil and Black Rice soup (and burgers) And the most beautiful short film I’ve seen in years

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La Bienvenida by Fernando Eimbcke is a beautiful short film about commitment, hope, and a refusal to be disappointed. It tells the story of a band in a small town in Mexico. They are learning a piece by Mozart to welcome an unnamed dignitary to their town. The film focuses on the sousaphone player, who is having some trouble mastering his part. We follow him on the long walk home from practice, watch him sit outside his small house in the moonlight, playing his part. Watch him walk to two stores looking for milk for his crying baby, then feeding the baby, then practicing in the moonlight again, and waking the next day, still in the chair outside his house, slumped over his instrument. Then walking to the town to take his place with the band under banners and streamers. It’s a hot day, there’s a long wait, there’s a pale donkey. And I won’t spoil the ending, but it’s delightful, delightful.

Everything about this film is beautiful to me. It glows like it was filmed on the moon: shifting shadows and glowing lights. A crocheted blanket over a window, a convenience store in the middle of nowhere, the pale donkey, the sousaphone itself, the warm, kind face of the sousaphone player: everything is beautiful. I see echoes of Fellini in the town scenes, echoes of Kurosawa in the landscapes, echoes of Jarmusch and Ozu in the rhythm, pace, and stillness of the movement. But it has a language and aesthetic all its own. So much is left unexplained, and the dialogue is barely existent, but you feel real love for the man and his baby, and the white haired woman rocking the baby. Visually it’s got a remarkable cool-warmth, and the story itself also glows with a generosity and honesty and quiet humor. Take ten minutes and watch this remarkable film. Yes I used the word “glow” too often, but I love things that glow, I love the word “glow” and this film GLOWS.

The short is part of a collection of shorts by Mexican directors called Revolucion, and all of them are worth watching. Fernando Eimbcke also directed Temporada de Patos (Duck Season), one of my favorite films ever.

In a similar vein, we have a mixed CD of musicians from Lagos, which I’m slightly obsessed with at the moment. This morning I said, “I love this one.” and David said, “Oh yeah, that’s very Claire-y.” Turns out it’s by Cardinal Rex Jim Lawson. It’s not actually unlike La Bienvenida, with its cool melty warmth, its light and darkness, its slightly-out-of-tune horns. And here it is:

I was thinking of writing a cookbook of meals that you can turn into burgers or croquettes the next day if you have leftovers. It’s such a thrifty, depression-era way to cook, and I hate hate hate throwing food away. In my experience, anything you make with legumes and grains can easily be made into croquettes or burgers with a couple of additions. Generally if it’s saucy you want to add things to bulk it up and dry it out: bread or cracker crumbs, always, and lately I’ve been adding a small amount of chickpea flour and high gluten flour (which is what they make seitan from). This made a nice warm, smokey, brothy, substantial soup, and delicious burgers the next day.

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