Category Archives: beans

Roasted beet, red pepper and white bean dip with lime and rosemary

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Roasted beet, roasted pepper and white bean dip

Roasted beet, roasted pepper and white bean dip

I like connectedness. I like the idea that people connect images to make moving pictures–to make a film. I like that people connect facts to make stories. I like that people connect stories to make history and culture. I like that we’re all connected to each other in surprising ways. I like that we’re connected to the world around us–to the earth and the animals–in ways that we don’t always acknowledge. I like the sparking moment of connection with a stranger, when you realize you have some small thing in common. I like the glowing moment of connection with a well-known loved one, when you delight in the fact that you have everything in common, more so every day. For your Sunday morning contemplation I’ve gathered a few quotes from wiser minds than mine on the subject of connection. Ready? Begin.

“Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.” EM Forster

“We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as causes, and they come back to us as effects.”
― Herman Melville

“Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect.”
― Chief Seattle

“It really boils down to this: that all life is interrelated. We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tired into a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one destiny, affects all indirectly.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.

“Man can no longer live for himself alone. We must realize that all life is valuable and that we are united to all life. From this knowledge comes our spiritual relationship with the universe.”
― Albert Schweitzer

So today’s interactive playlist is an exercise in making connections. Here’s how it works. You start with one song, and you connect it to another with any thread you can think of, be it ever so feeble. And then you think of some way to connect that to the next. The connection can be musical, biographical, autobiographical, collaborative, or any mix of any of these.

I’ll start. Tom Waits’ Jockey Full of Bourbon is in the opening credits of Jim Jarmusch’s Down By Law. Down by Law is a Clash song. The Clash worked with Mikey Dread (Living in Fame). Mikey Dread has a song of tribute to Bob Marley (In Memory (Jacob, Marcus, Marley)). Manu Chao also has a song of tribute to Bob Marley (Mr. Bobby). Fellow polyglot K’naan has a whole album in tribute to Bob Marley. He has a song (America) that features Mos Def. Mos Def first appeared on the De La Soul song Big Brother Beat. De La Soul appeared on the Gorillaz infectious Feel Good Inc. I’ll leave it at that for now, because the Gorillaz is a good point for somebody else to pick up the thread. You can get anywhere from the Gorillaz!! You know what’s funny? I could have gone straight from Down by Law through Mulatu Astatqe (Jarmusch’s Broken Flowers) to K’naan’s Mulatu Astatqe sampling America. Funny, right? I’m happy with tangents and misconnects. Feel free to start from any song you want.

Here’s the playlist. It’s interactive, so add what you like. If you can’t spotify, leave your songs in the comments and I’ll try to add them when I have time.

This beet dip was so lovely and simple! I roasted some grated beets, roasted a red pepper, roasted a garlic clove, and tossed it all in a food processor with some herbs and a can of white beans. I added some lime juice, because I think its tartness goes so well with the sweetness of beets. This made a nice meal with some homemade bagel chips. (I bought some salt bagels, but who knew they were so salty? They made good crackers, though, coated with a little olive oil and toasted. So we had that plus some oven-roasted french fries and a big salad. My favorite kind of meal!!

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Millet & chickpea kofta

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Millet and chickpea kofta

Millet and chickpea kofta

Malcolm’s basketball coach told him that if he keeps his head in the game he’ll be unstoppable. “Keep your head in the game” is now my favorite phrase in conversations with myself. “Keep your head in the game, Claire, or you’ll never get two breakfasts and two lunches made by 7:30!” And Malcolm’s teacher said that with a little more focus he’ll be unstoppable. There it is, the “f” word. It all comes down to focus, it all converges at focus. Isaac has been advised that he needs to focus on his focus, as well. It’s a distracting world! There’s so much going on, so much to see and say and taste! How can anybody concentrate on just one thing? It’s all very well to tell somebody to keep their head in the game, but the game is so complicated! The game is so fast-moving and there are so many things going on at once! One is in danger of getting one’s head bonked, if one keeps it in the game for too long! I’ve always had trouble focussing, too, so that’s probably where the boys get it. I can’t concentrate on one thing very long, with my gnat-like span of attention. My life is strewn with half-read books, half-written novels, half-sung songs, and lots and lots of brilliant ideas that never amounted to much (you’ll have to take my word for it). It doesn’t feel good, and I would wish my boys more success in concentrating on one task until it’s completed. I wish for them the ability not just to focus narrowly on one thing, but to bring everything around them into focus. To adjust the lens through which they view the world so that everything is as bright and vivid and clear as they can make it. Malcolm has discovered the joy of focussing beams of light through a magnifying glass until he makes fire, and this is sort of how I can see him moving through life–focussing his light and energy to set the world on fire. (Safely, of course, as executed with focus’ good friend self-control!) And I hope they’ll be able to concentrate on everything that interests them in the sense that they’ll distill it and make it as pure and flavorful as possible, creatively speaking. Isaac is a rare child who can actually sit and concentrate on one project for a fair amount of time. He’s happy with his own company, singing and drawing or making something out of legos. From when he was very little, his whole face reflects his absorbtion–head on one side, tongue out like Charlie Brown. Here’s Isaac’s picture of a focussed face…
focus
This is how I’m going to imagine myself, from now on, when I want to try to get something important done!!
Millet and chickpea kofta

Millet and chickpea kofta

I wonder if I like cooking because it’s a chance to finish a project – to see it through to its tasty completion. When you start to make a meal, you can’t stop till it’s done. You can’t give up halfway through because you get to a tedious part. If things aren’t going well you have to fix them, you can’t just set it aside for another time and then forget about it completely. And you have the promise of a good meal that you can eat and share as motivation to get it all done. Plus it’s fun! These croquettes were so simple to make. I combined leftover millet with chickpeas and grated cheese. I seasoned them fairly simply, with basil, cumin and lots of pepper. They turned out lovely–crispy and delicate outside and soft and flavorful inside. We ate them with spicy spinach cashew sauce and OOTOs (yeasted semolina flatbreads), as well as avocado and arugula. But you could eat them with pita bread or tortillas, and any sauce you like…tahini or tomato sauce or mustard or mayonaisse, or no sauce at all. Very versatile.

Here’s De La Soul with En Focus. Love this one!

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Roasted beet and butterbean salad with spinach, arugula and smoked gouda

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beet-and-butterbeanWhen I was younger–shall we say early twenties?–I wrote a screenplay about a man who wouldn’t leave his front porch. He’d travelled the world, and then something happened, but I don’t remember what, or maybe nothing happened–I’ve always been a big fan of the anti-drama–and he sat in a rocker on his front porch and refused to leave. His mother fussed over him and consulted various experts to aid in his cure. She talked to ministers and doctors and wise neighbors. He chatted with the mailman and with small children that ran by the house. We worry about him, because he’s not behaving like everyone else, he’s not normal. But he seems okay. He’s a little confused, but he’s pleasant and cheerful. He’s alright. It turns out he’s trying to rid himself of fear and desire, based on some combination of ideas gleaned from several philosophies that I barely understood at the time and understand even less well now, all these many years later, seen through a haze of crumbling memory. I still think about this from time to time. Would I want to rid myself of fear and desire, assuming I had the strength to do so (I don’t)? In all honesty, I don’t think I would. Desire, like hunger, is such a part of being alive. Wanting keeps you wishing and hoping and trying. And fear is so closely connected with imagination and creativity and dreams. The idea seemed good at the time, I suppose. I was confused, myself, and so full of wants and worries. But in thinking about losing myself, I was doing the opposite, I was completely self-conscious and self-centered. We all look at the world through our own eyes, through the prism of our own fears and desires. As Hobbes so delightfully says…

    …for the similitude of the thoughts and passions of one man, to the thoughts and passions of another, whosoever looketh into himself and considereth what he doth when he does think, opine, reason, hope, fear, etc., and upon what grounds; he shall thereby read and know what are the thoughts and passions of all other men upon the like occasions. I say the similitude of passions, which are the same in all men,- desire, fear, hope, etc.; not the similitude of the objects of the passions, which are the things desired, feared, hoped, etc.: for these the constitution individual, and particular education, do so vary, and they are so easy to be kept from our knowledge, that the characters of man’s heart, blotted and confounded as they are with dissembling, lying, counterfeiting, and erroneous doctrines, are legible only to him that searcheth hearts.

“Only to him that searcheth hearts”!!! I love that! Where was I? Ah, yes. I’ve been remembering my juvenile struggle with all of these muddled ideas lately because of all the memes! The memes and soundbites and super-designed quotes and quips and words of wisdom. It feels, sometimes, as though we’re taking little pieces of these philosophies that we don’t understand, and spinning them around to become something entirely new. Like all good twenty-first century Americans, we’re stripping them of their original meaning and making them all about making us feel better about ourselves. So that they’re no longer about losing ourselves, but about loving ourselves. We don’t have to rid ourselves of anything, cause we’re okay! Reduce a philosophy to a few pithy phrases, superimpose it over a rainbow or some flowers, and its meaning is distilled–it’s all about me! I know, I know, I sound hypocritical and hypercritical. But it seems as though if we’re going to appropriate ideas we should at least read enough of them to be confused by them, to let the words get us into a muddle, to struggle to understand something of the original wisdom, and not just swallow it down like some sugary pill that makes us feel better with no side effects. We should have more respect for the words than to make them into social-media-ready memes. That’s what kittens are for!

Springtime with its damp fragrant earth and unfurling ferns always makes me crave beets. So I bought a big bunch. My favorite method of cooking beets is one that Malcolm invented…grated, tossed with olive oil and herbs and roasted. So that’s what I did here. And I roasted some buttery butterbeans in butter. And I sauteed some spinach with garlic, and I mixed all of these things together, stirred in a little black truffle butter, added some ripe avocado, piled it into a nest of fresh wild arugula, and grated smoked gouda on top. Delicious! A warm, hearty salad with such lovely melty, smoky, sweet and buttery flavors.

Here’s Tom Waits with Just Another Sucker on the Vine, just because I love it.

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Beet and kidney (bean) pies

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Beet and kidney bean pie

Beet and kidney bean pie

It’s take your child to work day. The boys are at the shop with David, hopefully not routering their arms or circular sawing their fingers. Take your child to work day. It’s a little odd, when you stop to think about it, which for better or for worse I’ve just done. It seems to imply a certain neatness and regularity to the world that just doesn’t exist, as I see the world. Does every parent have a safe, child-friendly job? Does every parent have bosses and co-workers that will put up with an infestation of restless children? Does every parent have a job they can work at productively whilst entertaining a bored and or curious tyke? Does every parent have a job during school hours? Maybe they’re chefs or professors or rock stars or stage actors, and they work at night. Does every parent have a job at all? 399919_10200595609406883_2047603223_nI’ve just read that the day was invented by Gloria Steinem as Take Your Daughter to Work Day, and was intended to give girls a sense of possibility and purpose. This makes it seem even odder to me, almost as if it was subversively designed to illustrate the messiness of the world. How many children are bundled off to work with their fathers, because their mothers don’t work during the week because they’re home with children. Maybe they work at night or on the weekend so that they can be there to pick up their children after school. Maybe they have a job but its the kind of job many women have at some point in their lives–cooking or cleaning or caring for someone else’s children, and, strangely, this isn’t the kind of job you’d like to share with your own child. Maybe, like many women, you’re not treated with respect at your job, you’re not treated as an equal. A lot of things have changed, a lot of things have not. Of course, all of this stopping-to-think-about-it has included some thoughts on my own life, my own work, my own ideas of success or failure and how they don’t quite fit into those of the rest of the world. Any thing you do is considered work if somebody pays you to do it. And the more they pay you, the more successful you are at your job. I’ve been doing a bit of pastry cheffing, and yesterday I made a cake for a restaurant. If the boys had stayed home and helped me with that, they would have been at work with me (and we would have had fun!). Today, I don’t have any commissions for cake, so if the boys stayed home from school and baked a cake with me, we’d be goofing off (and we’d still have fun!). If I sit around writing or cooking or conspiring to make a movie, I’m a shiftless slacker who should go out and get a real job (I know, I know…). If somebody pays me to do those things, I’m a person who has followed my dreams to find success (although I probably still can’t afford health insurance.) Everything is a little different looked at through the prism of parenthood. What seems brave and valuable when you’re a single person with only yourself to care for, seems irresponsible once you have children. We have our own small business. We work seven days a week, one way or another, and the truth is that the boys spend all weekend every weekend at work with David, watching him watch the store while I wait tables. This is life as they know it. We don’t have days off or weekends or paid vacations, and we still can’t afford health insurance. And all summer when they knock about the house with me, cleaning and cooking and keeping themselves happy and creative, waiting impatiently while I finish writing some dumb thing so we can go to the creek, they’re at work with me, whether they know it or not. It’s messy, it doesn’t fit into any tidy pattern of employment, but I think they’re okay with it. I think they’re proud of us, and have a sense of possibility and purpose. I think they wouldn’t have it any other way.

Beet and kidney bean pie

Beet and kidney bean pie

Beet and kidney bean pie! It’s ruddy! This was inspired, of course, by beef and kidney pie, or steak and kidney pie. It does have a certain meaty quality to it. It’s roasted beets and mushrooms combined with kidney beans in a saucy sauce of tamari, sage, rosemary, thyme and allspice. If you use vegetable shortening instead of butter in the crust, this would be vegan.

Here’s King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band with Workingman’s Blues.

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Tacos with spicy black bean mince

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Black bean mince tacos

Black bean mince tacos

Behind the school there’s a hill where the children play. Some will build forts, some will make a bridge over the slight ravine that leads to the hill or a dam for the creek that runs down the hill after a great rain, some will be content just to climb, and see how high they get, and look down on the world below them. In the winter the hill is bare and beautiful, with a ruddy light between the silvery sycamore trunks; in the summer it’s lush and green, and it’s harder to find your children behind the vines and brambles. When Malcolm was younger, he used to disappear over the top of the hill, and it made me so anxious. I like to joke that I can get up the hill, but I can’t get back down. Of course I could if I really needed to, but I’m not as nimble as these young mountain goats, with their fearlessness and their low centers of gravity. So I’d stand at the bottom and fret, and yell at poor Isaac if he ventured up the hill at all. It’s odd to think back to that time, now, because these days I don’t think twice about letting Malcolm go over the top of the hill. I still don’t know what it looks like up there, and for some reason that idea appeals to me. I like to think about Malcolm venturing to places I don’t go, and seeing what I can’t see. I like to think about his world growing and glowing in that way, rich and colorful in my imagination and his memory. When we go for walks, Malcolm’s always climbing and leaping and scampering to places I could but generally won’t go. On top of giant piles of rock or down a slippery river bank. It used to me taking pictures of him and these feats of derring-do. Lately he’s taken my phone with him, so that he can take a picture of the view from his angle, of the world as he sees it. The other day we walked along the abandoned train tracks to the south of town, and came to a train car bathed in ridiculously beautiful golden evening light. I took pictures from the outside, but Malcolm, of course, climbed in.
glowy train

glowy train

And then he asked for my phone and climbed the ladder to the odd-looking train car adjacent.
Malcolm-climbing

And he took a picture of what he saw there–the wild and beautiful evidence of kids decorating their own secret world, making their mark, claiming their space.

What Malcolm Saw

What Malcolm Saw

I’ve made black bean mince before, but I’d never used it in tacos. It makes so much sense! It’s almost like refried beans, but with more substance and texture and flavor. I added sage, oregano, cumin and smoked paprika, which made it very tasty. We ate it with basmati rice, warm tortillas, shredded lettuce, and grated sharp cheddar. It would be nice with avocado, salsa, cilantro, hot sauce…anything you like on a taco. It would also be good baked inside of enchiladas or burritos. Very easy, very quick, very cheap. I made mine with eggs, to give it more crumbly texture, but you could leave them out if you’re vegan and it will still taste good.

Here’s KRS One with Out for Fame.

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Roasted butter bean, mushroom, and pecan galette

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Roasted mushroom and butterbean galette

Roasted mushroom and butterbean galette

As I’m sure you recall, we’ve been hosting a story-writing salon, here at The Ordinary. The cool kids have started calling it “Story Writing Saturdays at OOTO.” Yeah, it’s been wild. So far, one person has written a story (thanks so much, Laura!) And I’ve gotten one comment on my stories. (“Weird, very weird.”) Flushed with this unparalleled success, we’re marching on with the project. I love today’s picture, I think it’s a real beauty, and I hope that you do, too!
62167_10151448415479589_1872686226_n

As ever, my story is after the jump, and yours could be, too. My rules so far have been–make it quick, and don’t over think. But make your rules up as you go along.

I made this galette up as I went along, until it got to a place that I could actually imagine eating it, and then I knew I’d arrived at the right combination! I roasted some mushrooms and some butter beans. Roasted butter beans are one of my new favorite things! I combined these crispy-soft items with some fresh baby spinach and some crunchy toasted pecans, and then threw in some melty mozzarella, and I baked the whole thing up in a free-form pie. Delicious! And quite easy, too.

Here’s a song from one of my favorite storytellers, Mr. Tom Waits. Gun Street Girl.

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Black bean and kale cornmeal cakes with fresh avocado cucumber salsa

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Black bean and kale cornmeal cakes

Black bean and kale cornmeal cakes

I’m reading Roderick Hudson at the moment. It’s Henry James’ “first serious attempt at a full-length novel,” and it’s quite fascinating. It’s youthful and ambitious, and about youth and ambition, which seems so sweetly unselfconscious to me. James tells the story of two young men–an irresponsible genius and his more mature but less interesting patron. These men are like lovers, almost, and they’re like two sides of the same person (James?). And they’re like the two styles of writing that seem to be battling it out in the novel. The impetuous, romantic and credulity-straining meets head-on with the dense and methodical, and this seems to make the characters unintentionally more human and appealing. But I hadn’t planned to go on and on about the novel! I planned to talk about this one sentence that struck me as very interesting, and here it is…”At times when he saw how the young sculptor’s day passed in a single sustained pulsation, while his own was broken into a dozen conscious devices for disposing of the hours, and intermingled with sighs, half-surpressed, some of them, for conscience’ sake, over what he failed of in action and missed in possession–he felt a pang of something akin to envy.” Isn’t that beautiful? Isn’t that James? I’m fascinated by the way that time passes differently for different people, or at different times in your life. When I was younger the days seemed very long sometimes, and I remember wishing time away, and trying to fill up the hours, trying consciously to dispose of them, as Rowland does. And I recognize his gentle sense of regret and self-reproach. How could he get so little done and miss so many chances when time moves so slowly? I understand perfectly why he admires and envies Roderick, who doesn’t think about the past or the future or the consequences of his actions, who took the risks Rowland was scared to, not because he particularly wanted to or cared about the results, but because…why not? I’ve never been like that. I’ve never lost track of whole days or forgotten the time, I’ve never been brave or impetuous, I’ve never been able to free my mind of regrets about the past or worries over the future. Time doesn’t travel fluidly for me. But it does go more and more quickly, which is frightening, and makes me rue all of the hours I wished away when I was younger. I never really have anything that needs to be done, and yet I feel as though there aren’t enough hours in the day to do it all, to do everything I want to do. My days will never pass in a single sustained pulsation, I don’t think, but I have this odd image of myself swallowing them in chunks, hungrily eating them one piece at a time, and then looking back with surprise and some sadness when they’re all gone, wondering where they’ve gotten to. Obviously, the thing to do is to make them delicious, to make every hour of each day as tasty as possible, and then to try to savor them, to take my time, rather than wishing it away.

avacado-cucumber-saladThese little cakes were confounding to my boys. They didn’t think they’d like them, so they didn’t enjoy their first half-hearted nibble. But after some drama and persuasion, they both decided they liked them and ate almost all of them. David and I liked them. They were crunchy out, soft in, with a nice balance of earthy flavors. They were a bit dry, though, as baked goods made with cornmeal alone tend to be, so eat them with a sauce. This little salad or salsa was lovely! I don’t know why I’d never thought of mixing avocado and cucumber before, but they’re really perfect together! Fresh and green and soft and crisp. I kept the seasoning simple – salt, pepper, lime and cilantro, which made the whole thing bright and clean, and just the perfect accompaniment to the cornmeal cakes.

Here’s Wildwood Flower by the Carter Family, because they say “Yes, he taught me to love him and call me his flower That was blooming to cheer him through life’s dreary hour.” No dreary hours!! We’ll have no dreary hours!!

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Roasted cauliflower, potatoes and butterbeans in spicy red pepper – olive sauce

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Roasted potatoes, cauliflower and butterbeans with spicy red pepper sauce

Roasted potatoes, cauliflower and butterbeans with spicy red pepper sauce

When a child tells a joke (my child, at any rate) he always explains it. He always adds a little, “do you see what I did there?” (Except when they tell knock knock jokes, of course – not because they need no explanation, but because there is no explanation. They make no sense, and that’s the point of them.) As they get a little older they might just send it out there into the world, and see how it plays. They start to understand the universal language of jokes, and they recognize that others understand it as well. And if it plays well, they’ll repeat it, over and over and over again. There’s a regular at the bar where I work. He’s a friendly, loquacious guy, and everybody’s always happy to see him, as befits his status as regular. He tells jokes that aren’t always appropriate, and he lets us know they’re not appropriate by saying, “If you know what I mean.” One day, the bartender said, “Everybody always knows what you mean!” She said it in a jolly, joking way, but he seemed a little chastened. He was uncharacteristically silent for a few minutes. When I think about it, which I frequently do, it’s so odd that we can communicate at all. Words are so frustratingly, beautifully inadequate. Either they seem to have no meaning at all, or they have so many meanings you don’t know which to choose. We could lose ourselves in the space between what we mean to say or what we want to say, and what is actually said. We watched Tokyo Story by Ozu yesterday. (Beautiful!) His films are about regular, contemporary people facing problems that we all face, and one of these is, simply, talking to one another, conveying meaning. The characters are speaking Japanese, of course, which is a language I don’t understand, but they’re so clearly sharing the difficulty of sharing, with their gestures and expressions. They use small sounds, single syllables or grunts, that seem to carry more meaning, and be better understood, than whole streams of words. I love this! Each person fills the syllable with their own inflections, the whole force of their personality. Ozu will show one side of a phone call that consists of nothing but these short grunts, and you know what the person on the other end is saying. I read a little bit about these sounds, and they each have their own written character, which is a beautiful thing. I suppose we have something similar in English, but our small sounds, our ums and ers and uh-huhs seem to create little spaces of non-meaning, little expressions of frustration with meaning. Or maybe it’s just easier to see meaning when you’re less entangled in the words, when you’re outside, looking in.

It’s funny how recipes can become construed and misconstrued, made up, as they are, of words. The symbols I take as universal are very confusing to some people. And measurements are so changing and mysterious, especially when you’re talking about the size of a vegetable! In recipes such as this one, it’s okay that the measurements are vague. You can adjust the amounts to your taste. We have roasted potatoes, cauliflower and roasted butter beans (yummy!) And we have a sauce to toss them in, and you can roast just as much of each as you like! You can mix everything together, and fry it in a skillet till the sauce is fairly dry and coating each piece, and that’s tasty. Or you can leave the elements separate, and let people take what they like, which is what we did, because not everyone in the family is as enthusiastic about cauliflower. We ate this with simple herbed farro, and some sauteed kale and broccoli rabe tossed with lemon and butter.

Here’s the Tokyo Story Theme, by Saito Kojun

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Sage roasted butter beans and greens with raisins and pine nuts

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roasted butterbeans and greens with raisins and pine nuts

roasted butterbeans and greens with raisins and pine nuts

It was a night under the stars! That’s what the school dance was called, and, funnily enough, as we walked home I’d never seen the stars so bright and clear over our tinsy little metropolis. The stars were cool and distant, after the hot clamor of the dance, but they seemed to be dancing, too. The boys went in different shifts. First the little ones, racing around the transformed all-purpose room (cafeteria tables pushed out of the way, gym mats rolled up, starry black balloons floating everywhere.) Isaac and his friends wiggled through the dancing crowd like small minnows against the current. (How do they all know dance moves when they’re so young?) The older kids stood around in little groups, full of joyful secret drama. Malcolm looked dapper as hell in his suit. But we weren’t allowed to stay and watch the second shift, so I can only report that when Malcolm and I walked home, looking for orion and the big dipper, he had a cool happy glow about him, like the moonlight.

And the music? We had the Harlem Shake twice, of course, and gangnam style and that heyo gallileo song, and lord knows what else. They all sound a bit alike, they’re musically repetitive and lyrically uninspired, and yet they’re irresistible! I’m such a sucker for this kind of music. Roller rink music, prom music, school dance music. So for this week’s Sunday interactive playlist, we’re going to collect songs we remember from dances and roller rinks, or any public youthful dancing occasion. I’m excited about this one! I think we can make quite a collection of happy songs from different eras and different parts of the world. But I need help, because I was super backwards and shy as a child, and didn’t go to many school dances.

sage roasted butter beans and spinach with raisins and pine nuts

sage roasted butter beans and spinach with raisins and pine nuts

I’m excited about this meal, as well. As I’ve said a million times, greens with raisins and pine nuts, simply seasoned with garlic and maybe a little rosemary, is one of my all time favorite flavors. Here I added a little egg to make it comforting and substantial. You can use any greens you like. I used broccoli rabe and spinach, but you could add kale or chard, if you like. And the butter beans! I coated them in a little olive oil and roasted them with sage. Simple, but they turned out delicious. Cripsy, tender, meaty. We ate this with some herbed pearled couscous, and I made croquettes out of the leftovers with the addition of some bread crumbs, eggs and cheese – formed into patties and roasted on an olive-oil coated tray. Also very delicious! I’d show you a picture, but it got lost on my camera somewhere, and disappeared.

So here’s the playlist. I’ll make it collaborative, so feel free to add what you’d like.

And here’s a scene from Freaks and Geeks. I love the impossibly long walk to the dance floor, and the way the song kicks in when they get there. “If somebody making you go to a dance is the worst thing in your life, I’d say you have a pretty good life.”

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Jerk patties with pigeon peas, butternut squash and kale

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Jerk patties with kale and butternut squash

Jerk patties with kale and butternut squash

Malcolm has been trying to remember a song. It’s a song I listened to all the time when he was little, that I sang along to. (These claims check out, because I do tend to become obsessed with songs and sing along with them over and over.) Malcolm is the boy with the long memory. If we’re trying to remember where we put something, or if we watched something, or who said what, we ask Malcolm. I love to think about Malcolm looking out on the world with his wise, observant, beautiful eyes, these past ten years, and collecting a trove of thoughts and images and recollections, and storing them in his remarkable brain. It’s one of the things that makes him seem wiser and more mature than his years. (As opposed to, say, giggling over fart jokes with his brother in the back seat. And there’s also plenty of that!) I used to have a good memory for strange, inconsequential things, but I feel as though my memory is fading with my eyesight, which is a weird sort of impaired, half-awake feeling. So we’ve been trying to recall this song. On Saturday night we sat on the couch, and he leaned heavily against me in the sweet way I’m sure he won’t do for much longer, and he played songs on his iPod (or fragments of songs – he’s an erratic DJ!). We thought about all the songs we’d listened to when he was very little. We listened to songs that used to make me burst into tears when I was very pregnant or just after he was born, because I was overwhelmed with the scale of our impending change. We tried to remember all of the songs he’d sing along to, with delightfully incorrect words. And there’s no medium more powerful for conjuring recollections than music! And as we listened for old memories in the songs, we were weaving new ones as well, so that years from now these songs will have layer upon layer of remembrance. We never did figure out which song he had in mind, but in the end, of course, it didn’t matter. The joy was not in remembering this one song, the joy was in remembering.

Food is another great trigger of memories! I remember walking around Central Park in the blazing hot sun during a street festival. I coveted the jerk patties, so bright and festive and fragrant, but they usually had chicken or beef in them. Not these, my friend! These have kale and pigeon peas. And I developed a new technique with the butternut squash. I grated it and then roasted it. I like it this way, especially in a pie – it turned out more roasty, and a lovely texture. I tried to minimize the time it took to make these by rolling out a long thin sheet of dough (two feet by ten inches, maybe) putting big glops of dough along one side, folding over, sealing, and then cutting apart. Kind of like making ravioli. If this seems, actually, to be more work, feel free to divide the dough in six, roll out thin rounds, and make this half-circle shaped.

Here’s Stars of Track and Field by Belle and Sebastian. Malcolm used to sing “Stars and dragons still too far.”

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