Isaac just walked into the room with a tear-stained face and said, “Do you want me to run away?” Such has been our morning that I didn’t say, “Of course not, darling.” I didn’t even laugh. He wants to go fishing, desperately. And despite the dodgy ethics of a vegetarian fishing, we’ll take him, but first he has to write in his summer journal. It’s torture, I tell you! He drew a brilliant picture of himself imagining himself fishing. I said, now write about what kind of fish you want to catch. How can he be expected to know what kind of fish he might catch? He’s incensed at the absurdity of the situation. (Has he read Mcelligot’s pool? Of course he has.) I said, write about how angry you are that I won’t take you fishing…it’s okay to write about being angry. He burst into tears and said he didn’t want to write about me being mean. And now that he’s done trying to physically wrestle me from my chair and is yelling “I HAVE TO GO FISHING,” from a slightly greater distance, I will tell you that it strikes me as funny that I don’t want to go fishing at all, but I do want to write. What seems like a horrible punishment to him is my idea of a good time. He can maybe imagine a little polluted pool leading to the sea, and all of the strange and wonderful fish he might catch there, and I can imagine a tepid tide pool of my mind, cluttered and messy, holding every little thing that floats on shore. But maybe I’ll follow some bright silvery ideas into the waves, whole schools of well-organized shinily nimble words, and they’ll lead somewhere cool and quiet, with an underwater glow and an echoing resonance. And I’ll capture them all, somehow, without doing them any harm, and I’ll be able to take them and share them with others. “If I wait long enough; if I’m patient and cool, Who knows what I’ll catch in McElligot’s Pool!”
Isaac is finished raging and writing and talking about fishing like some kind of shot glass-sized Ernest Eemingway. And now the story is done and I have a promise to keep. We’ll head to the creek, and I’ll stand up to my ankles in cool water and watch the boys splash through pools of sunlight and shadow. They’ll catch minnows and water-strider spiders, and I’ll write a story in my head with all of the words swimming around there, and when we leave, we’ll let them all go, the fish and the words, and they’ll swim away into the shadowy depths.
Trifle! Why trifle? Because I made Malcolm two birthday cakes, and we couldn’t possibly eat all the cake. So for some reason it made sense to take some sweet thing we couldn’t possibly eat all of, and add lots more sweet things, and make it even bigger. Yes it did. I soaked the cake in rum, and then I added some black currants that I’d simmered in sugar till they were almost like a jam (you could just use black currant jam, if you don’t happen to have a black currant bush in your backyard.) I poured almond custard over all of this, then I added lots of fresh cherries and globs of whipped cream. Globs!! It was really tasty!
Isaac is miserable about having to write a summer journal entry, so in solidarity I’m writing one, too.
July 11, 2013.
This morning I cleaned the bathrooms for the first time in a few weeks. I thought about time passing. A baby screamed outside the window with that sound that could be crying or laughing, and from behind a closed door Isaac made the same sound. I thought about how summer used to last forever and now it flies by; I know it’s a clichéd thought, but that doesn’t make it less true–it might make it more true. Our summer days are the old-fashioned kind, nothing planned, but long and busy. They race by in a flurry of periods of activity mixed with spaces of inactivity, but they’re not particularly eventful, and maybe that’s why it’s hard for Isaac to think of anything to write about. It honestly doesn’t feel as though we have time in our days for notable events, that’s how full they feel. I thought about how Camus said “Since we’re all going to die, it’s obvious that when and how don’t matter,” and about how he died in a car crash with a train ticket in his pocket, for a train ride he could have been on. I know about these things from wikipedia and some dumb website that collects people’s quotes, and I wonder if Camus would have had any respect for these because obviously it means people are trying to understand everything, on some level, or if he would have been depressed by them because he said, “what we ask is that articles have substance and depth, and that false or doubtful news not be presented as truth.” I remembered another time that I’d cleaned the bathroom, and I’d made a humorous quip about how scrubbing a toilet if two little boys live in the house is sisyphean and leads to existential despair, and I’d wondered if Camus had ever had to do it. And I think that this quip was proof that I’d gotten Camus completely wrong my whole life, and I wonder why that was. Because I’d read him in high school French class, and I don’t speak French at all? Because I speak precious little English, either? Because I’d read him in high school and I heard what my teenage self needed to hear? Maybe I have it all wrong now, because I’m forty-four and I’m hearing what my middle-aged self needs to hear. I thought about this quote “I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain. One always finds one’s burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself, forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy,” which is not despairing at all, but completely hopeful, and I claim it for The Ordinary, and I apply it to all things–to getting out of bed in the morning and deciding to wake up and live, to embracing the long littleness, to scrubbing toilets and listening to the boys bicker and scream and laugh, over and over and over again, to all the beautiful tediousness of our long, busy, uneventful days. Isaac just finished his journal entry, and he said that tomorrow he’s going to write, “Yesterday in my summer journal I wrote about writing in my summer journal, and next day I’ll write about how I was writing in that summer journal about writing in my summer journal, and in that summer journal I was writing about a river!”
Almond cake with chocolate and cherries
We have so many vegetables now, from the farm, and I bought so much fruit from the store that I have a ridiculous sense of hopeful anxiety. I know what I want to do with all of it! But we only eat so many meals a week, and I don’t want any of it to spoil! I got myself a cherry & olive pitter for my birthday (thanks, Mom and Dad!) because it seemed like such a fun, frivolous item and therefore perfect for a birthday. So now, of course, I had to use it! I bought a big bag of cherries, and Malcolm and I pitted a bowlful. I made a batter of ground almonds, with almond and vanilla extract. I added chocolate chips, and I whizzed half in the food processor to break them down so they melted right into the batter. I made this in my big old french cake pan, but you could make it in any largish cake pan. Everybody liked it!
pistachio crumb cake with cherries, peaches and chocolate
Saturday storytelling time is back! And the crowd goes wild! I missed a week, and I can’t tell you how many calls and letters I’ve gotten from people who wanted it back. Well, I can tell you: it was precisely none, not one more or less. But I felt a little bad about not getting my story done, even though I know it obviously doesn’t matter. I just couldn’t focus on it, which I’ll blame on the weather and the boys, and maybe the dog, too. But I think that’s the whole point of writing every day or every week…you press on through, because the ideas are always there and the words are always there, even if it feels as though you can’t easily access them. The more you write the more you write, and this applies to all things. Anyway! We’re back, and as I’m sure you recall, this is the day I post a found photo, and invite everybody to write a story about it. I post mine after the jump, and you could have yours there, too, if you feel like writing one!
Here’s today’s picture. Why is this man at the train station? Where is he going? Where is he coming from?
pistachio crumb cake with cherries, peaches, and chocolate chips
This was my birthday cake! I did a splurgy shop before my birthday and bought cherries and pistachio kernels, and I decided I wanted to combine them in a cake. The pistachio kernels were salted, so the cake has a nice salty-sweet quality. Some of the pistachios were ground very fine and mixed into the cake, and some were left crunchy, and sprinkled on top with brown sugar and butter. Basically I couldn’t decide if I wanted a fruit crisp or a cake, so I made both. I wanted to make brown sugar vanilla ice cream to go with this, but the heat lately has been too much for my freezer, so the ice cream maker didn’t work. We poured the chilled custard over the cake, and it was really lovely! The boys called it sweet soup.
Have you ever discovered a wonderful new way to start a story? Cause I have, and I’ll tell you about it. Did you see? Did you see what I did there? I asked a question and then I told you that I’m going to answer it for you! Where did I discover this ingenious new rhetorical method? Why, in the piles and piles of paper Malcolm brought home on the last day of school, of course. I love going through all the boys’ papers. It’s so funny to see their odd ideas and their mad doodles. Sometimes I think all of the little notes and drawings, which are probably dire signs that they aren’t focussing, are my favorite part of their work. And I love to learn what they’ve been thinking about–that Isaac’s major interests this year were bats and his big brother, and that his heart murmur makes his heart have an echo, and that makes him feel special. Malcolm’s writing journal is a treat. It’s a chaotic pile of ripped pages and tiny pictures of his favorite recurring character, a fez-wearing fellow named madman. But it gets neater as it goes along. The writing is more even, the stories are longer and more carefully formed, but the spelling is as erratic as ever, which is definitely a sign of genius, right? Towards the end of the journal, all of the stories start with the “Have you ever…? I have, and I’ll tell you about it” pattern, which I actually love. I’m never going to sit around worrying about how to start a story again! This technique, so confiding and conversational, pulls you right into the story. My favorite of his essays begins like this. (Spelling and grammar have been cleaned up to ease comprehension.) “Have you ever had a favorite window? Cause I have and I’ll tell you about it. It is a green window that has a radiator next to it so when I look out I am warm. Speaking of looking out, I always see a white parking lot or [unintelligible] normal [trails off here]. I feel happy Jumpy when I look out that window…” And that’s pretty much it. It’s an unfinished work. I love it though, and I’m going to tell you why. First of all, I love windows in literature, and in photographs and films, and I’m proud to think of Malcolm joining this fine tradition. Furthermore, I know which window he’s talking about, and I like it too. I like to think of Malcolm, warm in his room, looking through the cool green window with his big green eyes, watching the world go by. I like that he feels happy-jumpy, whatever that means. Malcolm is a boy who will go anywhere with you. He never needs persuading, he’s ready and out the door in a flash, and I like to think about him sitting there thinking of all the places he’ll go. And funnily enough, I’d made a little film of this very window as part of my series of small videos that I’ve told you about in the past. They’re like Ozu’s pillow shots without the film all around them. “I started making short, static videos. I gave myself some rules…they had to last about a minute. I couldn’t change the frame. The sound would be whatever naturally occurred for that minute. I focused on leaves, or water, or shadows, even dirty dishes in the sink. The sound generally involved my children yelling for me and trying to get my attention, which was an idea that I liked a lot. It captured my life at the time (and to this day.) There was nothing brilliant about the videos, but I liked the way that shooting them made me think about how long a minute lasts, how hard it is to be quiet and still, how my life sounded, how pretty small things could be.” One night about a month ago, when we were putting the boys to bed, I was very taken with Malcolm’s green window. It was a cooly glowing spring dusk, and the light in the room was warm and creamy, and the light outside the window so cool and evening-blue green.
Because my birthday is in June, it has become a tradition to make a dinner of bread, tomatoes, mozzarella and olives. Just to sit and snack and have a slightly nicer bottle of wine than usual. This year, because it’s a sweltering and humid 95 degrees every day, I thought it would be a good idea to bake something. But I wanted to retain the basic idea of tomatoes, olives and cheese. I’m savory-cake mad at the moment, so I made a yeasted, herbed chickpea flour batter, and then I piled fresh tomatoes, herbs, mozzarella and castelvetrano olives in the middle, and then I baked it all. Delicious! We had it with tiny boiled potatoes from our CSA and some bright sauteed pattypan squash and asparagus. The boys liked it, too, because it resembles pizza. I actually left the batter in the fridge over night, but you could just do an ordinary afternoon-rise, if you like.
Here’s Brianstorm, by the Arctic Monkeys, which is Malcolm’s favorite song.
For as long as I can remember, David has liked to collect shards of pottery and porcelain. He’ll find small pieces of pots and plates in creek beds and river banks and tree roots, and even in the dirt in our backyard. Sometimes they have patterns painted on or worked right into the clay. Sometimes they have a little curve to them, and you can try to guess at the form of the pot from whence they came. Last time we were at our local antiques flea market, we came across a fellow selling a whole box of shards of pottery and porcelain. David said that it struck him as funny that he would never buy a shard of pottery, no matter how nice it looked, but if he’d found one, he’d never part with it. Well! Predictably, I love this. So often we value something, we consider it valuable, because somebody has set a price to it. A painting is only worth thousands or even millions of dollars because some art dealer has decided that they can persuade someone to pay that much money for it. This is true of practically everything around us…we’re consumers, and everything has a price. It’s like some absurd sort of game with nonsensical rules in which we all agree to accept abstract ideas of worth and to give meaning to meaningless numbers. Sometimes, though, there’s more joy in finding something or making something–even if that thing is imperfect or incomplete, Maybe especially if that thing is imperfect or incomplete, because you can imagine the rest of it, and when you imagine something it’s completely yours. When you think about it this way, when you think about how precious a small shard of pottery can be, it’s like tearing away the scaffolding that holds up the whole ridiculous system, so that we can understand that nothing is better for being bloated with money, and that maybe price is not the best way to assess value.
We don’t usually drink much besides wine with dinner or an occasional beer with punjabi mix, but every once in a while we’ll invent a strange and delightful drink. Usually this involves ginger beer, because we love ginger beer. Recently, we tried ginger beer and drambuie. It was really good! Sweet but refreshing, with a nice kick to it. I added some fresh lemon to mine, because I like everything with lemon. This cake was inspired by that experiment. It’s flavored with drambuie and a little powdered ginger, and it has chopped crystallized ginger mixed into the batter. It was really good! Oh yeah, and it has chocolate chips, because everything should have chocolate chips. The second time I made it I glazed it with a mix of powdered sugar and drambuie, but that’s not pictured here. I made the cake in my smallish deepish new old French cake pan. You could make it in a normal 8 or 9-inch cake pan, and it will be just as good, but flatter. And it might not need to cook as long.
Happy father’s day to all the fathers of the world! And in particular to my dad, (Dad) and also to David, the father of my children! You know how when you’re little you think your dad knows everything? Well, I’m nearly a million years old, and I still believe that about my dad. And I think my boys will always believe it about David, and they’ll be right. My dad is a historian, and when the world seems crazy he’s always been incredibly comforting to talk with. He understands the big patterns, he has a profound sense of balance and a strong core of peace and wisdom. And I’m so grateful to David for teaching our boys strength and compassion, curiosity and kindness, how to draw a rhinoceros and how to catch a tadpole.
So I apologize for the predictability of this, but this week’s interactive playlist will be on the subject of fathers and father’s fathers. Also acceptable, and probably more interesting…songs that remind you of your father. As ever, the list is interactive, so add what you like, or leave a comment and I’ll try to remember to add it later. (Though I haven’t been doing a very good job as list-curator lately!)
I made this cake with ground walnuts. It has a nice sweet earthy nuttiness. I put a layer of batter in the pan, and then I added some chopped fresh cherries and some bittersweet chocolate chips, and then I added another layer of batter. The batter itself has a little cinnamon and no leavening, I wanted it to be dense and almost pudding-y, and it was. I made it in my new little, tallish french cake pan, but you can use any cake pan that’s on the smaller side and it will work fine.
Last night we went to Isaac’s poetry cafe. I’ve got to start wearing dark glasses and a veil to these things, because I find them so moving that by the end I’m a puddle, despite my cynical and cantankerous nature. The kids are adorable, obviously, but it’s not this that gets me. It’s the raw, pure emotion–they’re all so animated and nervous and happy it just kills me. They’re not used to reading at all, let alone reading aloud. They stand at the front of the room, glance at their teacher, take a deep breath, and then they dive into the river of words–their words! They paddle through, head down, voice low and hushed, in a barely audible muddle, and then they’re done, they reached the other side, they’re elated, they nailed it. And it’s all so beautiful! Even when you can’t distinguish the words, the poems are full of rhythm and emotion. They’re about what they love and who they are, and these things are so clear and certain when you’re little–constantly changing and evolving, but not yet muddied and confused. They’re seven years old, so the poems are sincere in the best sense of the word. These kids aren’t trying to sell anything, or prove anything, at this age they’re not even worried about getting a good grade. They’re just telling you how they feel, and it’s so joyful and funny and even disarmingly profound in spots that you want to laugh and cry at the same time. Or at least I do. How long before the boys forbid me to attend events at their school? The whole class read a song about keeping a poem in your heart and a picture in your head, so you won’t be lonely, and this is such a perfectly Ordinary idea–this is what it’s all about! Not that you memorize a poem and walk around reciting it to yourself, but that everything is a poem or a picture, if you take the time to notice and collect it in your head in a way that you’ll remember it–with words or images or memories. My beloved OED defines a poem as “A piece of writing or an oral composition, … in which the expression of feelings, ideas, etc., is typically given intensity or flavour by distinctive diction, rhythm, imagery.” This is it exactly! Everything in your life can be given intensity and flavor, if you wake up and live. It sometimes seems that “they” are trying to make us slow and dull and stupid, so we’ll buy more that we don’t need. So I say, don’t watch the dumb shows, don’t eat the fast food, make your own meals, think your own thoughts, with passion and creativity! Nobody can take this away from you. In my visit to the OED, I also discovered the word “poeming,” as in composing or reciting poems, and I will tell you that the children in Isaac’s class were engaged in “Loud Tawkings and Poemings.” Yes they were. And so should we all be.
Savory almond cake with beets and asparagus
Yesterday at the flea market we met a French couple selling baking pans. I liked them so much, in an instant. They seemed so kind and friendly. We bought a half dozen pans of surprising proportions, and I’m excited to use them all. One was very large with straight sides about 1 1/2 inches high. I knew right away that I wanted to make a big savory cake in it. I’m fascinated by the idea of savory cakes, because I don’t think I’ve seen it anywhere, and I wonder why. We have savory pies and savory pancakes, but not savory cakes. I’ve experimented a bit, with a cake with chard and chickpea flour, and one with cornmeal and beets. This particular cake had ground almonds, and I made it like a savory version of a gateau basque, so it had two layers, combined on the edges, and containing a filling of toasted beets, mozzarella, goat cheese, beet greens and asparagus. And the asparagus tips are on top for decoration. I thought it was really delicious. Unexpected, with nice flavors and textures. Not too soft, not too dry. I was happy with the way it turned out! If you don’t happen to have a big French cake pan, you can use a regular cake pan or a small roasting pan.
We watched a movie the other night because the Guardian UK told me to and because it was written by (and starred) someone I admire. Well! The Guardian UK and the writer of this film are no longer my BFFs, because it was a bad film. It was a disappointing film. And it wasn’t even an originally bad film. It was just like every other film in its genre in every way; plot, platitudes, humor, prom scene. Ugh. Here’s the message of the film, delivered with a big self-righteous group hug: It’s not okay to be mean to people who are uglier and less fashionable than you are. Not okay! If you’re pretty, you have to be nice to ugly poorly-dressed people, and they’ll be very grateful for the attention. And that’s it. This is the kind of thing that makes me feel like growling–it’s not just stupid, it’s also dangerous because it cements stereotypes of human aesthetics that are just absurd. Nobody is prettier than anybody else. Even on a completely superficial level, ideas about what makes a person beautiful have changed so much throughout history, and they continue to change so much from country to country and culture to culture, that it becomes ridiculous to need to decide that one person is more beautiful than another. And it’s even more farcical to judge a person on their sense of fickle fashion, as any of the sharp, popular kids from 80s movies will tell you. Oh, how foolish they look now! People become more beautiful as you get to know them, the more so the more you like them. It’s not the symmetricality of a person’s features or the color of their eyes that makes them appealing, even on a purely aesthetic level, but the light cast in those eyes by ideas, by emotion and wit and understanding. It’s the way that each person is different from everybody else, the way that they’re strange to you. It’s the fact that they change with every changing mood and every passing year. The fact that they’re inexplicable and new with every shifting expression. If you were to make a movie about one of the token “ugly” people in any of these popular-kid films, and focus on them to the extent that we understand their story–that we hear their jokes and see their dreams and their talents, they would become the beautiful ones. Everybody finds different characteristics appealing, and it’s so damaging and limiting to suggest that the world is some sort of non-stop beauty contest with a very narrow-minded set of judges. And I’m speaking here merely about visual attraction. Not about “inner beauty” (yes, yes, it’s a sappy cliche, but no more so than the idea that barbie dolls constitute ideal beauty.) And not about the fact that vision is only one of the senses, and not the most important sense, in determining physical attraction–not more important than touch, taste, smell, sound. Not more important than all of those. It makes me sad to think that the “pretty” people in this bad movie and, I’m afraid, in life, are popular because we’re told that they should be by dumb movies and by magazines, and we’re foolish enough to buy it. Yeah. Join me next week for my rant on the idiocy of the whole concept of popularity!
I made this cake for a client who was holding a wine tasting featuring Australian shiraz. The client (henceforth known by her actual name of “my mom”) wasn’t looking for specifically australian foods, but I thought it might be fun to find something sort of Australian anyway. So I based this very loosely on cakes made by Dan Lepard, and written about in the pages of my former BFF, The Guardian UK. I think the strong flavors of ginger and bittersweet chocolate and marmalade go nicely with the very rich and flavorful wine that is Australian shiraz, any way, whether they be typically australian or not. This turned out to be a big handsome cake, and not at all difficult to make either.
Here’s Strange, by Screamin Jay Hawkins, about the unusual woman that he finds beautiful.
David and I took a trip today to the towpath we used to walk along when we first met, the place where we first intentionally spent time together, where we first kissed, twenty years ago today. Twenty years! It seemed as though the same old fellow in the same straw hat was riding on the same tractor and blocking the narrow winding road. It seemed as if the same birds were nesting in the same places. Of course it couldn’t have been the same birds, but it was probably their descendants, singing lustily in the vivid, shifting new leaves, so hard to see clearly, like memories or heralds along the path. Twenty years! I must admit I felt a little overwhelmed, to think about how much our lives have changed. To think about the people we were then, and how shy and uncertain I felt. I was afraid of long silences, but almost more afraid of speech–afraid to disappoint or be disappointed. It’s strange to think about how comfortable silence is now, and how full of promise, because I love talking with David and I have never been disappointed when he spoke. And to think of all the nonsensical ideas I’ve prattled about in twenty years, and how he’s come not just to tolerate this, but to anticipate it, and then to discuss it so intelligently that he makes my nonsense make sense. Almost as if he’d given it some thought, as if his thoughts had been wandering on the same strange roads. It boggles my mind that a person can spend twenty years so closely bonded to another person: sharing the same food, watching the same movies, listening to the same music, raising the same children, dreaming in the same bed, and it’s never boring, it’s constantly surprisingly wonderfully euphoric, in a glowing, peaceful sort of way that’s actually impossible to describe. And then the boys! So like us–so strange in all the ways we’re strange (poor lads) and so beautifully strange like just themselves and nobody else on earth. Twenty years ago we had long lazy days stretching before us, we had nowhere to be and not much to do. In my fading memory, my worries seemed so slight and easily unravelled. We filled the days up with each other, and now we have responsibilities and worries and decisions, which I can’t imagine getting any easier as we grow older. But we have one another to face it all with, we’ll take it on together. Well, I feel more grateful than words can say, so I’ll stop talking now.
This is sort of like a flourless cake, because it’s rich and dense, but it does have a tiny bit of flour in it. It also has almonds, lots of chocolate, raspberry jam and framboise. You could replace the framboise with chambourd, or any other fruity liqueur that you like. And you can use any kind of jam you like–you can experiment with different combinations!! Of course you should eat this with raspberries, but we gobbled all of ours down before I could take a picture, so the strawberries agreed to stand in for them.
Welcome to The Ordinary on this rainy Sunday morning! David bought a few new-old CDs recently, and I’ve been knocked over the head by how wonderful some of the songs are. Two blues compilations, and lots and lots of Buddy Holly. Buddy Holly!! Who knew? I mean, I sort of knew, but I had no idea. So sweet, and rocking, and generally amazing. So this week’s Sunday interactive playlist is songs that are new-to-you that you’ve been enjoying recently. I don’t hear much brandy new music these days, because I don’t listen to the radio all that much or watch TV ever. But I do love to discover old music that I hadn’t known existed. It’s like when you realize that there are bright yellow, red, and blue birds singing noisily in the trees above your head, and they’ve been there all along but you never noticed. So new new songs, or old new songs…anything you’ve recently discovered that is making you happy lately.
This cake was something of a surprise!! I added raw apples to the processor, and whizzed them up. I wasn’t sure how it would turn out, and it turned out really lovely. Dense and delicious, almost custard-y, but there’s only one egg in here. I added almond essence, because I’m adding that to everything these days, and I added chocolate chips, because I always add them to everything! Always! I also added some salted almond praline, crumbled up, which gave a nice crunchy salty texture to the soft cake. Anyway–a very simple, satisfying cake.
Here’s the link to the playlist. As ever, it’s interactive, so feel free to add what you like, or leave a song in the comments and I’ll add it for you.
Out of the Ordinary 