Pearled couscous and french lentils with yellow squash, tomatoes and fresh herbs
Couscous french lentil burgers
Couscous and french lentil burgers
Here’s Finn’s Baby Song, it’s been stuck in my head for days!
French lentil barley stew
Beware of any post that starts, “Last night, I was trying to fall asleep and I started thinking about…” You’ve been warned! So, last night, I was trying to fall asleep and I started thinking about the Easterish theme of resurrection. And I’ve had Elizabeth Cotten in my head (delightfully) for a few days, so I started to think about blues musicians who recorded some tracks in the 20s and early 30s, and then weren’t heard from again until the sixties. Their careers were resurrected.
Of course their lives continued in those decades, and they worked and struggled to get by, and they wrote about working and struggling, they wrote about their lives. In particular, I was thinking about Mississippi John Hurt and Skip James. (And then I thought about how hard it is to write about something that you really love as much as I love the music of Mississippi John Hurt and Skip James. But here goes!) Mississippi John Hurt and Skip James were Delta blues musicians. They were both born around the turn of the last century in Mississippi. They both started playing very young, sneaking a chance to play guitar any time they could. They were both largely self-taught, and they both developed unique styles of playing, just as Elizabeth Cotten did. She, being left-handed, turned the guitar upside-down, plucking out the melody with her thumb. Skip James has his own special tuning, in melancholy D-minor. Mississippi John Hurt played the guitar the way he “thought it should sound.” And when you hear him play, you’ll agree, this is the way guitar should sound.
Their music and their lyrics are disarming–sophisticated and wild, perfectly, strangely, human and familiar, poetical, violent, at times, but always sung in the sweetest possible way. Mississippi John Hurt’s voice is gentle and comforting, Skip James’ high and haunting.
Hurt was born in Avalon Mississippi, and he was endearingly fond of his home town. He travelled to Washington and New York to record music in the late 20s, but he wasn’t happy there – he was homesick. They tracked him down, later in life, based on lyrics to his song Avalon Blues. “New York’s a good town but it’s not for mine. New York’s a good town but it’s not for mine.” He was given a chance to perform with a traveling show, but he declined, because he wanted to stay near to his home. Skip James travelled for jobs and work camps, but his lyrics are about the people back home.
I wonder what it must have been like for them to be in their 60s and suddenly discovered by New York City folksy hipsters. What it must have been like to travel, at that age, and perform at the Newport Folk Festival, and be revered by these kids whose lives must have been so different from their own. Supposedly, Hurt, whom everybody liked his whole life due to his pleasant nature, enjoyed the experience, and James, who “could be sunshine, or thunder and lightning depending on his whim of the moment,” hated the folkie scene, and wasn’t fond of some of the covers of his songs that became wildly popular. What a strange turn for their lives to have taken. Blues music is full of fables and mythical characters, tales of death and life and reinvention, tales of people with legendary powers. I like to think about the long and hard-earned lives of James and Hurt in this way.
Here’s a short playlist of some of my favorite Mississippi John Hurt and Skip James songs.
So, this meal is something like winter’s last hurrah. It’s warm and comforting and nourishing. It has barley and french lentils, spinach, potatoes and carrots. So it’s pretty much everything you need in one big pot. The sauce is rich and savory, with port wine, tamari, sage and rosemary. And we topped the whole thing off with some grated smoked gouda and sharp cheddar. This is one of those “serve-with-a-good-loaf-of-crusty-bread” meals.
Ordinary pie
Mushroom and fench lentil pie
french lentils
roasted mushrooms
French lentil farro soup
The strangest thing was that almost before he had looked about him, Digory had half forgotten how he had come there. …If anyone has asked his “Where did you come from?” he would probably have said, “Ive always been here.” That was what it felt like – as if one had always been in that place and never been bored although nothing had ever happened. As he said afterward, “It’s not the sort of place things happen. The trees go on growing, that’s all.”
This, of course, is a passage from The Magician’s Nephew, by CS Lewis. He’s describing “the wood between the worlds,” a strange, lazy, dreamy green-lit place. It’s a place I think about a lot. We used to love The Chronicles of Narnia when we were little, my brother and I. Who wouldn’t like to imagine a magical world you could escape to at any time, where you could (safely) go on adventures and talk to animals? Your dog could finally tell you what she’d been thinking about all this time! We had a world of our own, in which we were talking animals, and the world had a history, a geography, a morality all its own. I’d tell you all about it, but it’s top secret! This world was almost like a religion for us, and it shaped our outlook on life to a remarkable extent. I’ve been looking forward to sharing Narnia with the boys, but I’ve been reading through parts of the books lately, and I feel a little disappointed! I’d forgotten about that whole, “Buck up, old chap, and stop your blubbering or we’ll despise you for the rest of the book” mentality. One of my favorite books was always The Horse and His Boy. I love the idea of stories that take place between the major conflicts. My idea of a good book would be a story of life when Peter was high king in which absolutely nothing happened. No drama, no evildoers to overthrow, just a tale of what day-to-day was like in this happy golden time. Well, I went back and read a bit of Horse and His Boy. It’s the story of light-haired, light-skinned noble well-intentioned people from the north fighting against swarthy-skinned, dark-haired, backwards and mean-spirited people from the South. Ugh! It’s still a good story, but I feel a little queasy when I imagine Malcolm reading it. Maybe I’m crazy.
Anyway…I’ve always loved the idea of the wood between the worlds. So many times in my life I’ve felt like I’m there, I’m in this tranquil in-between place, trying to decide which pool to jump in next. Because each pool is a world, and you don’t know what you’ll find there, when you jump in. Here in the green wood, you’re safe, all you have to do is sit still, and your memories are vague and dreamlike, and you can almost feel yourself growing. You don’t have to act, or interact with anyone. But you can’t stay forever. As Polly says, “This place is too quiet. It’s so – so dreamy. You’re almost asleep. If we once give in to it we shall just lie down and drowse for ever and ever.” So you have to exert yourself and pick a pool (or a school, or a job, or a place to live …) You have to wake up and exert yourself and engage with your life, and let the wood between the worlds become your dream. Since the boys were born, I feel like I’m having an extended stay in the wood between the worlds. I can feel the boys growing, at the incessant imperceptible rate that people grow, but how it all happened, how they got to be the boys they are now, on their way to being the boys they will someday be, is a jumble of memories and expectations and anxieties, all swathed in a glowing green light – a hopeful light, a healthy growing light. Sometimes I rouse myself from my pleasant drowse and I think about jumping into one of the pools – I apply for a job, I contact people about shooting a film – but I never seem to do much more than get my ankles wet in the wrong pool before I’m lying on the soft green grass again, wondering how I got there, listening to the boys grow, watching them get ready to choose which pool to jump into. Some day, in the glowing green future. There’s no hurry, it’s very nice here.
Well, I’ve mentioned that we’re all feeling a bit under the weather, here at The Ordinary. So I wanted to make a rich, comforting soup that would have a bit of spiciness to cut through the lurgy. So I made this soup, with french lentils and farro, for sustenance, spinach for all-around wonderfulness, and cayenne, ginger, and lemon, for salubriousness. It was very good! We floated green toast in it, made from the colcannon bread, which was lovely. This is a very hearty, meal-in-itself soup, but it wasn’t heavy at all – it had a nice warm smoky broth, and the ginger and lemon helped to brighten it.
Here’s This is Your World by Sam and Dave. What a good song!
Parsnip apple carrot soup
To quote Emerson one last time…”A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” Of course, Emerson was speaking of the foolish consistency of starting each and every meal with olive oil, shallots and garlic. Last night I made this soup, and I didn’t want it to taste like every other soup I have ever made, so I decided to leave our shallots and garlic altogether! Shocking, I know! I had some very great fears that it wouldn’t be flavorful. But it was extremely deliciously flavorful, and bright and comforting. Lovely and balanced and creamy. I used a larger ratio of carrots to parsnips and apples, but you could easily adjust that to your taste and to the contents of your larder, if you have such a thing!
Here’s Bob Marley with Wake up and Live. If ever a man ignored the wolf pack and let his own light shine, it was this man. Happy birthday, Bob!
Chard, lentil and meyer lemon soup
So readeth a banner on the wall of Lonesome Rhodes. Lonesome himself is on the balcony, raving like a Tom Waits-voiced Tarzan about how the people listen to him, because the people love him, because he is the people and they are Lonesome. He’s playing to an empty house, his own empty penthouse, lonely and cavernous, wrapped in sinister shadows. But his friend Beanie is laying on the applause – loud and often – on a machine that he himself, Lonesome, invented – it applauds him and laughs with him and oohs and ahs at his wise sayings. He starts to sing that he’s ten thousand miles from home, but he breaks off. He’s breaking down.
What is this madness? A face in the Crowd, directed by Elia Kazan in 1957. What a remarkable, odd, oddly contemporary film! It tells the story of Lonesome Rhodes (Andy Griffith), a drifter picked up in a jail by an eager Sarah Lawrence graduate (and all that that implies) played by Patrica Neal. She records him for a radio show on the voice of the common people, called Face in the Crowd. He’s irreverent and folksy. He becomes a star, a personality, first in Arkansas, and then all over the whole country. In New York his show is sponsored by Vitajex, a placebo that he sells as a libido-enhancer (Big Lebowski-esque dream sequence!); the CEO of Vitajex introduces him to a man running for senator, a tepid, aristocratic person that Rhodes sells as a man of the people. The film’s themes are startlingly relevant today: the intersection of commerce, politics and entertainment; the cynicism of the entertainment industry about the intelligence of their audience “Those morons out there? Shucks, I could take chicken fertilizer and sell it to them as caviar. I could make them eat dog food and think it was steak. Sure, I got ’em like this… You know what the public’s like? A cage of Guinea Pigs. Good Night you stupid idiots. Good Night, you miserable slobs. They’re a lot of trained seals. I toss them a dead fish and they’ll flap their flippers.” In the beginning of the film, Rhodes is irreverent towards the company that endorses him and suspicious of any commercial enterprises. He appeals on the air for all of his listeners to help a woman whose house has burnt down. By the end he’s on TV, exchanging quips with his senator about the evils of social security, and thinking of his audience, the crowd, the ordinary people, only in terms of the money, votes, or adulation they can give him. He’s seduced by the idea that he could become one of the elite, that he could guide the thinking of the masses. He’s funded by the Koch brothers of the day, to tell people what to buy, and to vote for the guy who will keep them poor, suspicious, and under-educated. He’s an ordinary person, but some people are more ordinary than others. Of course his career crashes, his women leave him, and he’s back where he started, ten thousand miles from home, and he doesn’t know where to go.
I bought a bag of meyer lemons! Look for them in every single recipe I make for the next week or so! They’re so lovely – sweet, tart, a little piney. I was thinking about french lentils, as one does. I love them, but I always seem to cook them the same way. I decided to try something a little different, and give them a kick with meyer lemons and ginger. This soup was so delicious! Comforting with potatoes and lentils, but very lively, with not just a squeeze of lemon, but the juice of two whole lemons!! Oh yes.
Here’s A Face in the Crowd, sung by Andy Griffith (to the tune of Sitting on top of the World, by the Mississippi Sheiks.
We had a lovely snow on Christmas eve, light and soft, the kind that makes the whole world seem clean and quiet. Snow makes Clio crazy, it brings out one of the “four formes of canine madnesse, the frantic or crazed madnesse.” She leaps about the yard, and then races in with icy snow in her pink paw pads, and leaps off of the furniture with mad abandon. I watched her on Christmas eve, and thought of Steenbeck, our old dog, buried in the yard under Clio’s frenetic paws, sleeping beneath a blanket of silent snow. I felt a sudden sadness, but it was a comforting sadness, in some inexplicable way. And on New Year’s Day we went to a party at a friend’s house, up on the hill above our small city. We walked up, it being a clear, cold day, and it felt good to shake some of the holiday-induced torpor from my mind. The party was lovely, with many children instantly interacting, as they so delightfully do, making things, and sharing things, and giggling. And we drank some good red wine, and talked to friends from town and just out of town – some we see nearly every day, some we see once or twice a year. It felt social, and cheerful, and just right for a New Year’s day. We left at dusk, which still comes early though the days are getting longer, and we walked home through the big old cemetery that over-looks our town. The stones were centuries old, but the names were familiar – the names of families that still live in our community. We read the name of the man who built our house in the 1850s, the name of the man we bought our house from ten years ago, the names of the people that own businesses in town, of families that our children go to school with. My boys raced along the paths, pelting each other with snowballs and laughing. And we walked down into town back to our old house, sleepy from the wine but sober from my thoughts, and made a warm meal, and watched a Buster Keaton movie, cuddled on the couch. It sounds idiotic, but I’d been thinking the night before about all the people that have ever lived. All of the humans that have walked on this earth, and lived, and loved, and wanted, and worked. Some in good fortune and freedom and wealth; most, probably, in poverty and servitude. But all wanting the same things, surely: affection, friendship, some degree of comfort, a kind hand, a warm meal. And I thought about it again, up on the hill, covered in a blanket of melting snow…”falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.” I felt, again, that sort of comforting sadness, looking out on our beautiful town, on all of the houses lit up and ringing with laughter, with people crying, “happy new year!” Which brings us to my resolution, if I have one, and, I think I do, but in true Clairish style, it’s vague and muddled, so I hope you’ll forgive this ramble. I don’t make resolutions to lose weight, or be healthy, or give up bad habits. I’ve said before that I believe in finding a balance in everyday life, and that those things are built into the fabric of that balance, cycling continually day-to-day, working against each other. Everybody gains a bit of winter weight, but we’ll eat soup meagre for a week, run up and down the towpath with Clio a few times, and be fighting-fit come spring! To me, “resolve” doesn’t mean to give something up, but to come into focus, to become harmonious, to be solved, or healed. So I hope to bring things into focus and harmony in this new year, moment-to-moment and day-to-day. To notice everything, to recognize how vivid and poignant every moment is, how completely alive each person that I meet – how like me and how completely unique. I hope not to let fatigue, crankiness, or laziness cloud my senses or lessen my appreciation of time spent with my children and David; of strong flavors, good sounds, beautiful sights. Not to be crippled by the sense that time is passing, but to let that awareness help me to feel more keenly. Not to be distracted by our fast, cold, cluttered, cynical world from clarity, light and warmth.
Well, this is my grand ambition for the new year, and this was the pie I made for New Year’s eve and New Year’s day. To eat leftovers on New Year’s day feels like striking out in the direction of frugality and good sense! I made the pie in a ring, because I’d read that ring-shaped foods are considered lucky. I made the crust rosy-golden with cornmeal and smoked paprika, because it seems like a fortuitous color. I filled it with lentils and greens, for luck, walnuts for crunch, and roasted butternut squash for flavor and sweetness, and capers for their flavor-dynamite explosion, so that our life will be sweet, flavorful, tangy, and substantial. Or, you know, whatever…who believes these old superstitions anyway?
Ring-shaped pie[/caption]
Here’s a whole album for you. It’s Jordi Savall playing Francois Couperin’s Pièces de Violes, we bought it for ourselves for Christmas, and it’s meltingly beautiful. Full of light and warmth and generosity, like a good life should be!
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Wild rice, french lentils and roasted vegetables
I like wild rice, but I don’t cook it very often, because I’m so comfortable cooking basmati, that it’s a worry-free situation for me. Quick, tasty and dependable. This dish combines wild rice with basmati and french lentils. It’s very autumnal, especially with the addition of roasted butternut squash and mushrooms, and the flavorings of sage and rosemary. I thought this was really tasty – savory, a bit sweet, a bit smoky with the cheese. Comforting! I made a purée of cauliflower and carrots to go with this, and flavored it with sweet smoky spices like cardamom and ginger. Sweet and soft where the rice is earthy and full of texture. A nice combination!
Here’s Police on My Back by The Clash. It might sound silly, but this is one of those songs that gets me to thinking about how you find hope and happiness when your life is dangerously uncertain.
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Walnut, roasted mushroom, french lentil soup
The recipe for today’s installment is one of the better soups I’ve ever made! I love roasted mushrooms, I love french lentils, I love them together, but I’ve never combined them quite like this. I pureed the mushrooms with walnuts to make a lovely savory, meaty sort of bisque, with sage and rosemary, and I added the lentils and their broth just before serving.
Here’s A Wee Bird Cam’ Tae My Apron by Jean Redpath.
Eggplant-french lentil burger
Buttermilk rosemary rolls
Here’s Jungle Brothers with Sounds of the Safari. It has lots of animal sounds. I don’t think tapirs or okapi make much noise, though.
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Out of the Ordinary 