Category Archives: recipe

Tender flakey herbed bread

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Tender-flakey-herbed-bread “What profit a man if he shall gain the whole world but lose his soul?”In the film A Band Called Death, Dannis Hackney tells us that the actions of his brother, David, embodied the meaning of this quote. The documentary tells the story of Death, a proto-punk band formed in Detroit in 1971. The band was comprised of three brothers, David, Dannis, and Bobby, and more than anything, the film is a story about their family, a testament to their warmth and loyalty. It’s a portrait of David, the brother who died in 2000 of lung cancer, and a moving celebration of the way that he lives on in the love of his brothers and in the music that they made together. One of the brothers says the whole story is “…strange. It’s just…strange.” And it is, but in the beautiful way that some stories are so strange they make perfect sense. David is portrayed as something of an eccentric genius, a spiritual philosopher. On the day of his father’s funeral, he took this picture of the clouds:
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He saw a triangle in the sky, and this took on the significance of the three elements of life, mental, spiritual, and physical. On the side he saw another shape, the shape of somebody looking after them, their father, maybe, or their heavenly father. This pattern became the band’s logo:
Death-logo-300x168
And Death became unequivocally the name of the band. Throughout their short career, this name created nothing but trouble. Nobody wanted to hear music by a band called “Death,” and they were offered a contract if they changed the name. But they refused, because that would have been like losing their soul, and in this context the word “death” is so much more about soul than anything else. It feels oddly perfect that we watched the film now, during the season of all souls, the season that the spirits of the dead can communicate more easily with the living. The Hackney brothers talk about their mother and father, who gave them a love for music, who taught them to always back up their brothers, who encouraged them to play even at their noisiest. We mourn with them when their mother dies, but we’re glad to see them so full of love and hope. When Death is finally discovered after 35 years, and achieves a bewildering popularity, we feel the confusion of Bobby and Dannis, happy that David’s prediction has come true, happy to share the music that he loved, but sorry that he missed this time. They re-form as a band with a new guitarist, three men on stage, and the photograph of David hanging alongside, watching over them. I think for any art to be great it has to have sincerity and soul, and the band Death, and these brothers, Dannis and Bobby, in their cheerfulness, and affection, and lack of pretension, in the energy and the warmth of their music and their lives, have a humbling amount of each. It’s strange, it’s just beautifully strange.

Bread! I love baking bread, particularly when it starts to get colder, as it is rapidly doing these days. I love that it takes all day, that it feels impossible, and, of course I love eating the bread! This bread has eggs, butter and milk, all of which make it tender and flaky. It also has a nice strong crust, and it has some herbs. I used sage, rosemary and thyme, because that’s what I’ve been getting from the farm, but you could use any that you have and like. Or leave out the herbs altogether, which would make this a great loaf for sweet things, like butter and jam, or cinnamon sugar, or french toast.

Here’s the albumDeath For All the World to See.

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Romesco paté

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romesco paté

romesco paté

Yesterday as we were walking home from school, Malcolm told me that he sometimes feels as though he has lots of different people inside of him. He’s not bound to this world or this time or the narrow point of view of one individual person, and he can close his eyes and be somewhere else, in a different world. I thought this was such a beautiful idea, and he spoke about it so beautifully, that of course I wanted to hear more, I wanted to ask him who he became and where he went, and I wanted to tell him he should write about it. Instead, instead, I said, “Oh, and is that when you get distracted and stop paying attention?” Because we’d just come from a conference with his teachers, all of his teachers. The poor boy was sitting at a tiny table with his long legs wrapped around a tiny chair, and he was surrounded by six adults, and we were all talking about him. It’s a familiar story, Malcolm is bright and creative and imaginative (or so say all of his teachers) but he has trouble focussing, and showing his work, and listening and following directions. I know that all of his teachers only want the best for him, and its their job to prepare him to take these epic standardized tests, but I had such a raw feeling of heartache, sitting next to Malcolm, looking out the window at the moody changing weather, listening to him trying to explain himself in his slightly husky voice, which has never really sounded like a small child’s voice. They asked him if he knew what an essay is, and I wanted to tell them all about my understanding of the word “essay,” which means to try something, and not to be crippled by fear of failure. But he said “it’s something really long,” and that’s the answer they were looking for. And as Colbert told us yesterday, the essays on standardized tests are soon to be graded by computers, “You see, tech companies have developed an automated reader which can grade 16,000 essays in 20 seconds…these essays are being compu-graded by evaluating critical elements like: How long the average word is; how many words are in the average sentence; and how long is the essay. Because as Shakespeare wrote, ‘Brevity is the soul of wit but splendiferous loquaciousness is paramount to acing your Lit final.’” You like to think about what sort of score Hemingway would get for his Nick Adams stories! And then you want to cry thinking about how little creativity and imagination matter in a world where ideas are graded in this way, and in which children are taught to write essays that will be graded this way. The teachers were talking about the importance of following directions, and they said, “If you were cooking something you’d need to follow the directions exactly, or what would happen?” Hoo, boy. I felt like yelling out, “You’d come up with something potentially a million times better! And it would have flavors you like, that combine in unexpected and wonderful ways, and it would use ingredients that you have, that grew in your garden, maybe, and it would be different from anything anyone had made!” Part of the reason I love cooking with Malcolm is that he’s not tethered to preconceived notions of how to cook or which flavors taste good together. His recipes are always completely fresh and unusual and delicious, and they always makes sense in some perfect, strange way. But I didn’t say anything, because I understand that you have to be able to follow directions before you can change them. You have to understand what’s expected of you before you can make something unexpected. You have to know all the rules, and be able to follow them, before you can allow yourself to break them. And I know Malcolm can do it, because my Malcolm, as I know him, is one of the cleverest, most observant and most capable people I know. He notices everything, and he understands how things work, and what he needs to do to make them work. He might be able to travel to different worlds in his head, he might have mighty castles in the air, but they have strong foundations rooting them to the earth. He might be able to see the world from a lot of different points of view, but he’s very strong in himself, he knows who he is and what he’s good at, with a sort of common-sense coolness that I aspire to, myself. When the teachers asked Malcolm what would happen if you didn’t follow a recipe exactly, he said with a smile, “It depends on the recipe.” I love this boy! He’s got a lot of work to do reining in his energy and imagination, but I know he can do it, and when he gets home we’ll cook up the craziest most unusual meal ever, and eat it with great delight.

Romesco paté

Romesco paté

I’ve always loved romesco sauce, the smoky, tangy mix of roasted red peppers, tomatoes, hazelnuts and almonds. I decided to try to make it into a sort of soufflé or paté. So I added some milk and eggs and cheese, and baked it in the oven. It puffed up like a souffle, but deflated pretty quickly. It was nice as a sort of side dish, but I think it would be good spread on crackers or toast as well.

Here’s They Might Be Giants, Malcolm’s current favorite band, with We Want a Rock.

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Kale and sweet potato empanadas with pecans, goat cheese and smoked gouda

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Kale and sweet potato empanadas

Kale and sweet potato empanadas

“For years, Cohen’s approach was to shoot three rolls of film over a two-hour walk, develop the rolls directly, have dinner, then go back to the darkroom, develop eight to nine prints directly from the negatives, and cast aside the rest. Cohen did this several times a week for decades. He estimates he has 600,000-800,000 images that he’s never seen or developed, not even on contact sheets.”

Mark Cohen is a street photographer who shoots images from his hip, without looking through the viewfinder. In an article in today’s Guardian, he describes his methods. He doesn’t carry a camera with him all the time, he goes on specific walks just to take photographs. This used to be in his home town of Wilkes-Barre Pennsylvania, but he’s recently moved to Philadelphia, and now he takes trolley rides, “I get on a trolley and go to a specific intersection. I like to go to the same one 10 times, so I understand the texture of the neighbourhood.”

His photographs, not surprisingly, are unusually framed, they’re askew and disorienting–not focussed on face and shoulders, but on whatever part of the body he happened to catch. There’s something beautiful in this discombobulation. The photos of people feel more intimate and specific to one person, because they capture some part of that person nobody would notice, but they also feel like a document of people everywhere at this particular moment in time. They look familiar, like family snap-shots, like people you knew, and in their abstraction they become surprising and new…you see the human form in a different light, as a collection of angles and light and shadows, vulnerable and beautiful.

Bare thin arms against aluminum siding

Bare thin arms against aluminum siding

I love the eccentric ordinariness of this whole process. I love the way it’s described as part of his routine, as natural as making a meal. In describing his career trajectory, from gallery shows in New York in the seventies to relative obscurity (although he has a show in Paris at the moment) he seems more than resigned. As his career waned, he remained as productive as ever, perhaps even more so. ‘Removing himself from the New York scene gave him a “purity”, he says, by virtue of “not having a personality so involved in the dissemination of work”. But by his own admission, he “dropped out” in the late 80s. “Gallerists couldn’t sell my stuff,” he says matter-of-factly. “My work’s not the most optimistic. It’s not like Yosemite.”‘

In all of these things: his subject matter, his seeming need to take photographs, the fact that he hasn’t developed many of his negatives, or even looked at them, he reminds me of Vivian Maier, another brilliant photographer who had a unique view of the world all around us. They capture time as it passes, they save moments in the lives of strangers and make them into something remarkable–something worth noticing, something worth saving. There’s a feeling almost of melancholy in the works of both photographers, something almost lonely in a glimpse into the life of somebody else. But there’s tenderness and compassion, too: we feel a connection.

kale and sweet potato empanadas

kale and sweet potato empanadas

Autumn empanadas!! These were warm and smoky, earthy, sweet and tangy. Very very nice on a chilly autumn evening. The kale and sweet potatoes are from the farm, as are the sage and rosemary. I used a combination of goat cheese and smoked gouda, for the nice contrast in flavor and texture. These were mostly soft and pleasing, but they did have a bit of crunch from the crust and the pecans.

Here’s Jimmy Smith with Just a Closer Walk With Thee.

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Roasted butternut squash and black beans in coconut milk

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Roasted butternut squash and black beans in coconut milk

Roasted butternut squash and black beans in coconut milk

Yesterday, despite my advanced years, the intimidating gravity of my demeanor, and my preeminently eminent status among the scholarly scholars of the world, I was scolded like a child. Like a bad child, I tell you! Like an impertinent middle schooler. I was made to iron my shirt, I was forced to roll silverware into linen napkins in the basement! (To be fair this is all part of my job, anyway, but it sounds so much more dramatic like this.) Obviously I only took this job so that I would have sympathy for all the scolded children of the world, so that I would learn the virtues of humbleness, obedience, and biddability, and yesterday my fiendish plan paid off in spades. So this week’s interactive playlist is scolding songs, songs that tell you to be good, get a haircut, fall in line, straighten up and fly right, or generally obey the rules and laws of society.

And this was a nice sweet and tart curry of roasted butternut squash, roasted peppers, black beans coconut milk and lime. Earthy and warm and autumnal. Good with basmati rice. Very very versatile…you could add any kind of greens you have, or tomatoes, you could substitute sweet potatoes for butternut squash.

Here’s a link to the interactive playlist. Add your own songs, or leave a song in the comments and I’ll try to remember to add it.
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Freekeh! And chard, chickpeas and sweet potatoes

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Chard chickpeas and sweet potatoes

Chard chickpeas and sweet potatoes

It’s strange how some moments can leave you feeling unexpectedly raw. Some days I’ll be walking along through the world, fully possessed of my maturity and composure and whatever other calloused armor lets us walk through this world in a capable and functioning fashion, and some small gesture will undo me. It’s usually something seemingly insignificant, something I could easily pass by without noticing at all (they do call me “oblivia” after all). But it will leave me a weepy puddly mess, for a minute or two.

Sometimes on our bike rides we pass what seems to be an entire school out exercising (it’s a very small school.) This is always a somewhat touching scene, just to see the glowing happy running faces, and the reluctant trudging faces, and everything in between, just to see the way the children arrange themselves in little groups, or end up by themselves, and to remember what that felt like. One day the teacher had organized a different sort of exercise, and as one group of kids ran out, another was returning to the starting line. They had to slap hands with the kid they passed. That was it, that’s all that happened, and this gesture of children touching hands with other children as they ran by was enough to make me hope the kids wouldn’t look up in my red and tear-y face as they trotted by.

Today I walked Isaac to school, like I do five days a week. Malcolm came running up, all bright-faced and happy. The power was out! They were being bussed to another school! They might have to have pizza for lunch! The excitement was palpable, and the noise was thunderous, as an entire school-yard full of children looked forward to the strangest, best day ever. Such a confusion! Such a botheration! Children large and small, making noise, tangling everywhere! No bell to get their attention, and the poor safety-patrol overwhelmed by children bouncing and bubbling all around them. It was chaos, I tell you! Cheerful chaos! And suddenly the remarkable music teacher walked out and clapped a rhythm. All the children around her clapped the rhythm, and then every child in the courtyard followed. Silence ensued. And what the heck, man, I’m suddenly the crazy mom standing on the edge of the courtyard with a mad grey dog, trying to think of an excuse for my red nose and watery eyes. I came home and told David about it and got weepy all over again! I’m weepy now, writing about it! What is wrong with me?

Oh, I could go on, I could tell you about how last week when Malcolm went to his friend’s house for breakfast (with all of his other friends) I made him some apple sauce to bring, and he said it was so good he could have eaten it all by himself. And last night he asked me to make more, and I assumed it was to bring to breakfast at his friend’s house again, but he said, “No, nobody else would eat it,” which means that he was asking me to make applesauce out of kindness to me, because he liked something his strange mother made even if nobody else would try it! That kills me! And that’s it, that’s all it takes.

I suppose it’s moments of connection, if I stop and look at it rationally, that strike such a tender chord; moments of communication or thoughtfulness. And they’re everywhere! They’re all around us! I feel crazy for getting so emotional about small things, but maybe we’re crazy for not being constantly undone by these moments, for not being constantly aglow with emotion set off by these small gestures. I don’t suppose we’d get much done, though, throughout the day.

Freekeh! I saw it at the grocery store in the bulk food bins. I’d never seen it before and it looked interesting, so I bought some! I did some research, and it seems to be the new, next super grain. I’m cutting edge! It’s wheat, but not as you know it. Well, it’s similar to bulgur, but it’s…well, I’ll let wikipedia tell you, “The wheat is harvested while the grains are yellow and the seeds are still soft; it is then piled and sun-dried. The piles are then carefully set on fire so only the straw and chaff burn and not the seeds. It is the high moisture content of the seeds that prevents them from burning. The now roasted wheat undergoes further thrashing and sun-drying to make the flavor, texture, and color uniform. It is this thrashing or rubbing process of the grains that gives this food its name, farīk or “rubbed.” The seeds are now cracked into smaller pieces so they look like a green bulgur.” I cooked it like I cook bulgur, toasted it in butter with some herbs, then simmered it till it was fluffy. I made a sort of stew of chard, sweet potatoes, herbs, and tomatoes from the farm, threw in some raisins, chickpeas, artichoke hearts, smoked paprika and nutmeg, and that’s what we at with the freekeh. The next day I mashed up the leftover stew, stirred in the leftover freekeh, some pecans, some bread crumbs, and an egg, and made croquettes.

Here’s the Beastie Boys with B Boys making with the Freekeh.
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Roasted beets and sweet potatoes with fresh tomatoes, mozzarella and walnut tarator sauce

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Roasted beets and sweet potatoes with fresh tomatoes and mozzarella

Roasted beets and sweet potatoes with fresh tomatoes and mozzarella

Here at The Ordinary’s home for over-used and worn-out metaphors, we’ve been visiting an old friend. We’ve been thinking of a metaphor, and we’re driving that tired horse the extra mile down well-traveled roads. It all started the other day when I described Malcolm’s mind as a vivid, teeming, beautiful place. I began thinking of it as a garden, I started to imagine what Malcolm’s garden would be like. I pictured it as a wild mix of different styles. In some parts it would be carefully planned and cultivated, and would yield delicious herbs and vegetables. In others it would be wild and unruly, full of raspberry bushes, say, delicious but prickly and hard to control. There would be gaps in the walls, hidden behind bushes or clever doors that Malcolm had fashioned from objects he’d found. These doors would open to secret passages, beautiful and rambling, which run for miles to unexpected places, alongside clear creeks. And Isaac’s garden would be bright and sunny, full of vibrant flowers and sweet smells. But there would be shadowy patches of skeleton flowers, or ghostly weeds or crazy jaggedy monstrous plants that look scary but would never really hurt you. His garden wouldn’t be hard to walk in, it would have plenty of paths, but they’d be meandering and twisting, and you’d never end up where you expect to. And my garden would be a miss-matched jumble. I would have started out carefully enough, drawing detailed plans in a little notebook, I would have chosen strange aromatic herbs and obscure fruits. I would have started with energy and good intentions, but somewhere along the way I would have gotten distracted or discouraged, and the flowers would never be as beautiful or the fruit as fruitful as I’d hoped. And I’d constantly be surprised by what I found in my own garden, forgetting that I’d planted something, or bewildered by some plant that had found its own way in and grown with wild gusto almost without me noticing. And sometimes this unexpected unremembered thing will be more beautiful than anything I’d planned. Like all gardens, ours will be dormant sometimes, seemingly bare under a layer of frost or snow, but beneath the soil all of the roots will be growing and alive. And like all gardens, we’ll have to be careful what we plant and what we allow to grow, and we’ll try to pull away the vines that choke everything healthy and vital. But we’ll never reject a plant because it’s not bright or showy enough or because somebody else calls it a weed. And we’ll understand that it’s good when our gardens are wild and alive and teeming, but it’s important for us to take care of them, and make plans for them, and forge paths through the brambles, so that we can share them with other people. We’ll revel in all the different moods and seasons, the sun and warmth and rain and frost, because we’ll know we need them all. Yeah. It’s an old metaphor, but the soil’s still good, it’s still got years of crops to harvest.

beet-sweet-plateBeets and sweets from the local farm! The season’s almost over, so we’ll make the most of it while we can. I sliced the beets and sweets and a few regular potatoes quite thinly. Then I roasted them till they were crispy. I lay these on a bed of baby arugula, and then piled them high with fresh tomatoes and basil (from the farm) and mozzarella, and then I drizzled the whole thing with a creamy vegan walnut tarator sauce. A sort of warm salad, perfect for this season of unexpectedly warm days and unexpectedly chilly nights.

Here’s REM with Gardening at Night.

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Mashed potato and white bean croquettes with sage and rosemary

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Potato and white bean croquettes with sage and rosemary

Potato and white bean croquettes with sage and rosemary

People at work have been giving me grief about my handwriting. Sometimes they’re joking, sometimes they’re exasperated and angry, but it’s always the same cry, “You have to write more neatly.” The odd thing is that in my 44 years, most of which I’ve spent a lot of time writing, nobody has ever said a negative word about my handwriting. It’s not pretty, I’m no calligrapher, but it’s always been legible. I get my point across. I’m tempted to say, “Don’t worry, my seven-year-old has a hard time reading cursive, too. You’ll get it eventually.” But I don’t. The other odd thing is that it’s surprisingly hurtful to be teased about your handwriting. It feels bad to be scolded. It feels bad for about a minute, because this is just my extremely part-time job, and I don’t really care enough to care, and when you work in a restaurant if you can’t weather some criticism barked at you by stressed-out cooks you won’t last very long. The other day we were trying to sort through the mess of papers in Malcolm’s backpack, and most of them said, “Write more neatly!!” Well! I had such a surge of sympathy for my Malcolm! He hears it all the time. The teachers are only doing their job, and I’m sure they’re kinder than my co-workers (they’d better be!!). But I’m sure it’s not just the handwriting, it’s everything. I’m sure he’s constantly told to sit still, focus, be organized, pay attention. And that’s just the school part, just the educational side. He’s got a million other things to figure out, too. The other day he needed his tiger hat. With classic Malcolmish single-mindedness and urgency, he wouldn’t even eat breakfast until he found it. He was sure all the other kids would be wearing their animal hats (last year his class was like a strange sort of zoo.) Well, they weren’t. It’s just Malcolm and his tiger hat. But he didn’t care, he’s still happy to wear it, as cool as ever a kid could be. Yesterday Malcolm was worried about a grade he got on a math test. So worried that he wouldn’t look at me or talk to me. He wouldn’t lift his head, and I found myself talking to the blankly staring, slightly surprised button eyes on the tiger’s hat, pushed back to the top of Malcolm’s head. It’s overwhelming! There’s so much for Malcolm to be responsible for, to keep track of, to figure out! He’s so bright and sweet and smart and practical, but it seems like so much. We can’t do it for him, we can’t even be there with him most of the time while he’s holding all the pieces together. It’s just so strange to be a parent, sometimes. It’s my job to show Malcolm that all of this is important: that grades are important, and neatness, and showing your work,and points, there are always points to keep track of, to be lost and never regained. It’s my job to make this matter to Malcolm, when part of me wants to shout, “Who cares what your handwriting looks like if the words you write with it are as imaginative and clever and funny as you are? Who cares if your spelling is erratic as long as your stories are so brilliant and creative? And who cares about math at all?!” But of course I would never say that, because I do care, and I know that he should, too. I know he can manage all of this, I know he can. He’s a strong swimmer, I know he can carry himself over this sea of worries and responsibilities. His mind is a vivid, teeming, beautiful place, and I know his head hurts sometimes with trying to see his way through clearly, trying to rein it all in, and trying to get it all out–trying to organize all this brilliance and show his work, and write more neatly so other people can share it, too. I understand that sometimes a person might need to lie on the floor and hide behind his tiger hat before he wades in again, I might try it myself sometime.

I think there’s nothing more comforting than mashed potatoes! They smell like a holiday while they’re cooking, and they’re so pleasing and soft and gently flavorful. I had some left over, and I wanted to make something that accentuated their comfortingness, so I made these little croquettes. I kept them very simple, but they’re not bland. It’s just mashed potatoes mixed with smushed white beans, eggs, white sharp cheddar, and rosemary and sage. Quick and easy. I made a red sauce to go with them, with some balsamic and garlic and shallots, so it’s got stronger sharper flavors which were nice against the simplicity of the croquettes.

Here’s James Brown with Mashed Potato
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Roasted butternut, pecan, & mushroom pies

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Roasted butternut French lentil pies

Roasted butternut French lentil pies

This weekend marks not only the second anniversary of The Ordinary, but the first anniversary of Clio’s stay in our house, as well. She’s lived with us a whole year! I remember when I went to get her. She was an hour’s drive away, and I was so nervous I felt sick. After weeks of begging for a puppy like a spoiled child, and nights of being sure someone else would adopt her first, I had gotten my way and I was plagued by saucy doubts and fears. Clio had met twenty other prospective families, or so her foster mother had said, and none were right for her. Would she like me? Would I like her? There was another family there to meet another dog. This dog was older, very calm and quiet and frightened, and the foster mom said, “Yes, she’s very good, you’ll have no problems with her.” And then she said, “But I’m not sure about this one,” and let Clio out of her cage. She bounced with joy! She jumped in my lap and licked me madly! She jumped in the lap of every member of the family there to meet the calm dog! She tried to kiss the man behind the counter! And that was that, she came home with me, and she’s been here ever since. People who know me get sick of hearing me say all the things I like about Clio, but it’s her anniversary, so I’m going to tell you here. I love her paws!! She’s a rough and tumble dog’s dog, but her paws are surprisingly elegant. They’re white and silky, and she holds them like a dancer. When she lies down she crosses them, and she’s got many different styles of cross-paws. There’s demure cross paws, and ballerina cross paws, and the extreme, one-arm-slung-over-the-other-I’m-so-glad-you’ve-joined-me-in-my-library-for-a-cognac-in-our-dressing-gown cross paws. Her paws are very speaking, she grabs hold of you and tries to make her wishes known, but we’re so slow! I love the way she sings when she’s nervous. I love the way she hugs–she stands and hovers for a moment and then puts one paw on either side of your waist and squeezes and whuffles. I love the way she cuddles, and especially the way she waggles her head contentedly when she lays it on your arm or leg, as if to get as close and comfortable as possible. I love her sweetness…she loves every dog she’s ever met, even though she’s been bitten badly twice. I’ve never heard her growl at another dog. And she loves most people, unless they’re wearing sunglasses or excessive cologne. And I love the way that she’s leapingly happy, jumpingly joyful. So, in honor of the anniversary of her stay here, today’s Sunday interactive playlist will be on the subject of jumping, leaping, hopping, bounding, bouncing.
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This is the dinner I made for David’s birthday. It’s a very fancy Ordinary dinner. It employs some Ordinary staples, such as french lentils and roasted mushrooms. It’s autumnal, because it also has roasted butternut squash, smoked gouda, and pecans. I made it in big muffin tins, with large holes in them, but if you don’t have those, you could make little free-form galettes and they’d be just as tasty.

Here’s a link to your interactive playlist. Keep bouncing!
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Almond praline cake

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Almond praline cake

Almond praline cake

It’s Saturday storytelling time again!! It’s been a while! I’ve worked on this one quite a bit. Gone, gone are the days of waking up at 7 before the boys do, writing down anything in my head and calling it a story. Now I spend weeks “working” on it. Of course “working” on a story, for me, means thinking about it, dreaming about it, not actually writing anything, and worrying that it’s just the wrong time to start putting anything on paper. As you may recall from the distant past of Saturday storytelling time, the stories are inspired by a picture from the brilliant website Square America. I’ll take a random snapshot of a complete stranger, and invent a past and future for the moment that it captures. Here’s this week’s picture, of a woman swimming.
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The story is very loosely based on the tale of Hercules and his friend Hylas. As Theocritus tells us, “We are not the first mortals to see beauty in what is beautiful. No, even Amphitryon’s bronze-hearted son, who defeated the savage Nemean lion, loved a boy—charming Hylas, whose hair hung down in curls.” One or two lines in my story are taken straight from a translation of the myth, but I won’t tell you which ones! And now, I’ve probably said too much! Never explain a story, right? The story is after the jump.

Almond praline cake

Almond praline cake

Today we will speak not of beets, nor will we speak of beans and greens, as we have so oft done of late. We will speak of cake!! This time of year I always have a cake around. Something simple, usually, to have with coffee in the morning (or all day long.) This cake is inspired by a tart from my French cookbook of the 60s, but it doesn’t count in our French-cake-a-week series because I’ve changed it quite a bit. This would have been the filling of a tart, and it would have had a crust around it. But for once I didn’t feel like making a tart! The cake has almonds and jam in it. The jam is mixed right in, and I think it gives it a nice, mysterious, juicy flavor and texture. The recipe calls for marmalade, but I used Four Fruits, because it’s just so good. I think it’s called a praline cake because you scatter almonds and sugar on the top to make a sort of crust. I used raw sugar, but you can use anything with largish crystals of sugar. I added some at the end and put it under the broiler, but when you do this be very careful, because you don’t want to burn the almonds!! The recipe’s after the story, after the jump.

Here’s Tom Waits’ Gin Soaked Boy, because I borrowed a line for my story, and because I love it.

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Sunshine pink soup

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Sunshine pink soup

Sunshine pink soup

It’s the second anniversary of The Ordinary!! Huzzah huzzah!! Flips and possets and toddies for all my friends! It’s a dark, pouring-down-rain day, and I sit here contemplating The Ordinary and the world at large. Everything feels a little chaotic and out of control, with government shutdowns and debt ceilings and changing climates and wars and near-wars everywhere you look. I’m still reading Zola’s Germinal (I know, I know, I’m slow). Striking miners are banding together, thousands of them, frantic and desperate after months of hunger and deprivation, they’re storming across the countryside, they’re destroying machinery. They’re shouting, “Bread, bread, we want bread!” They don’t want much: they want a home of their own to keep clean and warm; they want enough food to eat; they want some special days of celebration, with fancier meals and more beer; they want to be paid a fair amount for the work that they do; they want some sense of safety and security. They’re not shutting everything down to keep people from something essential, something they need, like access to a doctor when they’re sick. (Oh, how I’d love to have health insurance!) They’re not acting out of pettiness and spite to hurt people who don’t have much, they’re acting out of need, to ask for just enough. It’s a very Ordinary theme. We’d like to write demands for a new Bon Vivantery. Rules whereby every person can live well; not extravagantly, not lazily, but assured of enough. Assured of a chance to be healthy, a chance to know what’s really happening in the world around them and farther afield, a chance to work at what they love, a chance to have food and ideas and energy and materials to create something good every day, and to work towards something better as each day goes by, a chance to feel really alive, to glow amidst the pouring-down-rain and deluge of confusion and nonsense all around us.

Isaac named this sunshine pink soup. And he really loved it! He ate several helpings. In reality, it’s all of the vegetables left from the farm at the end of the week, roasted together and pureed till smooth. The vegetables were very autumnal, winter squash, sweet potatoes and beets, so the soup has a sweet, warm flavor and color. I added ginger, rosemary and lime, for some contrasting bite and zing. I made some nice soft rolls to go with it, and that was that!!

Here’s Art Blakey’s Moanin, live and full of style, grace, beauty and joy.

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