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Pearled couscous & french lentils with yellow squash, and burgers!

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Pearled couscous and french lentils with yellow squash, tomatoes and fresh herbs

Pearled couscous and french lentils with yellow squash, tomatoes and fresh herbs

I’m in a little bit of a blue funk these days. MId-summer slump? Mid-life crisis? A skewed perspective? I’m anxious about the future and regretting a past that hasn’t even happened yet. I’ve been looking at my life from the outside too much, maybe, and that’s never a good thing. You can’t think about it too much, right? You just have to splash through it like it’s cool creek water, try not to slip on the mossy rocks, and enjoy the dousing you get if you do. But I’m not going to talk about that, because who cares!! I’m going to talk about Adventure Time, again. I just love it, as Malcolm would say. I find it such a comfort…it makes me feel happy. I love the friendship and the humor, and the way that the whole world of the show is morally complicated but ultimately righteous. We bought the second season the other day, and we got a few Tintins at the same time (I have to tell you that we got some real books, too, with lots of words and chapters and the like, just so you don’t worry too much about the boy’s intellectual development.) And I had a major revelation! I love Adventure Time the way I used to love Tintin, and maybe haven’t really taken to anything else since. It makes me happy in the same way: watching it reminds me of being little with a new Tintin and a plate of fries, which was such a good feeling. (It’s not fries anymore, it’s grolsch and punjabi mix, which we had yesterday during a thunder storm, and which will surely be one of my best memories of this summer.) Well, I started to think about similarities between Adventure Time and Tintin, and I think I’ve gathered enough that I could write a thesis on it. A nice thick scholarly thesis. They both wear the magical Tintin blue. They’re both drawn in bright solid colors, they both have yellow-blonde hair. They’re both young boys who live, improbably, in a dangerous adult world, with only a dog for a companion. In both cases the dog is a sort of saltier, more mature individual…Snowy with his whisky drinking, and Jake with his gruff voice and tail-wagging appreciation of imaginary cute girls. The dogs are like manifestations of the maturity that these strangely independent boys lack but need to survive in the world. Tintin and Finn both cheerfully and eagerly face every challenge, and it’s this very enthusiasm that helps them to win the day. Yes, I love these boy-and-their dog stories, but it got me thinking that what the world needs now is a girl-and-her-dog story. It will be about Clio and me! A perplexed overgrown child, strangely out of place in the complicated and often sinister adult world, and her wise-cracking canine companion. Of course in this scenario, it’s Clio who has all of the enthusiasm, gumption and curiosity, but she has enough for two, so that’s alright. Our adventures will be slightly more low-key than those of Finn and Tintin. We’ll sleep an extra hour after the alarm goes off! We’ll chase cats (and squirrels and birds and dried leaves) on the tow path! We’ll walk the boys home from school! Can’t you just see it? Can’t you hardly wait to read about our exciting adventures?

Couscous french lentil burgers

Couscous french lentil burgers

We got some big beautiful yellow squash from the farm, along with some pretty plum tomatoes, and lots of fresh herbs. I wanted them fresh and flavorful, so I only sautéed them lightly, and I made a sort of pilaf of whole wheat pearled couscous and french lentils as a sort of base for the bright vegetables. We topped it all with pine nuts and grated mozzarella. Nice summery meal. Everybody liked it, even the picky boys. The next day, I combined the leftovers with some romesco sauce to make burgers, and they were almost better than the initial meal! Juicy and flavorful. We ate them with fake bacon, smoked gouda, lettuce and sliced tomatoes. If you don’t happen to have romesco sauce lying around, it’s worth making some just for these, but also because it’s so delicious in its own right.
Couscous and french lentil burgers

Couscous and french lentil burgers

Here’s Finn’s Baby Song, it’s been stuck in my head for days!

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Saucy summer vegetables with lemon, basil, and ginger

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Summery sauce with lemon, ginger, basil, and cilantro

Summery sauce with lemon, ginger, basil, and cilantro

We’re having a heatwave! It’s been one scorcher after another, with little relief even at night. I don’t mind it so much. I like to hole up in our one air-conditioned room and read or write, and then strike out in search of water for the boys to swim in. But it does make you feel a little weary, after a while, and leave you longing for crisp, energizing weather. You might expect this week’s Sunday interactive playlist to be about hot songs, right? But no! We’re going to cool it down with songs about coldness, winter, ice and snow. What’s cooler than cool? Our ice cold playlist to chill out to.

summery sauce with lemon, basil, and ginger

summery sauce with lemon, basil, and ginger

This is a light, bright way to use up some vegetables from the farm without heating up the kitchen too much. I used golden beets, pattypan squash, golden and red tomatoes and fennel, because I like the combination of flavors and that’s what we had, but you can use what you like. It’s very flavorful, with ginger, coriander, basil, cilantro and lemon. We ate it with soba noodles, and it looked very nice and colorful against their slate grey background, but you could eat it with rice, or over greens, or as a sort of side dish.

Here’s a link to the ice cold playlist. Add what you like, or leave a comment and I’ll add it for you.

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Grilled mushroom and white bean dip

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Grilled mushroom and white bean dip

Grilled mushroom and white bean dip

Well my story isn’t done. It’s barely even started. Yesterday I wasted lots of time waxing eloquent about how I wanted to write a story, and it sounded like it was going to be a pretty good one, all glowy and underwatery. And I actually wrote one in my head, or part of one at least. And then I got home all eager to write it down, opened up my notebook, and…naw, that’s no good. And then I spent some time looking for another picture to write about, but I couldn’t even do that, I couldn’t pick one. And I started maybe three different stories, but didn’t like any of them, and I began to feel like Isaac, frustrated and angry, yelling at myself, “I HAVE TO WRITE A STORY! WHY WON’T YOU LET ME WRITE A STORY!” I fear my little writer’s block-clearing exercise is giving me a mean case of writer’s block. Or maybe it’s the heat, it’s probably the heat. Anyway, I thought I’d tell you instead about a storyteller that I admire very much (thanks, Saneshane!). His name is Jeffrey Lewis, and he tells stories with pictures and songs. His songs are musically simple but very sweet and compelling, and his lyrics are wonderful. He tells stories about moments of his life that might not seem all that eventful, but that become memorable and meaningful in his songs. He’s witty, pessimistic, hopeful, honest and philosophical, and all in a lovely confiding conversational style. He’s brilliant but self-deprecating, discouraged but full of life. He also writes comic books, and sometimes he tells stories with pictures and songs at the same time. In fact, he did a whole series of songs for the History Channel on subjects such as the French Revolution and the Fall of Rome.

Here are some songs I like by him.


I like them all, actually, but I’m late for work.

This recipe is super easy! It’s a great way to use up leftover grilled vegetables. You just purée them with some beans and spices, and you’re done! It’s great with crackers or chips or spread on crusty bread. Or serve it with oven-roasted fries and a salad as a meal. It would work really well with leftover grilled red peppers, too.
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Trifle with black currants and cherries and almond custard

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Cherry and black currant trifle

Cherry and black currant trifle

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!

Here’s Tread Water by De La Soul
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Pesto potato-crusted “pie” with fennel, tomatoes and olives

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Pesto potato "pie" with fennel, tomatoes and olives

Pesto potato “pie” with fennel, tomatoes and olives

This is my 700th post! It boggles the mind! I should make it very clever and funny and memorable, but I’m not feeling very organized in my mind at the moment, so none of that is going to happen. Instead you’ll get a ramble from my melty brain, and it will start this way: “I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately…” As you may have noticed, I’ve been reading some Camus, specifically essays he wrote for Combat magazine as the second world war came to a close and the occupation ended. He’s so hopeful and passionate about starting fresh, about creating a new society, and he’s sorting through his ideas about politics, religion, violence, life and death. It’s an inspiring read, and it’s fascinating to see how his convictions change in response to the world around him. He starts one essay, “We are often asked: ‘what do you want?’ We like this question because it is direct. We must answer it with directness…by returning to the question again and again, we will give our answer clarity.” I love this about Camus! His answer is not entirely specific or practical, but it’s about justice and freedom and purity, and how those can probably never be achieved but they’re still worth fighting for. I’m not often asked “What do you want?” and I’m fine with that, because honestly I don’t want all that much, but I’ve been thinking about my defense of the ordinary, lately, and I have a lot of questions I return to again and again. For instance, I recently described the British kitchen sink films as Ordinary. They are about ordinary people, but they’re also about miserable people, who are trapped by an immoveable class system. And this is not something I would champion. I would not tell someone trapped in an unrewarding hopeless job, “Ah, just make the best of it and think interesting thoughts.” I would encourage them to make a change in their life, and I would hope they’d have the freedom and support to do so. But this is how the cycle continues…their new, more interesting job would become ordinary, and that would be a good thing. Because everybody lives day to day. You could have the most fabulous life imaginable, but you still live it one day at a time, you still move through it from meal to meal and sleep to sleep, from season to season: the sun still rises and sets on you. This is something we all share, and which we can’t escape. This passage through time, with it’s oddly variable, inevitable pace should join us in sympathy with everybody around us, because it makes us all equal, it makes us all Ordinary. But it also makes ordinariness unspeakably precious and not something we should feel stuck with, but something we should value and keep. I want to see a change in the world, I want to see a (peaceful) revolution that brings about the sort of justice in which everybody has the freedom to live their everyday life exactly as they would wish, with plenty and safety and inspiration. The tedious jobs should be shared by everybody, so that we all have the time to be creative and joyful. So that as we’re all stuck on this journey together at the same absurd pace, we all have a beautiful view out the window. Well, it’s 100 degrees and I’m probably not making sense, but by returning to the question again and again, we will give our answer clarity.

Pesto potato pie with fennel, tomatoes and olives

Pesto potato pie with fennel, tomatoes and olives

This is all from the farm! Potatoes, herbs, tomatoes, fennel. I wanted to put it all together with the smallest amount of heat possible. So I cut the tomatoes very thin and cooked them quickly. And I sauteed the fennel and herbs. But beyond that it’s all made (quickly) in the toaster oven. You could use the regular oven and broil it, and everything would be cooked in about ten minutes, so it wouldn’t be hot for very long. It’s kind of like a pizza, except that it’s gluten free! The boys liked it, and so did we.

Here’s Our House, by Madness, because somebody was listening to it as I walked down the street earlier, and I remembered how much I like it, and it’s very cheerfully about ordinary life.

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Arugula salad with roasted carrots, beets, pecans and shaved goat cheese

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Arugula salad with roasted carrots, beets and pecans

Arugula salad with roasted carrots, beets and pecans

“Hey, Claire,” I hear you say, “Why the hell have you never mentioned the ‘kitchen sink’ films of the sixties? Aren’t they perfectly Ordinary?” And then I slap myself on the forehead and say, “OF COURSE! Of course they are! And I love them! They’re some of my favorite movies of all time!” And then I think it over a little more and decide that some are more Ordinary than others, and maybe these are the ones I’ll talk about. The kitchen sink films, for those who don’t know, are British films made in the sixties that are notable for showing working class people going about their ordinary lives. They’re mostly black and white, and though simply, even roughly, shot, they’re gorgeous. They’re often filmed on location with natural lighting, but I would happily save each frame of most of them as a beautiful still photograph. The term “kitchen sink” was inspired by a painting by John Bratby, and this drive for social realism was part of a broader movement that included art, theater and literature.
John Bratby's Kitchen Sink

John Bratby’s Kitchen Sink


The films are also called “Angry Young Man” films, because many of them concern themselves with just such a character, but I find that my favorites are more complicated than this, they’re not always about men, and the central character is not simply angry, but has a conflicted attitude to their home and the humdrum life they find themselves stuck in. One such man is Billy Liar, played with pathos and comic genius by Tom Courtney. This film has an extraordinary balance of darkness and light. Billy works in a funeral parlor, and he woos one of his many girlfriends in a cemetery. His parents needle him to grow up and take responsibility. He dreams of someday escaping to London, preferably in the company of Julie Christie. But the truth is that Billy escapes his dreary reality every day: he has a world in his head, a country called Ambrosia, where he is a hero, or several heroes. Billy’s goal in life is to be a script writer, and through his fantasies, he writes a script for himself, for his life, that helps him to transcend the weighty worries of his real-life. When he’s offered a chance at a actual grand gesture, a genuine adventure, he decides not to take it, and the ending of the film is suffused with a melancholy sense of failure, but once again Billy’s imagination saves him. Billy Liar is a comedy, but it’s a complex one, with layer upon layer of questions about life and society buried deep in each scene. Billy’s world is far from perfect, but seen through his eyes, it’s beautiful and funny and touching. The ending is bittersweet and complicated, just like life. I think Billy has made happiness for himself, and to me that means he’s not a failure at all.

Stay tune for further installments of Claire’s favorite Kitchen Sink films at an Ordinary near you!

Roasted carrot and beet salad

Roasted carrot and beet salad

It’s been too hot to cook, so we’re having lots of salad. But when a salad is your meal, you want it to be hearty, you want it to have nuts and cheese and then you want to try to use up all of your vegetables from the farm, so you add roasted beets and carrots, and then you treated yourself to some special hard goat’s cheese from Spain and some special hard sheep’s cheese from the Basque region, and you want to shave some of that on there as well. And you end up with this big beautiful tangle of greens and everything but the kitchen sink!

Here’s The Decemberists with Billy Liar.
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Roasted potatoes and butter beans with summer savory

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Potatoes, butter beans and savory

Potatoes, butter beans and savory

I have the whole day to myself for the first time since…well, I can’t really remember the last time. “Oh! Miss Woodhouse, the comfort of being sometimes alone!” I had such big plans! I was going to get so much work done. I was going to start a novel, and make some progress on pre-production on this movie I’ve been talking about for half a decade. I was going to be creative and productive!

Six hours in, and I’m having such a strangely hard time focussing. I could blame it on the heat, because it is hellish hot, but in truth I think it’s the silence. It’s the complete and bewildering lack of distraction. Why isn’t anybody asking me for a snack, and then ten seconds later insisting on a drink to go with it? How can I possibly be expected to get any writing done if I can’t yell at anyone to stop yelling so that I can get some writing done–if I don’t have the deadline of a trip to the river to motivate me?

I’m actually a big fan of aloneness. I think it’s important to be alone some of the time, so that you can pursue the thoughts in your own head wherever they might lead you, so that you can try to figure out all of those things it’s impossible to figure out. It’s one of my tedious mantras that a person should have such a supply of inner resources that they’re happy alone with no distractions for long periods of time.

But, as in all things, I believe we need to find a balance. We need other people, and we need to be needed by them. It’s important to have an outlet and a reason for your wandering thoughts, so that you have something solid to tether them to. It’s important to have a sense of community, be it local or international. I’ve been thinking about this a lot, the last couple of days. If we know our neighbors, and understand them and care for them, then we’ll trust them as well. We won’t sit in paranoid solitude till we drive ourselves crazy with hate and rage. And we’ll understand why the actions of a few people acting out of hate and rage will be greeted by an ever-growing community of humans caring for strangers as if they were friends, with generosity, compassion and understanding.

Each week I’ve been picking handfuls of fresh herbs from the farm–rosemary, thyme, sage and more sage, oregano, mint, lavender, and summer savory. I generally throw everything together into one big mix of flavors, because this random wildness is part of what’s beautiful about this time of year. But summer savory is a flavor I don’t encounter very often. It’s not as nice dried, and it’s lovely and distinctive–a little lemony and, well, savory! So I decided to use it all on its own in this recipe, roasted simply with tiny potatoes from the farm and big butter beans that were almost as large as the potatoes. I roasted everything in olive oil, and then drizzled some truffle oil on top. If you don’t have truffle oil, you can leave this step out–it will still be very flavorful!

Here’s People Make the World Go Around by The Stylistics

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Greens with pine nuts and roasted beets

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Greens with beets and pine nuts

Greens with beets and pine nuts

“In such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, not to be on the side of the executioners.” – Albert Camus.

Today was a sad day for justice in America, a heartbreaking leap backwards. I’m sure that wiser and more articulate people than me will discuss it at great lengths, and I hope that before long a change will be made, we will have a new verdict, and we will have the kind of peace that can only come with justice. So today’s Sunday interactive playlist is on the subject of justice. Cries for justice such as Peter Tosh’s Equal Rights or stories of justice gone awry, such as Bob Dylan’s Seven Curses. If you can think of songs about justice being correctly meted out, those would be more than welcome, but I declare that I’m too saddened and discouraged to think of any at the moment!

And a recipe to go with our playlist, because even on a day such as this, we need to keep our strength up and nourish one another. Beets and greens, beets and greens. It’s been that kind of spring. This is a variation on my favorite dish, which is greens with raisins and pine nuts. Instead of raisins, we have lovely little sweet morsels of roasted beets. I used garlic scapes because I had them, but you could use regular garlic. I flavored this with fresh sage and rosemary from the farm. And I used chard and beet greens, but you could use spinach, kale, or even collards, if that’s what you’ve got. If you use kale or collards, you’ll want to parboil them for five or ten minutes to soften them up.

Here’s a link to your interactive playlist. Please add what you’d like, or leave a comment and I’ll add the song.

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Roasted golden beet, carrot & cashew sauce (with broccoli, garlic scapes, & tamari)

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Roasted golden beet, carrot and cashew sauce

Roasted golden beet, carrot and cashew sauce

I used the word “keen” the other day, and it struck me that it’s a very Ordinary word. Of course I’ve been thinking about it ever since, and of course I looked it up in the OED. The word has foggy and uncertain origins, and I think this mystery adds to its appeal. It’s had quite a few meanings over the years, and I like almost all of them. Most of them relate to an intensity of sensation or emotion. (Except, of course, in America in this century, when it’s meant something mild and harmless like “swell” or “nice.” Sigh.) In the earliest examples, which I can’t make sense of, even though I studied Old English twice, it meant wise, learned or clever, and then it drifted into brave bold and daring, which edged into fierce and savage, or cruel, harsh and insolent. Something of this fierceness and sharpness remained, and keen continued its career to mean anything piercing, pungent, intense, even stinging. Cold, touch, taste, sound, light, hunger, even love, all of these could be keen or keenly felt. Language could be keen, as well, in which case it was sharp, intense, even bitter…slicing the flesh like sarcasm. All of our senses can be keen–eyesight, smell, taste, which means they’re penetrating, acute and highly sensitive. And we can be keen, or feel things keenly, we can be “Eager, ardent, fervid; full of, or manifesting, intense desire, interest, excitement, etc. Also, of desire, feeling, etc.: Intense.” And we can be keen on someone or something, which means that we have a crush-like fascination with them or it. Of course, keen has another meaning as well, as noun and verb, it describes the singing of a wailing song for the dead, but even this sad meaning is wild and passionate and beautiful. “But Claire,” I hear you ask, “That’s all very well, but what does all of this have to do with The Ordinary?” “Well,” (I respond) “I’m glad you ask!” As it happens, I have an agenda, an Ordinary agenda. And the Ordinary agenda is about engaging keenly in all of the moments of your life…not just the big ones that everybody takes photos of, but the smaller ones, the quotidian day-to-day moments that pass by easily unnoticed. And perhaps this is the time to admit that The Ordinary is not really a food blog, (Shocking, I know!) except insofar as food is part of our daily lives, a necessity for daily life, but also a wonderful opportunity to experiment and be creative. And keenly flavored food tastes better when you’re keen-set for your dinner. And keenly-written books with sharp, clever, keen language read better when you have a keen interest in them. And keenly-played music is keenly felt by people who listen with keen ears. And the keen wild green of summer is only here for a short time before the keen-cold winter months return, so don’t wish it away!

Broccoli and garlic scapes with golden beet, cashew & carrot sauce.

Broccoli and garlic scapes with golden beet, cashew & carrot sauce.

This sauce uses golden beets and carrots from the farm. I grated them, toasted them, and pureed them with cashews, ginger, cardamom, cumin, coriander and lime. It has a sweet creaminess, but it’s vegan. We ate it with broccoli sauteed with garlic scapes, tamari and honey, which was a nice contrast of flavor and texture. But the boys also dipped raw cucumber in, and it would be good over rice, or with any roasted vegetables, or as a sort of curry sauce. Very versatile.

Here’s The Viceroys with Slogan on the Wall. We have an album called Nice Up the Dance, and every time I listen to it I have a new favorite. This has been going on for over a decade. Today, I have a keen regard for this song.

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Almond cake with chocolate and fresh cherries

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Almond cake with chocolate and cherries

Almond cake with chocolate and cherries

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

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!

Here’s Everyday by Yo La Tengo.

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