Category Archives: sauce

Carrots and cauliflower in carrot-ginger-lemon sauce with cashews

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Coconut ginger lemon sauce

Coconut ginger lemon sauce

It’s Saturday again, and you know what that means! It’s story time! Here’s your picture for the week. Who is this fellow, and how did he end up at Joe’s in 1954? As ever, my story is after the jump, and yours could be, too.
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Here’s a link to the post with the original idea for the series.

This was a delicious sauce. It had a lot of ginger in it, which gave a nice little zing to the tartness of the lemon and the creamy sweetness of the coconut milk. It would be good with other vegetables as well – broccoli would be nice! We ate it with long thin pasta, but it would be good over basmati rice as well.

Here’s Mississippi John Hurt with Joe Turner Blues

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Broccoli rabe, walnut and rosemary purée and roasted sliced potatoes

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Broccoli rabe walnut pesto

Broccoli rabe walnut pesto

We’re having a dinnertime problem, lately. I should start by saying that dinnertime is probably my favorite time of the day. I spend hours scheming about what to make, and making little parts of it as I go along. Dinner is the culmination of massive amounts of creative and emotional energy, dammit! It’s a work of mother-flipping art. Every…single….day. Of course that’s not entirely true. (It’s only a work of art 5 days a week. The other two…pffft, who cares!) Okay, so it’s never a work of art! But it is the best time of the day, and here’s why. Because the whole family is together, because we’re eating good food, or at least food that’s had a lot of thought put into it, because we’re most likely drinking wine (well, two of us are). We’re not just all in the same house, we’re all at the same table, we’re sharing food, we’re sharing thoughts. Ideally we’re sitting outside, sharing sunshine and cool breezes. I feel so ridiculously lucky that we get to eat dinner every day!! Lately it’s been stressful, though. Which is a horrible feeling–it’s that feeling of looking forward to something and having it all go wrong. The boys won’t sit still, they won’t eat, they won’t even try the food. If Malcolm stays in his chair for a second it’s with his head on the table (and his hair in the food half the time). If you ask him what’s wrong, he cries. For a few weeks now, I’ve been employing the it-sucks-but-there’s-nothing-I-can-do-about-it-hopefully-it-will-go-away-and-we’ll-all-have-lovely-dinners-together-when-they’re-out-of-college parenting technique. But then I started thinking about it from their point of view. You know, empathizing. I know that for a lot of people preparing dinner is a chore. Obviously, I don’t feel that way; for me it’s a delight. But I can see how it would become tedious in its day-in-day-out necessity. Well, it occurred to me that maybe for the boys eating dinner is a chore. Let’s face it, I make weird food. I can see that it might be stressful to have to taste something new night after night. I know they know how much I care about it, and they don’t like to hurt my feelings. I get that. And David and I are alone most of the day, on our feet, with our own worries and concerns piling up in our heads. It’s a relief to sit down, it’s a relief to have somebody else to talk to. But for the boys it’s the opposite. They’ve spent the whole long day of school trying to control themselves, and be silent and still, and focus their attention on words. They’ve spent the whole day navigating the choppy seas of social interaction–answering questions, forming complete grammatically correct sentences, coloring inside the lines and showing their work. It’s not relaxing for them to sit at the table and answer questions about their stupid day at school and eat the strange food their mom is anxiously watching them taste. It’s relaxing for them to sprawl on the floor with the dog eating grapes or race around the backyard watering plants with a water gun. It’s relaxing for them to be with each other, doing nothing, not asking each other how they did on their test, not asking each other how they feel about the homework due tomorrow, not trying to remember if they had a shower last night, not caring whether they eat anything but tiny tomatoes or drink a ginger beer so fast they’re not hungry any more. I’ve had a talk with Malcolm, and asked him to understand how important dinnertime is to David and me. And now I understand how important downtime is to Malcolm and Isaac, and I’ll tell him that, too. We’ll work something out. We’ll find a balance.

roasted sliced potatoes

roasted sliced potatoes

I LOVE GREENS!! I love chard and kale and spinach and broccoli rabe! And I love them puréed! Is there anything more comforting and delicious? I think not!! This particular dish started because I bought some frozen broccoli rabe. Why? I don’t know! It was winter! Fresh vegetables were sad-looking and expensive! Well, frozen broccoli rabe is not a happy thing. It’s all thick stems and withered leaves. After a good long boiling, though, it’s lovely puréed. It has that addictive bittersweetness, and with rosemary and walnuts it’s really wonderful. You could easily make this with fresh broccoli rabe and it would be even better! I ate this by the spoonful, but you could eat it any way that you eat pesto–on pizza, tossed with pasta, mixed into mashed potatoes, or…alongside roasted sliced potatoes. These were really simple. The only thing special about them was the shape, which was sliced. They were kind of like extra thick, warm potato chips. Lovely to scoop up some broccoli rabe purée!

Here’s Everybody Eats When they Come to My House by Cab Calloway
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Chickpea flour cake baked with tarragon and artichoke hearts AND spinach sauteed with white beans and black truffle butter

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chickpea flour cake baked with tarragon and artichoke hearts

chickpea flour cake baked with tarragon and artichoke hearts

Malcolm wore flannel pajamas under his trousers all winter long. Why did he do it? He has his reasons! Was it for warmth? for comfort? for a sense of extra security? Out of laziness? Was it a nouveau-grunge look? (Grunge is more than a stylistic choice for Malcolm, it’s a way of life, and if you doubt his devotion to the cause, look at his fingernails.) These last few days, the unseasonably cool weather has given way with complete submission to the unseasonably warm weather. No peaceful transition of balmy spring-like days. Cold to hot, just like that. We took a walk after dinner one evening, and we were all a little overdressed and a little warm, and none more so than malcolm, with flannel pjs inside of his flannel-lined trousers. We said, “Are you really still…?” He said, in a sweetly funny, sighing voice, “I regret it.” And, of course, this got me thinking about Malcolm and regrets. It really seems as if children have no regrets – my children anyway! Perhaps they’re prodigiously lacking in compunction, but it seems as if their friends are just the same. And this is yet one more way that I wish I was more like them. I feel as though I live my life under the weight of a vast network of regrets. They cling to me like spider webs as I pass through my days. They seem silly, but they add up, and they slow me down. Why did I have that last cup of coffee when my heart already feels like it’s going to explode? Why did I have that last glass of wine when my head feels as if it’s going to explode? Why did I say what was on my mind when I knew nobody wanted to hear it? Why was I so snappish with Isaac when he hadn’t really done anything bad? Why did I curse angrily in front of Malcolm when I know it makes him sad? And on and on it goes. Sometimes, I’ll have a faint hint of uneasiness, a nagging feeling that I’d done or said something regrettable, and in trying to unravel that one string, I’ll pull on a million others, so I can feel my heart sinking over something foolish I said decades ago. But my boys aren’t like that. They move right on with their lives. They’re never angry for long, they’re not resentful. They don’t store up bitter feelings about something somebody else has done, and they do themselves the same favor. This makes them light of heart despite the fact that their hearts are endearingly full at all times. Sometimes they’re irritatingly on-with-the-next-thing. Sometimes I have to stop myself from shouting, “You just spilled a pint of juice on your homework! Show some remorse you little psychopath!!” I think I’ll try to be more like them. I think I’ll imagine myself throwing away my regrets the way the boys throw rocks into the water–joyously and wildly, never worrying about the splashes, never regretting the loss of the stones.

Chickpea flour tart

Chickpea flour tart

I thought this dinner turned out so pretty! I’m not even sure what to call it. I made a batter such as I might make for puffy socca or chickpea flour crepes. I cheat and add eggs and a bit of white flour, as you may recall, and this makes the batter lighter and easier to work with, whilst retaining the singular taste and texture of chickpea flour. So I did this, and then I arranged artichoke hearts, grape tomatoes, tarragon leaves and mozzarella cheese in a pretty pattern on the surface of the batter, and then I baked it! I thought it tasted very good! I love tarragon, but my boys were disconcerted by whole leaves of it, so you might want to chop it up. Or use rosemary or basil instead. Chickpea flour tends to result in a slightly dry texture, so we ate this with sauteed spinach, white beans, and black truffle butter. The combination was absolutely delicious!! You could eat it with any kind of soft sauteed vegetable or even a simple tomato sauce, though.
spinach sauteed with white beans and black truffle butter

spinach sauteed with white beans and black truffle butter

Of course it’s going to be Edith Piaf, with Non, Je ne regrette rien, isn’t it?
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Collard purée with roasted sweet potatoes, ginger, smoked paprika, and lime

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Collard puree with sweet potatoes, ginger and lime

Collard puree with sweet potatoes, ginger and lime

Hello, Ordinary friends! Don’t look now but we’re doing it again! Last week I introduced the idea of a sort of writer’s salon, hosted by The Ordinary, in which we’d all (whoever wanted to that is) write a story inspired by a certain photograph. I hope to make it a weekly feature, because I’m enjoying the story-writing, and I’d be curious to see what my story-writing friends come up with. So here’s week two’s picture, courtesy, once again, of Square America.
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My story is after the jump, and I’d love to include yours, too!

This recipe is inspired by the Indian dish sag aloo, which is an addictive puree of spinach with soft comforting pieces of potato in it. This is collards, instead, because I love collards. And sweet potatoes, because they go nicely with ginger and lime, which were the seasonings I chose. It’s a nice dish to have with basmati rice and flatbread, or as a side for any other meal.

Here’s Children’s Story from Slick Rick. Classic!

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Spicy, tangy, smoky, sweet: catsup with pomegranate molasses

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Pomegranate molasses catsup

Pomegranate molasses catsup

We’re going to try something new, here at The Ordinary, and I’m quite excited about it! Allow me to explain… Once there was a website called Square America. I loved this website! It presented found photographs from various eras, arranged into albums. Some of the photographs were remarkably beautiful – snapshots from a time when you couldn’t take a million pictures at once, when you had to wait for the film to develop, and you’d never know what you’d find. I always found it profoundly moving to think that we were allowed a tiny glimpse into the lives of the people in these pictures, and that we’d never know what they were really like, what they were thinking, how their lives would turn out. I’d always thought that if I had some kind of writer’s group, it would be a fun exercise to choose one picture, and see what kind of stories various people would write about it (or haikus or epic poems or essays…) Well, I never actually had a writer’s group, so I never organized anything like this. As it happens, Square America is back on facebook, and the photos are as beautiful and inspiring as ever, so I thought…why not do it here? Why not host a virtual writer’s group at The Ordinary, for anybody that has the time or interest? So that’s what we’re going to try. Snacks will be provided! I’ve chosen a photo for the first story, and I’ve written my (very short) story, and I welcome others to contribute as well. Of course, you can make your own rules. For myself I had a few…keep it short, don’t think about it too much, and try to be respectful, because these were real people, after all. I haven’t completely worked out all of the technical details. If anybody does actually write anything, e-mail it to me and I’ll post it (with mine) after the jump. If you have someplace of your own to post it, give me a link, and I’ll post that here. We’ll see how it goes!

This is the photo I’ve chosen for the first story. Beautiful, right? My story is after the jump!
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Pomegranate molasses catsup

Pomegranate molasses catsup

Hopefully, it will go as well as this catsup! What a nice combination of flavors. Pomegranate molasses is sweet & sour and delicious! As the title says, this catsup was a nicely balanced mix of spicy, tangy, sweet and smoky. It had a nice texture, too, a little jammy. And a lovely deep brick red color. And it was very very quick to make! We ate it with oven-roasted french fries, but you could eat it with anything you eat with catsup. It would be good with croquettes or kofta or pakoras… David even liked it, and he doesn’t like catsup much!!

Here’s A Tribe Called Quest with 8 Millions Stories.
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Roasted butternut farro balls and rosemary walnut tarator sauce

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Roasted butternut farro balls

Roasted butternut farro balls

It’s a very slow, cold spring. Everybody is upset by it, everybody is complaining bitterly, everybody is angry with that stupid lying groundhog. Everybody except me. It’s very strange, but I don’t mind. I’m not quite through hibernating yet. I feel like maybe something’s wrong with me! And you might agree, when I tell you that I’m a little anxious about summer. Not about the long, endless days with the boys, which are days that I crave. It’s hard to describe. I feel as though I’ve slowly pulled layer upon layer of something strong and warm over myself and my family, to keep us cozy and secure. And in summer the boys will burrow out and run like mad little things in all directions, laughing and glowing, with barely a glance back, and it will all go so fast and be over before we know it. It’s a very strange feeling, and I’m not sure I’ve ever felt like this before, although in retrospect it might have been creeping up on me with slow sneaky progress for a few years now. TS Eliot famously said that April is the cruelest month, I think that people frequently misinterpret this line. They think April is cruel because it just won’t be warm and sunny, dammit. Just when you’re ready for spring it’s all chilly and drizzly with those April showers. But what he really meant was that April is cruel because it wakes you up.

APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.

I suppose I’ve gotten too comfortable this winter, with dull days that please me so much and go by so fast–just keeping my family warm and feeding them roasted tubers, and then writing about that and starting all over again. It’s hard to do anything very important when you’re too comfortable, but I’m also convinced that the day to day of every day is as important as life gets, so I’m not easily motivated. I’m sure it’s just the chill and the damp that folds me in on myself. Already the slanting hopeful rosy light of morning and evening is rousing me from my wintery dormancy, but gently and kindly. When the weather is warmer on top of that I’ll feel all the old unspecified longings and yearnings, which must visit you no matter what your age. I’ll be ready to go on adventures again. And if the warmth won’t do it, Malcolm will! He’s so full of life and plans, he’s so curious and fearless. I want to be like him when I grow up, so I may as well start now! And maybe summer will surprise us, and we’ll stop in the colonnade, and go on in the sunlight.

In the meantime, we’re still eating winter squash, here at The Ordinary. And I’m still experimenting with the joys of grating and roasting it. It’s so nice and soft and crispy and sweet and savory all at the same time! In this instance, I mixed it with some leftover farro and some walnuts and made it into little balls. I fried them up in olive oil, so they’re crispy outside and soft in. The flavors are sage, smoked paprika and nutmeg – I suppose they’re flavors I associate with a sausage-y taste, so these could pass for vegetarian meatballs, or if you made them long and thin, they could be vegetarian sausage. We ate them with tender whole wheat flatbreads, which I’ll tell you about soon, arugula, which went so nicely with the nuttiness of the walnuts, and a creamy (cream-free) walnut rosemary tarator sauce. The sauce turned out very good, and would be nice with any kind of roasted vegetable – beets, potatoes, parsnips, any of those old dried tubers. In the summer, it would be nice with grilled zucchini and asparagus as well!! If you don’t have leftover farro, I’ve told you how to make it, and you can use the extra to toss on salads, or as a base for sauces and stews.

Here’s Nina Simone with Another Spring.

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

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Roasted potatoes, cauliflower and butterbeans with spicy red pepper sauce

Roasted potatoes, cauliflower and butterbeans with spicy red pepper sauce

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

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

Here’s the Tokyo Story Theme, by Saito Kojun

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Roasted butternut semolina cakes with cauliflower pumpkinseed puree

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Roasted butternut semolina cakes

Roasted butternut semolina cakes

Two brothers sit on a grassy patch below an elevated walkway. Behind each of them, in the far distance, stretches a long bridge that seems to connect the boys to the real, busy world. But they don’t care about that. The boys are in their stocking feet, comfortably eating rice with their fingers, and drinking tea out of the tea kettle lid or their cupped hand. “Messy, isn’t it?” “Yes! Fun, isn’t it!” Minoru and Isamu have run away from home with their teakettle and rice cooker, because their parents won’t buy them a television set. They’ve decided not to speak to anyone until their demands are met. This is, of course, Yasujiro Ozu’s tenderly beautiful film Good Morning. The film tells the story of a small suburban community and the havoc cast upon it by gossip, suspicion, and two small boys on a silence strike. The film was shot in 1959, and it reminded me of Tati’s films of the same period – full of grace, generosity and gentle humor. It’s about ordinary people going about ordinary lives, but it’s completely captivating. The boys decide to stop speaking because grownups talk so much and say nothing worth hearing…it’s all just a lot of meaningless talk. “Good morning, good evening, a fine day, where to? Just a ways, I see, I see.” The brothers can talk to each other, if they show the right sign. And they have a shared language of gestures and expressions that are full of meaning, and beautiful to see. Of course their gestures don’t always translate to the rest of the world, and when the little one, Isamu, tries to ask permission to speak in class, nobody knows what he means. The adults in the film, including the boys’ aunt and their English tutor, are amused by the boys’ assessment of grown-up conversation, but they recognize that there’s some truth in it.The film is full of misunderstandings and half-spoken thoughts and desires. The gossip that travels from small house to small house is a perfect example of meaningless words gone awry and striking out with their own destructive pattern. And yet, the real joy of the film is the moments of understanding between people, and in those moments when we recognize ourselves in the characters, our lives in their lives. They speak Japanese and a bit of English (“I love you!”). They talk in niceties and don’t say what they mean. But we know what they mean, whatever language they speak. Ozu is famous for defying Hollywood’s rules for creating melodrama in a film, not just by his quiet use of still, low-angled shots, but also because he utilized narrative ellipses. He doesn’t show the big events, he shows the spaces between them. In famous “pillow shots,” he gives us beautiful small poems of transition, static, but full of quiet, gentle motion within the frame. In the same way, we understand that what’s important in communication isn’t the words, but the spaces between them, and the meaning that they convey through gesture and expression and a universal understanding of human nature. In the last scene, the boys’ aunt and their English tutor stand at a train station talking foolishly about the shape of a cloud (“Yes, it does look like something…”) But from their barely contained smiles, we know that they know they’re saying so much more to each other. Throughout the film, there’s a running series of fart jokes. The boys eat pumice so that they’ll be able to produce a fart on demand when they push each other on the forehead. One of the housewives repeatedly mistakes her husband’s fart for language. During a callisthenic session, two boys admire the flatulent prowess of an older man, and say he has a lot of practice because he works for the gas company. The boys decide that farting is okay, as a form of communication, and doesn’t constitute a breach of their silence strike. This is more than a spate of fart gags, this is a nod to the things that connect us all…our humor and our humanity.

Grating and roasting butternut squash is my new favorite culinary technique! I use my food processor, which makes it super easy and fast. You might find you have a huge mound of grated squash, but it cooks down. I had mine piled about 2 inches deep on the baking tray to start, but it cooked down to about one cup in the end. Just keep stirring the outside pieces, which brown first, into the center of the tray. I added my grated butternut squash to a batter that was very similar to that for semolina dumplings or Roman gnocchi, which have quite a comforting consistency. I flavored it with sage, rosemary, smoked paprika, and a bit of cinnamon and cayenne. Delicious! To go with these big cakes, I made a puree of cauliflower and pumpkinseeds, with a little roasted garlic and spinach thrown in. It was creamy and smooth with a mild nutty flavor, and was very pretty with the butternut cakes.

Here’s Memphis Minnie with Good Morning.

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Raggedy pasta filled with spinach, ricotta, artichoke hearts topped with roasted red pepper pine nut sauce

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Spinach ricotta pasta with roasted red pepper & pine nut sauce

Spinach ricotta pasta with roasted red pepper & pine nut sauce

In a scandalous act of shocking laziness, I’m going to plagiarize myself for today’s post. (I have to get to work soon!) This appeared in the Guardian this week, I wrote it! So I’m just going to repeat myself here, with the original un-edited version. Ready?
Every city has its shantytowns, tenements, projects and favelas; cramped, tightly-knit urban regions in which people are thrown together, joined by poverty and a sense of stagnation. These spaces form a teeming world of their own within the larger macrocosm of the city, connected but self-contained. Life is stacked upon life in a confined area, making the situation rife for story telling; a perfect stage setting of tension and drama. People struggle to survive from day to day, and dream of escape. They form a network of friendship and support, but crowded conditions breed pressure, and the threat of violence is never distant. Privacy is scarce when one person’s front door opens onto another’s and a network of alleys or balconies forms the veins that connect them all. This is brilliant fodder for movies, but it makes for good songs, as well. So this week’s Sunday interactive playlist is on the subject of cramped urban housing.

Here’s a picture that Isaac drew a few weeks ago. He started drawing “city towers,” and then he got caught up drawing these crazy rambling houses that sprawl up the hillside, and connect and expand and have levels and layers and turrets. The oval area in front is an underground space where they meet (and apparently practice math facts!)Isaac's-picture
This pasta is kind of like his labyrinthine spread. It’s handmade pasta for people who don’t have a pasta maker. What you do is this…you make pasta dough (which is fun and easy!) You roll it as thin as you possibly can (which is a bit of work, but also fun!) You cut it into any shape you like – triangles, squares, rectangles. You fill each one with a spoonful of delicious filling, then you wrap it up any way you like – each one a different shape. Some you roll in tubes, some you make in pockets. Some you put seam-side down, some you put seam-side up. You pile them on top of each other or next to each other. (You try not to get too great a concentration of layers of pasta in one place, so it’s not stodgy.) You cover them with a delicious smoky sauce made of pine nuts and roasted red peppers. You sprinkle mozzarella on top. You bake the pasta. It has nice soft pockets of filling, some lovely melty cheese, some crispy parts where the pasta sticks out and crisps up as it bakes. And then you eat it! You could also easily use this filling and this sauce to make lasagna, stuffed shells, manicotti, or any other sort of stuffed baked pasta that you buy at the store. And that’s that!

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Cauliflower, potato, tarragon, and pecan nests with broccoli rabe, white beans, olives and tomatoes

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Cauliflower, pecan and potato nest

Cauliflower, pecan and potato nest

“Daddy, do you want to play with star wars toys?” asked Isaac in his bright voice. “Nobody’s said that to me in thirty years!” said David. (He did want to play.) I remember the first time I saw Star Wars. It was 1977 (of course) and we waited on line. We saw it in a theater in a mall, and it was a seventies mall, all orange and brown and drab and fluorescent. And of course we loved the movie! It’s so bright and inventive and richly imagined. I love to think about George Lucas with this whole universe inside of him, and how joyful it must have been to make the movie and to watch the movie, and to see that people liked it. I love the fact that Star Wars has a history, even the first movie had a future and a past, and though it would be decades before we’d know the full story, even in that first (fourth) film, you could feel the haunting weight of memory. Which is a sort of a beautiful thing in a film! Star Wars is about generations, so it seems fitting and wonderful that we can share it with our sons. I love that our boys love it! (Actually, I like the fact that all boys love it!) It feels good to share this modern mythology with them, a mythology that’s probably shaped our consciousness more than we know! Like most mythology it’s about good versus evil, strength versus weakness, in the world at large and within ourselves. It’s about the struggle to understand where we’re from and where we’re supposed to go, and who we should trust to go with us. It’s about discovering that we have some invisible power within ourselves that we have to harness and struggle to control, and learn to use for good. Epic! The other night, whilst watching Star Wars for the gazillionth time, we played a game. I named Star Wars characters, and David and the boys had to try to draw them from memory. It was more fun than it sounds! Unless it sounds really fun to you. I LOVE the pictures they drew, and I love the way they illustrate visual memory, and the working of busy minds, and the fact that drawing ability has been handed from father to sons. Here they are…
Isaac's

Isaac’s

Malcolm's

Malcolm’s

David's

David’s

So today’s Sunday interactive playlist is about generations…about a sense of history, a memory of the past or an anticipation of the future. Advice from elders, sass from youngsters…any of this will do!

Cauliflower nest

Cauliflower nest

ANd this crazy meal was the result of some leftover mashed potatoes and a desire to play with my pastry tube. I decided to combine the potatoes with some steamed cauliflower, some pecans and some tarragon, (as well as some eggs and cheese) and make a smooth thick batter I could shape into a sort of nest. And since all of these things (potatoes, pecans, cauliflower, eggs and cheese) are sort of mild and comforting, I thought I’d combine them with something bright and saucy, like broccoli rabe and tomatoes. So that’s what I did! I thought it all turned out very tasty. You pecans and tarragon are very nice together. You could serve these with any kind of greens, or any sort of saucy dish that you like.
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