Category Archives: tomatoes

Cornmeal-spinach-goat cheese cake and chunky tomato sauce

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cornmeal cake with goat cheese and spinach

cornmeal cake with goat cheese and spinach

Yesterday I foolishly went on and on about how if you Hergéed my name it became Assez, and about how much I like the word “enough.” And I closed with a joke about how Assez would make a good graffiti tag. It was all inane nonsense and probably not worthy of one post, let alone two. And yet, I’m sorry to say, today’s post is going to be a follow up. A part two. Because I became very taken with the idea of having Assez as a graffiti tag! I developed this whole fantasy in which I had a) artistic talent b) guts and gumption c) money and freedom to travel and d) the ability to stay up past ten o’clock at night, and in which I travelled the word leaving my mark. Because “enough” doesn’t just mean an amount that is right and needful, or a sufficiency. “Enough” is also a word you yell when you’re fed up with something, when something is depressing, discouraging, or just generally wrong, and you want it to stop. (You know, when you’re watching your programs, and your children are upstairs beating each other with sticks, and you don’t want to stop them right away because you don’t want to discourage their creativity or dampen their competitive spirit, but finally, the noise is just too much and you can’t hear what the people on the TV are saying so you stomp upstairs and yell, …well, you know.) I had this vision of going to all the places in the world where people are being cruel to one another or to animals, which, let’s face it, is pretty much everywhere in the world, and sneaking in at night to write ASSEZ! “Then I’ll be all around in the dark – I’ll be ever’where—wherever you look.” I’d go everywhere that people are breeding ignorance and creating hatred and suspicion to keep some poor while they themselves become rich. I’d go wherever men are waging war for profit. I’d go to all the fast food places where people are serving pink slime burgers and cover their walls with it. (“Assez” not pink slime…) I’d go to all the places where people are making dangerously stupid television programs or reporting lies as truth, and I’d write ASSEZ!! And today I went so far as to waste a ridiculous quantity of time playing with the spraypaint app on my phone. It’s not perfect, of course, because as soon as I realized how much time I’d spent thinking about it I had to sheepishly stop.
assez
But do you see what we have here? Tintin blue, of course, and golden tear-bubbles, and a glowy quality, and the same sort of font as my Atget book, and … I know, I know, that’s quite enough of that, Claire. Basta! Genug! ASSEZ!

Spicy chunky tomato sauce

Spicy chunky tomato sauce

So we came home from the farm with about ten pounds of tomatoes! We’ve been eating them for lunch every day with olive oil, basil, goat cheese and baguette. But of course I had to make a sauce! I made it light, quick, chunky and flavorful with capers, olives, herbs and a little hot red pepper. And then I made this cake to spoon it over. It’s almost like polenta, except that it has a lot more flavor and a more interesting (to me) texture. It’s soft and puddingy inside, and a little crispy on the edges. It was very easy to make–I mixed it in the processor and then poured it right in the pan to bake it. Even the boys liked it!!
Cornmeal, goat cheese & spinach cake

Cornmeal, goat cheese & spinach cake

Here’s KRS One Out for Fame, about graffiti writers.

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Spicy cherry tomato chickpea stew; oven roasted hash browns

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Spicy cherry tomato chickpea sauce

Spicy cherry tomato chickpea sauce

– Au moins si l’on mangeait du pain à sa suffisance ! répéta pour la troisième fois Étienne, sans transition apparente. (“If only we had enough bread to eat,” Etienne repeated for the third time, with no apparent connection.) I’ve just started reading Germinal by Zola. I haven’t read enough of it to talk about it much (yet) but so far I like it as much as cherries. I love this exchange, in the very first conversation in the book, in which Etienne Latiner says three times, “…if only one had enough bread to eat,” with no apparent connection. And now, with no apparent connection, I’m going to tell you that Hergé (yes, that Hergé) was the pen name of Georges Remi. His initials arranged backwards (RG) and pronounced Frenchly, became Hergé. Of course, when I read this I thought about what mine would be. AC (never you mind that Claire isn’t actually my first name!) or AH SAY or … assez, enough. (French friends, correct me if I’m wrong). Well, I like the word “enough,” I like the concept. It’s not as voluptuous and joyful as “plenty,” but it seems honest and practical, “it is right or needful.” If we have enough bread to eat we can live and be content, and if we have plenty of bread we can turn it into bread pudding. Enough is just what we need, and all that we can ask. Enough money to live, enough food to eat, enough strength to carry on from day to day, and enough humor to enjoy it all. If nobody had too much, then everybody would have enough. And there’s no reason the world can’t work that way, except that to greedy and deluded people too much is never enough. Enough also means done to perfection, “Bake it in the oven, and when enough, strew Sugar again over it.” And now this essay is probably enough. I’ve said enough, and you’ve had enough of it. But when you see the graffiti tag ASSEZ all over the world, you’ll know where it came from.

Oven-roasted hash browns

Oven-roasted hash browns

We picked enough cherry tomatoes at the farm to last for weeks! There was “no limit” on what we could pick, and the four of us collected a beautiful pile of jewelly tomatoes, bright and sweet and perfect. I decided to make them into a sauce with chickpeas, because it’s sweet that they’re nearly the same size. I cooked half of the tomatoes until they were soft and stewy, and saved half to the end, to add their bright freshness. I seasoned this with smoked paprika, ginger and cinnamon and topped it with fresh basil, chives and parsley. I thought it was pretty and tasty! We also got a lot of potatoes and fresh herbs from the farm, and I had the idea of grated them and tossing them with together with olive oil, and roasting them till crisp. These sort of oven-roasted hash browns made a nice base for the saucy tomatoes and chickpeas.

Here’s earworm extraordinaire Just Can’t Get Enough by Depeche Mode.

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Kale with capers, walnuts and fresh basil

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Kale, walnuts and capers

Kale, walnuts and capers

Here at The Ordinary, we’ve decided to revive a worship of ancient Greek deities. We’ve been building oracular shrines and temples in our back yard…making little piles of stones for hermes, eating pomegranates for Hera, and worshipping owls for Athena. We’re sending the boys to vacation Zeus camp. I’m kidding, of course, but I have been reading the boys’ copy of D’aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths, and I’m completely smitten. The stories are so rich and strange, and yet so familiar. They’ve got a flood, with one couple building a boat that carries them safely through it. They’ve got people being made from other people’s body parts. They’ve got an all-powerful god who is strangely incapable of avoiding death and misery for everyone around him. The scope and balance of Zeus’s power and his limitations is so fascinating to me. He wants to change certain situations, but he can’t, because it’s against the rules. But which rules? Who made them? Who is more powerful than Zeus, to dictate what he can and cannot do? He can’t stop himself from killing his mortal wife by revealing himself to her in all his deadly, brighter-than-the-sun-glory (he promised!). But he can take her unborn son from her burnt body and complete its gestation in his leg, and he can eventually bring her back to life and give her a home on Mount Olympus. He’s powerless against the jealous anger of his godly wife Hera. In one story, he falls in love with a mortal named Io, and when Hera comes down to investigate, he turns the woman into a cow. She’s a very pretty cow, though, just as she was a very pretty mortal, and Hera is jealous. So she asks for the cow as a gift, knowing that Zeus won’t be able to turn her back into a real girl. She has her servant Argus watch over the cow. Argus has hundreds of eyes all over his body. So part of him can sleep while part of his watches the pretty cow. Zeus sends Hermes down to take care of Argus, and Hermes bores him to death! He tells such dull stories that half of Argus’ eyes close, and then he continues to tell such dull stories that the other half of Argus’ eyes close, and he dies! And Hera puts all his eyes on peacock tails! How can you not worship gods with stories like this?

This is a completely simple preparation of kale, but it’s quite pleasant as well. This time of year I love mozzarella, tomatoes, and fresh basil (I know, I know, everybody does.) This sees that combination piled atop kale that’s tender but bright and tossed with capers and walnuts. A little crunchy, a little tangy, and satisfyingly fresh and green.

Here’s Hermes Tri by Jorge Ben, I think there’s a connection to Hermes the god, but I’m a little confused by the story, since I don’t speak Portuguese.

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Summer stew with white beans, potatoes, crispy eggplant and basil-pistachio pesto

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Summer stew with white beans, potatoes and tomatoes

Summer stew with white beans, potatoes and tomatoes

This morning Malcolm and I went out for a long walk on the tow path. He told me about a dream he’d had. The water turned to air and the air turned to water. So the fish swam in air below us, and we walked through water as though we were flying. There were strange creatures in the water that we moved through: tadpoles with teeth, ducks with oddly shaped wings, lizards with tongues longer than their bodies that lived on our backs and were our friends. In this new world we walked though forests of “wimping trees,” that had fallen over, swooning, and were easy for us to climb. The water rose up into space, but an evil wizard had rented out all of space, so there was no space for rent, no space for rent. As we walked it became less the memory of a dream and more the telling of a story. We saw a clicking kingfisher and a bright swooping gold finch. I was hazy from sleep and felt that I might be moving through water, rippling with Malcolm’s words of a world turned upside down. The trees and bushes had bright flashes of crimson and pale gold, which seems too early but is not unwelcome.

So today’s interactive playlist is on the subject of dreams. Songs about dreams, or songs that that just seem dreamy. Add them to the list yourself, or leave a comment and I’ll try to remember to add them through the week.

Basil pistachio pesto

Basil pistachio pesto

This is my favorite kind of meal! Something saucy and flavorful made from potatoes, eggplant, tomatoes and herbs fresh from the farm, with a big loaf of crusty bread to mop up the sauces. I served olives, grated mozzarella, pesto and crispy eggplant on the side, to add as you like. I used french-lentil cooking broth, but you could use a simple vegetable broth or even water, and it would still have nice flavor.

Here’s a link to the dreamy interactive playlist.
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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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Summer squash “jam” with olives and pine nuts

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summer squash jam with olives and pine nuts.

summer squash jam with olives and pine nuts.

Well alright! Wh’apen? Hey ya! Gabba gabba hey! I’m not sure what you’d call these sayings…catch phrases, maybe? But they’re all the titles to some very good songs, and they’re the subject of this week’s playlist. The rules are quite flexible, but what we’re looking for is some collection of words that stands on it’s own in a conversation or greeting, that’s more than just the title of a song. Here’s the start of the playlist. I’m sure there are a million more, but I’m late for work!

This is a good dish for people who are looking for something different to do with summer squash. It’s not just sliced and sautéed, it’s grated first, and then cooked for a while with scallions and fresh herbs, so that it turns soft and saucy, almost like a jam. Then olives and tomatoes and pine nuts are added for a bit of texture and a kick of flavor. This would be nice on the side like a condiment, almost, but I think it’s best on toasts or crackers or spread on crusty bread.

Here’s that playlist again.

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Tacos with broccoli, chard, and kidney beans in chipotle-coconut curry sauce

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Chard, broccoli and kidney beans in coconut curry sauce

Chard, broccoli and kidney beans in coconut curry sauce

I got an iPhone four years ago. In the time since I’ve developed a nervous habit of checking my e-mail every few minutes. I don’t do it while I’m talking to people, of course, or at a meal or a gathering of any kind, but if I’m waiting on line, walking the dog, trying to write, if I’m actually just trying to check the time, I’ll always check my e-mail, too. It feels sort of hopeful and foolish. Any minute now, somebody is going to tell me they’d like to offer me a big advance to write a novel or make a feature film, and obviously they’re going to do it via e-mail, and it’s going to be totally legitimate, and if I don’t respond immediately I’ll lose the opportunity. Yeah. We got new phones, the other night, and now I get a gentle little chime each time I get a new e-mail. This means I don’t need to check!! This means that I know immediately that I got an important message from staples or toys r us or astrocenter (what the hell is astrocenter? Why are they bothering me?). Well, it feels strange. It’s vaguely disappointing, somehow. I no longer have the feeling that I could be getting good news at any time, because I know I’m not. Now I feel much more foolish than hopeful. And all of this got me thinking about mail, and how nice it used to be to wait for real mail from the mailman, and to write real letters, that required time and thought. And then I started thinking about photos, and how precious they used to be. People used to have special ways to keep photographs, little frames and boxes they would carry their one or two precious pictures in. Now we have phones loaded with snapshots. It used to require time and patience to take a photograph. The process was half skill, half luck in capturing the perfect moment. Now it’s all luck, the camera takes care of all the rest, and we can snap a billion shots a day. We have a much higher chance of capturing a randomly beautiful moment. I’ve been thinking about this quote I scribbled in my notebook a few years ago. It’s from René Claire, a filmmaker and writer who worked at the very beginning of cinema. He wrote essays about this miraculous new art form describing how passionately he felt about the direction it should take. He held it as a great responsibility to make films a certain way that would ensure that cinema lived up to its potential. Here’s the quote…

    In this era, when verbal poetry is losing the charm it exerted on the masses … a new form of poetic expression has arisen and can reach every beating heart on earth … a poetry of the people is there, seeking its way.

It’s easy to feel down and discouraged about the overwhelming barrage of messages and photos and news and information that we receive every single day, whether we like it or not. It’s easy to regret the days when a letter or a photograph was a rare and precious thing. It’s easy to be sad about the bloated, disappointing state of American film. But maybe it’s better to think about this new endless procession of snapshots, which capture an instant, are taken in an instant, and are shared in an instant, as a form of poetic expression available to most, and capable of reaching every beating heart on earth. Equal parts hopeful and foolish.
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We have tons of chard from the farm, which makes me very very happy, because I love chard. I decided to try something different with it, and cook it in a chipotle coconut milk sauce. It turned out really tasty! I added broccoli and kidney beans for substance, and lime and spices for flavor and brightness. We ate this with basmati rice, warm wheat tortillas, and a fresh salad made of avocado, cucumber and tomatoes, but you could eat it just with rice or any other grain you like.

Here’s Photo Jenny by Belle and Sebastian

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Savory cake with tomatoes, mozzarella and olives

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Savory cake with olives, tomatoes and mozzarella

Savory cake with olives, tomatoes and mozzarella

Have you ever discovered a wonderful new way to start a story? Cause I have, and I’ll tell you about it. Did you see? Did you see what I did there? I asked a question and then I told you that I’m going to answer it for you! Where did I discover this ingenious new rhetorical method? Why, in the piles and piles of paper Malcolm brought home on the last day of school, of course. I love going through all the boys’ papers. It’s so funny to see their odd ideas and their mad doodles. Sometimes I think all of the little notes and drawings, which are probably dire signs that they aren’t focussing, are my favorite part of their work. And I love to learn what they’ve been thinking about–that Isaac’s major interests this year were bats and his big brother, and that his heart murmur makes his heart have an echo, and that makes him feel special. Malcolm’s writing journal is a treat. It’s a chaotic pile of ripped pages and tiny pictures of his favorite recurring character, a fez-wearing fellow named madman. But it gets neater as it goes along. The writing is more even, the stories are longer and more carefully formed, but the spelling is as erratic as ever, which is definitely a sign of genius, right? Towards the end of the journal, all of the stories start with the “Have you ever…? I have, and I’ll tell you about it” pattern, which I actually love. I’m never going to sit around worrying about how to start a story again! This technique, so confiding and conversational, pulls you right into the story. My favorite of his essays begins like this. (Spelling and grammar have been cleaned up to ease comprehension.) “Have you ever had a favorite window? Cause I have and I’ll tell you about it. It is a green window that has a radiator next to it so when I look out I am warm. Speaking of looking out, I always see a white parking lot or [unintelligible] normal [trails off here]. I feel happy Jumpy when I look out that window…” And that’s pretty much it. It’s an unfinished work. I love it though, and I’m going to tell you why. First of all, I love windows in literature, and in photographs and films, and I’m proud to think of Malcolm joining this fine tradition. Furthermore, I know which window he’s talking about, and I like it too. I like to think of Malcolm, warm in his room, looking through the cool green window with his big green eyes, watching the world go by. I like that he feels happy-jumpy, whatever that means. Malcolm is a boy who will go anywhere with you. He never needs persuading, he’s ready and out the door in a flash, and I like to think about him sitting there thinking of all the places he’ll go. And funnily enough, I’d made a little film of this very window as part of my series of small videos that I’ve told you about in the past. They’re like Ozu’s pillow shots without the film all around them. “I started making short, static videos. I gave myself some rules…they had to last about a minute. I couldn’t change the frame. The sound would be whatever naturally occurred for that minute. I focused on leaves, or water, or shadows, even dirty dishes in the sink. The sound generally involved my children yelling for me and trying to get my attention, which was an idea that I liked a lot. It captured my life at the time (and to this day.) There was nothing brilliant about the videos, but I liked the way that shooting them made me think about how long a minute lasts, how hard it is to be quiet and still, how my life sounded, how pretty small things could be.” One night about a month ago, when we were putting the boys to bed, I was very taken with Malcolm’s green window. It was a cooly glowing spring dusk, and the light in the room was warm and creamy, and the light outside the window so cool and evening-blue green.

Because my birthday is in June, it has become a tradition to make a dinner of bread, tomatoes, mozzarella and olives. Just to sit and snack and have a slightly nicer bottle of wine than usual. This year, because it’s a sweltering and humid 95 degrees every day, I thought it would be a good idea to bake something. But I wanted to retain the basic idea of tomatoes, olives and cheese. I’m savory-cake mad at the moment, so I made a yeasted, herbed chickpea flour batter, and then I piled fresh tomatoes, herbs, mozzarella and castelvetrano olives in the middle, and then I baked it all. Delicious! We had it with tiny boiled potatoes from our CSA and some bright sauteed pattypan squash and asparagus. The boys liked it, too, because it resembles pizza. I actually left the batter in the fridge over night, but you could just do an ordinary afternoon-rise, if you like.

Here’s Brianstorm, by the Arctic Monkeys, which is Malcolm’s favorite song.

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Pizza with pumpkinseed-tarragon pesto, chickpeas and arugula

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Pizza with tarragon pumpkinseed pesto

Pizza with tarragon pumpkinseed pesto

It’s the summer solstice and the first day of summer vacation. After a spring that saw hot humid days alternate with days of freezing rain, the weather is finally perfect. And I found myself in the worst mood. Cranky, anxious, discouraged. I couldn’t tell you why. Well, I could, but then I’d have to think about why, and that won’t do no one no good. I always feel horrible when I’m dejected and sweary around the boys, it feels almost abusive. And some part of me begrudged the time I have alone when they’re in school, when I can be as indulgently miserable as I want. But not today, today it was not okay, I could feel that in the way the boys kept giving me little sidelong glances and gentle pats on the back.

And now I’m going to share the saga of my changing mood. This morning I went for a scamper with Clio, and when we came to the end of our journey we found a dead tree bathed in golden light, stretching upward with branches like the rungs of a ladder. Each branch held small swallows, making grumpy buzzing noises. When bigger swallows flew above them, they flew up and kissed in mid-air and then then swooped away, as in some mad beautiful dance.

And then I was in a foolish rush to get things done, but I was arrested by the sight of a sleek grey dog lying in the sunshine outside the door, golden and blinking, and Malcolm stopped in his backyard racing to cry, “Mom, look!” Black currants! Our bright bramble of currants is laden with fruit. I had so much to do, so much to get done, and I just stopped and picked black currants with the boys, deep in the berries’ odd acrid fragrance, trying to convince myself that this was the most important thing to be doing right now. Then Malcolm had a crazy idea of how to cook the currants, and we worked on that, but I was still in a state and cursed like a madwoman in front of the boys when the semolina flour fell out of the cupboard into our batter. (Why right in there? Why?)

And then we went up to David’s shop to build boats to take to the creek. David’s shop is like an inspiring museum of craft and creativity housed in a small post-apocalyptic compound, surrounded by miles of beautiful countryside. The man that rents him space also rents out construction equipment, and you’ll find oddly beautiful piles of giant rusted metal rings that you could walk into, and drill bits the size of cars. In the back of David’s shop, a door opens onto a long corridor where barn swallows nest. If you stand in the doorway, they’ll fly around your head in dizzying loops, with humbling speed and agility, and it’s so beautiful that you want to make a film of it, but you can’t, you can’t capture it, just like Isaac will never catch a swallow in his hands, even if he calls to them in his high bright voice that is strangely like their call.

And when I went back into the shop, Isaac leapt onto my back like a little monkey, and he said, in his way of talking that makes everything sound like a poem

Do you remember
When we went to the park
And you held my hands
And spun me around
And it felt like flying?

And they made clever boats and now we’re going to the creek, and I will sit on a rock and watch them, and do absolutely nothing, and try to recognize the momentousness of the situation.

Pizza with tarragon-pumpkinseed pesto and chickpeas

Pizza with tarragon-pumpkinseed pesto and chickpeas

I like to make pizza in the summertime. Well, I always like to make pizza, but in the summertime it’s fun to play around with different pesto sauces with which to top it, and to think of ways to add vegetables. So this time I made a pesto of pumpkinseeds, capers, arugula and tarragon. All very strong flavors. The pesto was delicious and unusual, with a slight edge of bitterness from the arugula, but in a pleasant way. Because the pesto was so strong and bright, I added chickpeas, because they’re simple and comforting. Not bland at all, but not overwhelming. The crust is thin and crispy, as ever.

Here’s The Ink Spots with When the Swallows Come Back to Capistrano.

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Masa crusted potatoes with smoky red beans and greens, and honey-lime avocado cucumber salsa

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Masa-dusted potatoes, red beans and roasted red peppers, and lime honey cucumber guacamole

Masa-dusted potatoes, red beans and roasted red peppers, and lime honey cucumber guacamole

One of the delightful things about my disintegrating eyesight is that when I read I’m no longer confined to the actual words on the page. When I read without glasses, who knows what the book really says? Not me! So I have a whole new world before me, in which the page contains whatever words I want it to–I get to choose! Sometimes at work I’ll overhear small chunks of conversations, and my brain will fill in the parts that are too quiet for me to pick up. Usually, the resulting discussion, in my head, is very funny (and frequently off-color). And now this effect has sidled over to my appreciation of printed matter. It says whatever I think it says. The other day I was reading the boys’ Rocks and Minerals books, as one does, and I came across a fascinating map of the world. It had little icons to show the various regions where people mine for things–I’m assuming coal and gold and the like, but I couldn’t tell you for sure because the writing in the legend was tiny. According to my eyes, one thing that people mine for throughout the globe is precious stories. Well! I like this idea a lot! I like to think of people traveling all over the world and mining for valuable tales, digging deep amongst the people that live in each region to come up with raw, beautiful chunks of legend. The icon for precious stories seemed to be in some very varied and interesting parts of the world, and in my imagination the stories are found in thick veins, running through all of the people there. People would come and set up camps, and they’d follow the story from one person to the next, probably never finding the end of it, because the myths would be as old as the rocks and would lie deep in the earth. Maybe they’d take it and refine it and polish it, or maybe they’d leave it in its original state, rough and strong. Farther along in the book, I misread a caption to read “metaphorical rocks.” And people would collect these, too, and string them together to make new stories. The metaphorical rocks would be prized and valued above diamonds and gold, which would be deemed pretty but relatively useless, when compared to a cherished tale. People would understand the value of a story to spark creativity, to heal, to transform, with these metamorphical metaphorical rocks.

Masa dusted potatoes

Masa dusted potatoes

I thought this was a really fun meal! First, I sliced some potatoes quite thinly, parboiled them, dusted them with rosemary and masa harina and then roasted them in olive oil. They came out with a nice texture–not super crunchy, exactly, but with more oomph. And they have the lovely subtle flavor of the masa harina. Then I roasted some red peppers, and combined them with red beans and spinach in a smokey sauce of chipotle and smoked paprika. And we added a bright light guacamole-salsa made with cucumbers, tomatoes and avocado lightly dressed with lime and honey. We topped it all off with grated sharp cheddar and pickled jalapenos, which my Malcolm loves! Any part of this meal would be good on its own, but it was very fun to eat all together as well.masa-potatoes-and-beans

Here’s REM with Maps and Legends.

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