chickpea guacosalsa or salsamole

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Chickpea saslamole

Chickpea saslamole

This afternoon Clio and I walked to school to pick up the boys, as we always do. I looked down at her, and she seemed very serious, head down, ears bobbing as earnestly as ears can bob. Yes, she has a light elegant gait and shiny white socks, but at this moment her pace was very businesslike. She had somewhere to be, and she was determined to get there. Dogged, I thought, Clio is demonstrating the definition of dogged.
Clio

Clio


I know that Clio considers walking the boys to and from school her job. She knows by some mysterious internal clock when it’s time to get them, and if I make any move around that time, she follows me frantically, worried that she’ll be left behind. What a wonderful work ethic she has! She knows where she’s going and she heads there at a relatively steady pace. If you were, oh, I don’t know, writing a novel, say, this would be the equivalent of writing a little bit every day, forcing yourself to write a few pages so that you will get where you’re going in a timely manner. We don’t take the same route every time, but we always arrive in the same place. She’s happy to let the walk take her where it will as long as we’re headed towards the school, but if I try to turn in the wrong direction she stops. She looks at me with serious, wondering eyes, she won’t move. She’s goal-oriented, but she’s willing to explore different options in achieving that goal. She’s willing to let herself get distracted by important things, like squirrels or sparrows, she’ll gladly stop to greet a friend, but she always has one paw back on the path, ready to continue the journey. Most of all, Clio’s work is full of the weighty buoyant responsibility of love. She enjoys the walk, sure, and she doesn’t mind the wait at the other end, as long as she has a few sticks to chew on. But the real reward is leaping happily on the boys when they finally emerge from the school. Her love for them has brought her out, in every kind of weather, when the sidewalks were slick with rain or treacherous with slush and ice. She’s joyfully, bouncingly dogged. She’s a true amateur.

Chickpea salsamole

Chickpea salsamole

This is so easy, so delicious, and so versatile. It’s a little like guacamole, a little like salsa, and a little like a cool chickpea salad. You could add anything you want to this! Garlic, raw or roasted, onions or chives, jalapeños, olives, capers, hot sauce, cheese…anything! I used cilantro from our garden and beautiful golden oregano from the CSA that we belong to. I like this to stuff inside a pita or tortilla with some croquettes or beans and rice.

Here’s Uncle Tupelo with I Want to be your Dog. I LOVE this cover!
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White beans with sorrel and chard

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White beans with sorrel and chard

White beans with sorrel and chard

It’s so strange sometimes to be an American. In many ways we’re taught that we’re the center of the universe, the richest, smartest, most advanced, most imitated, most moral country in the world. With the biggest, best-prepared military. No amount of statistics will prove otherwise, because this is just something we know, it’s a gut feeling. And although we’re proud of the fact that America was founded by a bunch of rebellious forward-thinking intellectuals, we seem to have arrived to a point where it’s treasonous to question anything. These last few days I’ve found myself unaccountably moved by the story of Bowe Bergdahl and his father, Robert. I suppose, on one level, it’s not that surprising that as the mother of two boys I sympathize with a man saddened and anxious that his son is a prisoner in another country. And admittedly I don’t know many of the facts of the case, but nobody else seems to, either, and that doesn’t seem to stop them speaking with self-righteous idiocy about it. I believe that, in part, I’m reacting so strongly because the whole affair seems to demonstrate how skewed our values have become, or at least how different from my own. How can we accuse a young man of cowardice for questioning the legitimacy of a war we know we know we should never have started in the first place? How can we question his morals and judgement instead of jailing members of the administration that cynically lied to us to persuade us to enter an unnecessary conflict that would result in the deaths of thousands of Americans? I’ve heard Bergdahl criticized for saying that he’s ashamed to be American, but sometimes it seems impossible not to be. I’m ashamed to be American every time someone on Fox News claims to speak for all Americans. This passage is (supposedly) from en e-mail Bergdahl sent to his parents, “I am sorry for everything here. These people need help, yet what they get is the most conceited country in the world telling them that they are nothing and that they are stupid, that they have no idea how to live. We don’t even care when we hear each other talk about running their children down in the dirt streets with our armored trucks…We make fun of them in front of their faces, and laugh at them for not understanding we are insulting them…I am sorry for everything.” Who would tell their child to shut up and carry on in this situation? Who would tell them to stay put and not to question anything? Who would tell them that it would be cowardly to leave? The same people who criticize him now as a traitor and a coward, the same people who have never lost a child or witnessed the nightmarish chaos of war. I suppose it’s easy to have clear-cut answers to questions you don’t let yourself ask. Robert Bergdahl describes this decade of war and what led to it and what we’ve taken away from it as “the darkening of the American soul.” Right now it feels that he is not wrong.

White beans with sorrel and chard

White beans with sorrel and chard

I’m sorry to go on and on, by by god, it’s been on my mind. We will turn, instead, Candide-like, to our garden. We have such a lovely garden this year, and it’s a great solace to walk through our tomatoes and peppers and salsify and herbs. We’re growing sorrel. I love the word “Sorrel” and I like the idea of it as an herb. It’s lemony to bitterness when raw, but it mellows when cooked to add a bright tart citrus-y bite. I included it with mellow-flavored potatoes and white beans and earthy chard. I kept the seasoning quite simple–white wine, salt, pepper, and a little rosemary. We ate this over farro, but it’s hearty enough to eat as is. Or you could eat it with rice, couscous, bulgur, anything you like!!

Here’s Alice’s Restaurant by Arlo Guthrie, which I heard all the way through for the first time just the other day.

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Butterbeans with quince and caramelized onions

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Butterbeans with quince and caramelized onions

Butterbeans with quince and caramelized onions

    There is shadow under this red rock,
    (Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
    And I will show you something different from either
    Your shadow at morning striding behind you
    Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
    I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

These lines, of course, are from TS Eliot’s The Wasteland, a poem I have long-loved. I only recently learned that the phrase “a handful of dust” comes from a meditation by John Donne, part of a series of meditations and prayers called Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions and seuerall steps in my Sicknes. Donne wrote these meditations while recovering from a nearly fatal illness, they’re about health, pain, and sickness, and they’re quite melancholy. In this particular meditation, number four, Donne starts by describing each person as a little world, which is an idea that I love. “It is too little to call man a little world; except God, man is a diminutive to nothing. Man consists of more pieces, more parts, than the world; than the world doth, nay, than the world is. And if those pieces were extended, and stretched out in man as they are in the world, man would be the giant, and the world the dwarf; the world but the map, and the man the world.” And what is it that makes us so immense, that makes the air too little for this orb of man to move in? It is our thoughts, our imagination. “Enlarge this meditation upon this great world, man, so far as to consider the immensity of the creatures this world produces; our creatures are our thoughts, creatures that are born giants; that reach from east to west, from earth to heaven; that do not only bestride all the sea and land, but span the sun and firmament at once; my thoughts reach all, comprehend all. Inexplicable mystery; I their creator am in a close prison, in a sick bed, any where, and any one of my creatures, my thoughts, is with the sun, and beyond the sun, overtakes the sun, and overgoes the sun in one pace, one step, everywhere.” No matter how confined our bodies are, whether it’s because we’re sick or imprisoned or merely stuck in traffic or a waiting room, there’s no limit to where our thoughts can travel. It’s like Pierre as a prisoner! “The harder his position became and the more terrible the future, the more independent of that position in which he found himself were the joyful and comforting thoughts, memories, and imaginings that came to him.” We might all be in the gutter, but we can look up at the stars! We might have to “live in the trunk of a dead tree, with nothing to do but look up at the sky flowing overhead,” but our imaginations and memories and reveries can soar with the flowing skies. And, as Donne tells us, when two of these little worlds come together, in friendship, or in love or marriage, we have everything, we have everywhere.

    For love, all love of other sights controls,
    And makes one little room an everywhere.
    Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone,
    Let maps to other, worlds on worlds have shown,
    Let us possess one world, each hath one, and is one.

Butterbeans with quince and caramelized onions

Butterbeans with quince and caramelized onions

My friend Neil told me about a recipe involving chicken baked with quince and caramelized onions. As a lover of quince, I was greatly intrigued! I thought about various substitutions for the chicken, and in this version I’ve settled on butterbeans. They’re big and juicy, and they take on a nice substantial texture when they’re baked. I mixed them with some pre-cooked quince and caramelized onions, and gave them a sauce of brown sugar and butter, salt and pepper, and a dash or two of white wine. I tried to keep the flavors quite simple, with only salt and pepper as seasoning, but you could easily add thyme or rosemary or any other herb you like. You could add olives or capers or pine nuts. I thought of this a little like fancy baked beans (although I used a can of cooked beans, because I’m lazy!)

Here’s Back in the Good Old World by Tom Waits, because I was just listening to it, and it seems to fit, somehow!

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Ricotta pistachio tart with crispy eggplant and castelvetrano olives

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Ricotta pistachio tart with crispy eggplant and castelvetrano olives

Ricotta pistachio tart with crispy eggplant and castelvetrano olives

The other day Isaac asked why gold is valuable, and we instantly answered, “because it’s rare.” By this same logic, it’s more thrilling to see a cuckoo than a sparrow or a wild rose than a blade of grass. When I was little I had a small notebook with a mouse on the cover. I loved it. And I collected different kinds of grass, I pressed them in the book, and I was going to try to identify them. Well, it’s hard to identify different kinds of grass! Similarly it’s hard to tell one sparrow from another. They’re not widely varied in color or size, and we see some kinds of sparrows so often it almost doesn’t seem worth our while to determine which particular type each is. We almost don’t notice them anymore. But sparrows have some of the prettiest songs. And not just remarkable for their sweetness, but also for being virtuosic, haunting, with a beautiful tone unlike any other bird’s. And when you see them sing, (which isn’t hard to do, they don’t need to hide because nobody is looking for them, except for other sparrows, of course!) they look joyful, they look happy to be singing. And grass is some of the prettiest, sweetest smelling vegetation on the planet, though it’s not often brightly colored and showy. The true grasses, and the sedges and the rushes, cereals, bamboo and the grasses of lawns. And grasses are among the most useful of plants, giving us food, drink, thatch, even paper. And each blade of grass and each sparrow is unique, is unlike any other, and has experienced life as no other has, which makes them rare, which by our original logic makes them valuable. And being a human, I can’t help thinking about this in human perspective, and thinking about how each person is unique, is wonderfully rare, has a whole world of thoughts and experiences and feelings inside of them that nobody else has ever had ever. And as any grammatically minded person will tell you, it’s impossible to be more unique, it’s a word that can’t be modified. We don’t have stages of uniqueness, you’re not more unique, or somewhat unique or quite unique. Either you’re unique or you’re not, and, as it happens, you are. Which makes everybody equally rare, equally valuable. The thing we all have in common is that we’re all uncommonly precious.

Ricotta pistachio tart with crispy eggplant and olives

Ricotta pistachio tart with crispy eggplant and olives

This is a tart on a pizza crust. The thing that makes it a tart rather than a pizza with strange toppings, according to my own definition, is that it has eggs in it, so it’s almost like a wide shallow quiche. You can put any toppings you like on it, but I highly recommend this combination. Make the eggplant one night, and you can use the leftovers in a million different ways.

Here’s a lovely little film about Django Reinhardt playing j’attendrai. He’s my new favorite!
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Chocolate chocolate chip almond, pear, and pimms cake

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Pimms cake with chocolate, almonds and pears

Pimms cake with chocolate, almonds and pears

May is bird watching season where I live. David and I have ventured out a few mornings into the wild and winding path that is the other side of the other side of the canal. We’ve seen some birds: parulas, yellow throats, red starts, orioles, hummingbirds, thrushes, too many warblers to name, and catbirds, catbirds, catbirds. Of course we’ve seen the nesting bald eagles, who are so much more important than any other bald eagle in the world because they’re our nesting bald eagles. They’re our neighbors. We’ve stumbled on a valley of new ferns so fragrant you could get drunk on the smell, we’ve seen a magical tree full of warblers of every description, a glowing field criss-crossed by swooping tree swallows. And we heard a cuckoo. A cuckoo! Cuckoos are famously hard to see, because they’re lurkers, they’re shy. Once, we thought we saw one, but it was very far away, and suspiciously similar to a kingbird. But I thought, if it’s just the two of us, and we both want to see a cuckoo, and we both decide we’ve seen a cuckoo, then we’ve seen a cuckoo! I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, about people seeing what they want to see and hearing what they want to hear. (In fact it’s a theme of my novel, but I promised myself I wouldn’t talk about that any more.) It’s such a tempting and dangerous practice to read the universe around you as you want to read it. We all do it, on some level, it’s unavoidable. I suppose the trick is to be aware of it, and then to expand and bend your universe-reading powers to the light, if possible. Everything talks to you, if you listen. The birds say “Sweet sweet sweet,” on a sweet morning, my dog sings “hello,” and “I love you,” because I think she does. The oracle of delphi sits on a stool above a chasm in a rock, inhaling vapors from the earth. She makes predictions, in a gibberish language, and then a priest interprets them and predicts the future. But we don’t need a priest, we can hear what we want to hear, we can predict our future as we want to shape it, as everything around us is telling us it can be, if we listen carefully. Eventually we did see a pair of cuckoos, startlingly handsome, in plain view for quite a while. And you’ll never guess what they called us!

A friend of mine posted a picture of herself on a train drinking pimms. I’d read about pimms, but I had never tried it, and I became completely obsessed. I love it! We drink it with ginger beer. It’s spicy, surprising, almost savory. I thought it would make a nice flavoring for a cake, and I thought it would go well with almonds and pears. It did, and it did!

Here’s War es also gemeit, a poem put to music by Schubert, about a miller who hears what he wants to hear in the voice of a brook.

Was this, then, what you meant,
My rushing friend?
Your singing and your ringing?
Was this what you meant?

…
Now, however it may be,
I commit myself!
What I sought, I have found.
However it may be.

After work I ask,
Now have I enough
for my hands and my heart?
Completely enough!
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Red quinoa& farro croquettes with roasted red peppers and hazelnuts (and hazelnut rosemary sauce)

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Quinoa, farro and red pepper croquettes

Quinoa, farro and red pepper croquettes

Hello, Ordinary friends! It’s been a little while, and I’ll tell you why. I gave myself a short sabbatical to finish my novel! And now I think it’s finished! What a strange feeling. Finishing a story feels like a real sense of completion, a real end to something, and usually leaves me feeling a little bit weepy. Finishing a novel is just confusing. It’s so sprawling, and I started it nearly half a year ago, and all the characters have been alive in my head so long. Also I don’t really have a sense of it–I don’t have a sense if it would make sense to anybody else. I know it’s strange, but it’s not strange in a cool and calculated way, it’s just strange like I’m strange. I just don’t know! I feel like I want Ezra Pound to be the first person to read it, but he’s dead and he was a fascist, and he’d say, “Girl, you stole one of my lines!” Yeah. Any way, there I was feeling very happy but all confused about it, and we went for a bike ride on the canal and passed a writer friend who yelled, “Happy birthday!” And I realize that’s what it felt like, it felt like giving birth to this thing that’s been growing in my head for such a long while, and is now mewling and puking and still demanding attention and keeping me up all night. The bike ride was part of Malcolm’s plan for our perfect first-day-off-together-as-a-family in ages. Since he’s my son every part of the plan involved meals. We were going to go for a bike ride to the next town and get egg sandwiches, then go for a hike with a picnic, then come home and make a nice dinner. On the bike ride I stayed behind Isaac who cried, “Not too close, I’m afraid of heights and I have a lot of fears!” And I said, I have a lot of fears, too, but I promise I’m not going to bump into you. As ever, Isaac talked as if his voice kept his feet peddling–nonstop. He live-reported the whole event. “That was a fun ride!” “It’s still a fun ride.” “Yeah, but so far, so good!” And then he started talking about time. He couldn’t believe how quickly we rode four miles. Four miles! It was like no time had passed at all! But remember last year when he was slower and had a different bike? And this bridge is 150 years old, and that’s almost as old as our country, which is not that old but is actually a very long time. And isn’t everything going so fast? So fast. And then on the hike part of the day, Malcolm had a little black book and he was writing all of his good ideas in it. And he’s going to have a whole collection of books full of ideas, and he’ll lock them in a crate. When he has kids, if they want to know how to do something, like make a giant papier maché dog head, they’ll look it up in his book. And they’ll find so many good ideas that they’ll never be bored. What a strange day it’s been, warm and bewilderingly bright and ridiculously springtime-fragrant bee-buzzing and full of memories for ourselves and our children and our children’s children.

I made a meal with quinoa and farro cooked together as a side dish, and the next day I mixed it up with roasted red peppers, hazelnuts and some smoked gouda to make croquettes. I really think that quinoa makes the best croquettes–crispy and flavorful. These smelled like bacon when they were cooking!! We at them with tortillas, lettuce, avocado, tomatoes and this wonderful hazelnut rosemary sauce.

Here’s Two Soldiers by Monroe Gevedon and Family (1937!) for Memorial Day.
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Roasted potatoes and olives with rosemary

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Roasted potatoes, olives and rosemary

Roasted potatoes, olives and rosemary

Yesterday I went over to the school to help with a mural. By the time I got there, they were just cleaning up the finishing touches. A classic, “Here let me help you with that…What? You’re all done? Just finished? Well, good job, everybody!” moment. As I stood admiring everybody else’s hard work, Isaac walked by with his class and invited me to lunch. How could I say no? They eat in the gym, at long tables, and it smells like every cafeteria ever: of mushy green beans, something fried, bleach, and kids who have been running around in the sun. And it’s loud! They’re all so excited to be there, and there is decidedly more chattering than eating. Isaac, the boy who won’t eat peanut butter and jelly or bagels or “regular” cheese sandwiches ate his current lunch of choice: goat cheese on pita bread and raw red peppers. The kids who bought lunch dipped their spoons in their macaroni and cheese and smeared it on the trays and tables, but didn’t eat too much. I think nobody ate the green beans. I don’t think they’re meant to be eaten. It was sticker day, and whoever had a sticker on their tray got a prize. The children looked and looked again, sure that this time they’d find a sticker under their paper carton of pasta, though it hadn’t been there seconds before. The winner was announced…Pablo. Isaac’s friend sighed and said, “I wish I could be Pablo just for one day.” When Pablo walked triumphantly back to his seat he was mobbed by kids who wanted to see his prize. A pencil!! A whole pencil! The boy across from me said, “I saw you at the liquor store,” and I wasn’t sure how to reply. Sure, I go to the liquor store from time to time, I mean, I don’t hang out there, but I’ve been known to buy a bottle of wine every once in a while. Isaac, who is famous for his tin foil art, made me a big cuff bracelet out of his sandwich-wrapper. It looked like a swallow. His friend said he could probably sell them, he could probably start a business of making bracelets out of tin foil. I’ve been thinking a lot about Isaac lately, and envying his spontaneous creative spirit. I feel like I work so hard sometimes to find the right words. I’ll spend a whole afternoon writing two sentences. Isaac, he just has an idea and he makes it, be it a tin foil sculpture or a drawing or a poem. He has to write sentences and stories with his spelling words, and because they very often rhyme, there’s always an easy poetry about them.

    I shook it off/I stood there, by the tree/he stood here, in the soot.
    “I rested a knife on my knee. Don’t ask me why there’s a rope with a knot in it. A wren landed on my thumb and pecked at that rope. I owe it a debt fore that. When I was done I read a near letter. It said: Still give the lamb a bath! The end.”

A near letter! I love that.

And here’s a picture Isaac drew on the back of his worksheets. I love this! See how the subway train goes “shhhhh,” just like it does in real life. Outside the city there’s a farm, and beyond the farm is a forest, and standing on the edge of the forest is a man saying, “ahhh.”

Good Town

Good Town

So your lesson for today, children, is that it’s exciting to find a sticker on a tray and win a prize, no matter what that prize may be, and it’s important to dive right in and make what’s in your head, no matter how it may turn out.

This is a really simple dish. Almost too simple to write about, except that it’s so good. It’s just tiny potatoes roasted with olives, in olive oil, with rosemary, salt and lots of pepper. Roasted olives are lovely…tender and flavorful and a little crunchy. Isaac loves them. You could add other herbs, if you liked, or a splash of balsamic vinegar or lemon.

Here’s Do It by the Beastie Boys.

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Chocolate chocolate chip cake with white chocolate-mint ganache

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Chocolate chocolate chip cake with white chocolate-mint ganache

Chocolate chocolate chip cake with white chocolate-mint ganache

I worked this weekend, like I work most weekends. I can’t complain because I only work two days a week. Most of the time I like waiting tables, for reasons I’ve talked about plenty here at The Ordinary. Mostly, it’s because, although I’m dubious sometimes about the goodwill of humanity as a whole, I like people, much of the time. Sometimes I feel good about my job, I approach it with great cheerfulness, I want to keep busy and turn lots of tables. Lately I’ve been in a slump. I suppose this happens to everyone, no matter what their job. I’ve been doing it too long. It’s gotten to the point where my heart sinks a little every time the door opens and new customers walk in. It will pass, I know it will, but that’s how I’ve been feeling lately. Yesterday was supposed to be warm and sunny (they promised!) but instead it was spitting grey and cold. Which means we weren’t very busy, and the day passed in a slow sort of blur, and I did my best to be friendly to everybody, but I was feeling a little grey myself. And then around 3:30 the sun came out. The door opened, and my heart didn’t sink at all, because in walked Malcolm, and I thought I’d never seen anything so bright and beautiful. He wore a bright green shirt, and bright green-and-yellow sneakers, and his green eyes were bright. He wore a purple backpack, and it didn’t have anything in it but lemon drops. I was all done taking tables, so we sat outside on a wall in sunshine that felt almost bewildering, after all the rain. The glad trees around us were suddenly vivid, vibrant, spring green. I drank out of a bright green cup, and I had lemons and limes in my water. Malcolm dropped a lemon drop in my cup, so sweet and tart. And we just sat in the sunshine, in a bright green-gold world, not talking at all. It felt like waking up.

The secret to this cake is that it has a melted easter bunny on top. We bought Malcolm a white chocolate mint easter bunny, because he doesn’t really like chocolate, but he wasn’t too crazy about this, either. If you don’t happen to have a leftover white chocolate mint easter bunny, you can melt white chocolate and add a drop of peppermint essence. If you like, you could add a drop of peppermint essence to the cake itself as well.

Here’s Tom Waits with You Can Never Hold Back Spring

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Pizza with olive-pistachio tapenade and breaded mushrooms and eggplant

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Pizza with olive-pistachio tapenade and breaded mushrooms and eggplant

Pizza with olive-pistachio tapenade and breaded mushrooms and eggplant

Yesterday we had torrential rain on and off all day. In the middle of the grey morning, Malcolm came home sick from school. We sat on the couch with his soft blanket and soft grey dog, and he ate a warm blueberry bagel, and asked if I’d read aloud to him from Go Saddle the Sea, one of my favorite books when I was his age. It’s the tale of a boy named Felix traveling through Spain on a beloved, bad-tempered mule. The boy is about Malcolm’s age, and he’s fair and strong and smart and resourceful, like my Malcolm is. It felt so perfect to sit with Malcolm on this icy wet day, warm and dry, reading this book, thinking about how, when I first read it and loved it, I could never have guessed about Malcolm, never have guessed that someday I’d have a boy so sweet and clever and complex. Malcolm is so strong and capable and level-headed that I’ve come to rely on him to help me with so many things, and it seemed so strange to see him miserable and sick, lying on the couch “crying without even trying.” I’ve probably mentioned it before, but one of my favorite quotes of all time is this one, “Do you know, Lise, my elder told me once to care for most people exactly as one would for children, and for some of them as one would for the sick in hospitals.” It’s Alyosha from Brother’s Karmazov, who is kind and thoughtful to everybody that he meets. It might sound condescending, but I think the point is that we were all children once, and everybody gets sick sometimes. We’re all in it together, we’re all here to care for each other. I think about this passage sometimes when I’m waiting on tables, or talking to co-workers or teachers or total strangers, when I’m feeling bitter and ill-used, when somebody is rude to me. It’s hard sometimes, but with an effort I can remember that they were children once, they’re still somebody’s children, somebody cared for them as I care for my boys. I can remember that they have been sick, or imagine that they’re even in present pain, that they certainly have cares and worries that I’ll never know about. Yesterday I was thinking that being sick makes us into children again. It makes us needy and vulnerable. Everybody wants to be taken care of when they’re not feeling well, no matter how old and important they may be. Malcolm’s so strong and capable, he’s growing up so fast, he does everything so fast, he never stands still. It felt like a rare gift to have this rainy day with him, though I’m sorry he was so miserable. It’s like a rare chance to slow things down a little, to travel back in time to his (younger) childhood, to my childhood. It seems like a reminder that though we’re always looking forward, always looking inward, everything goes in cycles and turns in circles, and we can take an afternoon to sit under blankets and read an old book, watch cartoons, eat crackers and ginger beer, doze and wake. A day well-spent.

Pizza with olive-pistachio tapenade and breaded eggplant and mushrooms

Pizza with olive-pistachio tapenade and breaded eggplant and mushrooms

This was really two meals. The first night I marinated and breaded some mushrooms and slices of eggplant until they were tender and crispy. We ate these over couscous, with a sauce of pistachios and castelvetrano olives. The second night, I made some pizza dough, spread the sauce over, topped it with a mixture of smoked gouda, sharp cheddar and mozzarella, and then scattered the leftover mushrooms and eggplant over that. Delicious!

Here’s A Tribe Called Quest with Excursions, “I said, well daddy don’t you know that things go in cycles”

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Coconut-black pepper-rice flour pancakes

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Coconut and black pepper roti

Coconut and black pepper roti

My favorite word at the moment is “perplex.” I like the sound of it–I think it has just a few more consonants than it needs, in just the right order, to make it perplexing to pronounce. And I like the idea of it, it’s not as dire as confusion or as final as bafflement. I find it pleasant to be perplexed, to puzzle over something that I don’t quite understand. It makes me feel awake and alive, although of course sleep and dreams are perplexing as well. Unpleasant things are confusing, like calculus tests and taxes, but perplexing things can be pleasant or even beautiful, like love or a poem with many layers of meaning. Something perplexing doesn’t need to be solved or fixed, but can linger raising questions, indefinitely. I love this quote from the Hagakure, “There is something to be learned from a rainstorm. When meeting with a sudden shower, you try not to get wet and run quickly along the road. By doing such things as passing under the eaves of houses, you still get wet. When you are resolved from the beginning, you will not be perplexed, though you will still get the same soaking. This understanding extends to all things.” I love the idea that rain is perplexing, because of course it is. Water falling from the sky! The very smell is unsettling and stirring, because it signals a change. It reminds me of an interview with Tom Waits in which he said he named his album Rain Dogs because he liked to think about how perplexed dogs must be after a rainstorm, when everything smelled different to them. He imagined them saying, “Hey, who moved all the furniture.” I love the perplexing phrase, “I don’t want no woman got hair like drops a-rain.” What does it mean? I like the etymology of the word “perplex,” it means entangled, intricate, or braided. I believe that everything is interwoven, and this is both what makes the world so perplexing, and what makes it worth puzzling over. I believe this to be a beautiful summation of the complicated fact that words will never be adequate to describe our perplexities, but they’re all we have. “I am perplext, and know not what to say.” “What canst thou say, but will perplex thee more?” Indeed. And with that, I’ll wish everybody a pleasantly perplexing day, and get on with my work!

IMG_3666I found these cakes perplexing to name. They’re loosely based on Madhur Jaffrey’s recipe for rice flour dosas, but they’re almost like crepes or just pancakes. They’re sweetish, but I thought of them as part of a savory meal, and we ate them with a curry of pigeon peas and raisins in cashew sauce, which I might tell you about some day. They’re quite easy to make, light and tender, and the boys liked them, too. I actually used plain old sweetened flaked coconut, but they’d probably be better with unsweetened.

Here’s Skip James with Look Down the Road.

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