Goold Road

We went out for a walk on Sunday.  It was a lovely day and we weren’t alone.

As we turned onto the road with the horses, there was another, older couple ahead of us.  And then, after we stopped to say hi to the fillies, they were even further ahead of us.  We figured they’d never go in the same direction as us.

But then we turned onto another road, and then onto Goold Road, and yep, there they were.

The gentleman was smoking a cigar as he walked. It smelled wonderful and, though yes, it is bad for your health,  Goold Road is a great cigar-smoking walking road.

33rd Street, 7am

I have some catching up, of posts and photos, to do.

I’ve been having a lot of very early mornings lately.

And while I find them trying, they’re really good for taking pictures.

Root Down

When I’m stressed out, I buy books.

And so, on the day before my surgery, I found myself in the cookbook section of the Strand.

I was looking for a copy of Nigel Slater’s Appetite to give as a going away present to an aspiring home cook, but what I was finding was a mountain of books I wanted.  There was I Know How to Cook, Momofuku and Ad Hoc at Home; Jim Lahey’s new bread book, Judith Jones‘ treatise on the pleasures of cooking for one, the surreal world of Heston Blumenthal and no Nigel.

So, I grabbed a classic Jamie Oliver tome for my co-worker, and, just for good measure, The Veselka Cookbook (complete with a recipe for my beloved Christmas borscht!) and for absolutely no reason (other than I’m a sucker for puffy book covers), Stephane Reynaud’s French Feasts for me.

On Friday, Isaac made us a beautiful pureed cauliflower soup while I lazed on the couch, trying to purge the anesthesia from my body as quickly as possible.  By Saturday morning, I was ready to get up and go again (I think they give you something when you have surgery to make you feel energetic and happy the day after), so we wandered down to the Tucker Square greenmarket.

The plan was to roast the last of the wee tiny beets and bitty little carrots from the garden, but we needed to supplement them with something.  So I grabbed a butternut squash, an acorn squash, a bouquet of sage, rosemary and thyme and a smoked duck breast.

Here’s where I divulge to you an embarrassing secret:

Macro

Recently my mom told me that one of her friends likes visiting this site when she is stressed out.  She especially likes the macro shots. She finds them calming.

Well, I’m feeling a little stressed right now.  Last week we had a third round of very deep layoffs at work and my uncle died. On Friday I’m having surgery, again.

So, I decided to go out into the backyard to see if taking macro shots could calm me down. And you know what? It worked.

So thanks Patty!  I hope these shots bring you the same degree of placidity in viewing them that they gave me in taking them.

White Bridge Road

The map of Columbia County is littered with little roads that are public, and yet, ostensibly private, like Spangler Road.  And they’re perfect for walking.

We found another one last weekend, White Bridge Road, about three-quarters of a mile down Route 13 from the ridiculously picturesque hamlet of Old Chatham.

To get there you pass a spooky old graveyard and a mysterious little building set into the hill, filled with water that I think was maybe at one time a spring house (does anyone know?).

What The Emperor Ate

I hate shopping for big things.

Cars, houses, kayaks, ranges.  I obsess over whether or not “the one’” we have settled on is really the best.  Is there another car with better gas mileage and a cheaper price out there?  Could we have bought a house for the same amount but without so much dampness?  Should I have waited another month to buy my kayak? Would it have been on sale then?

But our recent shopping trips to replace the dead oven have been smoothed considerably by our discovery of Emperor Restaurant on Wolf Road in Colonie, conveniently located across the road from Albany’s only Sears store.

One of the things we were both sad about when we embarked on our Upstate-Downstate adventure was the end of our near-weekly Asian noodle-themed brunches.  One weekend pho, another another jap chae, mee goreng, ramen or a great steaming bowl of pickled mustard greens and pork in a Chinatown basement.  We knew this ritual would end, but it was worth the sacrifice.

So as we were cruising along on I-90 I suggested we have lunch at this generic Thai place I took my mom to once, years ago, just after I had graduated from college and moved to New York.  It might not be the best, but it would scratch that Asian noodle itch.

Boy has it been a long time since I paid attention to the restaurant microcosm populating Wolf Road (for those not familiar with the shopping landscape of the Capital District, Wolf Road is lined for probably 2-3 miles with malls, strip malls, Olive Gardens, sub shops and Pier Ones) because that Thai restaurant seems to have been gone for years.  In its place is Emperor’s and its Hong Kong cuisine.

We were skeptical.

Cooking With Wood

Our electric oven caught on fire.

I didn’t even know this was possible.  But there I was, standing in the kitchen staring at a giant fireball in our oven which was emitting noises I have only ever heard in a sci-fi film.

I was preheating the oven so I could roast the half-dozen free oysters my fishmonger had given me (free oysters!) and then I was going to make clam chowder.  I quickly shut it off and watched the coil cool from white to blue to yellow to orange to red and then back to black.  It was obvious to me that we would not be using that stove to make dinner.  I looked around at all the perishable seafood sitting on the counter: Oysters, clams, scallops and a brick of frozen flounder.  I called to Isaac and we came to one conclusion; we still had to cook. So Isaac started a fire in the wood-burning stove and I pulled out my gorgeous, fire-engine red Emile Henry dutch oven.

With a small hesitation I set the pot down on the stove and added a few shards of bacon.  And then we waited.  Ever so faintly we heard a soft, sibilant sizzle, and then it turned into a roar.  It was working!  The bacon cooked!  Then I added leeks and garlic and potatoes and carrots and herbs, and it cooked, too! And then the clams opened and the stock came up to a boil! And then I added the frozen flounder and, well, yeah, things ground to a halt.

Chatham, New York 6pm

It’s really hard to leave town when even going to the gas station is this beautiful.

Spangler Road

Isaac and I took a walk down Spangler Road on Saturday.

We had seen on a map that it cut a handy transverse between two main roads with flimsy shoulders and had a “Bridge Out” warning.  Roads with bridges incapable of carrying cars generally make for good walking.

Little did we know that Spangler Road is the prettiest road in the whole world.  It passes a very well-manicured horse farm populated with lots of curious horses and a few silly dogs.  And then you go around a curve and you come to this:

Around The Backyard

Fall is definitely upon us.

This weekend I pulled the eggplants and summer squash out of the garden.

Isaac raked.

I filled the birdfeeders.

We bought bulbs.

The air smelled good and fall-y and was loud with migrating geese.

I can’t wait to make stew.

Yellow

Yellow has very quietly become one of my favorite colors.

I see it everywhere. I buy yellow pans. I wear yellow pants.

And this weekend yellow even made it’s way into our dinner.

The American Wing

I love the Met.

After 9/11, the Met was a major source of solace for me. I don’t remember, but I think for awhile they waived the entrance fee and I would just go to the Islamic Wing and contemplate what could make a culture that created such beautiful art do such an ugly thing. I know that there can’t possibly be any direct correlation, between art and the acts of a few people, but I needed to find some peace and some answers and I found them there.

The Islamic wing has been closed for several years and will be for several more. I miss it.  But judging from the makeover the American Wing just got, the wait will be worth.  Because despite what I’ve just said the American Wing is actually my favorite part of the museum.

I love the paintings and the silver and the jewelry and the stained glass and the furniture and the room vignettes and the bears sculpture, and despite the atrium’s gaudy makeover, I still love that too.  But why I love it even more now is the newly opened Luce Center.

Colorful Food

Many of the dinners we’ve eaten this summer have been rather monotone.  There’s been lots of green punctuated by little stripes and dots of red pepper.  It’s been a season devoid of the wild colors of heirloom tomatoes.  But this weekend, when we stayed in the city, we hit the greenmarkets and bought every colorful tomato we came across, and then I took them home and roasted them.

For years now I’ve seen recipes for oven-roasted cherry tomatoes on blog-after-blog but I never made them. The cool weather just never seemed to coincide with the end of tomato season.  But in this weird weather year, the conditions I’ve been waiting for have finally occurred and I made up for lost time¹.

We roasted some wickedly sweet little round red tomatoes on Saturday, then drizzled them with good balsamic and ate them with roasted duck breasts and yet another version of that gorgeous squash soup (this time with white beans for creaminess and a purple opal basil yogurt crema).  And then on Sunday I roasted a mix of colors and shapes and served them over smashed red bliss potatoes alongside a pan-roasted fillet of Spanish mackerel and another purple opal basil crema made zippy with one third of a Jawala pepper.

And now, after having had two dinners in a row graced by oven-roasted tomatoes, I can say this to you: Do not make my mistake! Roast when it’s roasting out if you must, but do roast some of your most perfect cherry tomatoes and serve them with whatever you’ve got .  Pasta, duck, fish, salad, beef, pork, chicken, polenta, rice, bread, quinoa, kasha, grits, jerky, tofu, ostrich, cardboard.  Anything.  Just make them.  You can thank me later.

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¹ Set the oven to 325°F.  Wash a few handfuls of cherry tomatoes, put them in an roasting dish or dutch oven, coat with a few glugs of olive oil, a pinch of salt and a minced garlic clove or two and place in the oven.  Roast the tomatoes–scoot them about the pan with a toss or a spoon once or twice–for an hour or so until they’ve collapsed in on themselves, taken on a burnished hue and released their juices.  Remove and mix in a handful of torn basil.  Enjoy!

Croquet

We stayed in the city this weekend, and on Saturday went for a walk in Central Park.

As we turned a corner a field full people all dressed in white, came into view. “Oooh! Look they’re playing cricket.  How civilized!” said Isaac. “Funny, whenever I’ve seen cricket matches in the Park they’ve been further south,” I replied.  And just as I had gotten that out, Isaac chuckled and said, “No, not cricket … croquet!”

And he was right.  There, on a perfectly manicured emerald square were a dozen men and women wearing white from the tops of their hats to the soles of their shoes, sipping coffee and warming up for a croquet tournament.  Stumbling upon the match from Alice in Wonderland would have been only slightly more surreal than our real world discovery.

But don’t go running off to the park with your whites and mallet.  As with most highly civilized pursuits there’s a high degree of bureaucracy involved; all players are required to carry a permit.

P.S. Here’s a couple great articles about the croquet, and some information on how to join in.

From the New York Times: Killer Croquet Games in Central Park and Crisp Whites, and the Crack of the Mallet.

And How to Get Involved from the New York Croquet Club.

Short & Sweet

I’m back, and I’ve got a little something up my sleeve.

Shorter, sweeter, lighters posts, and more of them.  I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about why I was having trouble keeping the Granny Cart fresh, and it came down to one thing: length.  The posts were too long, too ponderous.  I felt heavy thinking about them and trying to write them.  I felt constrained by their length and the necessity of keeping photos on a theme.  So I’ve chopped that up completely and given the site a new spin.

And so you’ll find a little post about peppers, and one about a fuzzy new friend, there’s a brief little vignette from a funny little restaurant, a view of the city from a friend’s rooftop and how scars heal in the garden. There’s also a jig of a recipe for eating a novel part of the Brussels sprout and photos from a paddle I took in my new kayak where I spied on an Osprey.

I hope you like the new feel.  It’s early goings for me, but so far, I’m liking it a whole lot.  Please let me know what you think.

Falstaff

Over any other vegetable in all the world, Isaac loves Brussels sprouts.

So when we were planning the garden, there was little doubt that we would need to plant a little plot of tiny cabbages.  But I wanted to grow something different.  We settled on Falstaff.

Falstaff is in my opinion tied with the Blue Coco bean as the most beautiful plant in our garden.  It is a red-purple sprout (apparently the color becomes more intense after a frost and is retained in cooking), and the leaves are just gorgeous.  They remind me of stained glass.

New York From A Rooftop

The Empire State Building is a little blurry, but it’s still so pretty.

It’s green for the 70th anniversary of The Wizard of Oz, but some Iranian activists see it as a rallying point and a sign that America is with them and not Ahmadinejad as the U.N. General Assembly rolls into town.

I think I like their idea better.

The Cottage

Early Sunday morning Isaac asked me, “Do you want pancakes for breakfast?”

I honestly hadn’t gotten that far, to the point of deciding what I wanted to eat that morning so I just brushed him off and carried on with my puttering in the garden.  Then he brought it up again, “So, you do want pancakes for breakfast, right?”

I can be epically dense in the morning but I was beginning to take the hint.  “Yes, yes I do want pancakes.  Why don’t we try that place over on the edge of East Chatham, The Cottage,” I suggested.

So we jumped in the car and headed through Old Chatham, past the Sheepherding Farm and turned into a dusty parking lot in front of an old low-slung building with frilly, frothy curtains.  The decor is exactly what you would expect, wood paneled walls, the aforementioned curtains, lots of yellow and bright blue, big plastic soda glasses from the 80s and slightly sticky tabletops–but the food is just a bit more than what it should be.

The Osprey

I spent Saturday chasing, and being chased by a hunting osprey.

I think he was migrating.  He never looked totally comfortable with the perches he chose at intervals on Kinderhook Lake.  Sometimes he would take a break and watch me in my little blue kayak.

I like to imagine that he was trying to figure out why this floating, bobbing thing insisted on peering at him through the viewfinder of my camera.

Other times he would tail me as I headed for another nook of the lake.

And then twice I watched him dive ohsoveryquickly and surface from the water with a silvered, squirming fish between his talons.  Then he would fly off to another tree and feast on his treat before tailing me again.

It was a very good afternoon.

The Fish Pepper

In a year without tomatoes, we’ve been blessed with a sheer glut of every other member of the family Solanacea.

The eggplants–who I always understood to be the prima donnas of the garden–have lived up to at least one attribute of that appellation.  They’ve been utter stars.  They’re beautiful, glossy, richly hued and delicious.

But it has been the peppers that have been the true outperformers.  First came the Czech Blacks with their purple-hued leaves and midnight-colored fruit.  Then, the Cyklons with their big shoulders and long twirled tips that just screamed of hotness.

Then, simultaneously my two favorites began producing at an epic clip, the Leutschaeuer paprika peppers which are simultaneously spicy and deliciously, juicily sweet, and the Hinkelhatz, tiny Pennsylvania Dutch peppers named for their resemblance to a chicken heart that encapsulate everything that is fragrant and floral and delightful about a Habanero, without the tongue-searing heat.  Don’t get me wrong, Hinkelhatz is a hot pepper, but just not that hot.

Nasturtiums

The nasturtiums that I had inter-planted with the tomatoes in an effort to keep pests at bay have completely covered the scars of pulling up those sad tomatoes.

And I couldn’t be happier about it.  They’re so cheery and colorful, and I love the way their waxy leaves trap drops of water which then roll around when the wind blows.  And the smell! Oh the smell! I never noticed what a beautiful perfume nasturtiums had.

And they taste good too, the buds, lightly pickled are like spicy capers, and the leaves add such wonderful flavor to salads.  True, they’ll never replace tomatoes in my book, but I think I’d like to always have a giant bed of nasturtiums in my life.

Kip, Spirit and Thumby Fred

I got to spend a whole day with two of my favorite boys, Kip and Spirit, when Keep Chatham Farming hosted an Open Farm day.

I hung out with Kip, a Quarter Horse rescued from Claremont Stables, and Spirit a rescued Saddlebred, all day. Though the weather was less than ideal I was rarely alone and spent the entire day trying to keep Spirit from chewing on me while chatting with the dozens of horse lovers that strolled through to see all the now happy, healthy horses, donkeys, mules, ponies and llamalpacas that Equine Advocates has saved.

And then at one point during the day, the barn manager’s orange cat came to hang out with us, too. I have dubbed him Thumby Fred.

Do you really need to ask why?

I ♥ NY

They danced on the shore in marvelous, civilized, humorous reels in which the old contributed wit when they could not contribute grace, and the young listened to their elders, who told them in their dancing to hold on, to love, to be patient, and, most of all, to trust.

Mark Helprin, Winter’s Tale

Felled

I can’t believe it’s been a year.

A year since we bought the house.  A year since the financial world collapsed. A year since I was last at the county fair.

And though I know the seasons trod a fairly proscribed path–Winter then Spring then Summer then Fall and repeat–it seems unfair to be moving into Fall again, even despite its many charms; pretty colors, apple pies, fires and stove-top popcorn.  The crickets have become quieter, the chickadees are changing their songs and on our hike this weekend we saw a few trees that seemed ready to shake off their leaves and take a break.

Which is exactly what I need too.

I’ve just made it through two really brutal weeks at work, and I’ve been trying for those same two weeks to write something insightful and witty and funny, but I just can’t do it.  So, once again, I need to take a break, breathe a little and reboot.  Enjoy the pictures and the first stirrings of fall.

I’ll be back before the leaves hit the ground.

Squashed

Dear friends, please try this soup.

Take some onions, or maybe a few leeks (three would be ideal) and soften them in a little canola oil and butter.  Add two cloves of garlic, chopped and one sweet-hot pepper sliced (I used one from the garden that was either a Bull Nose or a Leutschauer paprika pepper, but you could probably use one small sweet red pepper and a bit of a hot pepper and get the same results).

When the aromatics are soft and sweet add a lot of peeled and cored squash, and I do mean a lot, like five pounds worth.  Then add about two cups of water and a mushroom-flavored stock cube, bring to a boil, bring down to a simmer, cover and cook until the squash is tender. Season with a healthy dose of lemon juice, salt and if you have it, some ground Grains of Paradise.  Then puree with an immersion blender, or very carefully in a blender-blender.  Serve it with a minted yogurt sauce (yogurt, finely chopped mint, one finely minced small shallot or Egyptian onion and a little lemon juice and salt).

This soup is the most surprising thing I’ve made with all the ridiculous vegetables coming out of our garden this summer.  It’s creamy,without having almost any dairy in it (and honestly, I think you could make this vegan without sacrificing an inch of flavor) and it has the most profound, sophisticated, honest summery flavor I’ve ever run across in a soup.

I based my recipe on this recipe from the September 2006 Gourmet that I ran across while making blackberry jam (there’s a lot of sitting around and waiting for things to boil) on Tuesday (18 half-pints!), but bent it to the vegetables I had at hand, so no potato and no carrots (there’s some out in the garden, but I was feeling lazy).

Bounty

So, it turns out that I can grow tomatoes after all.

Just very, very slowly and one at a time. I’m a deliberate ‘mater farmer, obviously!  Little Roaslita has some amigas, but the plant has a touch of something. I’m just hoping that now that the weather is so hot and dry that she can hold the nasties (and the crows) at bay.

And while I’m excited at the promise of some real homegrown tomatoes to snack on, if you can believe it I’m actually sad that I don’t have any more green tomatoes.  Just as I was finishing up a batch of green-tomato ketchup¹ (the final four plants I had in the garden succumbed to the blight), flipping through a cookbook while the cans boiled, I came across a recipe for green tomato pie².

Oddly enough, the recipe sounds a bit like the Shaker Lemon Pie that you were all exclaiming about on my last post.  I’m hoping that I’ll be able to make it at the end of the summer when those farmers that have actually been able to grow tomatoes this year will be off-loading their greenies.

But while this year I’m a minimalist tomato grower, I’m a maximalist with everything else.  We have squash the size of your arm, and some the size of your head.  The eggplants and peppers are so leaden with fruit I’ve had to stake nearly every one of them.  And then there’s the beans.

Shaker Your Plate

It’s been a long time since I’ve mentioned the Shakers, but they’ve been on my mind lately.

Especially on Saturday as I pulled out tomato plants, which had all (but four) succumbed to the blight.  I pulled up Cream Sausage, and Persimmon, and the beautiful fluted Ceylon, Big White Pink Stripe, Black Prince, Palla de Fuoco and perfect little Ropreco.  I lined them up on the lawn, pulled off all the green tomatoes that were worth saving and packed the vines into garbage bags, and then bagged them again.

It was really sad. But it was Large Red that really hurt.

Large Red is the one tomato I decided to plant not based on its name, or because of a promise to keep me in sun-dried tomatoes through the winter, or because it would taste good in sauce.  I chose Large Red because it was a favorite of the Shakers and they grew it exclusively just a few miles from our house.  I reasoned that if it was bred for this area, it would be a survivor.  I was wrong, this summer was just too much for Large Red.

I first came across Large Red in the Shaker Gardener’s Manual.  Before the Shakers, there were no little packets of seeds available for the home gardener to buy at the local shop.  Seeds were sold in bulk for the large-scale farmer, or seeds were saved from the previous year’s garden.  But the Shakers saw an opportunity and sold their famous seeds in little packets in little boxes all over the country. And to help people succeed in their kitchen gardens, they offered a little manual.

The manual is chock full of tips, tricks and hints, many of which are still applicable today.  The Shakers were organic gardeners before the term was coined.  They believed the best way to grow a healthy plant was to make it strong by planting it in good soil, protecting it from weeds and watering it with moderation. The manual also offers a list of the vegetables and fruit grown just a few miles from where my garden is.  The only tomato they grew was Large Red.

In The Weeds

The road between New York City and Tupper Lake passes through many states.

Heading north, we drive through Grace, Beauty, Longing, Happiness and Anticipation. But the trip home passes through some different places–Nostalgia, Melancholia, Reflection, Dolor and Blah.  Leaving the mountains was especially hard this year.

The weather was damn near perfect up in the Adirondacks, and we took full advantage.  We hiked and paddled (seriously people, if you’ve never tried kayaking, get out on the water stat!), and sat outside marveling at loons, ducks, dogs and bald eagles and went for boat rides and grilled steaks.

And when the weather wasn’t so great, we went inside and sat and read and played with my nephew, little J, who’s at that age where he’s over Thomas and protective of his Legos yet somehow still a blast to be around, and when we were hungry, we cooked.

There were shrimp and controversial grits, (we tried to tell little J that the grits were polenta, something he loves, but his four-year old mind couldn’t get over the fact that they weren’t yellow).  There was also beet pasta with the greens thrown in for good measure, roasted squash and mint salad, braised radicchio, tarragon chicken and sandwiches and salads galore.  We ate and lived well on our short week up north.

And then we came back to reality.

Searching For Directions

The Internet has its uses.

You can find love, sex and friendship.  You can buy a car, music, a house, new shoes, shampoo and books.  You can sell couches, handicrafts, taxidermy and used appliances.  You can make yourself sound smarter, look prettier and cook better.  You can stalk your ex, find your long-lost best friend and pretend you’re someone else.  You can also read this blog.

But of all these miracles of the Internet, I’ve found one consistent failing.  Directions.

A few years ago, Isaac and I spent a dreamy, wonderful week in the Finger Lakes.  Our first hotel actually had a free-flowing spigot of wine about 11 feet from our room’s door.  It was kind of like being a kid in a candy store.  It was the most beautiful October New York state has ever had, and we spent it outdoors traveling from vineyard to vineyard, winding through the most picturesque back roads, eating at Diner-aunts and just generally relaxing.

But the trip didn’t start out this way.  We set out from New York City and headed north.  We followed the directions–printed out from the internet–exactly.  But no matter what we did or how many times we backtracked and tried again, we just kept ending up in a grocery store’s parking lot.

After a five hour drive, and with the promise of free-flowing wine, this is not exactly the place that dreams are made of.  So we circled the parking lot until one of us managed a very weak signal on our cellphone.  “Hello? Oh, yes hi. We’re supposed to be staying at your hotel tonight, but the directions from your website have us ending up in a grocery store parking lot.” “Oh, no! Do we still have the Mapquest directions up on the site?  Oh yeah, you can’t trust those.”

Things I’m Loving

It’s been a very easy summer to complain about.

The weather has been dreadful and the hours at work long and exhausting, and that has meant that finding the time to keep the Granny Cart up to date has been nearly impossible.  I begin a post and then it sits for a week, sometimes two, until I find the time to complete it.  And then, when the post is finally done, it’s nowhere near as good as I had hoped it would be.

So, in an attempt to not dwell on the negative, allow me to paraphrase Juliet:

Swear not about the rain, the near constant rain, that daily changes good dirt to mud, lest my prose prove likewise dour.

In a move that may surprise those that know me in real life, I’d like to stop complaining for a minute, and focus on the good things, because in the rare moments when the rain has stopped, it’s actually been quite an awesome summer.

So, in no particular order, Things I’m Loving, Summer 2009.

The Red Barn’s Tiny ‘Tinis. 2 oz Martinis. Perfect in both concept and execution.

14th & 6th

Sometimes after taking an extended break from New York, the idea of going back seems impossible.

The noise, the heat, the dirt, the stress.

But I always come back, no matter how hard it is.

And then I leave the office, turn the corner onto 14th Street and am treated to another stunning sunset and it hits me, there’s no place I would rather be.

I have nothing deeper to say than that.

I’m a sucker for a good sunset.

The Rollercoaster

I’m on furlough right now.

This means I get a week off from work, but no pay.  I’m quite happy with this arrangement if it means I get to keep my job, and those around me get to keep theirs, too.  Isaac and I are spending the week up at the house.

I had planned to mention this last week, but failed to finish that post, which I had planned to do over the weekend, and then on Monay and then on Tuesday and then on Wednesday, yet somehow I find myself at Thursday already!  Time has a way of slipping past me without my hardly noticing.

What I have noticed in the six days we’ve been here so far though, is the rain.  It has rained nearly everyday we’ve been here.  And then there was Monday. The day started bright and sullen with me discovering a deer had made its way into the garden and through my peas and sunflowers, and ended with 2 1/2 inches of rain and an inch of large pea-sized hail.

Tables And Vegetables

There are a few things in life that really do go without saying.

But since I’m a little short of ideas for this week’s post, I’m going to say them.  Even a bad day at home is better than a good day at work.  Sometimes the best dinners are the ones you can’t plan for.  A venti Starbucks iced coffee is a great way to jump start motivation.  Ethan Allen, no matter how hard they try, will never be hip.  We desperately need furniture.

Furniture.  Our house is nearly devoid of it, and it’s one of those things you really need to have before you invite people over to spend the weekend.  We have a bed and a table, a few bookcases, many assorted chairs, only one of which is very comfy and very pretty and the couch upon which the turkey sat.  And that’s it.

I have no idea how to go about furnishing a house, let alone a house way out in the middle of nowhere at which we only spend two days a week.  There is no furniture left from when my mom and step-dad combined houses.  It all either went to the Salvation Army or my step-sister.  And I have no idea what happened to all the furniture that used to furnish the houses of my relatives that have moved on, to greener pastures or smaller houses.  I think my family very seriously thought I would never settle down.

Like Herding Ducks

I fried some tomatoes last weekend.

Unfortunately, not in a culinary sense.  There was a frost warning Sunday and Monday nights, so my mom told me to put up-turned terra cotta pots over the two tomatoes I had planted.

But what turned out to be even worse than the frost was the two days of 90°+ heat on Wednesday and Thursday.  My poor helpless tomatoes fried in their own little pizza ovens.  By the time we woke up on Saturday morning they were shriveled and dead, dead, dead.

And then there were the beans.  Also dead (not sure if the frost or the heat got them), except for the ones that survived and are infested with aphids.  Where are all those ladybugs that lived in our house with us all winter long when I need them?

It’s kind of a relief though.  I knew something had to go wrong in the garden eventually, so I guess I’m hoping that this will be the extent of it.  For all my cranky, curmudgeonly complaints, I’m still a wide eyed optimist.

Ink, Pixel, Dirt

I’ve been keeping a garden diary in a little black and red notebook.

I find it amusing that the notebook is from Poland, and that its calendar is going to run out after this year.  I also think it’s funny that I find it easiest to keep this record in pen-and-paper form.  I spend my entire day in front of a computer.  I share my life with the world via a computer.  And yet, every week on Sunday night, I sit in the passenger’s seat of our car and scribble away as we head south, back to the city.

And that might be the reason I like it so much; it’s the antithesis of the 50-odd hours I spend chained to my desk at work each week.  Anytime I stay there past 7pm, which is everyday, I have to sign-out in a log book.  I’m often shocked at how hard I find writing after a long day of typing and conference calls.  I grab the pen and my brain pauses.  My hand feels weird curved around the pen.  And then it all comes back and the letters flow with the ink, in a halting, inelegant script.

Things are really speeding up in the garden, and the last two weeks have required two or more pages each to record all the developments.  By the end of those two measly pages, my hand is always cramped up and sore.  I can remember back in my high school days being able to write and write and write for hours on end.   I filled up notebook after notebook with my musings and stories and poems and rants.

Ramped Up

There is no surer sign that Spring has returned than the reappearance of ramps.

In years past, I was a part of the ravening hoard of ramp “hunters” at the Union Square greenmarket, marching from booth to booth until a waft of earthy, oniony air would hit my nose and stop me in my tracks.  But for some reason, this year, I had lost all enthusiasm for them.  They just didn’t seem special anymore.

Then on Saturday when I called my mom to make plans for our dinner at Local 111, she asked “Do you think they’ll have ramps?”  I said I thought they would. And they did; in a spring onion soup, alongside low-poached swordfish, and accompanying a local steak.

The soup was delicious, light and pleasant in a way that’s hard to do.  It wasn’t too “green”, as if it had been overloaded with spinach, nor was it too bitter, as can happen when you add too many raw alliums.  It was perfect topped by lumps of sweet, briny crab.  The encapsulation of Spring in a bowl.

And then there was the side of pickled ramps my mom ordered.  Tinted ever so slightly daffodil-yellow by turmeric, they were piquant in the most pleasant way.  Ramp-mania had indeed returned!

May Flowers

Someone who owned our house in the past had a jonquil-colored thumb.

The front garden is simply vibrating with the pastel-hued, frilly-edged universe of daffodils.  There are peachy ones, and sulphuric ones, and burnished silk colored ones and ones that look like fireworks and ones that look like they have faces and ones that are so frilly and perfectly white that they look like they should be in a bride’s bouquet.

I wish I could take credit for their exuberant beauty, but alas, the ones I planted all came up stunted.  Still pretty, but nowhere near the majestic, naturalized beauties that some other hand lovingly dug into the earth.  I’m hoping I have better luck with the vegetables.

Because, for sure, Isaac and I are expending a lot of blood, sweat, and not-yet-but-almost tears on the vegetable garden.  And it’s starting to pay off.  There are tiny, nascent peas and lettuces and radishes and kales and chards.  It’s all very exciting.

An Upper West Side Story

I think I’m in love.

Of course, I’ve thought I was in love before.  But it was never for real.  When I first moved to New York, I thought I loved the Lower East Side.  But it was too hard.  Too noisy.  And after 9/11, too fraught with memory.  We needed some time apart.

So I moved to Brooklyn.  Where I thought I was in love again.  But when I lost my job, the herd of toddlers living above me who treated the hallway above where I slept as their own personal playground and enjoyed flooding their bathtub so that it would rain down into my bathroom became too much.  I fell out of love.  I just couldn’t take it.

So I moved to Park Slope.  I thought I loved Park Slope, but what I really loved was the park.  I didn’t love the neighborhood.  My feelings about my neighbors can be illustrated with a single anecdote.  I was walking to the subway one morning, behind a gentleman in a suit, when a child on a tricycle zoomed past, nearly knocking me onto a stoop.  The child smashed into the gentleman, the tricycle’s tire riding up his pants leg, smearing it with mud.  The child’s mother ran up to him and screamed into his face, “Jesus Christ, why don’t you watch were you’re f*cking going!”  I wasn’t in love with Park Slope.

So I moved to Cobble Hill.  I did love Cobble Hill.  And I loved the apartment I was in.  But I didn’t love my roommate or the landlord who lived below us with his wife and two boys who felt our apartment was an extension of their apartment.  They would just barge in at any time and make themselves at home.  And their father often did the same thing.  It was creepy and I already had a man in my life, so I decided to move in with him.

Good, Hard Work

Whoops!

So sorry about that, leaving you without a new post for a week.  I hope that if you celebrated a holiday, it was full of fun and family and food.

And if you didn’t celebrate a holiday, I hope that you at least celebrated spring, because if New York is a state to judge spring’s springiness by, spring, she has sprung!

In the past spring has always meant renewal to me; flowers and birds and rabbits.  But this year? Spring is all about pain.

My muscles haven’t stopped aching for weeks.  Up at the house we have been doing a lot of hard, back-breaking work.  We are trying our damnedest to rescue the garden from the encroachment of nature. You see, our garden was carved out of a high bush blackberry patch and neglected for at least one summer, if not two.  And to top it all off, its enormous space was very badly used.

Lovely Day

Have you ever walked through Central Park on April 2?

No?  Well, let me tell you something, you should.  Go ahead.  I’ll wait right here while you mark it on your calendar for next year.  And if you’re coming in from out of town, you’ll want to be here by the evening before, no fooling, because you’ll need to be in the park before 8am, in order to avoid the herds of tourists.

Because the most important aspect of being in Central Park on April 2 is the ability to find a pocket of the park where you are completely alone.  Just you and nature and the city.  It’s a powerful, emotional moment, especially if you let the sonic wall that is the park’s birds in full song wash over you.

A secondary consideration to make, if you are planning a trip to be in Central Park on April 2, is that it should have rained the night before, so that there is fog and mist everywhere (this might require a degree of flexibility in travel plans).  It’s also another reason why you have to get up early, so that it hasn’t all burnt away yet.  Because, I now feel strongly that there are two times when New York City is at it’s loveliest: in the middle of a snowstorm (c.f. March Snow), and on a misty Spring morning.

Easter Eggs Of Another Color

Well, it’s that time of year again, time to dust off my most popular post of all time.  Apparently I’m not the only pickled egg fanatic out there…

It’s that time of year when the hearts of children, and yes, grown men and women the world over, sing with glee and hope.  It’s time to bite the ears off a chocolate rabbit.  Or snarf down multiple bags of Cadbury’s Mini Eggs.

And while I am human, and I do get a weird thrill out of chomping on dopey, oddly vacant bunnies in dark, milk and white chocolate varieties, the thing that really makes my heart go pitter-pat as we approach the Easter season is, of course, pickles.

And I know I am not alone.

Over the past two weeks, I have been getting hundreds of hits a day from people looking for a pickled red beet egg recipe.

Don't they look a bit like a sunset?

So, pickled egg lovers of the world unite! Here is what you’re looking for:

Pennsylvania Dutch Pickled Hard Boiled Eggs And Red Beets (aka, pickled red beet eggs)

• 1 can small, whole red beets¹
• 1/3 c. brown sugar
• 1 c. cider vinegar
• 1 c. cold water
• 3 or 4 whole cloves
• small pieces of cinnamon
• 1 doz. hard boiled eggs

Put all together in a pan and simmer for 10 minutes.
Peel eggs and add to liquid and beets.
Put all in a jar or container and cover.
Allow to pickle for about 2 days before using (aka,EATING!)

This recipe first appeared in the Pitcher Hill Church’s Ladies Cook Book.

It’s my grandmother’s recipe, or maybe even her mother’s, or her mother’s mother’s. We’re not 100% sure.  What I can guarantee is that these are delicious. Make them and eat them in good health.

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¹ Last year someone asked, a little snidely in my opinion, why the recipe didn’t use fresh beets.  My answer to this is: Because it is my grandmother’s recipe, and this is how I’ve always eaten these eggs, and so it’s how I’ll always make them.  Also, this is an old recipe, from a time when canned beets were probably considered a luxury.  If anyone has ever tried making these with fresh beets, I would love to hear about your experience. Please leave a comment.

Waiting

So sorry to keep you waiting.

It’s happening to me, too.  I’m just waiting for Spring to pop.  And for our little mini-vacation next weekend, (we’re going to Bermuda, yay!).  Waiting for the pear blossoms I’m forcing inside to bloom, for root vegetables to be displaced at the market and for a time when I can stop filling the bird feeders.  And right now I’m waiting for my mom to come over, so we can take her out for lunch.  And then it’ll be back to waiting again.

At least it’s active waiting.  Yesterday I turned over the compost pile.  Last weekend I drew up a plan for the beds I want to make in the old garden.  Today I’m hoping to draw up plans for the new garden (I’m thinking of turning one bed over entirely to squashes and melons and the other to nitrogen-fixing and super-tasty beans).

There are a few signs of things to come.  There’s a little patch of snowdrops, and two tiny, brave yellow crocuses sticking their heads out of the dirt (my mom says the yellow ones are always first).  And there are the promises of flowers everywhere; on the trees, on the bushes, in the ground.  But still we wait.

Last week I was feeling itchy, I wanted to see signs of spring in the city.  So I walked across Central Park to the eastside.  I could hear spring.  The birds were in full courtship mode, but there were very few flowers.

Lethologica

I have very nearly run out of words this week.

The old IRT power station. It supplied power for New York's first subway.

The beautiful, enormous building was designed by McKim, Mead & White.

I’m also all out of big thoughts, the ability to punctuate and good questions.  You see, for more than a week now, I’ve been filling in for one of the editors at work who has been out of the office.  I have slain many hackneyed phrases, deleted dozens of superfluous adverbs and thought very, very hard about the future of sports, the crisis on Wall Street and the new regulatory landscape in D.C., all on top of my regular job.

12th Avenue street art. This whole building was covered with it.

Clip Clop

New York City used to be a horse town.

People used to ride down Broadway. Buses used to be pulled by draft horses. Rather than streets full of yellow taxis there were streets full of neighing, pooping, kicking horses.

I wish I had seen those days.

The only remnant of the golden days of equine New York is the NYPD Mounted Unit. When I hear the clipclop of a police horse, my heart skips a beat and I get a little giddy. I turn into a 6 year old, I want to pet the horse!

Recently I was bumming around Tribeca when a very familiar smell hit my nose. Manure. Then I looked around and noticed all the trailers, and then I saw a mounted policeman. I asked if there was a stable around and he gestured down the street. Right there, opening up onto Washington Street, was a barn.

I could hear small rustlings, low whinnies, and see an occasional tail flick, but these are working animals and kept at a safe distance from over-enthusiastic ex-equestriennes like myself.

Not ready to join the NYPD? Then why not think about joining the New York Parks Enforcement Auxiliary Mounted Unit? You can patrol some of the city’s most beautiful parks and help lost kids find their parents and do a good thing for your city!

Legendary

The land around our house (which also happens to be near where I grew up) is shrouded in legend.

There are famous legends, like the Legend of Sleepy Hollow, with it’s headless horseman and hapless teacher.  And then there’s the legend of the school named for that teacher, which always manages to close for a snow day regardless of only a few flakes having fallen from the sky.

Then there’s the legend of that great adventurer Henry Hudson, and the naming of a little town, Kinderhook, for its wealth of little children.  The town is also, according to legend, the source of one of the world’s favorite terms, O.K. It either has something to do with apples, or with the eighth president of the United States, Martin van Buren.

Speaking of old MvB, according to my mom, who had a friend (or possibly a friend of a friend) who lived in his house before it became a national park, there was a legend that, every year on his death day and on his birthday, the legs of the bed in which he died would fly off at high speed.  Apparently she had to stop using the bed for this reason.  Personally, I would have stopped using any bed made prior to 1862 for reasons other than that, mainly involving comfort.

Also in the realm of the spiritual world, there was the legend of the ghost that haunted my friend Alison’s house.  It was a very quirky ghost, taking vengeance on those in her very large family who were bad, and bestowing gifts upon those who were good, like my friend and her favorite brother and sister.  One year it even gave her a Christmas present; wrapped up in a very grubby old box, tied up with grubby old string was a beautiful, very old Dutch coin.

Crud

I really thought,

I was going to make it through the winter,

without being felled by the flu.

I was wrong.

It hit me with a gale force last weekend,

and I have spent the entire week trying to bounce back.

It has not been easy.

Cool Beans

I can’t believe that I was once a beanist.

These days I judge a chef on his use of beans.  When I travel, I bring home beans (and write obsessively about local bean cookery). I give impromptu bean lectures in grocery stores, and bully coworkers into placing large, exorbitant orders of beans to be shipped all the way across America.  And, as I wait patiently for spring, I’m planning an entire bean plot in my garden.

Amazing to think that two and a half years ago I was happy to publicly proclaim that I was never going to touch another bean again.

This last weekend upstate was very hard.  Nature is making some very weak attempts to throw off the mantle of winter.  There are tiny fuzzy buds on the two pear trees that flank the entrance to our house, and the glacier on the driveway is beginning to break up, as are the ice floes on the creek (some of the sheets are over a foot thick!).  But it is still cold there, and the ground is still very, very frozen.  It’s hard to believe spring is ever going to arrive.

But, it will, just as sure as seven months from now I’ll be complaining about the heat, spring will be here before I know it.  And so I’m planning.  God I love planning.

I have a little red and black notebook in which I’m recording all the seeds I have and seeds and plants I want.  It was obvious from the first word I wrote in that book that I’m going completely overboard in my plant selection, but I’m okay with that.

Walka Walka Walka

I walked to work on Wednesday.

I entered Central Park through the Women’s Gate, near Strawberry Fields.  Within two minutes, I was deep enough into the park to have left the roar of the city behind me.  I was surrounded by mist and bird calls and tiny muffled sounds.  There were snow drops and spaniels and hurrying commuters and me, slowly making me way to the end of the park, wallowing in the beauty.

By the time I made it to The Mall, the sun had burned through the morning mist and returned the park to the land of shadows and bustle.

From Grand Army Plaza, I walked straight down Fifth Avenue.  Gawking at all the fantastically stylish women tottering on their sky-high heels I felt a bit like Bill Cunningham, and a little dowdy in my sensible shoes and too warm coat.

A Return To Tiny

It seems that, if one is to base their conclusions solely on the cooking coverage provided by the New York Times, tiny kitchens are all the rage.

Which really does make sense, given that the New York Times is a paper based in New York, purporting to cover New York things from a New York perspective, because, let’s face it, only the luckiest people in New York (and by New York, I mean Manhattan in this instance) have big kitchens. For further evidence see the introduction to this story by Moira Hodgson from 1979.  I’m a bit too cheap to pay $4 for the article, but I do love that she blames the landlords.

I know first hand that living in Brooklyn is the way to solve the tiny kitchen blues.  But, there are trade offs.  By gaining a big kitchen one may also gain a big commute.

I gather that the tiny kitchen rage started when Mark Bittman posted a picture of his kitchen, which, I’ll grant you, is tiny.  I, like many, was initially surprised that someone who writes so much about food had such a weeny kitchen.  But then I thought about it, and yeah, it makes sense.  A tiny kitchen forces one to cook smarter, with less and more, well, minimally.   As Mario Batalli says in Bittman’s article, “Only bad cooks blame the equipment.”

Traction

It’s amazing what you can accomplish with two cheap Ikea rugs.

Last weekend they helped avert a minor disaster.  Isaac and I have been shoveling the driveway upstate instead of hiring a plowing service.  It saves money and is good exercise, but we’re not quite as strong as a plow.  And since this has been an odd winter, with ice storms in between snow storms, our driveway has accumulated a viciously slick layer of ice below the snow.

On Friday, I loaded up Oliver with a bunch of little stuff to go upstate, while Isaac and his sister (who had flown in from Colorado for a mini-break that involved helping us move) packed a rental truck with our dining table and other furniture better suited to life upstate than life in a studio apartment.

I took the Taconic, happily bopping along to the awesome new Raconteurs album, managing somehow to stay on the road as I gawped at hawk after hawk perched ridiculously at the top of the tiniest tree, while the duo in the truck took the Thruway.  Beyond all expectations both vehicles arrived at the house at nearly the same time.  We showed Isaac’s sister around, unloaded and then decided it was time to return the truck.  We wanted to accomplish something other than moving that day.

And then reality kicked in.

Change

Change is in the air.

We (finally!) have a new president, big things are happening for both Isaac and I at work and we’re moving.

No, sorry Lydia, not upstate.  But we are moving on up, uptown in fact, to the Upper West Side.

Our two years in Bay Ridge were an experiment.  After living together in an apartment that more closely resembled a small watercraft (with a very small kitchen) than a place to live on land, we decided that space trumped an easy commute.  We packed up and moved to the far, far reaches of Brooklyn.

At first it was joyous; a new neighborhood with new quirks and so much good food to explore.  But as the months dragged on and my job, especially, became increasingly intense, the hour or more spent each way commuting to and from work has become too much.  And so, when an email popped up on my BlackBerry from a co-worker who was vacating a small (but not that small) two-room studio a block-and-a-half from Central Park, we jumped on it.

Into The Pan

I have a co-worker, an accomplished young woman, who’s guilty pleasure is reading chick lit.

To her this is a deviant activity.  She was raised by a family of very smart women, is Ivy League-educated and has a rather important job for someone of her not-yet advanced years.  So to her, reading what is the literary equivalent of a pair of fluffy, pink maraboo-bedecked, high-heeled boudoir slippers is a delicious and deviant activity.  It’s a release into a fantasy world where the tough questions life tosses at you include “Manolo or Louboutin?”  “Should I or shouldn’t I?”  and “Champagne or martini?”

I think this is a wonderful escape.  Working in the same newsroom, a place that can make Times Square look like a misty Adirondack lake, I fully understand the need to escape into another world.  But chick lit has just never done it for me.  Nope, I like my literary frippery to have a little more age on it.  My guilty pleasure is historical fiction.

I know, I know, you’re all sitting out there thinking, “Wooooooooo… Wow, that’s so, uhm, indulgent, Ann!”  God, even my guilty pleasures are cerebral.  But, it’s true. When I’m surrounded by chaos, there’s nothing I love more than to sink into a book about another time, far far in the past.

Snow Birds

For a minute there, I almost believed that winter had forgotten about us up here.

Isaac's lavender yesterday.

Isaac's lavender today

I was watching the status updates on facebook of my friends down in the city: Playing in the snow in Brooklyn! Cozy inside watching the snow fall.  Snowball fight!

And we were up here, in the great snowy north, with no new snow.  It was mystifying.

And then, as soon as I dared to mention something to Isaac, oh?  What’s that?  A flake.  Followed by another and another.  By the time we got home from the grocery store, it was snowing in earnest.

Like A Lamb

2009 crept in while I slept.

For the first time since my age was in single digits, I slept through the transition from old to new year.  And though I would have liked to watch the tail-end of 2008 slink away into the shadows of history, I’m okay with my decision to get some sleep.  It bodes well for the new year. Maybe this one will contain more serenity (and naps) than the last.

For, like many, I am not displeased to have 2008 behind me.  In reality, it was a pretty good year for me.  I got promoted, and we bought the house, we went to Italy, my second nephew was born, I mastered pie crust, went to the county fair, was party to the world’s best dinner party story ever and had a successful surgery that will hopefully keep me hale and healthy for many years to come. These are good things.

But I also worked my tail off in 2008, as did Isaac, and while good things hopefully lie ahead for both of us, we could both use a calm 2009.  So, a toast!  May your 2009 be healthy and happy, full of friends, family and delicious food.  May your house retain its value, may your bank accounts stay in the black and may your new year be as full of naps as your heart desires!

But back to 2008 for one minute.  The thing that I have spent the most time thinking about during my break away from the blog has been recipes.  Turns out that, after careful consideration, the writing of recipes is the thing that keeps me from posting more frequently.  You see, I’m not a very organized or disciplined person when it comes to cooking.