Monthly Archives: January 2008

My Take on New Hampshire

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So my Aunt Molly called last night after the results were in — we follow politics together, and we’d had a long talk last weekend when I called to thank her for the box of funny lovely old family pieces she’d sent me for Christmas (several years ago, she got my grandmother to start sending us things now, rather than waiting until after she dies). So anyhow, Molly and I have both been very excited about Obama, but she was a little cranky at both Obama and Edwards for their behavior at the debates last week. Smug, she said. They were just so smug. “They reminded me of those kids right out of school who come into my classroom and want to tell me how to teach,” said my Aunt Molly. “I’ve been doing this 35 years. Don’t think that just because you took a couple of classes …” I think there were a lot of women out there who saw the same thing.

And then Hillary’s facade cracked open just a little bit last week. Every woman I know has had that moment. You’re working so hard. You’re doing everything you can — at work, at home, at school — you might have kids or older parents you’re taking care of, or both — you feel like you’ve been stretched out as far as you can go and yet, you just keep going. And you’re fine until someone genuinely asks, until some kind person looks at you and says, “No, really — how are you?” And you realize how tired you are, and how you’re beginning to worry that you might not be able to pull it off after all, and you kind of crack a little.

I’m still not crazy about Hillary as the nominee, but there was something unpleasantly gleeful in the cries of the media pack, the braying that if she didn’t do well in New Hampshire she was done for. I’m not ready for the race to be over. I want a race. And I certainly don’t want to send someone who has done as much as Hillary has home after the first true primary. I’m not crazy about her as the nominee or as the president — but I sure do want her to prove that a woman is a viable candidate.

There was a woman on NPR this morning, who related that her own daughter, who supports Obama had called her yesterday. The daughter reminded her that when she’d come home from college and had told her mom that she “wasn’t a feminist” her mother had told her that she was being ungrateful. I think a lot of women voted with their gratitude yesterday. I think a lot of us might still have doubts, but we’re far from ready to send Hillary Clinton home.

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Dreaming of Pigs …

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05062007013.thumbnail Dreaming of Pigs ...
I’m dreaming of pigs these days — over the holidays, a friend and I got talking about starting a pig business. We’d see if we can get my butter-and-egg lady to raise them for us (she raises great pigs) and then we’d do charcuterie — prosciutto, guanciale, lard (leaf lard! from good pigs!), sausages — or as my friend said in an email: “We’ll smoke’em, dry’em, stuff’em, hang’em, and sell’em.”

Our original plan was to get some investors and just go for it, but I think approaching it like a grown up 4H project might make more sense. Get a few weaners this year, see if Isabelle will raise them for us, track the costs and see if we can make a decent product before going off to find investors and jumping in the deep end.

And so, I’ve been surfing sites like the Gloucestershire Old Spots Pig Breeders Club looking at pigs. If we’re going to raise some pigs, why not raise interesting pigs? If we’re not going to raise factory pork, then lets really not raise factory pork.

But like I said, we’re still in the dreaming phase. My friend and potential porcine partner is nursing a broken heart, and I firmly believe that nothing helps one through heartbreak like a new project. Pigs for a broken heart anyone?

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LivingSmall for Barack Obama

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I haven’t figured out how to embed a YouTube video on my page yet (must go learn that) but check out this clip of Barack Obama’s victory speech in Iowa last night. It’s long, but it’s worth watching the whole thing.

I think either Hillary or Edwards would be perfectly good presidents, and certainly better than that man who currently resides in the White House — but neither of them inspires me in the least (and I’m really not crazy about putting all the old Clinton folks back in — in general, I believe life should go forward, not backward.)

And that’s what I love about Obama — he’s only a couple of years older than I am. I’m excited about having someone from my generation come to power. I’m excited about a truly multicultural president. I’m excited about Obama’s ideas and energy and his insistence that we are One America. I like the way he reminds us all we can be better, do better, achieve great things. I think a leader should be inspirational.

And neither Hillary nor John Edwards has ever made me weep the way I wept this morning watching Barack Obama in Iowa last night. What I saw was a man ready to lead, a man ready to take power and use it responsibly. What I saw was inspirational.

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Burdock in Paris

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The New York Times ran a piece in it’s travel section over the holidays about Georges-Louis Leclerc, the Comte de Buffon. Buffon was, along with Linnaeus, one of the great early botanists and naturalists. Among other things, Buffon built the Jardins des Plantes — that enormous garden on the banks of the Seine. I’d never been there until my last trip to Paris when I stayed down in the 5th arrondissement — it was my last day in Paris and the sun was shining and I was getting a little lonely for green spaces and nature, so I went off to explore the Jardins des Plantes. It’s quite wonderful. There’s a small zoo, and a natural history museum, and the whole place was full of groups of French schoolchildren chattering with the joy of being sprung from school buildings and allowed to go off to see an exhibit about dinosaurs. An American girl approached me and addressed me in French about using the toilette — always a thrill to be taken for a Frenchwoman — we chatted for a minute and I made change for her so she could use the facilities.

The botanical collections are really fascinating, especially for anyone who keeps a garden. Long rows of rectangular beds separated by grassy promenades. This was late September so a lot of things had gone brown and dormant. I was poking along when I must have wound up in the collection from the Americas. I was peering at botanical labels when I came across a plant I knew all too well.

There it was, the ordinary burdock, complete with the same brown burrs that were the bane of my childhood. As a kid who spent most of my time in the woods, I was always coming home with burrs in my hair. And the ponies — my grandmother’s semi-feral ponies that lived most of the year in the pasture. Trying to get the matted burrs out of their manes seemed a nearly hopeless task. As small children, Patrick and I once got stuck in the pasture — it was late August, the burdock plants were a good six feet tall and we were stuck in a wilderness of thorns. Our grandmother rescued us, mad as hell that we were way out in the pasture where we didn’t belong instead of playing in the creek where we’d said we’d be.

And there, in the middle of this formal botanical park in Paris, was a single burdock plant, with burrs. I laughed out loud. A weed on one continent is a specimen on another.

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Lost Recipe

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In the NY Times Magazine’s 2007 roundup, the food page did a tribute to Peg Bracken — and they ran the Braised-Chicken-and-Artichoke Casserole. This was one of the first party dishes I ever made — I was fifteen or sixteen and my mother was very fond of the I Hate to Cook CookBook. I was so psyched to find this recipe — I remember it so vividly! Sauteeing off the chicken, then making the simple veloute with the mushrooms and sherry and chicken broth. Tucking the artichoke hearts in between the chicken pieces and pouring the sauce over — and the magical way it made the whole house smell delicious.

Well, it wasn’t exactly a house. My mother at that point was renting a funny little modernist bachelor pad by the Bath and Tennis club in the town where I grew up. There were two of them — funny little cubic buildings split in half vertically — so each cube had two-story apartment faced with glass on the front and back sides. The ground floor was open, with a tidy little steel galley kitchen that could be closed off with a sliding door. There was a spiral staircase to the second floor where there were two bedrooms and a bath. Like most of those early modernist buildings, the glass was single-pane, and those apartments were cold in the winter.

We lived with our dad in high school, and I made this recipe one weekend at Mom’s house. It was winter, and cold, and the smell of sherry and chicken and mushrooms and artichokes was delicous. It came out of the oven all brown and chickeny. It was one of the first cooking triumphs I ever had. This funny little recipe is a kind of Proust’s madeleine for me — one of the first things I cooked that made it clear to me that cooking could change the tenor of a winter’s day, could take a Sunday afternoon characterized by football and torpor and homework undone and transform it with a real dinner. Dinner that tasted and smelled delicious. Dinner that was transformational.

So thanks Peg Bracken. Thanks for teaching me that I could cook. For teaching me that cooking can change the way a day goes, if not change the way a life goes.

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