Category Archives: domestic life

Back to Boring Normal Life

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Well, the dogs are on the mend — Ray’s stitches come out on Friday and I took Owen  off to have his dressings changed today. I wish I’d had my camera with me — that external fixature is quite something. My little FrankenPuppy. His Fenatyl patch is also off, which is making him a little less groggy — thank goodness we have the mysterious “anaglesic elixir” because he’s still intermittently uncomfortable.
In other news — the tomatoes are getting their true leaves down in the basement, although I didn’t have the germination rates with the pepper seedlings that I’d hoped for –there are still plenty of peppers, but somehow, when nothing pops up in a cell I just can’t help but feel a tiny disapointment. This weekend I’m going to start some cabbages and greens — chard, maybe some frissee, things I can pop in once (if ever) it stops snowing.

I’m finally seeing the bulbs start to poke up out of the mostly-frozen ground, and if it’s warm I might transplant those roses that currently live where the new fence is going to go. The birds are finally back at my feeder — chickadees and finches for the most part. And the past few days we’ve started hearing birdsong –oh! and I saw a migrating swan yesterday when we were walking the dogs. They’re so beautiful and so mean …

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Green Soup for After a Party

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I hosted Easter yesterday — sent out invitations and invited everyone I know to stop by — it was great fun, there were probably 30 or 40 people over the afternoon, luckily not all at once since my house isn’t that big. I did a big ham, cured and smoked by our local butcher, Matt. He does wonderful hams (we keep trying to convince him to eschew CAFO meat, and while he does do some local sourcing, he’s unconvinced people around here will pay for it. Considering half the kids in the county get free lunch, he might be right, but we keep trying nonetheless). Even though he uses commercial pork, he does a great ham, and unbelievable bacon — I consider it half-local — and I glazed that 16 pound big boy with a mixture of equal parts orange marmalade, mustard, rooster sauce and brown sugar (next time I might add some orange zest as well). It came out spicy and sweet and fabulous, and as always, people ate most of that ham.

I also made some delicious asparagus mushroom egg stratas using this recipe I found online — and made a big salad. Now because I have a horror of running out of food at a party — I had an entire uncooked egg strata left over, as well as 3 big bags of washed greens (a mix of red and green leaf lettuce, frissee, and watercress). I cooked off the last egg strata this morning, then portioned it up and froze it — that’s a lot of easy dinners for nights when work has been hectic. And I’m making soup from the leftover greens.

I love greens soup in the spring — and today’s mixture of spitting rain and sunshine screams spring like nothing else. I cut up a white onion and sauteed it in enough butter and olive oil to cover the bottom of my dutch oven. When the onion was translucent I added a dried chile pepper and 4 cloves of garlic minced. Then I started feeding in the greens, stuffing more and more in as they wilted. A good slug of leftover champagne (I know! sounds decadant — but it was leftover cava from the mimosas) and cook it until all the greens wilted down. Then I added a box of chicken stock (I have some homemade in the freezer, but I wasn’t thinking ahead), and a half pint of whipping cream leftover from this weekends fiesta. Cook it until it seems done but not dead, then get out the hand-held blender and puree. And there you have it, a big pot of liquid greenness — which feels like just the thing after a long winter of bean soups. As if we all need the tonic of greens after a long winter, even though we’re not exactly Greek peasants surviving on dried fish and salt pork all winter.

So, Spring is officially here. We’ve had a big fiesta complete with kids and dogs and everyone standing around my kitchen talking and drinking mimosas. There’s been a ham. The leftovers are dealt with, and I’m looking forward to a long summer of entertaining in the garden — that is, if summer ever comes!

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Martha Stewart Cracks Me Up …

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I admit it, I love Martha Stewart. I love her drive. I love her insane love of crafts. She had Nathan Lane on the other day making plaster of paris bunnies — it was insane. She had these plastic molds she’d clamped together with binder clips and as she was making Nathan Lane file off the rough edges he looked at her and said “Martha! People aren’t going to do this! They have lives …” and her response was “Oh yes they will.” As though she was going to come over to each and every one of our houses and personally supervise the proper manufacture of decorative plaster of paris bunnies that we were all to paint to look like chocolate ones.

And then this morning she was dyeing eggs. First, of course, she was wrapping them in scraps of lace, “you know, from your sewing basket,” or, as she also suggested “you could cut up that old wedding dress. You know, if you’ve gotten divorced or something.” And then, after taking the lace-wrapped eggs out of the dye and cutting the lace off them (they really were pretty) she put them on this egg-drying board she’d made by sticking a million pins through a piece of foam core. Like one of those beds of nails the freak-show guys lie on. “You could just have your kids make one of these for you,” she said. I loved the whole thing. The freaky attention to detail. Her genuine joy at how pretty the eggs were. The kind of mind that thinks of sticking a million pins through a piece of foamcore so your eggs will dry without spots.

I don’t know about the rest of you, but I know that I have a little inner Martha, the one who took enormous joy in making 6 dozen pecan biscuits last weekend and freezing them for my Easter Brunch I’m throwing this weekend. My inner Martha likes projects — likes the way you get all focussed and keep trying to figure out how to make an actual object that matches that cool idea in your head. It was my inner Martha that got obsessive at Christmas about repurposing two tiny lunchboxes that I got for free at the grocery store into flower fairy lunchboxes for the twins. It was so much fun — finding the right paper then decoupaging it, then cutting the flower fairies out of the calendars and glueing them on, and of course, the glitter. What’s not to love about a project with glitter?

Here’s how they turned out: Martha Stewart Cracks Me Up ...
Maybe it’s the bossy older sister in me, but I get an enormous kick out of watching the way Martha relentlessly orders her world. It’s probably not always a lot of fun to be around her as she’s forcing the universe to conform to her inner vision of how it’s supposed to be, but there’s something I find enormously touching about it. She seems to take such genuine joy in her ridiculous crafts — it’s a joy I get. There’s something wonderful in knowing you’ve got a supply of perfectly lovely plaster bunnies that look like chocolate, but aren’t chocolate so you don’t have to worry about them melting or the pets eating them. And you made them yourself. Martha’s flaws, temper tantrums, and generally difficult nature have all been exhaustively documented, but I just have to admit to a big soft spot for her. She’s so relentlessly herself, and ever since she got out of prison, she seems to have grown a healthy sense of humor about herself as well. What can I say? Martha Stewart cracks me up …

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Wendell Berry’s Composting Privy

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Bookslut picked up on the indelible image of Wendell Berry mucking out his composting privvy by pointing out this really interesting interview over at Mother Earth News. Some of his points seem a teeny bit dated (Green Acres? Who has watched Green Acres in 25 years?) but as always, it’s the way Wendell Berry champions those old, unsexy values of work and fidelity and discipline and the hard work of learning a craft. Which sounds very grim, but like the monastic rules, it’s the idea that through discipline comes joy. For instance:

BERRY: It’s like having a milk cow. Having a milk cow is a very strict discipline and a very trying circumstance. It means you’ve got to be home twice a day to milk whether you want to or not, or else the cow will be ruined. Some days you’d rather do anything than go down to that barn and maybe some days you go and you’re kind of bored with it. But other days it’s a most rewarding thing and you realize that you get the reward and happiness of it because you stuck to it when it wasn’t rewarding. There’s some kind of wisdom in that fidelity, when you can say, “All right, every day ain’t going to be the best day of your life, don’t worry about that. If you stick to it you hold the possibility open that you will have better days.”

Years ago when I was the graduate student indentured servant for the Art of the Wild writers conference at Squaw Valley, we had dinner one night by the lake and Gary Snyder told us about how Wendell Berry called him after his divorce from Masa. Now Berry has written extensively about marriage and fidelity and that he basically doesn’t believe in divorce. Wendell called him up, Gary told us, and said that he should know that if he and Carole came east, they were always welcome at his place. Gary said it really touched him, because he knew how Wendell felt about such things, and he would never have taken Carole there without that kind of an invitation. That it would have been rude. And so, that phone call meant a lot to him, he was really grateful to know that the friendship between the two of them could transcend even such a fundamental difference. (Although they’re really more alike than different — one’s Christian, one’s Buddhist, one’s long-married, one’s divorced, then widowed — but the bottom line is they are both country people, both poets of the country ethic.)

In a week in which my blog seems to have been obsessed with do-it-yourself, and basic skills, and those things that Gary Snyder called “the Real Work,” it seems fitting to end with Wendell Berry, someone with a deep and unsentimental love for the physical world, and for the work it takes to live in honest relationship with that world.

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More on Reviving Lost Skills

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Funny the way synchronicity works — I’ve been thinking a lot about how skills like learning to knit, or sew, or garden, or cook — skills some of our mothers (or in my case, my grandmother) discounted as being the kinds of skills that keep a girl tied to a domestic existence that stifles other opportunity — are for me a fulfilling way of refusing to cede control of my basic lifeskills to the corporate behemoths that seem to have taken over our lives. If I can sew a skirt, I’m not entirely beholden to clothes made in factories. If I can knit a sweater, I am not entirely beholden to some corporate entity for personal warmth. If I can put up my own pickles, I’m not relying on Clausen any more … none of this negates my existence as a cyber-worker, as a person who bought a new car a couple of years ago, as a person who still shops in stores and is in no way living off the grid. I just like knowing that if I have to, I can take care of some of my basic needs myself.

So this morning I pull up the SF Chronicle (another wonder of technology — I can read five newspapers a day) and Georgeanne Brennan has a really fabulous piece about how traditional pig-butchering celebrations are becoming, if not common, at least less of an anomaly than they once were:

The “day of the pig” also has renewed meaning now, when many people are concerned with the source of their food and with humane treatment of animals. Yes, there would be a slaughter, but it would be done with respect for the animal and the food it provides. Using every part of the animal – or as much as possible – would also show our respect for the life given. We would try not to waste a thing.

There’s a real value to keeping all these older skills alive, and in the case of the DIY crafts movement, to re-inventing them and making them hip and alive again. Skills like these brign us into contact with one another — there’s a reason knitting shops have become centers of community for many women (and some men) around the country. Keeping a garden gives me something to discuss with the folks at the farmer’s market in the summer, and because I produce more than I can eat, sharing food brings me into my community in ways I might not experience if I was simply buying all my food at the supermarket. Industrialized food production has been so successful at divorcing most of us from the animal and vegetable nature of our food that it’s no surprise to me that in much the same manner as the absolute conquest of wild nature caused Americans to go back and re-evaluate their relationship to and how they valued wilderness, that the success of industrial agriculture has spurred many of us to go back and re-evaluate our relationship to our food sources.

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