So, the past few years my grandmother (via my aunt with whom she lives) has been sending family things for Christmas presents. This year I got a wonderful box full of many random things including a set of table linens that once belonged to Kate Dolly. Kate Dolly’s mother and my great-great-grandmother were sisters. Kate’s mother moved to St. Louis and married Thomas Dolly, and my great-great-grandmother went on a blind date (in her sister’s stead) and married Charles Plamondon, had five children, and died on the Lusitania. Somehow, most of “Aunt Kate’s” stuff wound up back in Leland, on…
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Here’s the winter herb garden on the mudroom porch. As you can see, the shiso and the basil bit the dust. It was just too cold out there. The funny thing is that for a long time all of them were just sort of dormant. The mint did nothing for months — I did have a little aphid infestation on the mint when I first brought it in last fall, but even after I killed them off, the mint just sat there with these little tiny nascent leaves that never did anything. Then about three weeks ago, it came back…
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The last two nights remind me why I spent all that time last summer putting food away. Even though I believe that Sunday’s require the smell of something braising, that warm scent of something bubbling gently filling the house, this Sunday was so gorgeous that I went outside all day long. By dinnertime, I was hungry, but not particularly interested in something meaty. So I rummaged around in the freezer until I found a couple of stuffed cabbage rolls I put away last summer. I went on a saffron-rice-and-leftovers kick last summer; in particular, a saffron-rice-and-leftovers wrapped in cabbage leaves…
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As I noted, I sat outside and read this weekend. Tinkers by Paul Harding — months ago my friend Anna told me about this subscription program that Powells Books in Portland runs, Indispensible. Every six weeks they send you a little box with a book and some other stuff in it. This was my first shipment, and it had Tinkers, a video magazine by the McSweeneys folks, and a poster by a comic book artist. So, there I was with a lovely afternoon and a new book — a first novel that like many of my favorite books, isn’t particularly…
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Today was like being let out of jail. The sun was shining. There was no wind. The sun, did I mention? It was shining. It was warm outside — 40s up into the 50s. I cleaned up the yard (dog poop patrol), cut some hollyhock stalks and put them over where I want hollyhocks to grow next year. I turned over a garden bed. I pulled all the dead stuff off the herb bed so the parsley and the chives can start coming back. I pruned a couple of errant branches off the greengage plum tree. Then I hung out…
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This is the first winter I’ve had a clothesline and I find I use it fairly often. If it’s sunny, and above freezing, I’ve been hanging things outside. Today is very windy, which is a bit of a challenge, but there they are, some clothes, getting dry without using my dryer. It’s a small thing, but makes me weirdly happy. (Plus the sheets smell so nice.)
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It’s funny, when I make up a dish, I don’t really think of it as a recipe. I was watching the Superbowl with a couple of friends the other night and I told them how I’d cooked a pork shoulder roast that afternoon even though I knew I wasn’t going to be home that evening. It just feels wrong not to have something cooking on a Sunday afternoon (and leftovers are what I live on all week). I was saying that I’d sort of crossed the Italian pork braised in milk technique with something Southwestern-y because a girlfriend sent me…
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There’s no shortage of praise going around for Updike’s work in the wake of his death, and I’ve been hesitant to jump in because well, there’s that prohibition against speaking ill of the dead. For all I know, in his personal life he could have been an exemplar of many fine qualities — I wouldn’t know. He was certainly productive, writing three pages a day over a lifetime he produced more than 40 novels, collections of essays, and short stories. However, I found his work repellent. The pervasive and unrelenting misogyny is only a part of what I hated about…
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Last night was one of those bad white nights where you wake at two and worry. The kind of night where you’re haunted by worries that are just practical enough to be real, and which yet, you know you can do nothing about at two in the morning. Or three in the morning. Or four thirty, when you know you only have another hour until the alarm goes off. And of course, by the time the alarm goes off, you’re finally finding yourself slipping under the wire into real sleep. Except that now, you must get up. The saving grace…
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Mornings in Montana lately have featured subzero temperatures and, as is the case this morning, 30-50mph gusts blowing right up against my kitchen windows (that sun porch I want is seeming less like an indulgence and more like an investment in insulation on mornings like this). At any rate, it’s been deepest winter here. Dark. Cold. Windy. And so, I’ve become addicted to this stuff, Zergut Hot Ajvar: It’s from Bulgaria. It contains peppers, eggplant, sugar, sunflower oil, salt, garlic and hot peppers, oh and some acetic acid (Vitamin C). It’s bright red. It tastes like summer. The jar says…