I’ve been playing a lot lately.

When Lucy is home, she mostly wants to play hide and seek with me. (And with her daddy when he is home. That’s a fine game.) Generally, she doesn’t quite understand the concept: “You count, Mama, and I’ll hide in my room!” I play along because she takes such joy in it. There’s such a delicious thrill to it, isn’t there? You hide in a place — and for Lucy, that generally means she stands beside the lamp in our bedroom, red tutu on, big grin — and you wait. You wait to hear footsteps. When she looks for me, she immediately shouts, “Mama, where are you?” The reunion when she finds me hiding behind the shower curtain is filled with giggling joy.

These days, as I’m writing up recipes as fast as I can — and working on the sandwich bread recipe when I need a break from the computer — Lucy is at preschool more often than she was a few weeks ago. I battled with this idea for awhile, until I realized I wasn’t being selfish. (And really, I have more than 1 full-time job at the moment.) She so enjoys the company of children her own age. We have found some wonderful schools on Vashon, preschools built on the ideas of kindness and compassion. And mostly, play. When I ask Lucy about her day, she always says first, “I just play and play and play.”

That’s how I have come up with all the recipes for this cookbook. I let go of making the “right” recipes or “best” recipes. I stopped trying to make food I don’t care about because I know other people want to see it. I’ve just been playing in the kitchen for months. All this playing has made me feel like a kid again.

This story on NPR today struck me. I recommend you read it, but the gist is this: we have forgotten to let our kids play. As a culture, we seem so hell bent on success with a capital S that we start pushing curriculum and flashcards and expectations long before kindergarten. However, it’s clear from the study this piece quotes that free play — running around the yard pretending to be a soccer star — actually promotes self-regulation in kids. In other words, kids learn how to handle their emotions, resist impulses, and learn self-discipline by playing.

Playing teaches us some of the most important lessons in life.

Playing is how we discover. Discovery is learning. Following our passions makes us happy. If we’re happy, we want to make other people happy. Everything else is just gravy for me.

And for our daughter. Listening to her talk to herself in her bedroom as I write this, long after she was “supposed to” be asleep is one of the best parts of my day. That kid has an imagination. For me, that’s one of the greatest gifts she could have to sustain her through life.

It’s clear from listening to this absolutely beautiful interview with Terry Gross that Maurice Sendak has been playing all his life. Last week, I stood in the living room, folding clothes and listening to him speak. I had another three recipes to write before I left the house to pick up Lucy, but I needed a lift. Some inspiration. Oh, did I find it in these words. I won’t say much, other than to say that I will never forget his raw eloquence. Especially when he said, in spite of all his losses, “I am in love with the world.”

Let’s be in love with the world.

And come on everybody, join me. Let’s play.

Variations: you could use almond butter, cashew butter, or peanut butter in place of the sunflower seed butter. I really love the taste of sunflower seed butter plus using it means this could be safe for preschool.

If you don’t have sucanat or raw sugar, substitute your favorite dry sweeteners here. I bet those of you who are baking with honey than I am could figure out a good recipe for that too!

When we first moved into this house where we will be living for one more month, Lu was only 8 months old. There is no way to convey how long ago that feels. A dear friend of mine and I were pregnant at the same time and have survived every phase together since. When the girls were less than a year, we both admitted to looking at 3-year-olds in amazement. How would our small, crawling babies ever be big enough to dance in tutus, talk in full sentences, or skip besides us down the street?

These last few years have been several lifetimes long.

Now, not only does Lu talk in full sentences but she goes on talking jags, galloping through the stories of her day, plus the imagined ones, with a determination I love. Yesterday, she was on this kitchen counter, talking with me as I cooked. Suddenly, she grabbed the apples in the red bowl and said, “Mama, apples are not vegetables!” (Except she pronounces them something like wapajos.) She put the apples in the fruit bowl, decisively, then returned to telling me about chasing Max that morning.

I honestly don’t remember her much when she was 8 months old. Pictures give me a glimmer but not much more. Now is so present, so giggling, so here. 8 months old is a long-ago memory.

So is moving into this house. When we moved here, we were really moving to the island. This house was our leaping pad.

It doesn’t feel like the right place anymore.

Oh, this has been our home, the space where we survived Lucy’s surgery and the sleepless year that followed it. Where she took her first steps. Where she started talking. Where we grew a garden and learned to run and fell down and laughed and laughed and laughed. We have done so much laughing here.

And so much cooking. We did all the major edits for our first cookbook here. I’ve cooked every meal in the new one on the gas stove in our kitchen. We have loved this home.

However, this photo up there? That should tell you. There’s just not enough light.

I took this photo in the middle of the afternoon, the sun out, on a low shutter speed. There just wasn’t enough light to make it more than a dark Rembrandt feel.

Have I ever told you that I take almost all the photographs for this website on our porch? I have a marble pastry board set up on a rickety black table, underneath an awning. Sometimes I’m dodging raindrops as I make a photograph of pasta.

I’m looking forward to taking photographs on our dining room table again soon.

Book’s due in a couple of weeks. I’m working nearly every moment that Lucy is asleep or in school. I’m going to make it. I’m going to make it. 

However, when I’m not cooking or writing, I’m thinking about our new kitchen. I’m purging everything from the house we don’t need anymore — the thrift store on the island is probably bulging with our stuff right now — and putting the rest into plastic tubs and organized boxes.

This move is a fresh start.

When we moved into this house, Lu was 8 months old. She caught a nasty virus that required a trip to the emergency room. She recovered and then had skull surgery. She didn’t sleep for longer than an hour or two at a time, for a year. All the while, I was editing our cookbook.

We lived in chaos for awhile. Not anymore. The kitchen is clean as I write. The laundry done. The floors swept.

It feels good.

I’ve learned a few things lately, especially as I have cooked three to six dishes a day for the cookbook. (There are 120 recipes. Every one of them has been cooked at least twice. Some, many many times, especially the baked goods.) As you can imagine, I spend almost the entire day in the kitchen these days.

This helpful primer from David Lebovitz on the tricks he has learned about how to keep a kitchen running efficiently helped me to change my habits. (Read it. He knows more than I do.)

I’ve been cutting out anything we don’t need. We used to have SO MANY pots and pans. (I still think we have too many. Danny disagrees.) Now, we have three cast-iron skillets in various sizes, a sauté pan, a Dutch oven, a stockpot, and a pot for cooking sauces. There’s no need to have anything more than that.

We’ve purged almost any tool that has a specific purpose, like an avocado slicer someone gave us. I want to toss the citrus reamer. A good pair of tongs is great for everything. I use a baking sheet for almost every food that goes into the oven.

I’m still learning to label everything in the refrigerator. That used to be like a toxic waste site after awhile. What is this grey-green sludge anyway? Now, whatever I make, I label it. It’s not pretty. Masking tape and a Sharpie does it. I have a label maker but it’s in another room. And the masking tape and Sharpie is a trick I picked up from the restaurant kitchens where I’ve been.

Speaking of restaurant kitchens, I’ve been watching Danny do inventory every week at his restaurant and learning from him. I’ve made a long list of every ingredient we have used in our cookbook as well as any ingredient we have used, even once, in our discovery of dishes. This weekend, I’m typing it up, in specific categories, and putting it in a folder in a kitchen drawer. Once a week, I’m doing inventory for our kitchen. What is running low so we can buy it on our next trip to the city? What do we need right now? It’s a heck of a lot more efficient than trying to take notes on my phone as I stand at the start of the store.

Speaking of trips to the grocery store, I have learned to not just fling the bags on the kitchen counter and walk away. The work only begins there now. I unload the groceries immediately and start chopping. Finally, I have learned to cut up all my vegetables, wrap them in a paper towel or damp cloth, label them, and make a list of the produce we have on the blackboard in the kitchen. There are very few shriveled carrots in our fridge right now.

(And this video from Tamar Adler? Beautiful. Man, I wish my kitchen was as spacious and lovely as hers. But I love the way she roasts the vegetables for the week in one fell swoop.)

I could tell you more, but I have recipes to write. I’ll be writing about some of this in the book, too. Mostly, though, I would love your help.

What do you know about keeping your kitchen organized? (The rest of the house too, for that matter.) What helps you keep on top of it all without cleaning all the time? What is your food storage like? Has anyone figured out a better system for buying produce than using all those plastic bags from the store? What is your psychological state when you’re cooking in a clean kitchen? How do you get there?

Oh, and our spice cupboard is still a shambles. I have a few systems in mind but what do you use?

Tell me your secrets. I want to learn.

In a few weeks, the first draft of our book will be in. And then, we move to a new home. It’s not grand but it’s filled with light.

And soon, hopefully, there will be another baby in that home. Before that beautiful chaos sets in again, I want to know how to do it right this time.

Mostly, these past few weeks, I’ve been sitting here, typing. Breathing. Then moving to the kitchen to cook. Cleaning. And typing again.

Thank goodness for Lucy. She keeps me grounded. When she’s around, I can’t think about the cookbook. I push her in the swing at the playground and listen to her giggle. “Faster, Mama!” she says, and then she throws her head back and laughs as the wind moves through her hair. Without those hours of being with her — and yes, playing Candyland again — I think I might go mad with all this work.

Last night, she stood on our kitchen counter, ready to look into the blender to see if the miso-ginger dressing was done. She looked up at me and smiled and said, “I’m cooking with my Mommy!”

And I remembered again why I’m doing all this work.

Still, there’s something singular about the time of finishing a cookbook. Everything is moving toward one goal.

(Well, I wish. My energies are also going to filling out paperwork for the adoption and purging the house and packing for our move soon. Really, this is a pretty crazy time.)

And in that one-pointedness, I have no time to waste. Not going anywhere much, I have more stillness. And I can feel what is tugging me more than ever.

Here’s some of what I have fallen in love with lately.

– Collard greens. I swear, I don’t know how I lived without these. Before this year, I had never eaten a collard green. I thought they had to be boiled to within an inch of their lives, with the slimy texture to prove it, before they could be eaten. While I’ve always been intrigued by the phrase “pot likker,” I’ve never liked the look of collard greens prepared in the traditional fashion. But around here, we get Northern collard greens, which are more tender than their Southern counterparts. When I slice them off the stem, then make ribbons of them with my white-handled knife, they are my favorite ingredient of the moment. A hot pan, some olive oil, a mound of collard greens, some apple cider vinegar, a few chile flakes and salt. Shake that pan. This, with a fried egg on top, is all I need for breakfast.

– My Polaroid Land Camera 110a. I found this on the island. A local photographer was selling his older cameras and I drove as fast as I could to buy this one. It’s an ancient thing, nothing sleek or technological. The lens moves back and forth on giant bellows, like I’m quietly fanning flames to make a train run instead of taking a photograph. I must admit that I was scared of it at first — the lens is so good, the camera so different than the quick and fast digital — but now I have moved past my fear. Luckily, Fuji now makes instant film that fits this camera. (Thanks, Molly, for letting me know.) I’m taking a lot of bad shots, learning. Once in awhile, however, this low-light shot comes out that actually makes me gasp when I see it emerge from behind the black paper.

– All this sunlight. People, we have luxuriated in six straight days of sunlight here in the Seattle area. Sun! On our faces! The other day, Danny, Lu, and I sat on the front porch of the coffee roasterie here on the island, drinking coffee and hot chocolate, nowhere to go for at least an hour. We watched people go in and out of the old screen door. One man clutched a mug the shape of a young woman’s graceful face. Neighbors greeted each other with grins. We listened for a few minutes to our Congressman speak near the rows of herbal teas. (We would have listened more but three-year-olds don’t have much time for Congressmen.) We talked. We sat in silence. Danny lifted Lucy high in the air, over and over, until his back could stand no more. All against the backdrop of a bright blue sky. I could feel warmth on my neck.

Sure, it’s going to go back to raining soon. We’ll have another two months of winter. But this week, the sun has felt like a gift. I’ve accepted it.

– Eggs. As some of you have mentioned — and been asking me about — I’ve been eating eggs again. To my great joy, I found that I am not allergic to them at all.

When I took an ELISA test this summer, it registered that I was highly allergic to eggs and almonds. I was pretty devastated. Damn, I love eggs. But I was also confused. Eggs always make me feel good. You know how your body knows that certain foods don’t do you much good, but you eat them anyway? Like Halloween candy or too many pancakes. Eggs were never like that for me. When I ate eggs, I felt clean. Healthy. Energized. So when this test came back with a high allergic reaction to eggs, I was shocked. But, I paid attention.

I went without eggs for a few weeks, dutifully. And I had some reactions that I thought must have been to eggs. For the three weeks I didn’t eat eggs, I started to feel better. A little lighter. The occasional mild headache gone. Some bloating and other loveliness seeming to disappear. Energy higher. I almost relegated myself to a life without eggs.

Notice the word almost. Something just didn’t feel right. I just couldn’t believe it would be eggs. So I had a long conversation with my regular doctor, in Seattle. He’s such a wise and lovely person that sometimes you just want to book an appointment with him to sit in the lamplight of his wisdom. He told me that true allergic reactions — as opposed to food intolerances or sensitivities — have only a few very specific symptoms. That he has had a number of patients and family members come to him with results from those tests and none of them turned out to be allergic to those foods. That he has never seen that test register an absence of allergic reactions to foods. That it’s almost impossible to do a scientific study on yourself, gauging your reaction to a food by how you feel that day. My symptoms that made me suspect another food was bothering me? Mild headaches. Some troubles sleeping. Digestive issues. Lower energy. I was never that sick. Just off by 5%.

The celiac has me so sensitized to food issues that it never occurred to me it could be something else.

So we started to talk about it. What had been happening when I ate the aioli and seemed to have a reaction: a bad headache and some wheezy breathing? Well, we had been traveling all summer. When we weren’t on an airplane or in a hotel, we were at home madly preparing for the photoshoot for our cookbook. This happened the night before we began, after a long day of preparation and no sleep the night before. I had a headache after eating? Yes. I hadn’t eaten all day. I believe now I started having some wheezy breathing because I ate aioli and suddenly remembered, “Oh damn! I’m not supposed to be eating eggs!” Small panic.

And had anything changed those days after we returned from all the traveling and photo shoots? The weeks I felt suddenly better? Well, I was in my own bed again. I was sleeping. I was eating better than I do on the road. I was taking long walks every day again. I was at peace. Hm. That could certainly have a lot to do with why I felt better.

Then, I realized. With all the tumult and travel, I had forgotten to renew my prescription for Tamoxifen. This drug, which blocks estrogen production, seemed to be treating me just fine. I didn’t think I was having any side effects. After that conversation, I realized I had been. I know them now.

Also, I’m 45. I’m getting old.

After I hung up the phone, I drove right to the restaurant where Danny is a chef. I sat at the counter and said, “Make me a poached egg.” (I also knew the fire station was down the street if anything happened.) Damn, that egg tasted good.

I’ve been fine ever since.

I learned a lot in that time without eggs. I’m trying to put some of it into our cookbook. But I can eat eggs again. And that makes me happier than this sudden sunlight.

Now, if you will excuse me, I have more recipes to write.

p.s. Oh, one more. Downton Abbey. Oh yes.

COLLARD GREENS AND TOMATO CLAFOUTIS, adapted from La Tartine Gourmande: Recipes for an Inspired Life

Something else I’ve been loving lately is Bea’s new book, La Tartine Gourmande: Recipes for an Inspired Life. If you have ever seen the website La Tartine Gourmande, you know that Bea makes beautiful food and even more beautiful photographs. You might not have known, however, that almost everything she makes is gluten-free. This is a gloriously sunny day of a cookbook, filled with inventive flavor combinations and an impeccable French sensibility. Just flipping through it the first time inspired me.

And when I read and looked, I noticed Bea had a recipe for a savory clafoutis. Savory clafoutis? I’ve only ever heard of light-as-air clafoutis, with ripe summer fruits, dusted with sugar. Savory? Well, let me tell you, that Bea knows what she is doing. I took her recipe as a template and threw in my new-found favorite: collard greens. Danny and I ate this for dinner, happily. He didn’t miss the meat.

(As I said, I’m still learning that camera. This shot’s a little out of focus. Don’t let that stop you from making this dish or buying Bea’s book.)

3 tablespoons olive oil
1 red onion, sliced
2 garlic cloves, sliced
2 tablespoons fine-chopped fresh thyme
1 14-ounce can of diced tomatoes (we like the Muir Glen fire-roasted tomatoes)
1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar
½ bunch collard greens, cut into ribbons
40 grams gluten-free AP flour mix
1/2 cup whole milk (you can sub in a dairy-free milk here)
3/4 cup cashew cream
1/4 cup water
3 eggs
½ teaspoon fine sea salt
90 grams grated Parmesan

Preparing to bake. Preheat the oven to 400°. Grease a 10-inch baking dish with your favorite oil and set aside.

Cooking the onions and tomatoes. Set a large skillet over medium-high heat. Add 2 tablespoons of the oil. When it is hot, add the onion and garlic. Cook, stirring frequently, until the onion has softened but not begun to brown, about 4 minutes. Add the thyme and cook until the fragrance of the herb releases into the room, about 1 minute. Add the tomatoes. Cook until the tomatoes have begun to soften, about 2 minutes. Add the vinegar and cook until everything has combined and the tomatoes are really softening, about 3 minutes.

Transfer this mixture to a plate.

Cooking the collard greens. In the same skillet, add the remaining olive oil. When the oil is hot to the point of almost smoking, throw in the collard greens. Cook, stirring occasionally, until the greens have turned bright green and begun to wilt, just a bit, about 3 minutes.

Put the collard greens on the bottom of the baking dish. Top with the onion-tomato mixture. Spread it out evenly in the dish.

Making the batter. In a blender combine the gluten-free flour, milk, cashew cream, water, eggs, and the salt until they are silky smooth.

Pour the egg batter over the vegetables. Top with the Parmesan.

Bake the clafoutis until the eggs are set and top is golden brown, about 30 minutes.

Feeds 4.

When I was in graduate school, I wrote a 24-page research paper in just under 6 hours. I sat down at 8 am to type on my roommate’s computer, since my hard drive had crashed the night before. I stood up at 1:45, creaky and feeling a little shaky, scattering the popcorn on my lap onto the floor. As the printer began spitting out the pages, I shook my head, dazed. Outside, I saw hazy sunshine falling on the water towers. I hadn’t looked to see the weather all day.

For the past few days, I had been reading cultural theorists Jean Baudrillard, Fredric Jameson, and Jacques Lacan, underlining and taking notes. Slowly, ideas had formed in my head, some semblance of something to say. I had taken pages and pages of notes in Pilot blue ink, scrawled fast and stained with coffee rings. My brain had been chugging along, like Charlie Chaplin tightening sockets rapid-fire in Modern Times. Still, I hadn’t written anything yet. The night before the paper was due, I paced, drank some coffee, called friends, organized my sock drawer, and finally sat down to type. My computer died within a few sentences.

Frustrated, I went to sleep to dream feverish anxieties of missing trains and printers not working. When I woke up the morning the paper was due, I bolted up into anxiety immediately. And then I wrote, in a focused panic. I wrote, and wrote some more, and paced around the room, only to sit down and write some more. Even though I felt the entire morning that I might have a heart attack, and the only sound repeating in my head was Ah shit, I’m not going to make it, I’m not going to make it, I wrote. Somehow the adrenaline and my hunched body in the tiny room of a tight deadline made it happen. I did it. I caught the subway, the printed paper still warm in my hand, and made it down to NYU in time to slip the paper into the professor’s mailbox.

I did it. (Does it make this story even more ridiculous that the entire paper was an analysis of the Indiana Jones ride at Disneyland through the ideas of those theorists?)

And at the end of the day, I swore to myself I would never do it again.

Except, I did it again and again, for years.

My brother came up with the right term for this: breaking out of your own prison. You procrastinate and sit around, thinking about working, promising yourself you will work soon, and then you don’t. You clean the house or you call friends or you finally organize all the photos on your computer. When the train is approaching fast, you finally climb up off the tracks and start moving. And then, when you do it, you’re the hero of your own story. I did it! Look at me! 

I used to think I would always do this. That this is what it means to be a writer. I wrote my first book in four months. I cut 8000 words from the first draft in 3 days. I started writing our cookbook after our daughter had nearly died in the ICU, turned it in before she was six months old. I planned a book tour on the fly in a week, emailed everyone I knew, showed up smiling and hoped the rooms wouldn’t be empty. I kept breaking out of my own prison.

But this time, it’s different.

I’m 45. I have a 3-year-old. We have adoption papers to complete. We’re moving to a new house soon. And our cookbook is due in less than five weeks, with Danny at the restaurant most of the day.

I’m breathing pretty easy right now.

Am I overwhelmed? Sure. But I also know that at less than five weeks before a big deadline, I’m always going to be a little overwhelmed. The mild signs of a heart attack push me to work every day. I adore our book editor, who kicks my ass kindly when he cuts into the words. This time I feel comfortable sending him the best draft I can, instead of thinking it has to be perfect. It’s not going to be perfect.

So today, after I cooked and typed all day, I picked up Lucy from her preschool, happily. We put on Caspar Babypants and we danced around the living room. “Spin me, Mama!” she shouted, and I took her hands and twirled her in a circle. The room blurred, and for a moment all I saw was the color on the walls and her smiling face. I didn’t think about the cookbook for hours.

(Besides, a 3 1/2-year-old gives you plenty to think about besides the sound of your own words. If I survive this age, I’ll be even more calm about deadlines.)

Maybe I’m finally growing up.

This month of being quiet online (except for bantering with my friends) has really helped. Hearing hundreds of voices at a time makes mine too quiet. I’ve missed you, and this place, but I’ve loved this time. I’ve learned a lot. I’m not sure I even want to say much more about it. I just know this: if you are interested in this idea of internet respite, take it.

But it’s more than that. There’s something about the work of making a cookbook that I love deeply. There’s no way to create 120 recipes in less than six hours. It’s hard to create 3 in less than six hours, if I want them to be of use. The only way to make a cookbook good is to work on it every day, quietly, taking notes, writing as I go.

My fingers are still stained with Pilot blue ink. And I still spend too much time organizing my sock drawer and cleaning out files. But hey! Since we’re moving 2 weeks after the book is due, at least I’m productive.

Written on the blackboard in our living room is this: slow and steady wins the race. Except, tomorrow, I’m changing it to slow and steady crosses the finish line. That’s all I need, really. I don’t need to win anymore.

You have to peel a lot of onions to make a cookbook. It’s the humblest task I know.

Writing a cookbook is also an enormous leap of faith.

My hope is that these recipes Danny and I have created — with mine the main voice this time — will end up as food on your table. I don’t care about awards or accolades. I just want this book to be food-stained and open on your counter, often.

And yet, at this moment, it all feels like a dream. Right now, I’m in the cave, chipping away. The light is pretty dim in here and I’m by myself. But as one of my friends wrote yesterday: “Stalactites! Stalagmites! And maybe some bats! Being in the cave is pretty all right. Just remember your headlamp.”

So I popped up to say hi. To let in a little light. To wave to you all. To tell you that I took this photo too late in the day to see much at all, but the caramelized four-onion soup in that image is worth every onion I have peeled.

I hope you’ll make it — and 119 other meals — sometime next spring.

It’s the bleak dark winter. Starting the year in January, when the light is weak and the cold air sharp, has always seemed so wrong to me. This is the winding-down time, the slowest time of the year.

And yet, every magazine article and blog post right now is about Improvement! New Start! Green smoothies, kale salads, and a clear denunciation of who we have been in the past year. Organize yourself now! Most magazine’s covers this month read: lose weight, clear yourself of clutter, improve your memory, get your financial life in order, and be happy now! How is that last one possible when we’re so busy bustling, doing all the things needed to become a new person?

I don’t want to become a new person. I just want to be here.

That’s why I’m not going to be here for awhile.

Our cookbook is due in 8 weeks. Actually, a day shy of 8 weeks, since it’s due on March 1st.

Danny and I are both pleased with what we have made. This cookbook will be much more accessible than our last cookbook, a reflection of who we are and how we eat right now. We’re sharing food with our friends and neighbors and they’re happy. The wonderful people testing recipes for us approve.

However, we’re not done. Nowhere close.

Last week, I had a bit of a panic. It didn’t help that the preschools and daycares were closed for a week and thus I spent eight straight days with Lu without 15 minutes to myself. I love that kid with all my heart but a constant one-on-one with a 3-year-old is like a marathon, with no one handing you water on the way. I caught some awful stomach flu — my immune system weakened after not being able to eat real food for three weeks, I’m sure — the day after Christmas. Taking care of a 3-year-old on your own with the flu stinks. It grows worse when she catches it too. It wasn’t our best week.

Danny tried to do what he could. But you see, he’s hardly home right now. A few weeks ago, he took over as head chef at The Hardware Store, the restaurant where he has been working for the past two years. Deliberately, he chose to be a line cook for that time. Our lives are full with cookbookery and blog-making, touring and creating. That’s what made this past year of travel possible. However, he couldn’t really do it anymore. He was ready for more, ready to make changes. He’s cooking for the community where he lives. He is jazzed, alive, firing with ideas all the time. And gone from 9:30 in the morning to nearly 11 at night most days.

I remember again what it’s like to be married to a chef. A walk with him on the beach is a rare, fine thing.

This means that finishing the cookbook is (mostly) all on me now.

I’ve known that for six weeks. I’ve been working, cooking, thinking, and writing down recipes. I cook several dishes a day, feed Danny when he comes home, and ask him what he thinks. He laps it up, grateful to be fed after such a long day. In the morning, we talk about what we ate, tweak a few things, and call it good. Then I go back to work again.

I’m sure that our cookbook will actually benefit from Danny not being able to work on it right now. He’s so talented. His food is so good. However, he thinks like a chef. He cooks with a team of people, with set-up stations, dishwashers, and a joy of being on his feet all day. His recipes start with marination, include 18 ingredients, and end with reduction. I’m a home cook, confident in the kitchen. I’ve learned well from him. But if I create the recipes, and he edits them, you are far more likely to feel you can make them.

That’s what we want for this book. We want it food-stained, flat open on your counter. We want it to be of use.

So I’ve been feeling okay with this. Until the week of double flu, no childcare, and little sleep. Panic.

Then, after a calming talk with Danny at nearly midnight, I woke up with a new resolve.

This is 8 weeks of creating. A deeply satisfying time. The work I love the most.

Let’s go.

I’ve been thinking about the feeling of being fully absorbed in work I love. There are moments when I am writing, or making a photograph, or standing in front of the stove when I feel fully alive. No other thoughts. Just here.

However, that’s more and more rare these days.

I took this photograph on my phone early afternoon Christmas Eve. I had to take it. That sky, those birds, the quiet. It called to me. I stepped out of the car into the cold and waited for the right moment. I sighed at that light.

A few moments later, however, I got back into the car, showed it to Danny and Lucy, processed it, and put it on Twitter.

Why?

I’ve been thinking about this for months, this constant communication and documenting of my life. I don’t really like it. It’s not how I want to live.

If you haven’t read this essay by Pico Iyer on The Joy of Quiet in the New York Times, I invite you to read it now. But this stayed with me:

“We have more and more ways to communicate, as Thoreau noted, but less and less to say. Partly because we’re so busy communicating. And — as he might also have said — we’re rushing to meet so many deadlines that we hardly register that what we need most are lifelines.”

Last week, Christina Choi died. We knew her through food, from buying mushrooms from her at the farmers’ market, then happily eating at her wild-foods restaurant, Nettletown, as often as we could. Christina was vibrant, alive, and living her dream. She was doing what every single self-help book says we should do to live a life that matters. Three days after Christmas, she died of complications of a brain aneurysm. She was 34 years old.

I’ve been trying to process this for days. There’s no way to make sense of it. I feel enormous sadness for her family, more than words can convey. But more, I’m struck by what a sham all those Urgent Messages for a Better You really are. You could be fiscally solvent, eating all the right food, organized, and the perfect weight.

You still die.

With all this, swirling in all this, came a clear decision.

I’m going to be quiet for awhile.

I’m taking a break from this space for the month of January. Partly it’s survival. When I’m creating and writing 2 to 3 recipes a day for the next 8 weeks, I just don’t have any others to give here. But it’s more than that. I need the break. I need the quiet.

I’m also taking a hiatus from Twitter and the Facebook page for a month as well. The rhythm of my days is tapped out in typing and clicking. The other day, Lucy looked at me and said, “Put down your phone, Mama.”

Yes, my love. I am.

To quote Iyer again: “None of this is a matter of principle or asceticism; it’s just pure selfishness. Nothing makes me feel better — calmer, clearer and happier — than being in one place, absorbed in a book, a conversation, a piece of music. It’s actually something deeper than mere happiness: it’s joy, which the monk David Steindl-Rast describes as ‘that kind of happiness that doesn’t depend on what happens.’”

I want to feel who am these days without the constant connection and sharing it publicly.

I’m craving time to have tea with the friends who live near me instead of bantering with the hundreds of people I follow online. I don’t think it’s humanly possible to keep track of the lives of 300 people a day, or more. But I’ve been trying and I’m exhausted. I don’t want the end of my life to be marked with: “She was really good at Twitter.”

Please don’t worry about me. There’s nothing wrong. Instead, it feels as though everything is right. Right now.

I’ll be working all day, every day.

But there will be more life, undocumented and quiet.

I want to live these moments in stillness for a time.

Today, I started to understand why people can freak out about Christmas presents.

I’ve been meaning to make these cookies since September. Actually, longer than that. After I read the advance copy of Diana Abu Jaber’s incredible novel, Birds of Paradise, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. As in, I really couldn’t stop thinking about it. I walked through my days hoping that Avis would leave her perfect world of spun sugar and open her emotions to her husband, who was grieving alone in the other room. I wondered, agonized, what it would be like to have a teenage daughter somewhere in the world, maybe close, sleeping on the streets, and knowing there was no way to help her. My heart throbbed in my chest, thinking about it.

This novel does what few do for me anymore: it slithered under my skin and became part of my cells. I read so many novels that leave me cold now. It’s funny — I was a fiction girl the first thirty years of my life. I coveted Penguin paperbacks of the British classics like I did Beatles records. Jane Eyre was never merely words on a page. Holden Caulfield still feels real to me. Virginia Woolf always seemed to find the words I never could.

But modern fiction? It feels so thin. There are wonderful exceptions, of course. (I loved Geoffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex so much that I actually threw it against the wall when I finished. “F- you for being done!” I shouted, then I burst into tears.) But generally, the voice is so thin, so transparently “writerly.” Rarely anymore does a new novel move into my life and make me look through new eyes.

But this book, this Birds of Paradise, it just cut right through me. Maybe it’s because I have a daughter, a darling three-year-old who spent part of this evening asking me to blow bubbles, then giggling as she ran through them, back and forth, again and again. But she’s also learning how to roll her eyes at me when she doesn’t like what I’m saying. None of us is immune. We could end up with the teenager on the street, silent, no longer giggling, no longer really ours. So I read this book with a dreading heart, uplifted by the beauty.

I wanted to do this reading experience justice. Sometimes I still have to pinch myself. How did the shy bookworm girl with a huge love of books become a woman who can influence some people to buy more books? I know that some of you like to hear what we like. This book? This book I love. I want you to buy it.

So I planned to make these cookies. The recipe isn’t in the book, but Diana was kind enough to send it to me. We talk back and forth on Twitter, which still amazes me. These cookies are the only homey ones that the character Avis makes. They’re crisp and taste of butter and sugar. They’re sweet without being cloying. They’re filled with flavors and relatively simple. These cookies are the ones Avis makes for her daughter, bringing her a tin full whenever they are supposed to meet. Often, she returns home with that tin still full.

September. I’ve had the recipe since September. Why haven’t I made them before today? Why didn’t I plan ahead and make a beautiful photograph of them, in full light, lined up perfectly so you would be tempted to make them?

Life got in the way.

As the day proceeded, after I made the dough this morning and let it sit in the refrigerator, I started to grow worried. Buying groceries at the store took much longer than normal. There were so many people trying to buy food that the employees regulated a line snaking around the frozen section. I watched a woman with a cane dangling from her cart, leaning heavily against it, in line in front of me. No one turned to her and said, “Why don’t you go before me?” Everyone is in such a hurry right now.

Everything I did, every errand I ran, was good. Even full of joy. I baked and cooked and dipped grapefruit peels in chocolate. The dishes piled up. There was still much more to do.aDanny and I are happy to be making a Christmas possible for a family that can’t afford one this year. Buying shoes for the kids made me so happy. (I don’t give a damn about anything I get anymore.) The car was filled with sunlight when I delivered bags of treats to my closest friends on the island. I’m so damned grateful that these women are in my life.

And through it, I thought, “I have to get home to make those cookies look good.”

I missed the light. I took this photo at dusk, just after 4, outside, straining for any last rays. It’s not a very good photograph. At first, I was sort of disappointed in myself. I blew it. I blew it for Diana.

But then, I started driving, to pick up Lu. The darkness was gathering fast as I moved toward town. The bright lights threaded through bushes and trees outside our neighbors’ homes danced against that black sky. There was a good song on the radio. I could my feel my shoulders relax.

And it hit me — this is why people go into such frenzies of shopping, losing the point of any part of this season. It’s easy for some of us to rail against the commercialism, the ridiculousness of the pile of presents when there are so many other people suffering with little to nothing. But it’s all a cliche, at this point — the madness of midnight sales as well as the good-hearted complaining about the people who buy stuff. Yes, I think we all get sucked into this season, thinking we have to be perfect, organized, more than we are. But at the heart of it is deep caring.

I loved this novel. I deeply admire Diana Abu Jaber. I want you to buy her book. And these cookies? As Danny just said to me, “Those cookies are damned good.”

If the photograph isn’t perfect, will that keep you from thinking about it?

It’s easy to lose ourselves in the notion that the perfect present, or perfect number of them, will make these holidays more meaningful. But it’s to forget that it’s generally out of love.

When I picked up Lu from her school, the warm lights of the schoolroom were a balm against the darkness. We bid goodbye to her teachers, eager to go on their vacation. She and I held hands on the way to the car, talking all the way. In the dark of the car, I asked her how her day was. “It was good, Mama. Thank you for asking!”

I laughed out loud. That, right there, was the biggest gift.

Tomorrow, Danny, Lu, and I will see dear friends here for breakfast. Then we’ll drop off presents and masses of food to this family with whom we have connected. In the afternoon, we’ll head to my parents’ home for a day and a half of games, food, fires, waiting for Santa, opening presents, and laughing.

It really will be the being together that will be the best part. But this year, I’m welcoming it all. Imperfect photographs, too many presents, staying up late to wrap, opening gifts too late to eat a decent breakfast so everyone growing a little cranky, having to leave too early because Danny has to go to work early on Monday morning.

We’re damned lucky to be here. That is enough.

We’ll be taking a little break from blogging to be with our families and just live for a week or two. Danny, Lucy, and I wish you all wonderful holidays, whatever you celebrate. Have a great new year. See you in 2012. 

GLUTEN-FREE CHOCOLATE-GINGER SHORTBREAD COOKIES

This one is pretty darned easy. If you want, you could make the dough Christmas Eve morning and bake them by the evening. You’ll see that I’ve given you the AP flour (use whatever blend works for you), as well as white rice flour and cornstarch. Rice flour is traditional to Scottish shortbread. Cornstarch makes these cookies a little more crisp than they would be without it. 

Enjoy. These really are wonderful cookies. 

170 grams (1 1/2 sticks) cold unsalted butter, cut into 1-inch cubes
1 cup fine sugar
1 teaspoon kosher salt
2 egg yolks
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
1/2 vanilla bean, split down the middle and scraped out
1/4 teaspoon orange flower water
140 grams AP flour (we used sorghum, sweet rice, and potato starch)
70 grams white rice flour
70 grams cornstarch
1 teaspoon psyllium husk

Put the butter cubes into the bowl of a stand mixer. Run the mixer until the butter is creamy. Add the sugar and salt. Cream them together until they are light and fluffy, about 2 minutes. Add the egg yolks, one at a time, mixing until each one is incorporated. Add the vanilla extract, the vanilla scrapings, and the orange flower water. Mix. Scrape down the sides of the bowl.

Whisk together the gluten-free flours and the psyllium. Slowly, add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients until the flour is fully incorporated. Give it a minute or two — the dough will look too dry at first. As you let the mixer run, however, the dough will come together.

Remove the dough from the bowl. Divide the dough into 4 equal parts. From each part into a log about 10 inches long. Wrap the logs of dough in wax or plastic paper. Refrigerate for at least 4 hours, or overnight, ideally.

CHOCOLATE-GINGER TOPPING

1/4 cup granulated sugar
1/4 cup unsweetened cocoa
1 tablespoon peeled and grated fresh ginger
1/4 cup minced candied ginger
3/4 cup bittersweet chocolate shaved or chopped into tiny bits

Preheat the oven to 325°F. On a large plate, combine the sugar, cocoa, gingers,
and chocolate and mix. Set aside.

Cut a dough log into about twenty disks. Firmly press each disk into the cocoa
mixture. If it’s hard to make the sugars, sprinkle or press them on top of each disk.

Place disks cocoa side up on a parchment-lined cookie sheet.

Bake the cookies until they are starting to be firm to the touch and golden brown, about 15 to 20 minutes. Remove the cookies to a cooling rack and allow them to cool.

Makes about 40 cookies.

The candied grapefruit peel have taken days to make. Don’t get me wrong — they’re lovely. But between the blanching, the simmering, the drying, and rolling in sugar, it has been a couple of days since I first peeled those grapefruit. And today’s the day I dip them all in chocolate.

There’s a plate of toffee on the shelf, ready to be packed. And grapefruit simple syrup in the refrigerator, waiting to be poured into little jars. The fudge shouldn’t take too long. Neither should the pumpkin seed brittle, the vanilla sugar, the citrus-rosemary salt, or the peppermint snowflakes. But I’ve never made caramels before, and for some reason I decided to make ginger-infused cream before I even attempted the recipe.

And last night I burned the hell out of an entire batch of homemade granola. (By the way, it turns out that molasses burns much faster than maple syrup.) I have to make another batch of that  today.

I haven’t even started on the cookies.

This is the first year since I met Danny that I am actually making edible gifts for Christmas. Every year before this has been a whirlwind. I promised myself the chance to bake and stir butter and sugar into something different, but it hasn’t happened. Forget the newborn year. Impossible. But this year, Lu has been helping me. And we’ve been having a grand time.

Still, after I made this cardamom fruit bread yesterday, which took ten minutes to prepare, I kind of wish I had made one of these for everyone instead.

This moist bread (Lu kept calling it a “cakebread” and that seems a little accurate) comes from a recipe by Red Star Yeast. As you my remember, Red Star Yeast is one of the sponsors of this website. We decided to work with them because they make great yeast, which we use all the time. But even more than that, they’re great supporters of those of us who have to be gluten-free. Danny and I particularly like that there are gluten-free baked goods recipes on their site because these are bakers. With test kitchens. They know what they’re doing.

If this cardamom fruit bread is any indication, I might be making a lot of their recipes in the new year.

In the meantime, if you’ll excuse me, I have gruyere crackers to start.

Since it’s the holidays, Red Star Yeast is giving away some goodies to one lucky reader here. If you would like to win a bread pan, a pizza cutter, a rolling pin, and some yeast? Please leave a comment here. The winner will be chosen at random on next Wednesday, December 28th and announced here. 

P.S. Stephanie of Dollop of Cream, you are the winner of the Red Star Yeast package! If you email me at glutenfreegirl@gmail.com, I will put you in contact with them!

CARDAMOM FRUIT BREAD, adapted from Red Star Yeast

If you have a kitchen scale, this recipe will be ridiculously easy to make. (If you don’t have a scale, please ask Santa for one this year. I don’t convert to cups because I want you to have a successful baking experience.) It’s this: combine wet ingredients, combine dry ingredients, put into a pan, bake. So simple. 

I like this combination of cardamom and candied fruits, but you could play with other flavors too. Many of you have asked about family holiday favorites and how to convert them. If any of them are like this — slightly sweet bread, baked into a shape — this is your recipe. Make it yours. 

We used a combination of sorghum flour, sweet rice flour, and potato starch to make this bread, in equal parts. That’s my favorite AP mix right now. Three flours! I’m refining the proportions for our cookbook, and we might change flours, but this combo is working for everything. However, you’ll notice that I gave you the grams of flours necessary, in case you have another combination of flours you like better. 

Finally, I wanted to make this into a ring. Did I have a pan for it? Of course not! So I greased a 9-inch cake pan, greased a small bowl, and put the bowl in the cake pan. I held the bowl when I poured in the batter and voila! A ring pan. This time of year, we have to do what we can to make it work. 

260 grams warm water
3 large eggs, at room temperature
4 tablespoons oil (I used walnut oil here)
1 teaspoon apple cider vinegar
400 grams gluten-free flours (we used equal parts sorghum, sweet rice, and potato starch)
2 1/2 teaspoons psyllium husk
90 grams buttermilk powder
1 1/2 teaspoons kosher salt
3 tablespoons sugar
2 teaspoons cardamom
2 1/4 teaspoons active dry yeast
220 grams dried candied fruit, plus another 30 grams

Preparing to bake. Preheat the oven to 375°. Grease a bundt pan or loaf pan with a neutral-tasting vegetable oil. (Or, if you want to do what we did, grease the small bowl as well as the cake pan.)

Combining the wet ingredients. Combine the water, eggs, oil, and vinegar in the bowl of a stand mixer. Let it run on low while you put together the rest of the ingredients.

Combining the dry ingredients. In a large bowl, combine the flours, psyllium, milk powder, salt, sugar, cardamom, and yeast. Whisk them together well. (If you truly want to combine them well, whirl them around in a food processor.)

Finishing the batter. With the stand mixer still running, slowly add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients. Let the mixer run on medium speed for a good long while, at least 8 minutes. (This is a good chance to put away all your ingredients and wipe down the counters.) Add the dried fruit and mix for 1 minute more. The batter will be the consistency of thick pancake batter. Never fear — you’re on the right track. Do NOT add more flour.

Letting the dough rise. Pour the batter into a greased bowl and let it rise for for 1 hour.

Baking the bread. Pour the risen batter into the prepared pan. If you wish, scatter the remaining candied fruit on top of the batter. Bake until the top of the bread is firm and the edges are pulling away from the sides of the pan, about 45 to 60 minutes.

Let the pan stand on the counter for 10 minutes before you turn it onto a cooling rack. Allow the bread to cool to barely warm to the touch before you attempt to eat it.

Frosting this bread would be a lovely idea. Here I brushed a bit of melted butter with Chinese five-spice powder onto the top of the bread and dusted it with powdered sugar.

Feeds 12.

I have a nightstand problem.

Sadly, the nightstand by my side of the bed is rarely as neat as this stack of books is. I like to splay open my books to save my place (even though my eyes always remember the exact page and paragraph where I stopped reading the last time). And I seem physically incapable of reading one book at a time. I hear that other people do this — pick out a book, read it all the way through, put it back on the shelf with a contented sigh, then find another book to read. Really? Do you do this? I always have at least five books going at once. Always.

Time to read? Not much. With a kid, this website, a cookbook-in-the-making, and a thousand emails to answer, I rarely gave myself the time to sprawl out on the couch and drink in words. But this past year, I gave myself a gift. I made myself time to read. Sure, I’ve read every night of my life before I go to sleep. Even in earlier days, if I crawled into bed at 4 am, bleary-eyed, I still turned on the lamp next to the bed and read a paragraph before I passed out. So I have 15 minutes or so of reading before my eyes grow too heavy to focus on the page. But I need more than that. This past year I realized that unless I made the time, I would miss reading the rest of my life. There’s always another reason to do another kind of work. I’m a writer. I need to read. So now, it’s at least half an hour of reading a day, quiet time, rapidly running across sentences and stopping sometimes to hear them again.

With more reading time, and more books piled up sideways on the nightstand, I came up with a tall stack of non-fiction books I’d love to share with you.

It is a few days until that holiday, after all. If you’re looking for books for presents, I think you might like some of these.

Who In This Room: the Realities of Cancer, Fish, and Demolition by Katherine Malmo

Before I tell you about Katherine’s incredible book, may I go on a small rant about subtitles? When did publishing begin to think that a snappy title on a book needed a 27-word  subtitle that explains the entire book? Most of them are about loss or loving or learning or gaining. What would literature be like if the publishers had insisted on subtitles. The Grapes of Wrath: In Which the Joads Travel Across the Country, Lose a Few Family Members to Death or Prison, and Learn to Find Their Gumption Again. Or, Hamlet: The Young Dane Who Thought Too Much and the People Who Goaded Him Into Thinking More. Ulysses: We’re Not Sure What It’s About But It’s Great Literature. It’s like every book has to have one of those dreadful movie previews that tell the entire movie in three minutes, leaving no need to see the thing in its entirety.

The fact that Katherine Malmo’s subtitle (The Realities of Cancer, Fish, and Demolition) is the most absurd and precise at the same time tells you a bit why I loved this book so much. Katherine was diagnosed with inflammatory breast cancer at the age of 31. Far too young. Far too inexplicable. As soon as she finished chemotherapy, she began writing about her experience. Too close to it to write about it fully, she began writing it with the thin veil of fiction, calling the character Kate. As she healed —partly from the writing, I’m sure — she grew more bare and clearly writing her own story. Rather than going back and making it one voice, this book is a series of essays about surviving this cancer. The depth of this slim volume is incredible.

It’s pretty easy now for breast cancer stories to be swathed in pink, to be about survival and triumph, to have an easily identifiable arc. Katherine’s book is like flint, like hard rock on frozen water. There’s no sentimentality here. But there’s no self-pity and wallowing in the details either. It’s even funny in some parts. It’s clear and strong and utterly horrifying. It’s art, not a memoir.

“This tumor is not a virus, not something you caught; these cancer cells are not foreign intruders. This is your own creation — a cluster of cells that developed abnormally, multiplying beyond your control. Perhaps your immune system was overtaxed. When treatment is over, you want every bit of energy to go toward fighting stray cancer cells, not dealing with cancer that may or may not be taking hold in your other breast.

On your thirty-second birthday, over a cup of onion confit at your favorite restaurant, you say to your husband, ‘I think the right breast has to go.’ Then, ‘How’d you end up with a bald, breastless wife at the age of thirty-two?’

He says, ‘Don’t worry, Babe, I’ve always been more of an ass man myself.’”

If you know someone who has breast cancer, survived breast cancer, or loves someone with breast cancer, buy this book.

Season to Taste: How I Lost My Sense of Taste and Found My Way by Molly Birnbaum

When I was a kid, my father loved to ask imponderable questions of us to start a conversation. Perhaps his favorite, and my most terrifying was this: if you had to lose any of your senses, which one would it be? My stomach clutched at itself, thinking of losing my sight. The sun, Mike Kelly’s profile, lights on the Christmas tree? I couldn’t live without them. I lived for music, and I still do. No more Beatles? Or Stevie Wonder? Or John Denver? Touch. No, I want that too. I wanted to brush my fingers against the leaves of the eucalyptus tree, plunge them into cool chlorinated water, and shiver against the cold of an air-conditioned room after sitting in the hot sun all afternoon. I wanted touch too.

But finally, I always came up with the same answer. Smell. That’s the one I could not live without. Not only because smells are so intently evocative, so primal and beyond words for the way they harken back memories. But also because when you lose your sense of smell, you lose your taste. So I offered up sight (Stevie Wonder is blind, after all), so that I wouldn’t have to lose my smell.

Molly Birnbaum lost her sense of smell — and much of her taste — after a terrible car accident that nearly left her dead. Grateful to be alive? Sure. I guess. But she had been training to be a chef, finding her path in her early 20s, just about to go off to the CIA. Who was she now without this deep-seated part of herself?

“For me, the slow drip of the summer turning into fall had always held the strongest allure of all the New England seasons. Autumn never failed to feel new, reminiscent of crisp notebooks and freshly sharpened pencils. Tart apples, hot cider, and the smell of pumpkin seeds roasting in the kitchen made me feel new. I had been apple picking every year in the orchards near my childhood home, breathing in the scent of wet earth and fermented apples left to fall. Halloween had smelled of chocolate and peanut butter, the staccato burst of fruit lurking under the caramel-coated globe. Autumn was when my family began to build fires in the fireplace, the sweet smell of smoke and burning wood inviting me in for warmth.

But without smell, the world around me seemed suddenly strange and stagnant. It was as if I was watching myself in a movie, present but not wholly interested but not engaged.”

I’m not giving anything away if I tell you that Molly shook herself from that torpor eventually. She could have written a book otherwise. Part of her recovery is investigation: how does smell work, why do people lose it, what strides have been taken in this underfunded study. She interviews and researches and shares that knowledge with us. I feel like I learned more about the olfactory sense than I had ever known by reading this memoir-investigative piece.

But mostly, after finishing Season to Taste, I went around sniffing at the air every few feet I walked. I wanted to breathe it all in, and out, to appreciate again what I had forgotten before. That being here is enough. Sometimes it takes a major, life-altering accident to realize. Or reading the book about the recovery from that accident.

Growing a Farmer: How I Learned to Live Off the Land by Kurt Timmermeister

There has been a lot of idolization of farmers lately. Have you noticed that? I adore farmers. And I’m a bit guilty of that gauzy-lens, fuzzy-focus way of looking at what they do as well. Now that I have read Growing a Farmer (and now that I know Kurt personally), I’ve stopped talking about return to the land or buying local. I’m just grateful when my farmer hands me a bunch of kale.

Kurt Timmermeister was a restaurant owner in Seattle for years. He owned a sort of cozy French-style placed called Café Septieme in Capitol Hill. (My friend Gabe and I used to end up there late in the evening, often, sharing some kind of dark chocolate cake and glasses of milk, back when I thought I could eat gluten.) It was hip, moodily dark, and constantly packed. How did Kurt go from there to milking cows just after dawn, by himself, on a small farm on Vashon Island?

That’s what Growing a Farmer is about.

“Kurtwood Farms first growing season ended on a sour note: we failed to crack the challenge of the vegetable farm. Matt quickly quit to work on another farm on the island and I could hardly blame him; he hadn’t made very much money. Our harvest had been thinner than either of us had expected. I had argued against taking disfigured, insect-eaten leeks to market and for reserving the the best produce for subscription boxes, and as a result Matt made less money each week at the farmers’ market. I had my restaurant income to fall back on but vegetable sales were Matt’s sole livelihood….

My goals of making this farm sustainable, profitable, and enjoyable would be a process of selection and elimination: trying out sheep and goats, pigs and cows, bees and chickens, vegetables and fruits. I was excited; I wanted everything; and as much as possible, I would crack this nut.”

That’s Kurt, and the journey of this book, in a nutshell. He doesn’t try to hide how many mistakes he made along the way. His spare prose doesn’t draw attention to himself. It’s that mystery he’s trying to solve: how to take a weekend home into a sustainable farm. His language is unflinching, funny, and tremendously engaging. I could have read his stories of collecting honey from the bees for another 100 pages.

I should say that I know Kurt now. He’s a friend, someone I dig. We connect as writers, and we talk fast as we stand in the gorgeous kitchen building he built on the farm (right next to the loghouse where he lives, built in 1881, the oldest-standing building on this island), talking about the weird world of the internet and the people who fascinate us. I’ve been to dinner there. I bring him pie. And always, I eat his cheese eagerly.

I’d heard about him for year, about his Sunday suppers and his cows. Somehow, we never met, even though we had friends in common. Plus, we live 10 minutes from each other. But it wasn’t until I read his book — his smart, honestly eloquent book about running a farm and every thought that has to go into it — that I pushed through the shyness and insisted on meeting him. I’m so glad I did.

You can meet Kurt through this book too. I hope you do. If you truly want to know where your food comes from, this book is a good place to start.

Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit by Barry Estabrook

I will never eat another tomato grown in Florida after reading this book.

Barry Estabrook wrote a searing piece about the slave-labor situations for tomato pickers in one county in Florida when Gourmet magazine still existed.  I remember sitting on the couch, reading as fast as I could, one leg tucked under another, not moving. I came up blinking, shaking my head. Here? That happens here?

That piece drew such attention that it changed some of the situation there. However, there’s still plenty of work to do.

When did we, as a culture, decide that we need little diced tomatoes on our salads all year long? Especially when they’re pale and tasteless. Do we just need dots of red on our salads, slices of mealiness on our sandwiches, little smears of pale pink on our pizzas? Have you ever thought about what this need for tomatoes in every month of the  year has done to the way we raise tomatoes in this country?

“I was mindlessly driving along the flat, straight pavement of I-75, when I came up behind one of those gravel trucks that seem to be everywhere in southwest Florida’s rush to convert pine woods and cypress stands into gated communities and shopping malls. But as I drew closer, I saw that the tractor trailer was top heavy with what seemed to be Green Smith apples. When I pulled out to pass, three of them sailed off the truck, narrowly missing my windshield. Chastened, I eased back into my lane and let the truck get several car lengths ahead. Every time it hit the slightest bump, more of those orbs would tumble off. At the first stoplight, I got a closer look. The shoulder of the road was littered with green tomatoes so plasticine and so identical they look like they could have been stamped out by a machine. Most looked smooth and unblemished. A few had cracks in their skins. Not one was smashed. A ten-foot drop followed by a sixty-mile-per-hour impact with pavement is no big deal to a modern, agribusiness tomato.”

After reading Tomatoland, I started walking my talk more. I won’t eat any fresh tomatoes anymore, not until it’s summer and they’re actually in season.

Girl Hunter: Revolutionizing the Way We Eat, One Hunt at a Time by Georgia Pellegrini

I bet you’ve never read another food memoir that has recipes for coot legs in sherry, quail kebabs, or braised javelina haunch. Then again, you’ve never read another book like Girl Hunter.

Georgia Pellegrini is one heck of a good writer. After reading her first book, Food Heroes, I knew I’d read anything she wrote. However, I did not expect the next book to be about hunting for her own meat. Georgia went from formal culinary training to cooking at some of the better restaurants in the country, to standing in a field in the early morning in Arkansas, about to shoot an animal. Her stories and prose are just that unexpected. This book keeps you thinking without being ponderous.

Twain’s Feast: Searching for America’s Lost Foods in the Footsteps of Samuel Clemens

This book is equal parts history, research, and personal narrative. The author, Andrew Beahrs, read a menu Mark Twain concocted when he was in Europe, desperately nostalgic for American regional cooking. Black bass from the Mississippi. Lake trout, from Tahoe. Hot biscuits, Southern style. Beahrs traces the footsteps of Twain by going to those places, revealing something about one of America’s greatest writers. But it’s really the food that’s the star here, as well as where that food grows.

“The cold, upswelled water that makes the fog full of detritus, decomposed fish, rotted plankton, and whatever else has drifted to the ocean bottom — all now broken down into particles fine enough to billow back to the surface on a rising current. When these nutrients combine with sunlight, the ocean explodes with plankton; if you scuba dive in the upper reaches of an upwelling zone, you can barely see your hands through the green, almost greasy water. And plankton is everything — plankton is it. Upwelled nutrients, and the plankton they support, are the foundation of all California marine life, from fish to whales to the Farallon islands murres whose nests were once so busily robbed.”

Although we do hear about Beahrs and his adventures in the book, it’s clear that it’s the regional sense of the places he visits, and how Twain led him here, which interests him most of all.

And quickly — because this is growing epic length — let me tell you about the last few a little more quickly.

97 Orchard: An Edible HIstory of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement by Jane Ziegelman is fascinating history told through food. Life on the Lower East Side in the early twentieth century was a crazy melting post of immigrants. It’s easy to study that culture through politics or party affiliations, but Ziegelman shows an incredible story of the lives of these people through the dishes they brought from the countries they left to come here.

Blood, Bones, and Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef by Gabrielle Hamilton is possibly one of my favorite memoirs of all time, mostly because it is so utterly imperfect. Hamilton, who owns Prune (one of our favorite restaurants in New York) is unflinching. She doesn’t give herself a Hollywood shine, that’s for sure. She’s often angry, stubborn, hungry grumpy, and almost inexplicable to the reader. But damn that woman can write. I loved any passages where she wrote about her life as a chef — I’m pretty sure I read all of them to Danny while we lay in bed — and how she felt about food. But her failed relationships are brutal on the page. And you can’t look away. The book didn’t end neatly. I won’t say more, but I know that many were disappointed in the ending. To me, it was the perfect imperfect, left-hanging-open that was the only way to end this extraordinary book.

The Kitchen Counter Cooking School: How a Few Simple Lessons Transformed Nine Culinary Novices into Fearless Home Cooks by Kathleen Flinn (the name changed after I received that advance copy up there, which was called Changing Courses) is part memoir, part cooking class, and all earnest. Kat wants to take the skills she learned at Le Cordon Bleu and put them into the homes of ordinary people. What she teaches them, mostly, is confidence in the kitchen. And that’s all we need. It’s didactic — don’t look for lyricism — but that’s the point. Kat wants to teach the world to cook.

Fed Up with Lunch: How One Anonymous Teacher Revealed the Truth About School Lunches — and How We Can Change Them! by Sarah Wu is a great book for anyone who is waking up to how atrocious school lunches can be. Sarah Wu, also known as Mrs. Q on her blog, Fed Up With Lunch, ate school lunch with her students every day for a year. Need I even say how gross most of the food was? When it was edible, she was pleasantly surprised. The book is lovely, even if a little slight. If you’re well versed in the politics of school lunch, this book is great to remember what it’s like to be a beginner again. And if you’re wondering what your kids are eating at school, and starting to question it, you need to read this book.

So, those were the best for me this year. But, I still have that nightstand problem. I still need more books splayed open upon it. So I’d love to hear. What were your favorites this year?

p.s. I thought about doing a cookbook roundup, but everyone is doing a cookbook roundup right now. We’ve been telling you our favorite cookbooks all year. In a few days, some of my favorite fiction books of the year, along with a recipe for ginger cookies.

As I type this, Danny has three of these treats in his hands. He’s back from work, after being on his feet for over 12 hours, and we ate a big dinner of red beans and rice. Very good, he said. Very good. Still, I think he was being polite. Really, he just ate dinner so he could get to these.

“They’re like rice krispie treats with a zing, a taste of milk chocolate and white chocolate. Can I have another one?”

(Danny’s my taster for everything right now, since I still can’t chew. Nearly two weeks ago I had my wisdom teeth out — at 45! — and unfortunately, there was some nerve damage. I can’t feel much of my chin or lower lip. I’m in pretty constant pain. The surgeon thinks it should reverse itself, slowly. I can feel that, luckily. Two more months and I should feel my chin without that burning ice sensation, when I’m lucky. The hardest part has been the no-chewing rule. Since the surgery is still healing, and I can’t feel my teeth — do you know how weird it is for your teeth to be numb? — the surgeon doesn’t want me eating anything I have to chew for a total of three weeks. That means the first time I can have anything besides soups, smoothies, and peanut butter off a spoon? Christmas Day.)

I’m going to hide most of them from him tonight, however, since I made a batch of these for Lu’s preschool’s holiday party. There will be nearly 15 darling children, their parents, food, and a lot of dancing. These treats should go over well.

(Okay, I took one chew of them. I can’t go on until I tell you that truth. These looked so good that I could not resist. I nibbled at one, like a rabbit, with my two front teeth. And then I let it melt on my tongue until I could swallow it. And oh, it was so good.)

Honestly, I can already tell these are going into the annual rotation. Thanks to the good folks at Food52 and their wonderful new holiday iPad app.

Do you own an iPad? We bought one last year. At first, I felt a little guilty about it. Did I need one more computer? Now, however, I am so firmly in love with it that I cannot imagine life without it.

My iPad is always in the kitchen. I love that I can bring it in, place it in my cookbook holder, and look at a recipe easily. This is much easier than when I found a recipe online, scrawled it on the back of an envelope, and cooked while the spilled milk on the counter slowly seeped through the letters. Once I have the recipe cooking away, I use the iPad to listen to RadioLab or Fresh Air, or check my email while I listen to music. It’s astonishing to me to have everything in that one place. And it feels like it belongs in the kitchen.

Danny and I both hope that we can write cookbooks for the rest of our lives. But will each of those cookbooks, or gathering of recipes, be in hardbound form? I don’t know. The state of publishing is in an interesting place. I love the idea of doing smaller gatherings of recipes, for the holidays, or just about breads, or a cookie compendium. iPad apps feel like the future for those ideas.

This is why I was so eager to check out the Food52 app. Amanda Hesser and Merrill Stubbs are so damned smart. They’re not only fascinated by food, but they really know it. With their experience, they could have easily started a food site based solely on their knowledge. However, what I love about Food52 is that they reached out to good home cooks around the internet and asked for their ideas. At first the website was an interesting idea: hold weekly contests like “Give us your favorite pear recipe” or “Summer soup,” choose the best ones, and then make a cookbook out of it.

Well, The Food52 Cookbook:140 Winning Recipes from Exceptional Home Cooks is out now. I highly recommend it, especially if you love food, feel confident in the kitchen, and aren’t intimidated by great ingredients. Note that the book was created by home cooks, with the key word being “exceptional.” Open the cookbook and you’ll probably find 20 new recipes to try within a few moments. I know I did.

However, as much as I like the cookbook, it’s the new holiday iPad app that really has my attention. You see, with an iPad app, you can do so many things besides having a recipe inert on the page. Within a recipe, there might be a directive to “roast the hazelnuts.” Click on the highlighted passage and you’re taken to a little video of Merrill demonstrating how to roast the hazelnuts. Another recipe might call for you to melt chocolate in a double boiler. You don’t have one. Click on the line and you’re taken to an online store where you can order one. If you’re not sure what fine sea salt is, click on it in the ingredients list and see a picture immediately.

Cookbooks in book form are wonderful. We have hundreds and more arrive every week. But having it all in one place like this, interactive and all visual? It’s pretty incredible.

This app not only contains recipes for the holidays like Le Bernadin’s Crispy-Skinned Fish, Kale with Pancetta, Cream, and Toasted Rosemary Walnuts, and Tipsy Maple Corn, but it also has a photographic guide to the most basic cooking techniques, baking 101, and prep for drinks. There’s also a holiday tip sheet for how to survive these crazy weeks. And, if I were more adventurous and had more time this year, I’d make the gingerbread house according to the specifications they provide.

You want to know what else is cool? There’s a special recipe category: condiments, gifts, vegetarian, individual holidays. And gluten-free. There’s an entire gluten-free options category and it’s full.

That’s where I found the original version of these treats. This afternoon, I made them.

I’m going to stop writing now, however, and join Danny on the couch. When I posted the photo of these on Instagram this afternoon, some of you were shouting at me for the recipe. I’m going to stop talking so you can start making these now.

P.S. Amanda and Merrill have been kind enough to give away one copy of the iPad app. Naomi Devlin, you are the winner! Please contact me at glutenfreegirl@gmail.com. 

CHOCOLATE CANDY CANE SNOWFLAKES, adapted from the Food52 iPad app

 The original of these called for white chocolate, rice krispies cereal, and peanuts. Well, our store was out of the healthy brown rice cereal I planned for. Heck with that — let’s use chocolate crisp rice cereal instead! We’re not big peanuts fans, but we sure love sliced almonds. And since Lu is crazy about Christmas this year, she has been talking nonstop about candy canes. Crush those up and go. 

When it comes to melting chocolate, you have a few options. (Here’s where I wish you could click on each of these and see us demonstrating them in a video!) 1. Use your double boiler to melt the white chocolate. 2. Use your microwave. Set it for 30 seconds, stir the chocolate, and keep going until it’s nearly melted. Stir. 3. Do as I do. Put one pan on top of a pot of boiling water. As the steam rises, it heats the bowl on top. Stir the melting chocolate with a rubber spatula until it’s ready to go. 

That’s the most time-consuming part of this recipe. The rest? Stirring and waiting until they are hardened in the refrigerator. 

Chew one for me, will you? 

2 1/2 cups chocolate rice crisp cereal (we’re big fans of Nature’s Path cereal around here)
6 candy canes, crushed into small pieces
1 cup sliced almonds
22 ounces white chocolate chips  (or a block, if you chop)

Combine the chocolate cereal, crushed candy canes, and almonds into a large bowl. Toss around the ingredients until they are well combined.

Melt the white chocolate until it is entirely smooth, using one of the methods described above.

Pour the melted white chocolate into a large bowl. Pour the chocolate-candy cane-almond mixture into the melted chocolate. Using a rubber spatula, and moving quickly, combine all the ingredients together until everything is coated well.

Drop rounded spoonfuls of the mixture in little mounds onto a parchment-paper covered baking sheet. (Don’t worry about being too careful about how they look. The more splattered, the more real, I think.) You can put a lot of these spoonfuls onto the baking sheet because you’re not baking them. You don’t need to leave room for spreading. Put the baking sheet in the refrigerator (you’ll probably have another one filled too) to allow the treats to harden, about 30 minutes. Store the snowflakes in the refrigerator in a covered container.

Makes about 40 snowflakes.

The spread of food on the table amazed me.

There we were, in Cordova, Alaska — a tiny fishing town of barely 2500 people — in someone’s home, about to eat dinner. Any other marketing association would have taken us out to a fabulous restaurant for our first night in town. Except, there aren’t any fabulous restaurants in Cordova. There are plenty of warm homes, filled with people gathered over food, the windows steamed up from all the talking, and nowhere else to go. Beth opened her home to us, invited a bunch of fishermen and spouses, and we four food bloggers (plus Danny and Lucy) were treated to a feast.

On the table? Salmon. Plenty of it. We were, after all, in Copper River salmon country. The rich dark red flesh showed up smoked, poached, roasted, and made into jerky. There were other dishes too — including slow-stirred polenta for me and a gluten-free apple tart for dessert — but what gleamed on that bright tablecloth most clearly was the salmon.

Salmon is at the heart of everything in Cordova.

Even though we landed in Cordova only a few days into September, we were greeted by gale-force winds and dark skies. That’s the thing about Alaska: nature prevails. After we landed at the tiniest airport I have ever seen, we stepped outside to see sky. Mountains. Clouds. Green trees. A road that began at the edge of town and stopped 50 miles later. And mostly, sky.

This is a town where people seem to know their shaken fists at the sky do not accomplish much of anything in the face of the unexpected. When we visited a salmon packing plant, Beth introduced us to the owner. She asked if he was worried about the days upon days of crazy weather. You see, you can only reach Cordova by air or ferry. That road doesn’t go anywhere but back and forth. So, with the wind howling at nearly 100 miles an hour, the rain pelting down on the face like staccato, the ferry couldn’t run and couldn’t take the cases of salmon to the boats coming down to the lower 48. Any other owner might have been pulling out his hair.

This guy? Laconic and calm, he said, “I can’t do anything about it, so I’m fine. I learned long ago to not spend any time worrying about the things over which I have no control. That’s most of life. The winds will stop.”

This, to me, seemed like Alaska.

Cordova is a fishing town. Grey skies or blue, those boats are loaded and ready to go as soon as the Alaska Department of Fish and Game says a run of salmon is open for the next 24 hours.

If you have never eaten Copper River salmon before, I hope you have the chance soon. For years, Danny and I have eaten wild salmon from Alaska almost exclusively. (We’re lucky enough to live near Seattle, where it’s easy to find Alaskan salmon.) I can’t eat farmed salmon. It doesn’t taste as good, or feel as firm, or have that deep red flesh of a salmon that has swum from its spawning ground to the ocean and back again.

Salmon has a season and we wait for Alaskan salmon season to begin every spring before we begin eating fresh salmon again.  (We eat smoked salmon, and flash-frozen fish, and the salmon we cured ourselves, through the winter.) It seems funny to me to demand salmon all year. Waiting for it, like asparagus or peas, makes spring seem exciting.

Cordova is one of the most astonishing communities we have ever visited. Everyone in town — and I do mean everyone — is involved in the Copper River salmon season. But what’s astonishing is that this isn’t the story of fishermen (and women — there are plenty of women fishermen in Cordova) out to earn as much money as they can. Fishermen in Cordova work with the scientists at the research center and the governmental officials who keep track of the spawning and the number of fish running, the ones who decide how many fish can be caught in any one run. There’s no great divide between the people making money and the regulators. They’re working together.

On our last night in Cordova, I asked one of the older fisherman, a thoughtful man who also helps to run the science center, “What are your hopes for Copper River salmon for the next ten years?”

He told me, “We’re not thinking about the next 10 years. We’re thinking about what we can all do for Copper River salmon for the next 200 years.”

It’s actually written into the Alaska constitution that “…fish be utilized, developed, and maintained on the sustained yield principle.” Fish. In the constitution.

Alaskan fishing is sustainable food in action. We like supporting the communities like this by buying their fish.

Cordova is possibly the most beautiful place I have ever been.

This is where your salmon comes from.

Even the artwork in Cordova is centered on the salmon.

That top painting was made by a woman named Pat McGuire. She lives in Cordova half the year (in Washington State the rest of the year), where she paints. She’s also a salmon fishermen. Her paintings are full of movement, luminous, and evocative of the experience of living in Cordova.

We were lucky. We learned how to do Gyotaku prints from Pat herself. Gyotaku is a centuries-old tradition of making a print with fish. It began when fishermen brought in their haul but could not brag about the size of the fish, due to Japanese custom. Painting the salmon with ink, then laying delicate paper over the fish, rubbing and pressing until the fish imprint is left — this is Gyotaku. The salmon had been prepped for us. Each of us painted our salmon the colors that called to us, and then we made aprons.

Lucy loves wearing hers, many months later.

The woman on the left is Beth Poole, the director for Copper River Salmon Marketing Association. That sounds like a big group, doesn’t it? Mostly, it’s Beth. She runs everything, with a part-time assistant, while being the mama to two small boys. (Lu loved them.) She’s the one who brought us to Cordova, who picked us up from the airport, invited us to her home, took us around the town, and drove us everywhere. Before our flight out, she took us out on that road to nowhere. Finally, the sun had emerged from the clouds after days of storms. Giddy at the warmth and the joyful time we had spent together, everyone in the car encouraged Beth to go faster, to splash through that giant puddle.

Too bad that flooded the engine.

Luckily, after a few flustered moments, Beth spotted a couple of moose hunters up the road. They came by with the right tools, and some drying agent they had in their car, and got us driving again.

I love Alaska.

Through our few days there, we ate salmon.

That’s salmon roe, which had just been harvested before us, then packed and sent home with us for lunch. Um, okay. We were invited to the home of one of the top fishermen in Cordova, a lovely woman who heads to Mexico every winter. (I want to say that the women who fish in Cordova call themselves fishermen. They will not abide fisherwomen.) She had broiled salmon with garlic for us, lay out warm smoked salmon with cheese and crackers, and that roe. Lu ate a plate of smoked salmon. We all talked, happy in the sunlight and the gathering.

She and Beth explained that Cordova is the potluck capital of the world. “In the winter, when there’s no fishing, and it’s dark most of the day, there’s nothing else to do but gather in each other’s homes and bring food.”

I don’t know that I could ever live in Cordova — that darkness in the winter would kill me — but Danny and I both are thrilled that we had this chance to visit. Now, every time we eat Copper River salmon, we’ll think of Beth, and her boys, the moose hunters who fixed our truck, the moments Lu and I had on the bank of the river watching bright-red fish return to the same spot where they had been born years before, the incredible views Danny had in the prop plane that flew over the Copper River Delta, the pelting rain, the laughter, and that gathering.

This salmon tastes even better than it did before.

We were graciously brought to Cordova, Alaska by the Copper River Salmon Marketing Association. The opinions expressed here are my own. 

SMOKED SALMON SPREAD

You don’t have to live in Alaska, or the Pacific Northwest, to buy Copper River salmon. There are some good sources for buying flash-frozen fillets. And Costco sells boxes of smoked Copper River salmon from the same plant we visited in Cordova. Now, for the holidays, this would be a wonderful gift. 

This spread, made with oil-packed Copper River smoked salmon, would be the quiet talk of any holiday party you still might be throwing. You can use any smoked salmon you can find, of course, but the Copper River salmon has such a rich taste that you might need to throw in more seasonings if you use another kind. (It also has more omega-3 fatty acids than any other kind of salmon.) Use thick smoked salmon, not the thin slices of lox. And you might want to play with the fresh horseradish. I like a little heat. So do our friends. But if you’re wary of that gulp of heat from horseradish, take this down to 1 tablespoon instead. 

Enjoy. 

8 ounces smoked salmon
4 ounces cream cheese
4 ounces sour cream
1 lemon, zested and juiced
2 tablespoons fresh horseradish
salt and pepper

Put the smoked salmon in a food processor and pulse until it is entirely broken up into small pieces, like crumbs. Add the rest of the ingredients and let the food processor run. Taste and add more seasoning if needed, understanding that the flavors will build over time. Run the food processor again. Let it run for a good 3 minutes so the salmon spread is smooth.

Refrigerate for at least three hours to allow the flavors to develop and the spread to thicken a bit.