“It shouldn’t work. It shouldn’t be magic. You shouldn’t weep happy and then sad and then happy again. But you do. And I do. And we all do.”  – Ray Bradbury, The Cat’s Pajamas

In less than two weeks we will buckle up, roll down the driveway, wait for a break in traffic, and turn left. We’ll drive north past salt marsh and pinelands, through perfect flat farmland, and then across the Delaware Memorial Bridge, before turning south again for another trip to Western North Carolina – this time, to stay.

It’s a decision we made months ago, but it’s been hard to write about it because it is really quite raw. It’s tangled up in all kinds of feelings about education and community and vocation and gratitude and plenty. Teasing that knot apart and then reworking it into a smooth rope of story has felt, quite frankly, beyond my abilities. There are also many details that remain unsettled. When I thought about sharing our news while so many of the bones were missing, I felt really vulnerable.

But it’s been hard not to write about it. As a child I imagined adulthood to be rife with clarity and wisdom, and I thought that meant grownups made decisions with ease and grace – but my actual experience has been that decisions wring more from me the older I get. You don’t get to try for the thing you’re aching for without losing something else that was hard-won. We are choosing a magical school community for our kids and losing our community here because of it, and I’m in the thick of that loss right now. Writing about it earlier might have helped.

I’m sad because I want my children to be from somewhere. I don’t know that I would have said the same thing fifteen years ago, when I was 25 and living in New York City and just beginning to imagine what parenthood might look like. I pictured it within the context of the life I was living then, a life that might have moved me to Mexico or Switzerland or Burkina Faso. It wasn’t crazy to imagine doing this with kids, because it was the real story many of my dear friends and coworkers were living. But as it turned out, it wasn’t my story. The person I wanted to build a life with was a farmer, and as a rule, farmers need to stay in one place. Plants need irrigating and weeding and bean beetle squashing. Chickens need water too, and they need to eat every day, and the time to figure out what’s eating six of them a night is right now, not when you get back from a work trip.  You have to pick and prep for four farmers markets a week, and a dozen CSA drops on two different days. You have to repair your irrigation pump, put new plastic on the greenhouse, call the tractor mechanic, pay your market fees, pay your payroll taxes, pay your crew, drain the hydrants when the nights fall below freezing. The goats are stuck in their fencing. Something is eating the dill. The third generation of tomatoes will get too leggy if you don’t transplant them in the next 48 hours. This list is not a burden, not a lamentation – if anything, it is a benediction. Say no to a life of motion, the list tenders, and you can say yes to feeding people, yes to learning over years what your soil and your climate can do, yes to falling into bed exhausted and proud, yes to being deliciously in charge of your days, yes to integrating your children wholly into those days.

It bears saying: I didn’t say yes right away. For a couple years I scuttled back to New York on visits as often as I could, straining to be both who I’d been and who I was becoming, seeing the decision as binary and hating that I had to choose. My years in New York had taught me a thousand things about community, about dignity, about belonging, about needing and being needed, but what did the tomatoes care about any of that? How did my take on extreme poverty help me learn to pick fast, to troubleshoot irrigation, to sell eggplant? I had to cram a lot of myself into a box and push it into the shadows, out of the way.

But time did its thing, and eventually that yes-list a couple paragraphs up, along with the birth of my first child, was enough to anchor me in my farm life. We bought twenty acres in Virginia and we thought we’d be there for decades, thought our kids would pick wild blackberries from the same brambles every summer, thought they’d learn our woods by heart, thought they’d keep their drawl. Life brought us north, though, to this narrow county between a vast expanse of bay and the Atlantic Ocean, and I thought so much, as I always do, about the opening sentences in Annie Dillard’s An American Childhood, when she writes that the topography of our childhood will inform our sense of home and self for the rest of our life:

When everything else has gone from my brain – the President’s name, the state capitals, the neighborhoods where I lived, and then my own name and what it was on earth I sought, and then at length the faces of my friends, and finally the faces of my family – when all this has dissolved, what will be left, I believe, is topology: the dreaming memory of land as it lay this way and that.

Those words throbbed in my chest for months after we arrived. Over and over I stood in the wind on the beach, hand on my swollen belly, toes kneading sand. I watched my son squeal and jump in the icy surf. I surveyed the wide, wide water, the canopy of sky, thinking: this is so beautiful, and so foreign.

But my son was still little and my daughter was still a couple months from her inaugural cry. It broke my heart to realize he wouldn’t remember our farm, but I came to understand, and relish, that the dunes and the mud flats and the wide creeks twining through the salt marsh would give to him what thick woods and rolling hills gave to me. He will know why the horseshoe crabs come, I thought. He will recognize milkweed and glossy ibis and whelk egg case. He will know how to walk at low tide without sinking in the mud. He will know how cold it has to get before the bay freezes. He will swim in tea-colored lakes among pines and white cedars. He will slap at greenheads, and cry as crabs pinch his toes, and hold luminescent comb jellies in his palm at dusk.

This landscape enveloped both my children for four and a half years – years so tender the details will surely fade.

But me? I’m 40, and this coastal plain that felt like a strange dreamscape in 2013 has become, unexpectedly but unequivocally, home. I came here on summer vacations as a child and teenager, and what I loved then was returning every few years to things I could count on, things that stayed the same: the crash of the surf, the flash of the lighthouse, the memorial plaques on the boardwalk benches, the shrieks of laughing gulls, the first lunch at the same sandwich shop every year. But now that I live here what I love is how it is never the same. The bay looks different to me every single time I’m there, depending on the tide and the light and the season. The laughing gulls, it turns out, are migratory summer birds, and they leave not so long after the tourists do. I wait for the ospreys and the oystercatchers and the diamondback terrapins and the horseshoe crabs and the monarchs to lay their eggs. When I drive the long stretch of highway on the west side of the county, the marsh spreads away from me in every direction and I feel cradled. I think: I could never love another landscape the way I love this one.

History tells me that’s false, tells me I keen so hard for home wherever I am that I get outside and pay attention and that this attention makes every place beloved. But its hard to see that forest of truth for the trees of my grief.

It’s not just this teeming wetland ecosystem we’re leaving, of course. Leaving Virginia was hard mostly because it meant letting go of the vision we had for our farm and family life there. Leaving the Hudson Valley was hard mostly because it meant letting go of a brief flash of possibility of selling our vegetables in the thriving markets of New York City. Leaving here is hard mostly because it means letting go of the most amazing community. There have been beautiful people in our life at every turn, don’t get me wrong. But until we came here, we didn’t have it all.

We have haunts, where the baristas and servers and deli managers and librarians know my kids by name and have inside jokes. We have sitters who love my kids like family. We have friends who squeeze around our table every Wednesday night, never complaining about the sink full of dishes or the missing toilet paper or the fact that we’re out of chairs and so they’re half-sitting on the play kitchen sink. Rare is the day when there’s not someone who can meet us at the beach or the playground or the library. When I have an emergency trip to the dentist I know who can take my kids. When I need to cry I know who will share a pot of coffee with me. We have all of this and I feel like we’ve only just begun and now we are walking away.

Last month my son spent a day visiting his new school. All of this change is big, and when I picked him up I could see that in his face right away, so we headed straight to an ice cream shop. And after that we drove just a little ways north, into a national forest. We pulled off to the side of the road and right there plunged a waterfall. We climbed down to the creek bank and then onto flat wet rocks, the spray an exploding rainbow in our hair and on our cheeks.

I was cautious in this new place. I worried: how slippery are these rocks? How deep is the water if we slip? Will he hit his head? But then two things happened, and my racing mind slowed almost to a freeze-frame. First, I saw that my son was sure-footed and happy. Second, I saw the falls: violent, mighty, wild. Anything but static. I thought of the beach, comforting in its sameness when I was a tourist, and for the very opposite reason now that it’s home.

I’m not home yet, I thought, but this wild water is going to be the thing that leads me there.

On the long list of watershed decisions in my life, that moment in the summer of 2015 when I hit “send” on the invitation to our first weekly potluck has got to be near the top. Yes, I lost my religion and found my people when I studied abroad twenty years ago. Yes, the ground beneath my feet took on a whole new kind of gravity when I said a resounding “I do!” underneath a sprawling ash tree on a clear May afternoon in front of two hundred of our favorite people. Yes, I was born again, more ferocious and exhausted and present than I had any clue was possible, when I pushed two babies out of my womb and into this terrible beautiful world.

Maybe clicking “send” didn’t boom with the same obvious thunder, but I maintain it was just as big.

I’ve thought for a long time about writing a meaty post about our potlucks: why we invite people into our messy home every week, what kind of community has emerged, even tiny details about forks or bedtimes or dishwashing. But one of the truest things about our Wednesday nights, I hope, is they are safe. You come with your salad in one hand and your weariness in another, and when you get here you put it all on the table. Sometimes you talk. Sometimes you reach for the bread quietly. Sometimes you can’t hear anything for the din of children careening from couch to coffee table. But you know these gatherings aren’t fodder for likes or traffic or ad dollars; you come as you are, to feed and to be fed.

And so I’m not sure I can in good conscience write a detailed potluck manifesto. What I can tell you is to make some soup.

When I first envisioned a standing weekly dinner, I thought I’d make soup and bread every week and we’d ask our guests to bring sides or desserts or drinks. Soup is easy, and comforting, and convivial: everything I wanted these meals to be. But for the first five or six months, we gathered on the beach at the end of our block, and we determined immediately that sandy soup is not delicious. So we switched to picnic fare, but as the weather turned and we moved indoors, out came the Dutch oven and the bone broth. To this day, the table looks different every week, but there is almost always a pot, or two, of soup.

This week I hopped out of the shower less than an hour before our friends were due with no idea what I’d make – par for the course, if I’m being honest! I dug through my soup recipes and remembered one we’d adapted from Simply in Season several years ago for our market customers and CSA members. We have onions and potatoes and kale, I thought, so let’s do this! Our original version didn’t call for any beans, but we had some chickpeas too, and that sounded even more like a meal.

The pictures in this post come from those same Virginia farm years. As we stand here at what is probably another of those watersheds, I find enormous comfort in remembering that our story as a family winds back through lots of years, across fecund fields and crowded crosswalks and many shared tables. We’re going to be fine.

Fall roots and greens. October 2009, Virginia. 

Hearty Potato Soup with Kale and Chickpeas

When I revisited this recipe this week, it seemed odd to divide the broth, but I think there’s something to it: some kind of textural alchemy happens when you partially purée the vegetables in only half the broth, and the soup gets way more interesting than you’d expect from such straightforward ingredients.

Use the broth you love best here; water works but a rich chicken bone broth or a deeply flavorful vegetable broth (I like Better Than Bouillon very much) is way better.

1 tablespoon butter or olive oil
1 large onion, chopped, or 1 leek, roots and toughest greens removed, thinly sliced
1-2 cloves garlic, minced
1 1/2-2 lbs potatoes, diced
6 cups chicken or vegetable broth, or water in a pinch, divided
1/2-3/4 lb kale, chopped
1 15-oz can chickepas, drained, or 1 1/2-2 cups cooked chickpeas
salt and pepper to taste
Parmesan (optional)

In a large pot, melt the butter or warm the olive oil over medium heat.  Add the onions and sauté until they begin to soften, and then add the garlic and sauté for another minute.  Add the potatoes and enough broth or water to cover by an inch or so – probably about half the broth.  Bring to a boil and then reduce to a simmer and cook until the potatoes are soft.

Using an immersion blender, carefully blend the soup until it thickens but some chunks of potato remain – or, ladle out about half the vegetables and set aside, purée the rest of the vegetables and the cooking liquid in a blender or food processor, and then return everything to the pot. Add the kale, the drained chickpeas, and the remaining broth. Return to a boil, reduce to a summer, and cook until the kale is soft.  Add salt and pepper to taste. Grate or shave some Parmesan on top and slurp it up!

Harvesting curly kale. September 2010, Virginia.

This afternoon I walked, alone. My usual course is straight back from the house, around the barn and away from the road, through the hedgerow of milkweed and phragmites and multiflora rose and goldenrod and sumac, and then either a hard right northwest to our neighbor’s pond and woods, or a short jog right before setting west again toward the salt marsh at the very back, a half mile from the house. But today I stayed close. I felt chipper, unburdened, crouching to examine praying mantis egg sacs and stepping carefully around a cracked pane of glass blown from a barn window by this wind that follows us from farm to farm.

And then I looked at the long watermelon beds, a few dozen desiccated fruits in slow decay, and was ambushed by a grief so acute and unexpected I almost doubled over.

…

Things are changing, and that’s something I need to write about. Here, I hope.

…

I walked. I stopped again at the fence between our yard and the sweet potato beds, my jaw tight. I looked down at a feather. And then, whoosh, whisper, whoosh. I couldn’t find a Carolina wren in the bare lilac bush, nor a squirrel in the dense underbrush where our chickens used to take cover from hawks. I looked up, and just in time: a large black bird, not ten feet up and passing directly over my head. Whoosh, whoosh, and then it coasted low through the yard before disappearing over the old pecan tree out front.

And like that: the grief eased.

I walked back to the barn again and then around it, searching the sky, wondering about the bird. Too small to be a black vulture, I thought, but was it too big to be a crow? A raven? I saw it again, soaring above the south tree line. Further back, more of the black birds screeched and dove at a black vulture perched high on a leafless poplar, finally driving it off.

…

It was a lonesome sort of winter scene, all blacks and greys and browns, plaintive caws, naked trees, last year’s vegetables gone and their beds asleep under a cover crop of wheat and red clover, my fingers stiff with cold. How comforting, then, to feel so solidly un-alone.

I keep the company of these birds, and of my questions about who they are and why they’re here now, and of the people who will help me to figure it all out. I am looking up, and looking it up, and writing it down. It seems a good way forward.

It’s been a big week. Count me among the devastated. But the list of things bringing me quiet solace right now feels a mile long: the perfume of the thorny olive blossoms; lingering woodsmoke in my hair and my clothes; these aching blue skies; cold nights under goose down; my first efforts at fermenting milk kefir; stolen minutes (sometimes seconds) with my book; a fridge cleanout; this trusty soup and a half dozen friends around my table; the smell of the woods as the leaf mulch thickens and begins to decay; my fierce toddler and my tender 7-year old and our Twister mat spread wide in front of the fireplace; our inherited barn cat, half feral in the year we’ve been here, now ready for ear scratches; pulling another bag of July blueberries from the freezer for pancakes; naps. Not my own, alas. But my hilarious, determined, curious, headstrong daughter…maaaaan, the girl is non-stop. (I say it like Leslie Odom Jr. so I don’t forget to laugh!)

There was an afternoon last week when we stopped at the bay, just for a minute, just to see it was still there, just to remember to breathe. I parked at the end of the road and kept both hands on the wheel. I remember the tide was quite high. Both kids begged to get out and play, and I want to be the mom who forgets her to-do list and says yes to that, and I think I am that mom really, but this was a hard day on a hard week and I was aching for an hour where no one needed anything. So instead we went home, and my daughter napped, and I pulled The Homemade Kitchen from the shelf, because what I needed was a promise that if we keep sitting down to eat and listening while we chew, then things will be okay. Alana is very good at that sort of reminder. I randomly opened to her words about the peace she finds alone in a quiet morning kitchen, and I thought, I want that. I read her master muffin recipe and thought, I want those! And then I remembered that I make a pretty mean muffin myself, a muffin that has seen me through some other hard times, so I made those instead. I found a sad pear in the crisper, pretty bruised from a day (or maybe two) in the snack bag and with a bite already taken out of it. Perfect. I grabbed some chocolate chips, I grabbed the nutmeg, I got to work.

It’s not enough, the down comforters and the woodsmoke and the muffins. But it’s how I’m getting through the week. And while I measure and stir, somewhere underneath, I am figuring out what to do next.

I spent almost a month in the Midwest and Pacific Northwest in late August and early September. It was a wild and wonderful trip, full of tasty food and even tastier conversations with people I have been wanting to hug in person for years and years, and Big Thoughts about the value of a less filtered life. Thoughts for another post!

When I was in Portland I discovered I had packed for late summer on the wrong coast. I had to buy two pairs of jeans and some shoes that were not sandals and I was thoroughly convinced it was time to dig up our hats and scarves and bake a lot of gingerbread. Then we flew home and sweated our way right through baggage claim and I thought, oh right; technically we’re south of the Mason-Dixon line and I guess (sigh) those woolens can hibernate a little longer yet.

But fall has found us at last, even here, and last Tuesday morning I sipped my second cup of coffee and flipped the calendar. November is here. On Saturday my son turned seven (!!). Tomorrow I am crowding into the voting booth with both kids. Later in the month one of my oldest friends will turn into our driveway and my kids will leap on her before she is even unbuckled because they adore this person who, after my beloved cousin, is the closest thing they have to an aunt on this coast. Together we will eat turkey and butternut something-or-the-other and cranberry sauce (this is the one; I’ve stopped searching now), and the next day we will have leftovers on good bread for lunch (either that or this turkey pho, which I haven’t made in a few years but which is really terrific) and we will absolutely crack open some porters and watch the new Gilmore Girls. A little over a month later she is moving all the way to Colorado. People seem to love it there and I wish the same ease and satisfaction in my friend’s fresh start, but I’d be lying to say I don’t also feel bereft. Colorado is much further away than her current home in the Hudson Valley.

But I’ll try not to think about it too much, not while she’s right in front of me to hug. I’m happier than I can say that she’s coming for Thanksgiving. I get to spend the holiday that puts gratitude front and fore with one of the people I’m most grateful to have found my way to in this life. I can certainly raise my glass to that.

I’m going to try doing it here too! It’s been seven months since I wrote here. There’s a lot I could say about why, but the truest and simplest answer is that I’ve been doing other things. I’ve been learning a whole lot of amazing things with my kids, and I’ve been reading a ton, and I’ve been curling up on the couch with my husband watching shows and movies featuring quite a lot of snow. What else? Crazy Eights, mornings by the fire pit, potlucks, the sometimes awesome/sometimes thankless/always necessary task of feeding my family. Walks along the bay. Making hummus and banana bread and meatballs with a group of awesome first and second graders. Chicken coop troubleshooting. A weekend trip to Annapolis. Hamilton!

It’s a tough season for writing, but I love this space, so I’m going to try a gratitude practice here on the blog this month: Monday Thanks. It’s possibly too ambitious, if we’re to judge according to earlier efforts at this sort of thing. And I’m a little nervous to write here instead of in a more immediate and arguably more intimate place like Instagram or Facebook. But when it comes down to it, the stakes are pretty low and the potential returns (I get to flex my writing muscles again, I get to connect with some of you again, and I get to be happier because that’s what happens when you think about what makes you happy) are significant. So here we go!

Imagine, if you will, an enormous industrial stovetop. Six back burners. Imagine every burner with a pot on it, every pot asimmer. The whole kitchen smells like waking to somebody already cooking breakfast, like Thanksgiving, like a happy childhood. Yeah, so those pots are the stories I want to tell here. Nothing’s ready to eat yet, of course. Shall we stretch this metaphor to the very edge of its usefulness? Can I say I guess these stories really do need a good long braise? Shall we turn around and look out the kitchen window while we wait?

Because y’all, here at our house near the salt marsh, it is spring. Spring! Spring is better than winter! It looks a lot like you might expect, especially if you also live in the Northeast. The daffodils opened up a few weeks ago, and then I saw the roadside maples with their blood-red buds, and then it was just BAM! BAM! BAM! Magnolias! Forsythia! Sandals!

And then there is all the stuff that feels so particular to living right here, surrounded by wetlands, supported by the summertime crowds, waiting for vegetables. Most of the ice cream shops have opened back up, for one, which I really should have said before all that bosh about back burners. The crab shacks and seafood markets are open again too. We’re still waiting for mini-golf and the bread stand, but the peepers are singing their lovesick chorus and my husband is turning all that winter cover crop back into the soil and so we know it can’t be long. My brain is racing happily: When are signups for swim lessons? Can my kids stay awake for the Friday night frog hikes in the trails around the lighthouse? Can we help tag horseshoe crabs this year? The pear tree behind the oldest barn, the one loaded with a welcoming committee of juicy fruit when we moved twenty minutes up the road last November, went from tiny green buds to full bloom in the span of just a couple days this week. We didn’t do much more than cram the pears into our mouths during our first walks here last fall, but maybe this year there will be jam or pies or something poached.

Here’s to my own gentle simmers and to spring’s wild rumpus!

1) DINNER | Melissa Clark’s Chicken Curry with Sweet Potatoes (via Luisa at The Wednesday Chef) I would love to tell you my farm kids eat everything, but HARDY HAR HAR, says the universe, DID YOU THINK YOU WERE IN CONTROL HERE? But friends, they eat this. I don’t really have an explanation. I’d like to say it’s because it is over-the-top, knock-your-socks-clean-off, shout-it-from-the-mountaintops good (WHICH IT IS), but so, for example, is this soup, and my oldest won’t touch that with a ten-foot spoon. I’m learning not to parse these things for too much meaning and instead to just say thank you.

2) BRUNCH | These apple and sweet potato cakes with poached (or fried) eggs and a sweet mustard sauce (via Tasty Kitchen) This morning my son ate eggs and toast and clementines with my husband before he (the latter) went to work, and my daughter ate leftover roast chicken and roughly her own weight in pistachios. She ate those while sitting right in the middle of the dining room table because there are mornings when I have no fight left in me. This was after she emptied her whole bookshelf but before she dumped two giant bins of Legos when I thought it might be okay to pee alone and before she dumped the box of Christmas ornaments I may or may not get put away by April. This is how it came to be nearly eleven o’clock and I only had two cups of coffee in me. This is a long way of saying I love my my fine fine father, who FaceTimed with my kids so I could feed myself these.

3) BREAKFAST/SECOND BREAKFAST/ELEVENSES/AFTERNOON TEA/DESSERT | Nancie McDermott’s Sweet Potato Pound Cake (via our old farm blog, which is looking a bit rusty and which I need to dismantle but can’t quite) Always exactly what I want to eat.

This is not the writing I wrote about, not exactly, but like I said, I’ve been cleaning up a lot of Legos. Also kissing a lot of stubbed toes, homeschooling, moving (again), and watching the sun set over the salt marsh. It’s been kind of a lot.

I’ll be back here when I can figure out how to be. In the meantime, we’ve all got to eat. Make some of this good food! And tell me too how you’re warming your own belly and soul this winter.

I want to be a writer.

I’m not talking about someone who sits back while her muse serves up exquisite turns of phrase on a silver platter. I don’t daydream about an advance that pays the bills. I’m not thinking about getting an MFA. I’m thinking about Madeleine L’Engle, who wrote night after night, after her children were asleep, throughout her “tired thirties.” I’m remembering when I would rise at 5 to get in an hour of words before anyone else was awake. And I’m still sitting with this episode of On Being. It made me cry about eight times (about par for the course), including when Maria Popova remarked:

“Those ideas, the best of them came to me at the gym or on my bike or in the shower. And I used to have these elaborate theories that maybe there was something about the movement of the body and the water that magically sparked a deeper consciousness. But I’ve really come to realize the kind of obvious thing which is that these are simply the most unburdened spaces in my life, the moments in which I have the greatest uninterrupted intimacy with my own mind, with my own experience. And there’s nothing magical, at least not in the mystical sense, about that. It’s just a kind of ordinary magic that’s available to each of us just by default if only we made that deliberate choice to make room for it and to invite it in.”

These early years of motherhood are startling in – nearly defined by – their paucity of uninterrupted intimacy with my own mind, but it’s there. It’s there when I’m nursing my daughter in the pre-dawn hush, when I’m driving to the grocery store, even in that fraction of a moment when I take my first sip of coffee. I used to say I did my best writing in those delicious (and pen-less) moments, but real writing is something I can share with someone else. Real writing is a decision to push through the distractions and exhaustions that reappear as soon as I put the coffee cup back down. Real writing is work.

When I do the work, life is really good. I get words to look back on, hindsight casting a gentle glow on a time I thought I was stumbling through the dark. I get to wade through the mush of my mom brain and figure out what I really think. I get to talk to you, to other writers and readers. And that’s when a remembered bowl of corn flakes and a downpour in the grocery store parking lot and the quiet wilderness of my little backyard turn blogging into something useful: an instrument of encounter.

But when I don’t do the work, all that fades, like so many July blossoms.

My haphazard phenology is as concrete a metaphor as I can come up with for why I want to write. Phenology is the study of plant and animal life cycles, especially as influenced by available sunlight, temperature, and precipitation. The most valuable phenology happens at regular intervals and focuses on a discrete physical area – the span of backyard you can see from the bottom step where you sip your coffee every morning, for example, or the same 10-meter stretch of shoreline.

But even my amateur and slipshod observations have worth. They help me understand where I have landed. They help me teach my children about death and patience and wonder, lessons that seemed so easy when we lived on farms and which seemed so hard at first when we didn’t anymore. And these tiny heralds all around us – poison ivy’s first leaves, tiny and carmine; the first whelk egg cases to wash up along the wrack line; February’s robins puffing their feathers and settling into a westward position on bare oak branches to absorb the last of the day’s thin sunlight; even the cocklebur I step on and curse in the dunes during the dog’s morning walk – they tether me, at least for a moment, in time and in place. These years are tricky. My children are one day asleep in the crook of my elbow, the next day climbing the bookshelves, and the next day teaching themselves to read. They need water and toast and a new shirt and kisses and I have not had any coffee yet. She wants to whisk the pancake batter and he wants to know which species of sharks give birth to live pups and I struggle to gain purchase. But I pry the bur from my heel and drop it in my pocket and look it up online when we get home. I think that perhaps the whelk egg cases are a little earlier this year. I am not startled now to unearth a clutch of horseshoe crab eggs when we dig moats for June’s high tides to fill. Patterns emerge from the welter. I am reminded that life – marine and my own – is unfolding with a sound beauty.

May I be resolved and stubborn enough to do more showing up, more noticing, more work.

A week ago Sunday I made myself a second cup of coffee and settled myself not into my spot at the end of the couch against the bay window, and not onto a warm patch of bayside sand while my children splashed, but into a patio chair on my friend’s terrace in the East Village. It was the last day of a sweet and chockablock week in the city, and after so much time climbing slides and eating bagels and chatting with strangers and boarding ferries and buses and subway cars, it was good to exhale. My son finished up his second bowl of corn flakes inside and called out to me his plans to make Minecraft weapons from an old egg carton. My daughter stacked and unstacked and restacked flower pots. I sipped my coffee and lifted my face to the hot May sun and took in the Sunday morning sounds of the East Village (church bells, bus brakes and engines, mourning doves, my son’s spoon clanking merrily against his cereal bowl). It’s easy to forget that the city ever slows down, but it does.

My friend’s terrace looks out over the inside of the block, a motley vista of fire escapes and ivy and air conditioners and unlikely trees. It’s such a comfort to me to look out over these bones and muscles of city living. It’s not a quiet place to live, of course, and daily life with small children anywhere is full of questions and bumps and tears and fart jokes and throwing, so much throwing. But sometimes there’s a moment when the exigencies have been deftly met or benignly ignored, when your children are immersed in their own work and you are not needed. I guess that’s going to keep happening, isn’t it?

Sunday though, I didn’t fret about how fast they’re growing. I looked at bricks I’d looked at a hundred times and wondered for the first time whose hands had laid them. I noticed a pigeon in a flower pot and wondered if she had a nest there. I saw an empty six-pack on a fire escape and smiled, thinking of that passage from Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn about the people who go to early mass:

Oh, what a wonderful day was Saturday in Brooklyn. Oh, how wonderful anywhere! People were paid on Saturday and it was a holiday without the rigidness of a Sunday. People had money to go out and buy things.They ate well for once, got drunk, had dates, made love and stayed up until all hours; singing, playing music, fighting and dancing because the morrow was their own free day. They could sleep late – until late mass anyhow.

On Sunday, most people crowded into the eleven o’clock mass. Well, some people, a few, went to early six o’clock mass. They were given credit for this but they deserved none for they were the ones who had stayed out so late that it was morning when they got home. So they went to this early mass, got it over with and went home and slept all day with a free conscience.

We’re home now. Horseshoe crab spawning season, one of the most magical and curious times of our year, is upon us. I wrote a post a couple weeks ago but never finished it and thus didn’t post it, in which I talked about how much I like easing past the first lusty weeks of spring, all frogsong and snowdrops and cracked open windows, and into spring proper. But in our week away another shift happened. The daffodils that were just past peak are now fully wizened on their stems. There’s a fine film of pollen on everything and we keep the windows open 24/7 except when it rains. And of course the farm goings-on are full tilt.

Here’s to spring’s wild rumpus! Here’s to my Mother’s Day breakfast in bed and a long solo morning, to our favorite beach bar opening back up, to muddy kids and hungry red knots and strawberries just around the corner. To picnic dinners at the bay and all the baby pigs and even to mosquitoes. To the familiar feeling of it all. To home!

(I may pop back in here and add some of our NYC photos, because I know I’ll be glad to look back on them. But for now: hello again!) 

(joining Karen and company)

It is, almost unbelievably to me, nearing ten years since I left New York City. When I lived there I worked as part of a small anti-poverty non-profit, accompanying families as they dealt with the compounding instabilities of housing crises, school frustrations, health issues, family separation, convoluted legal and criminal justice systems, and social isolation. These situations were simultaneously acute and chronic, in ways that left me sometimes angry, sometimes overwhelmed, sometimes all fired up – but never desperate. I didn’t feel desperate because families took me in. We sat at kitchen tables drinking coffee and eating pork chops and laughing at toddlers. We read books and flew kites and made s’mores and clung to one another on ice skates and ate pie. I didn’t feel desperate because we took those struggles and worked to craft something beautiful and constructive and necessary from them: poems, speeches, books, campaigns, relationships. I didn’t feel desperate because I didn’t have a right to wallow or to pity or to sensationalize; I had a responsibility to bear witness, and not only to what was hard but also to the incredible knowledge and tenacity and resourcefulness I saw. I didn’t feel desperate because I was part of a community that shared an extraordinary ethos rooted in relationship and respect, and a vision of a world where every person is known and treated as a whole human being.

There’s a ghost. Mine. She’s pretty quiet these days, not too sad. But she still walks the fields of our old farm in Virginia, and I think maybe she always will. Blackberry juice stains her lips and fingertips. She crouches low in the grey half-light of dawn, studying the Frontinella communis and Florinda coccinea webs spangled with dew. She stands, puts one hand on my son’s shoulder, points out the wild persimmons ripening against a cloudless October sky. She stops to scratch my goat Lulu under her jaw, and then she’s off again, skirting a vernal pool filled with tadpoles, kicking off her sandals, crossing the creek. I keep her company sometimes, late at night usually, too late. These hours are untrustworthy. Good for writing, terrible for making decisions. These are the hours when the deep disappointment and disillusionment in articles like these (about the challenges of making a living at farming) resonate. Eventually, though, I sleep, and in the light of day, that sorrow evaporates, is replaced with a steadier, more discerning take on our story and on farming in general. My rested self finds the articles too grim, the blame too pat. My rested self is not angry. Sad about what we left behind? Sure. Probably always. Regretful? Probably not. We could have done without the financial albatross of a farm we sank a ton of money into and then struggled to sell. But what about everything those acres gave us? What about the hard-won but enduring lessons about how to (and how not to!) run a business with the person you love, efficiently and compassionately manage a crew, make sound decisions about equipment and markets and infrastructure? What about the food we coaxed from the soil to fuel our bodies and fill our baby’s belly? What about quiet nights on the back porch with a beer, listening to the CoolBot hum and the crickets sing? What about the high of a good day at market, when you’re running on four hours’ sleep and three cups of coffee and the heady potpourri of Ambrosia muskmelons and basil and the steady passing back and forth of tomatoes, cash, recipes, well wishes? What about the barter economy among food producers, our tomatoes for your strawberries and honey, our tractor to till your garden in return for a lamb shoulder from your freezer? What about the easy generosity of other farmers, the potlucks and equipment loans and shoptalk? What about trying your damnedest, getting some sleep, and trying again tomorrow? In the end, whether we’re hilling potatoes or writing grant proposals or soothing away nightmares or waiting tables or waiting on test results or teaching declensions, that’s what we all do, isn’t?

I am grateful for every bit of that. I wouldn’t unlive any of it to protect myself from the heartbreak of walking away from our farm. I do wish for: more discussion about the economics of farming, easier answers to hard questions about the costs of good health, every belly full every single night.

I’ve been thinking about all this, about these places I’ve called home, about the fire inside me. In this season of my life I’m not facilitating writing workshops or speaking at the United Nations or hustling tomatoes or helping anyone cook their way through a seemingly interminable eggplant glut. I am at home, nursing my baby, roasting vegetables, learning about bivalves and monarchs and hawks with my son, thinking (and thinking and thinking) about how children learn and about what my role should be. This season is, all at once, quieter and more contained and so much deeper than everything that came before.

I have chosen not to share much about our school plans here. And maybe that’s a mistake – so much hangs in the balance of that decision, and I’m so unsettled by that knowledge sometimes. The mama hive is rich with guidance, solidarity, and reminders to take a deep breath and just put one foot in front of the other. Maybe I should be articulating my biggest doubts here and asking for your help! But something in me feels this is not the space, at least not now, to talk about the details.

Still, I think I can say this: recently I am enormously comforted to realize that my current preoccupation with this big question is rooted in a deeply familiar instinct. The place where I thrive has always been the place where people come together full of pigheaded hope. This means I am right where I need to be.

Now who wants coffee?

Today my mother turned 65. She and I share an easy and generous sense of humor that is somehow sister to our earnest literal-mindedness and unflappable trust in things working out – a quality that either endears us to you or drives you mad or both. I also owe her big time for my impressive mental catalog of early and mid 80s easy listening and country, my enthusiasm for game nights and meandering drives, and my love of cocktails, cake, baseball, books, stacks of books, ice cream, ephemera, British miniseries, and sitting in my chair at the movies until the very very last credits have rolled. Watching her taught me that kindness matters more than almost everything else, that it’s never too late for another cup of coffee, and that reading on the beach is better when you drag your chair into the surf. She has an astounding mind for minutiae, is fiercely loyal, and remembers my own stories better than I do. She is a marvel. She is my closest friend.

A few weeks ago she came across this post of Andrea’s from 2013 and asked if I might consider making a similar list for her, as a birthday gift. Indulge in some sweet nostalgia and make my mom happy? This I can do.

“A happy childhood can’t be cured. Mine’ll hang around my neck like a rainbow,
that’s all, instead of a noose.” – Hortense Calisher, Queenie (1971)

Here you go, Mom. A long and happy list of things I grew up with:

that Strawberry Shortcake album, which I’d listen to with my ear pressed flush against one of the giant wood-paneled speakers (later it was Bookends and Sgt. Pepper)
Steak San Marco
Le Sueur peas in the silver can
Laurie’s chicken
baked potatoes with their steady plumes of steam
Life cereal
languorous Saturdays stretched out on the blue love seat with Johnny Tremain or The Egypt Game or The Baby-Sitters Club
clarinet reeds
road trips to the Smokies, to St. Louis, to Providence/Boston
the smell of church: that heady alchemical fusion of wooden pews and old hymnals and pink soap and sheet music and coffee and perfume and choir robes and wine that to this day, despite considerable wandering, comforts me immediately like little else
doodling with you on the back of a Sunday bulletin insert
lazy summers
Randy Travis
pets, always
KinderCare
Sniglets
Certs (and in fact the composite smell of your purse: Certs, leather, cash, Poison perfume, and CoverGirl Hint of Bronze Lipslick)
Born in the U.S.A.
Fisher Price Little People
blocks
afghans
Pert Plus in our bathroom, the brown Vidal Sassoon bottles in yours
Bisquick
Madonna
watching you pull on your knee highs
sticker books
Sticker Page
dinner rolls
oldies radio
cul-de-sac living
Bain de Soleil
MoonPies at PoFolks, the peg game at Cracker Barrel, popcorn shrimp at Red Lobster
Parker pens
piano music at dinnertime
red tip photinias
Putt-Putt
rock candy
the mall
TGIF
Georgia pines, sweetgums, Russian poplars
the smell of our street after a summer rain
whole wheat + Provolone grilled cheese
my eraser collection
friends’ birthday parties at roller rinks, McDonalds, ShowBiz
the staccato of orange roller skate wheels on the tile floors of the bathrooms at the rink
“Oh My Darling, Clementine” and “Marianne” and “Stewball”
Weekly Reader, Children’s Choice, and Parents’ Magazine book clubs
riding bikes
fireworks at Fort Gordon
swimming at Clarks Hill Lake
the Hawaiian nativity
the hum of Grandma’s sewing machine
a flamingo sticker on the sugar bin
red dirt
dappled light
seeing you and Dad kiss good-bye and hello every day

(Anyone else want to play? I’d love to read your lists.)

Gosh, it’s been almost four months since I did one of these posts, and that one was the only time I did it in 2014. Hogwash! I do like some links.

1) PROJECT | Bored and Brilliant: The Lost Art of Spacing Out Join WNYC’s New Tech City managing editor Manoush Zomorodi for an experiment in spending less time on your phone and more time spacing out and doing creative work that doesn’t happen if we never allow our minds to be idle. There will be a week of challenges starting February 2, and in the meantime, download the Moment app to learn more about how you’re really using your phone, and follow the podcast and blog for more.

2) WISDOM | The Strange Art of Trying I’ve been meaning to share Deja’s post since last summer, maybe in a post of my own about our family food culture and my kid and all the things we did right and how he’s still so damn picky at five and how if I had to do it all over again I’d still do most of the same stuff. I think that post may linger in Draft Land forever, but I don’t want to wait any longer to share this. In half a sentence about effort and surrender, Deja says everything I felt but couldn’t articulate about kids and food. Hell, about how to live.

3) PHOTO ESSAY | 1989: America’s Malls I was strangely moved by Michael Galinsky’s photos of late 80s mall patrons. I think it’s to do with how I’ve been chewing on the idea of our shifting commons recently. More thoughts on that in another post, perhaps. Anyway, I was 12 in 1989.

I found some pretty deep peace in a simple pot of lentils this week. It happened like this:

We’ve been hunkering down and making do/merry pretty well, all things considered – imagined Autobot space voyages to Pluto for magical ice, daytime baths, long read-alouds on the couch, good coffee and mugs of bone broth with ginger and cayenne – but it is also true that we’re still coming down from the joyous mayhem of presents and travel, that the weather outside is very grey and very wet, and that all four of us have massive, dizzying, ugly colds. To say I look forward to the moment when my husband walks in the door at the end of the day is a study in understatement.

Tuesday around 4pm: I get a text that a meeting is running long and he’ll be at least an hour late. I’m not mad, of course, but that doesn’t stop a knee jerk inner growl. I yawn and rub my temples, my daughter whimpers on my hip and wipes her snotty nose against my shoulder, and my son leaps off the table and lands with a ruthless thud. “Mom? What’s for dinner?”

Running on empty and knowing I’ve been by neither farm nor store since our return from the North Carolina mountains, I look in the fridge. Hmm. Lots of cheese. Very old milk. Three kinds of mustard. Pickle relish, yeast, simple syrup, tomato paste, miso, wrinkled grapes. Leftovers of indeterminate origin. It’s not looking good.

Popcorn and smoothies is not a terrible dinn– I begin to tell myself.

But I don’t want popcorn and smoothies I interrupt. I want something substantial and healing. I want protein. I want plants. Yes, you’re really tired. No, smoothies for dinner don’t make you a bad mom. Cook anyway.

I close the fridge. I think suddenly of the More-with-Less Cookbook, written by Doris Janzen Longacre and published by the Mennonite Central Committee in 1976 as an appeal to thrift in the kitchen and a call to arms against the global hunger crisis. I haven’t reached for it in a long time, but it is homely and modest and practical and that’s what I need tonight. I pull it down, find a recipe for Basic Cooked Lentils, and get to work.

Both kids are playing with the dog’s bowls under the kitchen table. I smile, put a couple cups of rice in the rice cooker, and slip out the back door, rummaging through our upright freezer out in the shed for some frozen chicken broth. I wrestle it out of its Ziploc armor, drop it into a big pot on the stove, and set the burner to high. I rinse a cup of lentils and as I agitate them in the sieve under running water I feel my mental fog lifting. The kids laugh and I hear dog food scatter and all I think is it feels good to feed my family. I add the lentils to the broth along with a bay leaf and a pinch of salt and turn everything down to a simmer. I look in the fridge again and surface with three leeks, shriveled and pretty gnarly but not rotten. Perfect. I put our big skillet on another burner and set half a stick of butter to melt in it. I peel away the (many) dried outer layers of the leeks and chop off their roots, slice them, rinse them well, and drop them in the skillet. My daughter clings to my leg with another soft whimper.

“Hello, sweet girl,” I say, hoisting her to my hip and kissing her forehead. “I know you want snuggles now. But I need to get dinner ready.” Like magic her brother appears with a big ball and a grin, and she turns to him with twinkling eyes, already wriggling free.

I step onto the back porch, where we often keep a crate or two of farm vegetables. I’m not hopeful because I know we haven’t filled the crates since our Christmas travels, but lo, there beneath a handful of wilted lettuce leaves sits one plump carrot – it looks a little tired, sure, but not so bad. I bring it inside, give it a quick scrub in the sink, dice it, and add it to the leeks along with another small knob of butter and some curry powder.

Miraculously – or perhaps because I am ignoring them – the kids don’t need anything. All the base components of the meal are cooking now, and I can turn to the tinier tasks of stirring, tasting, adjusting spices. My mind meanders pleasantly. I think of curries, of how little I know about authentic ones, of how much I love them anyway, of the lunchtime curries I ate at any of the half dozen little restaurants along East Sixth Street in the East Village and of the many approximations I’ve cobbled together at home. Almost seventeen years ago I bought two books from a man sitting on a quilt outside a train station in Chennai. One was Gandhi’s autobiography and the other was called Indian Cookery: for use in all countries, by E.P. Veerasawmy. For no good reason I haven’t cooked from it much (despite the back cover’s admonition that it “should be part of any cook-proud housewife’s library”!). But one big lesson from its first chapter has lingered with me for years: you must cook your curry powder or curry spices in the fat with your onions and garlic for several minutes, before adding any coconut milk or other liquids, to cook off their raw flavor. I’d like to learn more someday, I think, about how to really build layers of flavor in a curry. I think of the pact my husband and I make (and break) every year, to each pick a cuisine and cook from it once a week. Maybe this will be the year.

I think of my enormous cookbook collection. I think of what a thrilling time this seems for cookbooks in general: vibrant, clever flavor combinations; deep explorations of single ingredients or techniques; endless options for all kinds of eaters; and of course the beauty of the books themselves. I don’t get to do it much these days, but I love to sit with a stack of cookbooks and a cup of tea.

There’s a clear trend right now toward clean, wholesome cooking, whether you tend toward marrow bones and raw milk and home cured bacon or collard wraps and almond milk and meal-sized salads (or all of it, like me!). But there’s also a clear trend toward luxury in book design: heavy matte paper, breathtaking full bleed photographs, obvious care and cleverness in layout. It’s an interesting juxtaposition.

I think suddenly, absent any guilt or shame: what if I only had three or four cookbooks? I don’t mean what if I had to pick my three or four favorites from this crazy collection. I mean: what if, by choice or circumstance or culture, I just wasn’t into cookbooks? What if I was just a confident and unfussy home cook with a few worn references tucked on the counter between the coffee pot and the fridge? More-with-Less, maybe. The 1979 Fannie Farmer? A cookie book? What would that be like?

Our own little family straddles these questions of abundance and scarcity every day really: work that means access to the highest possible quality of produce and eggs and meat, smashed up against a pretty spartan budget everywhere else. Hmm. It’s a lot to think about, and tonight I am grateful to be muting the chatter and making some simple food with what I could rustle up.

I check the vegetables. The carrots aren’t quite done, and over in the pot, neither are the lentils. I scrape the curry mixture into the lentils and pour in another cup of broth. My phone buzzes again: another hour late. I put a lid on the pot, turn the heat to low, and gather my children into my arms.

Wishing you and yours a joyous new year. May your bellies and hearts be as full as mine.

* * *

A Simple Pot of Lentils
adapted from More-with-Less Cookbook, by Doris Janzen Longacre

I like this over rice or another grain. If you do too, get that started first. Then combine 2 1/2 cups broth or water and 1 cup rinsed lentils in a pot and bring to a boil. Reduce to a simmer and add a bay leaf and a pinch of salt.

In a large skillet, melt several tablespoons butter or warm several tablespoons olive oil over medium heat. Add an onion (chopped) or a large leek (sliced and very well rinsed) and anything else that sounds good or is lying around threatening to go to waste (chopped small) – a stalk of celery, a carrot, a red pepper, a few turnips maybe. Sauté until the vegetables begin to soften. Add some chopped garlic and continue to cook for another minute. Now add some spices or herbs. A tablespoon or two of curry powder is nice. Or try some thyme or rosemary and some black pepper. Italian flavors work great. Don’t skimp. Saute for a few minutes more and then scrape the vegetables into the pot of lentils. Add more broth or water if things seem dry. Taste the lentils. If they’re done, simmer everything for a few minutes more. If they’re not, bring everything back to a simmer, put a lid on the pot, and go read with your kids.

Adjust seasonings and serve over grains. Top with a dollop of yogurt or a squeeze of lemon juice and some chopped parsley, if you like.

(seven posts in seven forty-two days)

Sometimes the sour looks and the careless words and the doubts make such a ferocious racket. Maybe, probably, almost certainly the racket dons a mask and tries to pass as truth when you’re getting very little sleep.

So let me take a sweet moment to remember the rest of it: one mother, one baby, one 5-year old, and the 19 pounds of fleece/wool/Gore-Tex required to go anywhere this time of year. Dashing with my boy through the drizzle into our favorite coffee shop for hot chocolate. A slow drive up the coast, through sleepy shore towns and across silvery sounds. Wreaths on balconies. Windblown shacks teetering on stilts above the water. Empty osprey nests. Filling an empty diner with our laughter and squeals and stories. Bacon. A white paper bag of donuts tucked quietly under my arm by our waitress as we headed back out into the bluster. Dinosaur bones, fast slides, and 28 wild turkeys in the rain at the playground.

And then this morning: a boy making his own scrambled eggs and talking a blue streak while his dad made me coffee. This album. All the cars pulled over at the end of Beach Ave to watch the waves crash, and all the cars parked where the canal empties into the mouth of the bay, watching the ferries. The way such disparate strangers gather in an accidental kinship of awe and delight warms me every time.

(seven posts in seven days)

(Only one more to go! If I post again by Thursday it’ll be seven posts in 21 days,
which doesn’t have quite the same ring, but is still satisfyingly mathematical.)

“Thanks”

Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow for the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water looking out
in different directions

back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you
looking up from tables we are saying thank you
in a culture up to its chin in shame
living in the stench it has chosen we are saying thank you
over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the back door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks that use us we are saying thank you
with the crooks in office with the rich and fashionable
unchanged we go on saying thank you thank you

with the animals dying around us
our lost feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us like the earth
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
we are saying thank you and waving
dark though it is

W.S. Merwin
Rain in the Trees

 (seven posts in seven days)

I’m thinking back on the wintry drinks of my childhood, and I think I can sum up my happy memories in two telling words: Swiss Miss. There was the occasional waxed paper cup of hot cider after a haunted hayride, to be sure, and I only have to close my eyes to see my dad’s green Stanley vacuum thermos of coffee bouncing on the black vinyl passenger seat of our sky blue Volkwagen Beetle on the occasional thrilling dirt road shortcut to KinderCare. But it was really all about the Swiss Miss: Swiss Miss to warm fingers and belly after caroling, Swiss Miss halfway through my frostbitten gig as a shepherd in our church’s live nativity, Swiss Miss from the snack bar during the third quarter of high school football games (when we marching band folks were permitted a short break), Swiss Miss after marching in our town Christmas parade.

What was it exactly? One packet was never really enough to make a satisfyingly creamy drink with 12 ounces of water – and that water was always either lukewarm, requiring Sisyphean effort with a plastic stirrer to dissolve the lumps of powder, or scalding, and you never could make yourself wait, rushed as you were to feel the tiny marshmallows on your tongue before they melted completely, so then you’d burn your tongue and it would hurt for two days. None of this diminished my love for Swiss Miss in the slightest. And I’d wager to guess that in another twenty years, my own son will recall his packets of hot cocoa mix at our favorite deli with at least as much fondness as our nights in front of the stove with real milk and a box of cocoa.

Let’s not beat around the bush: mainly it was the sugar. Rare is the kid who can resist it. But there was also something enormously gratifying about how fast you could turn something that looked like powdered tempera paint into something that smelled of cake and snowfall and Christmas break. It was like magic.

And so eggnog – the stuff in the carton with its musty nutmeg and slimy mouthfeel – really didn’t stand a chance with me in 1989, but a quarter century later, the real stuff has my heart. We make it a couple times every December. Sometimes it’s on offer at a small solstice gathering with friends, and I like to sip it when we decorate the tree too. It is, of course, lovely with bourbon, or rum, or brandy, but there is little that compares to the gleam in my son’s eyes or his frothy mustache when he drinks it, so I usually hold back the booze and we adults just add it to taste, if at all.

 (seven posts in seven days)

Eggnog
adapted from Alton Brown

About the ingredients: lucky as I am to have such easy access to such high quality ingredients, I’m often reluctant to suggest you use “the best you can afford.” Most people can’t afford that stuff, and I feel strongly that a wholesome family life doesn’t depend on pastured eggs. But because eggnog is raw, taste and safety matter enormously here. Make sure you feel good about where your eggs, milk, and cream are coming from.

4 eggs, separated
1 tablespoon plus 1/3 cup sugar
1 pint whole milk
1 cup heavy cream
generous grating fresh nutmeg (about 1 teaspoon, or to taste)
3 ounces bourbon, rum, or brandy (optional)

Using a stand mixer or handheld electric mixer, beat the egg whites to soft peaks. Add 1 tablespoon sugar and beat to stiff peaks. Pour the whites into a small bowl and set them aside. You don’t need to clean your mixing bowl.

In your mixing bowl, beat the egg yolks on medium speed until they begin to lighten. Add the rest of the sugar and beat until dissolved. Add the milk, cream, nutmeg, and optional liquor, and mix on low until just combined. Gently whisk in the whipped egg whites.

This is best served right away, but leftovers can be stored, tightly covered, for about a day in the fridge. You’ll need to shake the jar before drinking leftovers.

Serves 4-8, depending on serving size.

* * *

Mark Twain said, “Too much of anything is bad, but too much good whiskey is barely enough.” Does that mean I can keep talking about eggnog?

Alton Brown’s recipe really is everything I want in eggnog: it’s rich and festive and worth waiting for, super easy to make, and delicious with or without booze. But Molly’s great-grandfather J. P. Hartt’s boozy eggnog was the first stuff to open my eyes to a world beyond the carton in the supermarket dairy aisle, close to ten years ago now, and if you’re having a party, you should consider it. Also, two years ago I made this vegan eggnog. You won’t confuse it with the traditional stuff, but it’s really very good in its own right. But wait; there’s more! I had written off storebought eggnog completely until my friend Abbie – who farms in Vermont with her family and knows a thing or two about good dairy – encouraged me to check out Organic Valley’s eggnog. Whoa! Game changer! Real food ingredients! Pastured cows! Really worth seeking out in a pinch or if you just don’t fancy making your own. But if, perhaps, you do fancy more kitchen experimenting … has anyone ever made aged eggnog? Three years! Whoa again! I want to do it. And finally, convention be damned, I really want to try this rose and cardamom eggnog (and everything else in that post).

What did you love to drink as a kid when the weather turned or during the holidays? What do you love to drink now?

The day begins a little before 7 in a tangled, laughing pileup of pouncing baby and garrulous older brother and bleary-eyed parents, the late November light creeping through the blinds a merciful pearly grey. After a few minutes I take a deep breath and throw back the quilts, one child on my right hip and the other at my left side, hand in mine. We close the door behind us and slip out into the world of coffee and Legos. (Only on Sundays; the rest of the week my husband is the one wrangling the early birds and scrambling eggs and unloading the dishwasher, and I am the one burrowed deep under the covers stealing a blissful bit of uninterrupted sleep.) I plug in the waffle irons (we have two!) and put on a Christmas record even though it’s not yet Thanksgiving. I am almost 37 and I find myself pleasantly loosening my iron grip on these sorts of things. I sip my coffee through a smile and marvel at these two children playing amicably, needing little more than my nearness.

Before long my husband joins us, taking my spot on the couch when I rise to make the batter and set the table and put on the kettle for another cup of coffee. I pull buttermilk from the fridge. We never used to keep buttermilk around and now we do and I find myself reaching for it all the time. I smile at this too. Some eggs, some butter, some flours. Quiet whisking. I think to slice some apples into a small pot with a knob of butter.

I call everyone into the kitchen. We’re easy and merry. The baby is ravenous recently. I think she’s growing. After nine months of not really napping she’s napping, and maybe it’s just for this week, but I’ll take it, because she is also nursing like a new piglet all night long. At the table she reaches for everything, stewed apples and red pepper hummus and pork roast and buttery carrots and, because I am trying to chill out a little, a couple bites of her brother’s waffle, pre-syrup. She slaps the table and yowls out for more.

Our mornings are not always like this, not by a long shot, but sometimes they are.

(seven posts in seven days)

Whole Grain Waffles
adapted from Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone

I didn’t post yesterday but I do have waffles to share. I hope that counts for something. We love breakfast around here. Growing up, we all had to be out the door pretty early for school or work most days, and so it was usually, and happily, cereal and milk, maybe a Brown Sugar Cinnamon Pop-Tart. These days we mostly do oatmeal or scrambled eggs with toast and fruit. But I do love a Sunday morning, the one day we’re all home. We take it very easy and we usually up our breakfast game, just a little. Scrambled eggs with scones or muffins instead of toast, often. Tara’s berried breakfast cobbler. Dutch babies and bacon. My dad’s French toast (which is really his mom’s French toast). Or waffles! I’ve tried so many recipes over the years and while I can’t say I’ve ever met a waffle I didn’t like (except for the one time I tried using organic vegetable shortening that had been sitting in the cupboard for who knows how long; those tasted exactly like plastic), I keep coming back to two Deborah Madison recipes – these and her yeasted waffles, which I make with a blend of white whole wheat, millet, and buckwheat flours. Really, really good, but you have to remember to start them the night before.

(See note below on substitutions.)

1/4 cup (half a stick) butter
3 eggs
1 1/2 cups buttermilk or 1/2 cup yogurt stirred into 1 cup milk
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 cup white whole wheat flour, whole wheat pastry flour, or all-purpose flour
1/4 cup each of four additional flours or meals (try cornmeal, millet flour, barley flour, buckwheat flour, oats whirred into coarse flour in the food processor or blender, even a cracked grain hot cereal blend)
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt

Preheat your waffle iron and melt your butter.

Whisk all the wet ingredients except the butter together in a bowl. Whisk the dry ingredients in a separate bowl. Add the wet ingredients and the butter to the dry ingredients and whisk or stir to combine. The batter should be fairly thick but shouldn’t get stuck in the whisk; if it seems too thick (and it might, depending on which combination of flours you choose) add another splash or two of milk. Cook in your waffle iron until nicely browned!

(A note on substitutions: we love these waffles on a Sunday, when I relax a little about starting the day off with whole foods, but I’m happy to make them on other days too, because there’s only white flour in them if you want it; they’re fantastic without it. Feel free to play around with the flour combination. I’ve found the recipe quite flexible, although I find rye flour does make them a bit heavy. I have not worried too much about the percentage of gluten flours. These are easy to make vegan by subbing in flax eggs for the regular eggs, any milk alternative plus a splash of vinegar or lemon juice for the buttermilk, and oil for the butter.)

PS If you’ve made it this far: who wants to weigh in on this?

Not long after breakfast I was tucked quite comfortably into a corner of the couch, nursing the baby (who will be nine months old in a couple days, whaaaaaat?) and surveying the detritus of life with little people and stealing sips of my second cup of coffee, when wham! I knew exactly what I’d write about today. There’s this thing that’s been a real haven for me in these early years of motherhood and I think this might be just the time and just the spot to talk about that.

The post nearly wrote itself: when I was nursing the baby down for her naps, and when I drove to the library and then again when I drove to pick up pizza, and when I was giving the kids their bath. Do you do some of your best writing like this too?

Hoping hard that post will still be up there in my head waiting for me in a day or two. Tonight I’m going to bed full to bursting with thanks, for hot breakfasts and good coffee and another cup whenever I want it. For the way the back of my baby’s head fits into the crook of my elbow. For my five-year old’s morning hair. For apologies and deep breaths and do-overs. For librarians. For a hungry hungry baby and cooking with my boy and his exploding interest in math. For four phone calls a day with my mom. For clear night skies and Christmas records and hot cocoa. For wind on the bay. For Legos. For bread. For Henry and Mudge. For Cheers on the couch and a splash of bourbon in my cider and my husband at my side.

(seven posts in seven days)

Monday started sweetly enough: steel cut oats piled high with yogurt and apples and drizzled with maple syrup, and coffee of course, always coffee, and then the family yoga class we’ve been joyously starting our week with for a couple months now. But Monday also started with some deep yawns. It felt less like the beginning of the week and more like the next in a long string of long work days for my husband. Farming is like this: lots of weekend work and lots of last minute demands. I think I surrendered to it more easily though when it was our farm and when it was happening a field away. Work and family life were all mashed up together. In any case, the day was cold and wet, and we passed lots of it bouncing off the walls inside, and when late afternoon rolled around I was very, very ready for the music class we’ve also been loving this fall. We dashed through the parking lot in the rain to find the walls of the music room torn to pieces, drywall and plaster dust and exposed lumber everywhere, with nary another confused family in sight; I’d clearly missed, or misplaced, the memo. My pocket buzzed: a text from my husband saying there’d been a delay with some equipment and he wouldn’t make it home until two hours after bedtime. I took a deep breath. We dashed back to the car, and I buckled the kids in, and I slid into the driver’s seat. “Well,” I said. “Shall we see if anyone’s Christmas lights are up yet?”

And so we drove around this beach town for an hour, listening to Elmer and the Dragon on Audible and looking for lights. It was perfect. And when the baby wouldn’t sleep and we all had a Prince dance party in the living room instead, waiting for my husband? Perfect too.

(seven posts in seven days)

There are so many reasons I don’t write here much. I’m sure the list is familiar to lots of you: I have two young kids and I cannot figure out when to shower, much less write. I still can’t decide how much is okay to write about my family. I expect a lot out of my own writing and have not been very open to sometimes posting tiny plumes of words. And finally, the big one for me maybe: is writing about myself this much too self-indulgent? When all is said and done, will I wish I had directed this energy toward something broader, toward building loving community, here on my block and out there in the world?

But writing here flexes my storytelling muscles and sends up smoke signals – of distress, yes, but also the sort that say, “I’ve found good food and shelter from the storm; come join me!” – and opens up all kinds of doors. Writing here has been my respite during some tough years, and even the sporadic posts have become a record I would otherwise have lost. Also, the satisfaction of seeing a thought through to its natural end – a deep pleasure I took wholly for granted in my 20s – should not be underestimated. All this from crumpling up that list of reasons not to write.

And so I’m issuing myself a small challenge: seven posts in seven days. Public accountability does not generally light much of a fire under my rump (to wit: my Year of Mornings 365 several years ago, which took me a full two years to complete) and sometimes it even makes me downright irritable, but I think I can do this. I was pretty sure I was going to, and then I read Janelle’s awesome post yesterday on Renegade Mama, Twelve Easy Steps to Doing Creative Work While Parenting, where she said, “Write anyway write instead write because of write when you can’t write.” And apparently that did light a fire under my rump, because here I am. My aim is to keep the posts short, and since ’tis the season, I’m going to focus on gratitude.

See you here tomorrow!

For two or three months this spring and summer I kept my camera close at hand in the kitchen and on the farm, with every intention of joining back up with Heather and others in the This Week in My Kitchen blog hop. I love the idea of these simple everyday photos of what’s happening in our kitchens – a record of what we’ve been cooking and eating, and inspiration for times when I have no idea what to cook. For someone who loves to cook and whose family pays the rent with farm income, truth is, those times strike pretty often. And as to my memory of what we cooked for dinner four days ago, much less this time last year? Burned off like so much early morning fog. Even a partial log of what we ate, of what worked and what didn’t, is truly helpful.

Thing is: I post here so infrequently. If I joined up with the blog hop every week or or even every other week, this website would fast become less about that hoary search for home and belonging and more about my abiding love for pancakes, frittatas, porters, and roasted anythings.

Still, I snapped away. And – inspired in equal measure by the blog hop, by the food logs I kept for my midwives during both my pregnancies, and by Jenny Rosenstrach’s dinner diary – I started keeping a list of our meals and snacks. I am not highly organized or disciplined, and I suspect this effort will fall by the wayside soon enough. But that’s okay. The blog hop photos I’m not posting and the food log have taught me a lot. I’ve learned we eat a lot of mid-day breakfast sandwiches at our favorite deli, where they know us all by name and come to chat with us at the counter when the lunch rush is over. I’ve learned I really do drink a lot of coffee. I’ve learned I don’t have much of a grip on lunch. I’ve learned rock star days in the kitchen beget more rock star days in the kitchen. I’ve learned that salmon no wait just-picked strawberries no wait pulled pork no wait homemade bread no wait tomato sandwiches with mayo and basil no wait a giant bowl of buttery salty green beans with a poached egg on top no wait PEPPERONI PIZZA is my favorite thing ever.

Also, I learned that I did not squander strawberry season, which made me very cheerful.

Some of you might remember that last year we lived on a farm with vast quantities of rhubarb that I looked at longingly but didn’t manage to eat very much of. When my dear friends from Norway were visiting we made a simple rhubarb grøt (Porridge! Delicious plain or with a little cream. We spooned leftovers on top of Molly’s everyday cake and that was very, very good.). I half-remember making a pie for the Fourth. I know I drank a startlingly good rhubarb buttermilk soda when I was out to dinner once, one I wanted to try to recreate at home, but instead I just think about it all the time. I digress. Last year was very hard and despite the fields of produce staring at sad old me at every turn, I just didn’t manage to dig very deep.

My May and June 2014 food log tells a different story, I am happy to report: Alice Medrich’s buckwheat shortcakes with sliced strawberries and maple sweetened whipped cream. Strawberries with granola and yogurt. Strawberries on waffles, on pancakes, on French toast. Strawberries in salad. Roasted strawberry buttermilk ice cream. Strawberries on my mother-in-law’s famous poundcake. Runny but perfectly good strawberry jam on toast with coffee (PSA and Note to Self for Next Spring: making jam in the slow cooker is awesome, especially if you have little people about, and Pomona’s Universal Pectin is awesome, but ne’er the twain should meet, because the Pomona’s needs a boil to set the jam). Strawberry cake, twice, at my son’s utterly disarming request. Strawberries in my Gordon’s Cup. Strawberries straight out of the quart box in my lap on the drive home. Strawberries straight out of the fridge at the farm stand. Strawberries straight off the plant. Strawberries for daaaaaays, and days and days and days. It was awesome.

The story of how I came to farming has a lot of threads. For the purposes of this post it’s pretty important to tell the part of the story that begins along a sunny stretch of chain link fence in the courtyard of a shelter in southeastern Queens, where for a few months in 2004 I ran a gardening project with some families. We grew tomatoes and flowers and herbs in containers along that fence, and the kids conducted taste tests to compare supermarket and farmers market produce. The most formative part of the experience, for me, was the interviews the kids did with one another, with their families, and with some of the staff at the shelter. As they took careful notes about favorite foods, childhood gardens, and old family recipes, I began to understand that the dangers of food insecurity swell far beyond the physical. When families lose the intimacy of the family table for weeks or months or longer, when parents can’t teach their children how to make their famous rice and beans because they’re not allowed in the kitchen, when no one has the chance to ask for seconds or thirds of something delicious because dinner is always a thawed tray from an institutional freezer, warmed by someone who may be kind but is never family – the damage can be quite severe.

I began to wonder: is there a confluence of the family support work I’ve been doing and, well, growing stuff? Can gardening or farming support families who are struggling? I’d spent years working alongside families, but my ability to judge the maturity of a zucchini was about as refined as my ability to perform a root canal, teach Arabic, or gut a chicken, which is to say, I was completely incompetent. I decided to take a sabbatical. I wasn’t sure how it would all play out, exactly, but I imagined I’d spend a year – two, tops – working for farmers, before returning to the city to try to bring all these experiences together into some kind of job. I spent the spring of 2006 helping out on some smallholdings in France and Ireland and then landed at a working vegetable farm outside of Washington, DC.

I still remember the sweltering August afternoon when I walked out of the repair shop with some tool I’d been sent after, probably another nut driver or some hose clamps for an irrigation repair. I glanced north toward the hoop house, where this guy who was leasing some land from my bosses worked with his crew, sorting pony baskets of sweet peppers for the next day’s market. His brown arms moved fast and his easy laughter carried across the lawn. He worked with dispatch and good cheer and I realized how little I’d understood about the satisfaction of physical labor. Uh oh, I thought.

Leaves fell. Snow fell. The next spring I found a job on a livestock farm the next county over. By the end of that year we’d decided to marry and to become business partners, and a few months after that we closed on our own farm. We built a greenhouse, and laid out our fields, and hired a crew, and started a big CSA, and sold at markets, and had a baby, and watched him grow, and fed him from our fields, and put down roots, and wondered if the deep joy of building a community around our own farm was worth the financial struggles. I never forgot about the kids in Queens. But helping to keep our business afloat and parenting very small children took everything I had.

And now, well into my ninth year on a farm, I am finally catching my breath. My children are still quite small, but I’m not working on the farm anymore. I’m looking at it all – my plans, our plans, the merits of local agriculture – with a little bit of distance. And I am beginning to think we place too much import on seasonal eating.

Of course it’s meaningful. A tomato I picked right before lunch, an egg my chicken laid this morning, or the lettuce your farmer woke up long before dawn to pick in time for market really does taste better. And while, officially, the jury is still out on the matter, for me there’s no doubt that the nutrition in that dead ripe tomato I just picked is superior to the nutrition in a tomato grown in a hothouse in California, picked green and hard as a rock, shipped across the country, and gassed with ethylene so that it is a uniform deep red when it’s unloaded in the stockroom of my local ShopRite. The strawberries I ate in the field in early June made me smile the way you do when you remember a kiss. The giant strawberries in the 2-lb clamshell my son reaches for now at the supermarket taste flat and make me grumpy.

What a privilege! I can put the clamshell back down and tell my son October strawberries don’t taste very good, and we can drive to the farm where my husband works and pick sugar sweet Nelson carrots right out of the ground, or select a couple butternuts from the farmstand for our favorite soup. Or, for Pete’s sake, maybe I’ll just buy the damn strawberries. I’m sure the nutritional gap between those perfect June fruits and these October understudies is just a sliver, compared to the chasm between either one and the donuts or Goldfish he would also be quite content to wolf down. Do I fret too much?

It’s impossible to avoid these flights of contemplation as I survey the autumn bones of our garden or walk the farm, coffee in hand. Summer’s dewy flush is long gone. A few tomatoes will hang on until first frost, but their leaves are yellowing with blight. Most of the fruiting crops have been mowed and turned back into the soil, and my husband is planting grasses and legumes, to hold the soil in place, replenish nitrogen, suppress weeds, and improve tilth. The farm, so lush not two months ago, is about to get very brown and very muddy. Even so: autumn eating is my favorite. I could eat my weight in winter squash and sweet potatoes and kale. Stews and roasts and braises fill me right up. On the days when I manage to think about what’s for dinner before 5pm (which, frankly, is pretty hit or miss), I can start that soup in the slow cooker, or put a roast in the oven, or spend five minutes chopping cabbage and carrots for this braise (throw some chicken thighs and drumsticks in there too), and then boom, dinner cooks itself. I love that!

It seems silly to ignore the pleasure that autumn ingredients and cooking methods bring me. It seems silly, too, to ignore the easy bounty of fresh produce that is always available to us. I think all families can provide something wholesome or formative for their kids, something that comes easy. Maybe you live in the woods and only have to open the door to get outside. Maybe you live in the city and there is no way for your kids not to take in all those bodies and colors and voices and kisses and think of them as normal. Maybe you have a great relationship with your in-laws who live across town and they watch your babies while you work. Maybe your husband is a farmer and the countertops are always heaped with whatever is growing. You know?

Also: I’m deeply proud of my husband’s work, and I deeply miss what our family life looked like back in our Virginia days. Eating the vegetables my husband grows, when he grows them, is a way to celebrate him and also the way we became a family.

This food feeds us, belly and soul. I know that. And yet – I don’t think it can feed everyone, and I know I feel uneasy about that. Without turning this into a sob story, I think it’s worth acknowledging that most small scale farmers struggle to make ends meet. But we’ll always have food on the table, which is just not true for so many people. Right now I have way, way more questions about food and hunger and community than I came to farming with.

Look: I know I’m speaking from a somewhat ragged place. We left a farm that couldn’t pay our bills, and I’ve written over and over again about how hard it was to leave our land and the rhythms our family life took on there. But I lost my community too: CSA members, farmers market customers and staff, fellow farmers with whom we shared equipment and shipping costs and pest control strategies and so, so many meals. I think I’m only just now understanding the cost of losing those daily relationships.

Because that’s the thing, isn’t it? The thing that’s so hard about moving, the thing that makes it worth forging through six pounds of CSA eggplant week after week, the thing about teaching your kids how to make your famous rice and beans: we belong to each other. In a chapter of my life when I’ve known a lot of loneliness, in a world where so many people are displaced by disaster or avarice, in a time when so much online grandstanding and so many incomprehensible injustices make it feel easier and safer to retreat than to reach out – I choose belonging.

And so today I went to the grocery store with my kids and I bought some coffee and cheddar cheese and three kinds of Halloween candy. And then we stopped by the farm for carrots and sweet potatoes and leeks and turnips. We drove home, and as we turned onto our street, we could see our friends from New York, here for the weekend, unloading their car. We hugged and carried the babies and groceries inside. My husband grew some delicious food, and tonight I put it in a pot with some oil and salt and heat. My friends handed me some braised beef they’d brought with them, the last roast from their own cow, and I added that too. Later we moved the pot to the kitchen table, grabbed some bowls, grabbed some beers, and ate. Together.

No fretting.

American persimmon/Diospyros virginiana. September 2014.

Here are some awesome things some friends of mine have been working on. I offer this particular list because a) these are compelling projects that deserve your time and love, and b) when I remember the powerful, hopeful work my friends are doing, it is hard to stay irate about things I can’t fix, like the way we insist on gendering our children’s lives from the time they are very, very small. Ahem.

1) ESSAY | Look at the Horses Did I first meet Cate at an informal lecture way up on the 35th floor of the curious and beautiful Cathedral of Learning? Or was it twenty minutes outside of the city in a quiet and icy barn one January night? I don’t remember the details but I do know we weren’t more than 19, teetering deliciously on the cusp of adulthood. Her essay about the plans we make and the places we come from is exquisite.

2) COLLECTIVE STORYTELLING | The Way They Worked Hilary and I go back even further, to the chalk dust and linoleum tiles and square roots of Ms. Presto’s early, early Monday morning pre-algebra class, seventh grade. She’s the motor behind a new project that collects the stories we remember about the work of our grandparents. What did your grandparents do? How did they feel about it? How did their work inform your own feelings about responsibility or family? Share a memory, with words or a photo or both – on the project’s website or your own website, or use the hashtag #TheWayTheyWorked on Facebook/Twitter/Instagram.

3) FREE E-BOOK | Artisans of Peace Overcoming Poverty The work I did in NYC is always at the margins of my writing. I struggle to give it its due. Family life, farm life, and Fourth World’s radical and inclusive approach to fighting poverty – these are my chorus, and I want so badly to write them into some kind of harmony. I’m going to keep trying, but if you want to learn more about what I was doing before the fateful day I first heard my husband’s easy laughter spilling between the tomato stakes, read this book.

What about y’all? Any good reads or powerful projects you’ve come across lately that keep you looking on the bright side?

It is tempting, sometimes, to call this neighborhood less wild than the other places I have called home in the close to ten years since I left New York City. There are stop signs and water mains and dogs accustomed to their leashes, tidy sod lawns, fences every hundred feet or so that say this is mine and that is yours. I do not watch the fireflies flirting in the marsh a hundred feet off my back deck. The goats do not call to me at milking time from their spot under the enormous old oak at the highest point on our old farm. There is no Virginia creeper or bittersweet snaking its way up our front porch.

But there is a small brown rabbit that sits and chews quietly between two of our raised beds most mornings. The cardinals here fill their lungs just as boldly and sing the same cheerful hurly-burly hurly-burly hurly-burly as I make my coffee. Here they call from somewhere in the spiny sanctuary of holly all around. Last year they called from the mulberry at the edge of the marsh, and in Virginia it was the sycamore outside our kitchen window. Neither the plantain nor the clover will be beaten back, for all my mowing. On the nights when I walk the dog, I regularly nearly trip on a toad that must live under the porch, and last week a young garter snake eyed me calmly as I hung the diapers. I keep forgetting to roll up the car windows and the most exquisite spider webs appear on my dashboard overnight. A few months ago a mourning dove made its nest in our gutter. The dragonflies right now are a marvel to me and they touch down everywhere: clothesline, tomato stake, radio antenna on the car. These creatures, I am reminded, don’t discriminate. They find some food, and find a mate, and make themselves at home.

I sat on our back steps with a glass of iced coffee late this morning, eye to eye with an inchworm swaying on its silk escape rope, and I thought how our suburban street has more than a little in common with all the farms I have known. We humans harrow and mow and mulch and build, hoping to coax the land into providing us food or shelter. But we are always just a step ahead of the bindweed, or the bean beetles, or the crows, and that’s only if we’re quick enough and lucky enough. The lawns will always need mowing, and the shingles will always be battered by the wind off the ocean, and some pretty bird will always be eager to make its nest in our gutter.

And of course: the bay. It is four hundred yards from porch to surf. We leash the dog and set off, stopping perhaps to talk with a neighbor about the mosquitoes, or how big the baby is getting, or Ninja Turtles. We walk on. We slip off our sandals and climb the dune and then there it is: broad like the sea, glassy and lazy some days, other times fierce and grey. We right overturned horseshoe crabs. We inspect sea lettuce and graceful red weed and knobbed whelk egg cases in the wrack line. We identify laughing gulls, semipalmated sandpipers, snowy egrets, and at least a half dozen others that we will look up when we get back to the house. Here more than anywhere, I am reminded: we are only scratching the surface. Sure as the plantain and the cardinals, we will be at home here soon enough.

Last summer I started migrating a few of my farm blog posts over here. I didn’t get very far with that project, I don’t think – but as I licked the food processor bowl clean tonight, I thought, heck, let’s try again. Let’s show up here a little bit and then figure out how to show up some more. Nothing says, “I miss you!” like garlic breath, right?

(I’m reposting this recipe almost exactly as I wrote it for our farm blog in 2011 – I’ve taken out just one or two confusing references, but am otherwise leaving the words as is. They speak to a different time in my life, and as I continue to explore what and who make a place a home, here on this site and in my life, it feels valuable to look back on where I’ve come from, even if I’m just talking about cheesecloth and lactobacilli. The nearly word-for-word repost also explains all the first person plural pronouns.)

Tzatziki is a classic Greek appetizer made from strained yogurt, cucumbers, garlic, and herbs, and similar dishes are made all over the Middle East and Mediterranean.  It manages somehow to be both refreshing and substantial at the same time, which is exactly what I’m after these days.  Heavy braises and long slow roasts make me sweat just thinking of them – but these hot sticky midsummer days are tiring, and a girl needs some fuel!  Enter tzatziki.

Our only caveat is that you need to plan ahead here.  The recipe is straightforward and easy, but you’ll need to strain your yogurt, and salt and drain your cucumbers.  And ideally you stick it in the fridge for a couple hours after you mix it up, to let the flavors blend.  So it’s not something you can whip up at the last minute for a potluck or to accompany a Sunday dinner outside by the grill – although it would be right at home in either of those settings!

Tzatziki

1 quart yogurt (preferably full fat with no added stabilizers or sweeteners – just cultured milk; or, substitute 2 1/2 cups Greek yogurt and skip the yogurt straining step)
2 large cucumbers (or 3 picklers), peeled, seeded, and chopped (instructions below)
1 tablespoon salt
juice of one lemon
one clove garlic, chopped
1-2 tablespoons chopped fresh dill or mint or both
additional salt and pepper to taste

First, strain the yogurt. We use a nylon nut milk/sprouting bag like this, but you could also use coffee filters or cheesecloth.¹ If using a nut milk bag, hang it into a large jar (a half gallon or one gallon jar works well) and secure with a rubber band.  If using coffee filters, line a colander or large strainer with two coffee filters and set the colander/strainer inside a large bowl.  Cheesecloth can be used either way. Carefully pour the yogurt in.  Whichever method you use, you want to leave room for the whey to drain out of the yogurt, so be sure the bottom of your bag or filter isn’t touching the liquid as it drains out.  Some whey will drain out immediately, but be patient; the longer you can wait, the creamier your tzatziki will be.  You could probably use the yogurt after 45 minutes or so, but wait about two hours if you can.  Or strain the yogurt the day before you make the tzatziki and store it in the fridge overnight. When we use a quart of Dannon All Natural Plain Yogurt, we end up with a little over two cups of thick strained yogurt and a little more than a cup and half of whey. We’ll try straining our own yogurt later this summer, and anticipate the ratio of yogurt to whey will be a bit different.

(Don’t pour that whey down the sink! It’s full of good healthy stuff including lots of Lactobacilli, which are said to be good for gut health and general immune health. It will last for about forever in the fridge. You can add it to a smoothie, use it in place of water or other liquids in baked goods, use it as a starter culture for all kinds of lactofermented fruits and vegetables and beverages, use it in soaked grains like overnight oats … most recently we’ve been using it in a our daily almost-no-knead bread and in a pickle recipe.)

Next, prepare the cucumbers. This process takes about 45 minutes, largely unattended.  We pick our cucumbers quite young and of course never wax them, so we rarely peel or seed them for any recipes.  However, tzatziki really does benefit from cucumbers that have had a lot of the liquid removed.  First, peel the cucumbers.  Then seed them.  You can cut them in half lengthwise and run a spoon along the seeds, scooping them out.  Or quarter them lengthwise and use a small paring knife to cut out the seeds.  Next chop up the cucumbers and place them in a colander, place the colander in a large bowl, and sprinkle the cucumbers with about a tablespoon of salt.  Toss.  The salt will draw water of out of the cucumbers.  Let them drain for about half an hour.  Press to release any remaining water, and then pat them dry with a paper towel.

Now you’re ready to mix it all up! Put the strained yogurt in a large bowl.  In a food processor, blend the cucumbers, the lemon juice, the garlic, the herbs, and a few grinds of black pepper until well blended.  Add the cucumber mixture to the yogurt and stir to mix.  Taste to see if you need additional salt; we don’t find it necessary. Tzatziki tastes best if you put it in the fridge for a couple hours to allow the flavors to meld. But we won’t tell anyone if you dig in right away.

* * *

Serving ideas: Use tzatziki as a dip for vegetables like carrots or cucumbers.  Spread it on crackers or nice bread.  Use it as a spread in a sandwich with other summer vegetables.  Add it to falafel in a pita.  It’s also a great side dish or dipping sauce for meats and fish. (2014 update: So good on top of beef or lamb burgers. Great on bean or grain based patties too, like these little quinoa patties, or fritters like these. Delicious on salmon. Perfect on top of an eggplant roasted until charred and meltingly tender and split in two lengthwise.)

1. I actually prefer using jelly bags like these now.

From top to bottom:

Brown rice, always a staple. This week we had it under a chickpea stew with sausage and pesto (one of the last from the stock of freezer meals my parents made for us when our daughter was born) and alongside salmon and broccoli.

Speaking of broccoli … I love it anyway, but it seems I am especially mad for it postpartum. Both times. I could eat it every day. I’m not kidding when I say I buy eight or ten heads at once at the grocery store.

Next up? Hard boiled eggs fore, raw eggs aft. Oh, and my son, who decided with zero prompting from his mother that he wanted to clean both the kitchen island and the fridge that day. Have at it, sweet child!

I cheated on my normal granola this week with Molly’s Granola No. 5. A splurge, with all that maple syrup, but wonderful. That’s what you see in the Pyrex measuring cup, and don’t think for a second I didn’t scrape the dregs out with my finger to slurp down.

Then there’s my steady baking companion, helping me measure out flour for our nearly no-knead bread. I used to make this loaf several times a week but for no good reason I’ve been on a long hiatus. No longer! I’ll try to write up our recipe soon.

Frittatas are absolutely a go-to dinner for us around here. They’re not exactly the non-supper I referenced in my last post – there is chopping and grating and whisking, and we use both the stovetop and the oven. But I make them so often I can nearly do it with my eyes closed, and we use whatever we have on hand, so it is seriously low stress. This week I made one with cubed sweet potatoes, a mess of onions and garlic, a bit of smoked paprika, and whatever cheese we had in the fridge – supermarket mozzarella and some nice Parmesan, I think.

Coffee, everyday.

Usually we eat our broccoli plain (olive oil, salt, garlic) and pretty much always straight from the roasting pan. But this week I made some lemony tahini sauce, from The Oh She Glows Cookbook but via Shutterbean. Had it on top of broccoli a couple times and also on salmon. Very good.

We “blast” our broccoli à la Molly Stevens, which is to say: we toss it with olive oil and salt and roast it at 450°F for about 15 minutes, then throw two or three minced garlic cloves on top and let it go for another three or four minutes. It gets caramelized at the edges but is still tender and sweet inside. It’s broccoli fries really.

Lastly: my kid planted beans because you are not allowed to be 4 without doing that. They’re looking healthy and I hope we’ll be munching on them in a couple months!

Here, in our beautiful beach town, we’re learning a new normal when it comes to this stuff. We don’t have our own land, so there’s no way to easily raise our own meat. And this is a resort town, with a huge summer population that turns over weekly and very sleepy winters. So it’s a tough place to be a market farmer selling most of your products retail, and therefore a tough place to find raw milk or grassfed beef. So what does this mean for us? Well, first, as the freezer stock we brought with us dwindles, it means we are eating less meat. It also means we compromise. We buy organic milk at the grocery store, but we don’t know where it comes from or how the cows were treated. We can’t trade for amazing cheeses at market anymore and so we buy from Miss Linda at the deli counter. She and my son are becoming fast friends. We usually buy Dannon yogurt. But eggs. For some reason, I can’t relax about eggs. Why? There are many, many reasons to eat locally produced foods in season – some of those reasons matter quite a lot and others, I am starting to think as the years go by, are perhaps overplayed. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration, though, to say that fresh food tastes better. The lettuce you picked at 11:30 to eat in a salad at noon? Those dead ripe, still-warm-from-the-vine Sungolds? Broilers you raised in your backyard whose grain was supplemented with daily kitchen scraps and June bugs they chased down themselves? It’s really no contest. But when it comes to eggs, maybe I’m wrong.

I don’t know. Maybe it’s personal. I have washed I don’t know how many thousands of eggs over the years. There were times I thought my brain might rot from the endless, changeless hours of scrubbing, but sometimes I really found peace in the rhythm. (Either that or I found a bottle of tequila and mixed myself a margarita, after which everything looked cheerier.) Here’s what I do know. I know there is not much farm fresh food to be had before May in this part of the country. I know I am only two months into learning how to mother two children and there is no elaborate or inspired cooking going in. I know eggs are fast and healthy and always delicious. (We are big, big fans of not really cooking dinner around here. Scrambled eggs and toast ranks just after popcorn and smoothies and just before a baked potato bar on our Effort Scale.)

The best thing I know? My kid will always crack an egg. I think this matters to me more than whether or not he’ll eat one. We have cooked with our son since he was just a few weeks old. He started in a sling on my hip as I stirred stock or sliced tomatoes, and he perched on my husband’s shoulder a few months later as they flipped pancakes together. When he was steady(ish) on his feet, he graduated to a beautiful homemade learning tower we received from a friend in trade for one of our CSA shares. We taught him more than two years ago how to crack an egg, and how to scramble it too. He has a preferred whisk. He can safely use a sharp knife.

I cannot take credit for much of his awesomeness, but I do think that keeping him right alongside us in the kitchen is one of the better calls we’ve made as parents. They say that when your kid cooks with you, he’ll be more likely to develop a broad palate – that hasn’t been our experience. But, and I say this with a hard-won and bittersweet clarity: that is almost beside the point. My children do not belong to me, and I can no more easily dictate what they will eat now than who they will love later. What I can do is give them skills – how to use that knife, how to know when cupcakes are done, what to do with a few wilted carrots and an onion – and I can also give them my time. It’s the thing, you know. The thing that matters.

I had a baby two months ago. She has rosy cheeks and big eyes. She sleeps a dream, for now. She loves to watch her brother talk, and she loves it when we sing the Mighty Machines theme song (or, oh my gosh, in French!) to her during diaper changes. She gasps when the bay breezes rush over her shoulders. And she nurses the day away. I love her, hard.

I also miss my boy.

But you know, thanks to those damn farm eggs, we’re finding our way back to one another.

Classic Vanilla Cupcakes with Cream Cheese Frosting
cupcakes adapted from The Fannie Farmer Cookbook, Twelfth Edition (1979)

I am not kidding when I say we made these cupcakes a totally immoderate three times last week. Partly it’s that we had a lot of leftover frosting from a cake we’d made the week before, and what were we going to do, give it to the pigs? I don’t think so. Partly it’s that they’re just so good, and we found we didn’t like being out of cupcakes. Mostly, it’s that something really good happened when I tucked my sleeping baby tight against my chest in the sling and invited my son into the kitchen to mix up the second batch. He leaped from the couch with an enormous grin, after a week of furrowed brow and clenched fist. He chose the eggs he wanted to use and watched, rapt, as I showed him how to separate the whites from the yolks. He turned on the mixer, and he measured and added the ingredients as I read him the recipe, and he taste tested the batter every step of the way (because that’s how you get good at this, right?), and he spooned the batter into the muffin tin. Later, when he ate his cupcake from the top down and asked for a second layer of frosting when the first was all gone, I wanted to say, “My beloved child! You have no idea how much I’ve missed you! We spent four years walking through our days hand in hand and now we have to make some space in our togetherness and I believe with all I’ve got that your life is going to be better because your sister is in it but it’s really hard for me right now and YOU CAN HAVE ALL THE FROSTING!” But instead I just handed him the spatula.

The cupcakes were my idea, by the way, and not his. I bake quite a lot but didn’t have a go-to cupcake recipe. I avoided looking for one online altogether, knowing how many I’d find, and instead I stood quite thoughtfully in front of my cookbook shelf, considering. I wanted something simple and classic. I was willing to put in a little effort, but I dismissed any recipes that insisted on cake flour (we don’t usually have it around) or a different number of egg yolks and whites (yes, there are always ways to use leftovers of either, but again with the new baby – I knew I’d just give any leftover egg to the dog). When I pulled my Fannie Farmer off the shelf and read the recipe for Boston Favorite Cake, I knew I’d found what I wanted right away. That Marion Cunningham. She knew a thing or two.

(A note on the frosting: I used a cream cheese frosting because I almost never want anything else, but a basic buttercream would be good too. Or play around – add some almond or lemon extract, or some citrus zest. Mmm. It might be time for a fourth batch of these babies.)

For the cupcakes:
2 eggs, separated
6 tablespoons/85 grams butter, room temperature
1 cup/200 grams sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1 3/4 cups/245 grams all-purpose or cake flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
2/3 cup milk

For the frosting:
1 8-oz/226 gram package full-fat cream cheese, room temperature
1 stick/113 grams butter, room temperature
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 cups/250 grams powdered sugar

Preheat the oven to 350°F/180°C. Line a muffin tin with cupcake liners (recommended) or generously grease and flour the tin. (This recipe makes an awkward 14 cupcakes. You can either find two small oven-safe bowls and put an additional two cupcake liners in those, or you can grease and flour a ramekin and make a very tiny cake with the extra batter.)

Make sure your mixer bowl is very clean. Using the whisk attachment, beat the egg whites on fairly high speed until they are quite stiff but not dry. Scrape them gently into a medium bowl and set aside.

Switch to the paddle attachment, but don’t worry about cleaning the bowl. Cream the butter for a few seconds and then add the sugar slowly, beating until the mixture is light. Add the egg yolks and the vanilla and beat until well blended.

In a separate bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, and salt. With the mixer on low, add about a third of the flour mixture to the butter/sugar/egg yolks and beat until just incorporated. Add about a third of the milk and beat until blended. Repeat twice with the remaining flour mixture, following each time with a bit of the remaining milk. The batter should be smooth at this point, but be careful not to overblend.

Add about a third of your egg whites to the batter and mix on low until incorporated. Remove the bowl from the mixer and fold in the remaining egg whites by hand with a spatula. You don’t need to be too gentle – you’re not making a soufflé. Fold well enough that the egg whites are thoroughly incorporated but still light and fluffy.

Spoon the batter into the muffin tin and other pans of your choice (see note above), filling each well about halfway. Bake for 15-20 minutes, or until the cupcakes are lightly browned on top and spring back when you touch them. (These consistently take 18-19 minutes in my oven, but I confess that since our move I haven’t confirmed my oven temperature with a thermometer, which I really do recommend.) Cool on a wire rack, in or out of the tin (these don’t seem to suffer from being left in the tin to cool).

Meanwhile, make your frosting. Using the paddle attachment, cream together the butter and cream cheese until fluffy. Beat in the vanilla extract. Add the powdered sugar a bit at a time, beating until smooth and thick.

Wait until the cupcakes are cool to frost. Or frost them as you need them. You’ll have more frosting than you need. The cupcakes keep well at room temperature for about a week in an airtight container or zippered plastic bag, and the frosting keeps for about a week in the fridge, or for quite a long time in the freezer.

I don’t intend to write too much here about about the final weeks of my pregnancy (which were more intense than I expected) or my labor (which was more beautiful than I expected) or our first weeks together as a family of four (delicious, but also something I want to protect). But I’m home with just the baby this weekend, and the day is stretched out before me in a blissful haze of nursing and nuzzling and coffee sipping and probably a misty walk to the bay. I think I’ll have to wait for this sweet fog to dissipate a bit, or at least until some semblance of a nap rhythm emerges, before I return to writing here in earnest (I have so many ideas for this space!) – but I want very much to check in, and also to yoke a few words to these fleeting weeks.

I can’t think of a single thing analagous to bringing a baby into the world, and appropriately, I’ve spent a considerable amount of time in the last five weeks thinking Enormous Thoughts. Did I really grow AN ACTUAL PERSON inside my belly, again? Does my body really make food for her? Are we qualified to usher these tiny exquisite people through this scary and beautiful world for the next twenty years? 

Much of the time, though, I am just here. I hold my babies close, and I cheer on the melting snow, and I watch gulls soar high above the surf before dropping clams onto the rocks below to crack them open. In the evenings, I crack open one rich and malty porter and I lean against my husband’s shoulder and we start another episode of Breaking Bad (and I look down at the sleeping newborn on my lap and whisper to her: dream of mama milk and big brotherly love instead of a suspicious old RV in the desert outside of Albuquerque).

And I eat. Man, there is nothing like pushing a baby out of your body and then feeding that baby with your body to make food taste otherworldly. Here’s just some of what we’ve been eating:

• this pulled pork with ancho, cinnamon, and cocoa, which remains one of the best things I have ever eaten
• these lamb shoulder chops braised in garlicky tomatoes and a bit of white wine
• this cauliflower roasted with thyme and parmesan
• bowl upon bowl (upon bowl) of this oatmeal (I like it with yogurt and half an apple, diced)
• these scones with prunes, caraway, and olive oil
• these blondies (twice!)
• an amazing pecan sourdough boule from Kathya, and many bowls of this popcorn on Sunday nights when we watch David Attenborough documentaries as a family (my mind is still completely blown by what I’ve learned about monotremes), and a not insignificant amount of chocolate sent in the sweetest care packages by friends who understand me
• a freezer full of sturdy stews and casseroles – a true labor of love on the part of my mom and dad, who don’t even eat much meat, but who figured oh so rightly that the sort of dishes that usually grace a church potluck table would also be deeply appealing to a woman who just had a baby and her farmer husband

It’s a delicious, if fairly monochromatic, list. Hearty fare. The right sort of stuff to see us through The Winter That Would Not End. But I’ve been thinking about coaxing spring indoors with these pea shoots, and down at the farm, the greenhouse is filling with seedlings, and the chickens have started laying again, really laying. I’m really excited about fresh food. More importantly, I feel like I’ve made it through, am more or less on the other side of something really hard: leaving our farm, leaving New York, letting go of the pregnancy and birth I had expected, soldiering through a long winter. I don’t know what this spring holds, but I do like these blue skies.

Last night I was looking through photos from the last week or so. There weren’t a whole lot. Most of them were of my son: digging in the dirt floor of the shed at the farm, or shucking oysters with his dad, or building excavator factories with blocks that are three generations old, or licking an ice cream cone here in the bleak midwinter minutes before his first game of pinball. All were exactly the sort of tiny exquisite moments I hope I’ll remember even a tenth of, but this blog isn’t the place for those images.

It’s okay, I thought. IPhone pictures of my coffee and our food it is then! And truly that would have been fine. We all have to eat, after all. And while there’s not an enormous amount of farm fresh food in our kitchen right now, growing good clean food is how we pay the rent. And these days – the bay winds so cold, and the roads so slick, and me so pregnant – see us in the kitchen quite a lot. Sometimes the boys are making gumbo. Sometimes I’m making something with a bit less chopping but equal amounts of belly warming winter joy (over toasted day-old soda bread, with grated Dubliner and an egg over easy and coarse sea salt). Sometimes I am just peeling a banana and wrestling the lid off a jar of peanut butter. The kitchen is where it’s at, you know? And the dearth of outdoor photos this week is as accurate a marker as any of the season we’re in: it has not been a mild winter, and these late pregnancy hormones make me crave a deep hibernation.

But then! More snow! I confess sighing and grumbling when I looked out the bay window last night and saw the frosted street. But this morning I slept – a little late, while the boys ate breakfast – and then I hoisted myself and this babe we’re so close to meeting from the bed, and the day felt fresh. A little later the boy and I headed out with the dog, and we laughed, a lot, and we ate some snow, and I didn’t slip, and when we got home we saw scores of robins in the holly trees.

Will we meet the baby next week? Next month? Will I ever get to wear sandals again? Will I stop feeling guilty about using Netflix as a babysitter while I ignore the dishes and the laundry and just sit? What will we do for school? How hard will it be for my son to make room in his world for a sibling? How hard will it be for me?

This morning, for a while, I let it all go.

I’d like to try.

But! In the meantime! I was delighted when Shari of the art of seeing things asked me to join her and some other wonderful folks in talking about our favorite reads of 2013. My post is up today, if you’d like to read it – and then make yourself some tea, cancel all your commitments, and dig back through this month’s archives. So much good stuff there.

I can’t say for sure but I don’t think this is a rerun of last winter’s long insomnia. What I do know is that last night I was fretful about the baby. Moving late in a pregnancy is hard. I’m struggling, a lot, to surrender to some pretty enormous changes in my prenatal care and in our plans for how and where to welcome this baby.

The deep darkness of the wee small hours doesn’t do one’s fears any favors, of course. I lay there for a long time, panicky, miserable, begging for sleep, before remembering: sit up and be with this wakefulness. And so I did. I was immediately rewarded for that tiny act of surrender when I opened Pandora and this was playing. I snorted aloud before switching to a piano station and pulling The Zuni Cafe Cookbook onto my lap. A little later I slipped from under the down comforter and headed to the fridge for a big glass of milk.

I didn’t find any answers, but eventually a certain kind of peacefulness crept in and dulled the edges of my worry. With blessedly heavy eyelids I turned off the lamp and pulled the comforter back over my shoulders.

I woke a few hours later to the sweet smell of hash browns in the skillet and the sweeter sound of dishes being put away. In the muted light of early morning I felt a little better, which seems to be how morning works. I found my slippers, made my way to the kitchen, hugged my husband, and thought with delight about some things bringing me quite a bit of comfort and joy:

1) Heather of Beauty That Moves just announced her latest online workshop! Heather writes: “Hibernate is a self-paced, four week, online retreat – a place to celebrate the pause that wintertime brings. A place to linger through the dark and quiet, to welcome stillness, and allow time to enjoy home and hearth.” Each week will offer ideas to nourish, gather, refresh, create, and rest. I cannot think of something more appealing. I’ve participated in Heather’s 30 Day Vegan and Whole Food Kitchen courses, and I think what I love most is her gentle, non-dogmatic approach and her heavy focus on self care. This course begins January 13. Lots more details here.

2) Nicole of Gidget Goes Home is running The Motherhood & Jane Austen Book Club in 2014 – a chance to read or reread all six of Jane Austen’s novels though the lens of motherhood. Nicole notes that the novels are “chock full of interesting mothers, mother figures, absent mothers and young women who we imagine may become mothers later. We will discuss these characters, how they affect the plot, how they make us feel as mothers, how they relate to mothers we know, and more.” First up is Pride & Prejudice. I can’t wait.

3) Throughout all of that – and also as soon as I post this – I plan to drink a lot of chai. I’ve made a lot of versions over the years, all delicious, but my current favorite method comes from Jess at Witchin’ in the Kitchen. I like my chai spicy and not too sweet, so I’ve been reducing the honey by a smidge, upping the ginger, crushing cardamom pods, black peppercorns, and a star anise pod to add to the garam masala, and using some cardamom-flavored tea in place of straight black tea. For a decaf version I bet rooibos would be nice! Delicious, gorgeous recipe here.

 I’d love to know what’s bringing you comfort and joy these days.

For real.

To say 2013 has been a wild ride is putting it mildly. It’s been just over a year since we announced our decision to put our Virginia farm on the market, and less than nine months since our move to the Hudson Valley. In many ways they haven’t been easy months, but for a long while we enveloped that stress in a kind of peace. Moves are difficult, we reasoned. Let’s not pretend otherwise, but do let’s try to be patient. Let’s keep digging in this good earth. Let’s have margaritas on the back deck and watch the fireflies. Let’s take the train into the city lots. Let’s make popcorn and start watching Planet Earth, and let’s go out for breakfast because hey! we finally have Saturdays off, and let’s build a sandbox. Let’s make a baby even.

We did all that, and we laughed, quite a lot, but we couldn’t really shake the feeling that some things weren’t getting better. About three months ago we realized: this is not the stress of transition – it’s the stress of a bad fit. And so we started looking, again.

I lived in Virginia for seven years. It would be dishonest to say I felt at home there right away. But love made me stay, and then a bigger kind of love kept us going, gave us the strength to marry, to buy a farm, to build a business, to bring a child into the world, to weather financial uncertainty, and then, to walk away. By the time we did that, Virginia felt very much like home indeed.

Leaving was really hard, and as I’ve said, so was adjusting to our new farm. Our new region, though, felt really good right away. Partly it was moving to a part of a the country so dense with resources. The Hudson Valley is beautiful, for one: I took to its rivers and its glaciated ridges and its mossy forests zigzagged with old stone walls with a child’s sense of wonder and delight and freedom, my own child at my side on every expedition. (Three turns out to be a pretty fantastic age for daytrips.) And so many people! Some have called the area home forever. Others came to be near New York City, and still others left the city behind – but not too far behind. They still needed to buy the things they knew, and to earn a living from making the things they knew, and to sing their songs and fill their bellies and teach their children. Which meant: Diners! Bagels! Playgrounds! Festivals! Farm markets! Creative approaches to school!

I loved it. I loved all that. Our immediate situation was not really working, but more broadly, I was settling right in. Until we moved to New York, I didn’t realize how much I missed the Northeast. And in truth, for all its riches, it’s not that it’s more special than anywhere else. It’s that I grew up there. So even as things were really very hard, I was steadied by the familiar.

It’s a funny thing, the call of home. Sometimes, when I’m feeling very out of place, it’s a high and lonesome sound, a plaintive cry I can’t soothe. But more often, it’s a lullaby. It’s the thing that takes my fears and worries and eases them back into place among all the good and hard that I am living.

It has been a very strange year: unsettled, uncertain. My mind has often been with the families I grew close to during my years in New York City. Many of them were quite expert at dealing with the chronic ache of insecure housing. They said too many goodbyes to dear friends and neighbors. They dealt with the incredible red tape of transferring school records. They crowded in with relatives or friends where it was a challenge to find a pillow to call their own, let alone the quiet to take a centering breath. Or they navigated the city’s complex shelter system, where most often they were crammed into tiny apartments and where dozens of people made rules for them about when and where and what they were permitted to eat, and about where and how they could spend their time, and about who they were allowed to welcome. The shelters provide a place to sleep, and the best of them have patient and respectful staff, but none of them are easy, peaceful places to live.

What advice would the families have for me, I’ve wondered? I think they’d remind me that it’s okay to feel angry and sad. I think they’d remind me that you do get through stuff. I think they’d remind me not to go it alone – to call my mom, to have a meal with a friend, to laugh with my kid. I think they’d remind me that at some point the dust begins to settle.

Will I miss the Hudson Valley? Badly. I will miss our long drives, fertile farmland spilling away from the open road in every direction. I will miss the dairy we drove to every three or four days – the way the new calves stretched their necks as I scratched their jaws, the no-nonsense stare of the Jerseys as they grazed, the clink of the glass jars as I wedged them between the carseat and a bag of books. I will miss mornings with a kindred spirit, frying bacon or chopping tomatoes or rendering lard as our boys squabbled and played and sorted their way to sweet companionship, and our afternoons too, foraging wild blueberries or fording creeks or talking about our midwives. I will miss living so near to one of my oldest dearest friends, and the way she’d arrive on a Friday after work with ice cream and freshly roasted coffee and (before I got pregnant) my favorite porter. I will miss the deep joy of living near my aunt and uncle and cousins – the sweet company of people who have known me all my nearly 36 years, and the reassuring rightness of seeing my boy get to know his own cousins. I will miss my kind and wise midwife, and the plans we were making to welcome this baby. I will miss cider donuts and real New York bagels. I will miss walking across the back deck and down the steps and across the backyard to pick eggplants for dinner or sun golds for now. I will miss running out of eggs and wrapping myself in a scarf even as I’m already halfway to the chicken coop.

That last one is so big. I didn’t grow up on a farm, and for close to ten years before meeting my husband I was a very content city gal. But we’ve lived on farms our whole life together. And all those even rows and freshly tilled fields and wide open spaces and cedar windbreaks and border streams became, well, how I parent. When we were grumpy from too much time inside, there was no searching for keys, for shoes, for diaper bags, for pants even! There was only opening the door and unfolding into the wide and busy world out there. When he was a baby I laid a quilt beneath the giant sycamore just east of the house, where he napped (a little) and nursed (a lot) and grabbed fistfuls of grass and clover. As he became more mobile we’d collect eggs, or look for frogs and snakes in the creek, or visit his dad and the crew as they seeded carrots or snipped garlic or dug potatoes. For someone who grew up in the suburbs, and then lived all those city years, never craving escape, the power of those fields and woods to shift our perspective and to ease open those tired and lonely hours of new motherhood was startling and deeply soothing.

And now, for the first time in eight years, we are living off-farm. When we were searching for a better spot we cast a pretty wide net, looking as far afield as Oregon and Minnesota and Georgia. Many farms didn’t offer housing – what a shift from something that had come to seem part and parcel of my definition of home. How could I give that up? It was too much.

But you know? We’ve been here a week, and already I’m reminded that a farm is hardly the only sweet environment in which to raise a happy inquisitive child, to create meals and messes and connection in the kitchen, to find peace. It’s hardly the only place to make a home.

For all its gifts, a farm can be a lonely place for someone like me. For the most part, in these last eight years, I’ve staved off the worst of it by getting out there in the middle of things – exploring with my son, hanging out with our crew, hauling the harvest back home to the kitchen – and by knowing when to get off the farm too. But it was always with me, that loneliness.

Last weekend I drove to our new town from the mountains of Western North Carolina, where I’d spent some sweet days with my family before the move. It was a long drive for a very pregnant woman and a 4-year old, but gorgeous too – the smoky blue ridges of Appalachia and then gently rolling farmland, punctuated by small towns and big cities, and then at last the broad coastal plain of our new home. There is so much to learn and say about the sea so near, and about the new farm, fifteen minutes south of our little green house. But what struck me most as night fell last Saturday, our new address at long last looming close on the GPS, was commerce, density, stoplights. It could not have felt more different from the rural expanses I have called home for so many years. But what I felt was certainly not loss. It was a giddy good cheer. Has all the open space and abundant unspoiled nature and quiet of the last near-decade profoundly impacted my parenting and been deeply restorative? Yes. Have I felt it in my bones? Yes. And do I madly love a human landscape? I do, I do, I do! Here, there are neighbors raking their yards and calling out, “Welcome to the neighborhood!” There is a 7-Eleven a mile and a half up the street, a sweet blessing indeed those first three mornings here, when I rose early for coffee and writing and searched the mountains of boxes in vain for my own beans. There are Christmas lights twinkling sleepily at me and the dog as we head to the bay for a walk every morning after my husband and son wake. I know that any given day might hold some leaf pile jumping (a brand new experience for our little guy – one does not do much raking on a farm), or a trip to the library (one mile away!!!!), or a second and perhaps third visit to the beach, or a visit to see Dad at the new farm. It’s all so close at hand.

Here’s to home.

I do miss things. I miss the crackle of the woodstove, and the pile of shoes drying out next to it, and the way my toddler learned to swing a hatchet at the woodpile under the watchful and loving tutelage of his father. I miss the dappled canopy of the walnut trees behind our house. I miss autumn potlucks, all kabocha squash and braised pork and cold beers. I miss the call of my goats from under the majestic old oak that stood sentinel on the hill, nodding its quiet reassurance north to where I was hanging laundry behind the house and west to the crew snipping winter squash from their vines. I miss the goats’ winter coats too, less shiny than their summer sheen and thick almost overnight with a cashmere undercoat. I miss the carpet of leaves and pine needles crunching underfoot on long walks through our woods with my child, and the moss and dirt under his fingernails as he plunged into the shallow creek in gleeful disregard of the growing chill. I miss the color of wild persimmons against an October sky, and our fire pit, and our fall carrots. I wonder how many leaves our young sugar maple, the one we planted up near the mailbox, put out this year.

But it is also nigh on impossible to ignore fall up here in the Hudson Valley. It crept along quietly for awhile. Way back in early August I drove north along the Taconic to Rensselaer County and had to squint to be sure I was really seeing a few red leaves. One day in September I went to buy some corn for dinner at our local orchard’s farm store and half gallons of their first cider, pressed the night before, beckoned from an icy bin. When I drive to pick up my son from his preschool on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, I am often stopping behind elementary school buses, and kids hop to the pavement under slow-motion showers of ochre leaves. Most mornings call for jeans and a sweater, but by noon we can still trade our slippers for sandals. It won’t be long, though, before we dig through the closets for our boots and winter hats.

But I’m in no rush. Last winter was extremely hard. And there’s no getting around it – the one that’s coming promises to be pretty intense as well (I’m working on another post about it all; I’ll share it as soon as I can). And so I’d like to just hit pause for a spell, thank you very much. I’d like to curl like a cat in the warm lap of these golden afternoons. I’d like to kick through the leaves with my son. I’d like to sip my cider and scratch my head as I figure out how to make his requested pink furry mouse costume with a complete lack of sewing skills. I’d like to eat more cider donuts.

I will even take a month of todays. It was cold and wet. We slurped soup in a diner while, back home, the steady rain cleaved the gravel driveway into tiny canyons. We dried off while we bought our groceries and when we pushed the cart to the car the rain had tapered off to a sweet drizzle, but in the 90 seconds it took to return the cart something shifted up in the clouds. I was soaked through to my skin when I climbed back in the car. We sat in the parking lot for a while, chuckling and waiting for the rain to let up enough to drive home.

Later he woke from his nap and climbed onto the bed where I sat writing. I closed my computer and I put my empty mug on the windowsill. He climbed into my lap and rested his head against my growing belly. I grinned in unspeakable delight to realize my two children were nearly cheek to cheek, and the littlest one even gave a swift thump, but I didn’t say a word. These are the last months when he doesn’t have to share me.

Then we trudged through tall wet grass to the basement for a butternut squash, and over to the barn for some onions and garlic. He curled up on the couch to watch some excavator videos (“With a grapple, Mom, but no operator, okay?”). I made this soup. It is like a fresh pot of coffee, or a handwritten letter, or the Amélie soundtrack, which is to say: always perfect.

Winter Squash Soup with Curry and Coconut Milk
adapted from Better Homes and Gardens

You can use almost any kind of winter squash here – butternut, kabocha, red kuri, hubbard, anything sweet and tender. I really like the little kick this soup gets from the chili sauce, but you can certainly leave it out if you like. If you’re making this early in the fall from local squash, there’s a chance your squash hasn’t fully cured yet. It will still work, but the sugars won’t be as concentrated, so you might want to add another tablespoon or two of sweetener – taste before serving and adjust as needed. Finally, if you have a low- or no-salt curry powder, you’ll need to salt this soup. Taste just before serving and add additional salt as needed.

1 medium or large onion, chopped
1-4 cloves garlic (depending on your feelings about garlic), minced
1 tablespoon curry powder
1 winter squash, about 2 pounds, peeled and cut into 1-inch cubes
1 14-oz can unsweetened coconut milk
2 cups chicken or vegetable broth
1 tablespoon brown sugar, whole cane sugar, or maple syrup
1 tablespoon fish sauce or soy sauce
1 teaspoon Asian chili sauce (like Sriracha) (optional but recommended)
1/2 cup red lentils (optional; these give the soup a nice protein boost and cook quickly, but I often leave them out)

Warm a couple tablespoons of olive oil, coconut oil, or the fat of your choice in a Dutch oven over medium heat. Add the onions and saute until they begin to soften, about five minutes. Add the garlic and cook another one to two minutes. Add the curry powder and saute a minute more.

Add the squash, the coconut milk, the broth, the sugar, the fish or soy sauce, the chili sauce, and the lentils if using. Bring to a boil, reduce to a simmer, cover, and cook until the squash is soft, about 30-40 minutes.

Puree the soup until it’s smooth and velvety. An immersion blender makes this easy (and safe!), but you can also puree the soup in batches in a food processor or blender – be careful! Or you can use a potato masher; the soup won’t be quite as smooth but will still taste delicious. Taste for salt and sweetness and adjust if necessary. Ladle the soup into big bowls, top with a dollop of plain yogurt or sour cream or a squeeze of lime juice, and serve with lots of bread!

(Want to make this in the slow cooker? Easy peasy. I actually wrote about this soup before. This soup also cooks up beautifully ˗ and fast! ˗ in an electric pressure cooker/Instant Pot. Just use the saute function to saute the onions in the oil for a few minutes, until they begin to soften, and then add the minced garlic and curry powder and saute for another minute or two. Add the rest of the ingredients and give everything a good stir, cover, and cook for five minutes at high pressure. Release the pressure manually (natural release is also okay if you forget), puree, and eat!)

Today, I’m less interested in food for thought and more interested in sitting a spell. You too?

Read what Katrina Kennison has to say about the last Saturday afternoon in September.

Listen to Carrie Rodriquez and Chip Taylor sing “Big Moon Shining” and feel yourself exhale.

Linger a while over at habit. I’m a guest over there again, starting today and through October.

Also:

“Camas Lilies”

Consider the liles of the field,
the blue banks of camas opening
into acres of sky along the road.
Would the longing to lie down
and be washed by that beauty
abate if you knew their usefulness,
how the natives ground their bulbs
for flour, how the settlers’ hogs
uprooted them, grunting in gleeful
oblivion as the flowers fell?
And you—what of your rushed
and useful life? Imagine setting it all down—
papers, plans, appointments, everything—
leaving only a note: “Gone
to the fields to be lovely. Be back
when I’m through with blooming.”
Even now, unneeded and uneaten,
the camas lilies gaze out above the grass
from their tender blue eyes.
Even in sleep your life will shine.
Make no mistake. Of course
your work will always matter.
Yet Solomon in all his glory
was not arrayed like one of these.

Lyn Ungar
Blessing the Bread: Meditations

Yes, so, kind of ridiculous to try passing this off as another three things post when most people over the age of about six can clearly count (at least) 20 items here. But hey, I’m talking about tomatoes and corn and peaches! All is forgiven? Moving on.

1) Delicious summer food we’ve made and gobbled down recently:

Fresh corn cakes from David Lebovitz. We topped them with a fresh corn and tomato salad (see below), chèvre, and eggs over easy. Leftovers kept well in the fridge and were delicious reheated in the toaster oven.

Bangain bharta. This is a traditional Punjabi dish made with charred eggplant, tomatoes, and lots of good spices, and I’m putting it in our rotation until there are no more tomatoes and eggplant. So good. We ate it over brown rice and topped with a dollop of plain yogurt and scooped it all up with Camille’s naan, which we made with lard we’d rendered from our own pastured pigs. If you eat and have access to real lard, I heartily recommend that substitution. This particular version was shared with us by a CSA member a couple years ago.

Pasta with let-my-eggplant-go-free! purée from Francis Lam. (Thanks, Molly!) One of those awesome kitchen alchemy recipes, where simple ingredients combine and go BOOM! I would only like to say that after about 12 years of trying, I can say with certainty that I really, really, really don’t like whole wheat pasta. I think I’m going to stop trying. I suggest white pasta here, which, for flavor and texture reasons, will really let this sauce sing. Might even make my own next time.

Fresh corn and tomato salad. No real recipe here, and it changes some every time we make it, which is a couple times a week at least. Shave the kernels off an ear of corn, chop a couple hefty handfuls of cherry tomatoes, chiffonade some basil, squeeze in some lime juice, salt to taste. Scale up as necessary. I love it on top of brown rice and black beans (try Molly’s quick black beans with cumin and oregano) and topped with a fried egg, or on top of those fresh corn cakes above, or straight from the bowl. I bet it would be good in a tortilla soup too.

Cream of tomato soup. I had the Campbell’s stuff often enough as a child, usually with grilled cheese, and while I didn’t have to force it down, I didn’t really understand the fuss. Now that I make my own I sure do. I love Marion Cunningham’s recipe in The Fannie Farmer Cookbook. The ingredient list is quite short so the quality of the tomatoes matters enormously. If you’re using fresh tomatoes, make sure they are dead ripe, and make sure you love how they taste raw. You can also fix a slightly lackluster tomato soup with a big spoonful of tomato paste. Canned tomatoes are also an excellent choice here. I’ve seen lots of versions out there made with stock, which sounds good too and would be perhaps a little less rich than the one we make. I’m also tempted to try a version with roasted tomatoes.

One-pan pasta from Martha Stewart. I followed this recipe nearly exactly (just subbed our homemade chicken bone broth for half the water) and while it was delicious – I adored the sauce that forms from the tomato juices and pasta starch – next time I will use all broth and will double or even triple the tomatoes. Edited to add: I can’t wait to try the farro verion of this from Smitten Kitchen. Could something this tasty and easy also be a bit more nutrient-dense?

2) Delicious summer food I love but have somehow not yet made this year:

Cultured salsa from Nourishing Traditions. I can’t even begin to explain how good this is. Get yourself some whey (I just strain it from full-fat plain yogurt) and hie thee to your kitchen! It should last for ages in your fridge only it won’t because you will eat it all in two days, and that’s if you don’t have company.

Braised okra with cherry tomatoes, which I wrote about last week.

Yotam Ottolenghi’s sweet corn polenta with eggplant sauce. Polenta made with fresh corn! It’s a little labor intensive but very straightforward. And the eggplant and tomato sauce is good on everything. I put it in a savory galette once with some chèvre and should really do that again.

Tomato and cheddar pie. This one requires a little planning: the biscuit dough for the crust needs to chill for an hour, and the tomatoes need to drain for 30 minutes.  But otherwise it comes together quite easily. The crust is quite forgiving. Once I was a little short on flour, and the dough seemed a sticky and hopeless mess as I eased it into the pie pan.  But it baked up beautifully, and didn’t get soggy even after a day in the fridge. And seriously: tomatoes, mayonnaise, cheese, biscuit crust? Need I say more?

Tomato cobbler with blue cheese biscuits from Joy the Baker. Everything about this is amazing. The flavors are assertive but perfectly balanced – I recommend all spices and seasonings in the called-for quantities.

Peperonata. Sweet peppers cooked long and slow, with some capers, red wine vinegar, and herbs tossed in at the end. This is ostensibly good with many things – I imagine it would taste great alongside almost any kind of meat, on crostini with some soft tangy cheese, mixed into hot or cold pasta, on top of polenta, maybe folded into a frittata – but I wouldn’t know because we always eat it straight out of the skillet.

Pomodori al forno from Molly Wizenberg. You cook roma tomatoes low and slow and then marinate them with garlic, parsley, and olive oil, before serving them with goat cheese and sliced baguette. This stuff would make you very popular at a brunch and would also make a very fine (and messy!) start to a summer dinner party, but again, I’m only guessing, because I pretty much eat this standing at the counter with the bowl of tomatoes, a hunk of bread, a tub of cheese, and a knife.

Gordon’s Cup, also from Molly. Gin! Lime! Cucumber! Salt! Do it!

Peach pie. I do make a mean pie. ‘Tis the season!

3) Delicious summer food I have never made (so please share your recipes with me!):

Tomato jam

Moussaka

Tomato sauce for putting up. I’m happy to freeze or can. I make sauces from canned and fresh tomatoes all the time, but I’ve never done it in storage quantities. Maybe I should just make more, and freeze it, but I still feel on the lookout for something really worth all that peeling and seeding.

Ketchup

Corn ice cream!

And that’s a wrap.

What about you? What are you eating these days? And can you help me with that last section?

Okra/Abelmoschus esculentus Moench. Virginia, August 2012.

My husband says I can get nostalgic about a paperclip, and he’s not far off. Something I’ve been missing like the dickens this summer? Okra. Oh man. It was a star crop for us at our old farm. I never ate it growing up except under great duress, but seven years on Virginia farms turned me into a card carrying okraphile. I guess there are northern varieties (farm and garden friends, please chime in and tell me what they are!!), but we don’t currently grow them at this farm. My husband tells me he’s been seeing some at market – it’s reasonable to ask him to bring me home five pounds next week, don’t you think?

The rest of this post is another that first appeared on our farm blog – hence the references to our being Southern farmers and to a time and place when we grew lots of this little emerald wonder. The recipe at the bottom, for braised okra with cherry tomatoes, is what I would be making this very second if I still had a 200-foot block of okra (or even just a plant or two) a short walk away. It’s dead easy and, more to the point, one of my very favorite things to eat ever. The original post also included recipes for the other things I love to make with okra: lacto-fermented okra pickles, our favorite fried okra, and my husband’s gumbo. I’ll probably bring them on over here too, soon enough.

(Insert Wayne’ World Scooby Doo ending sound here. Boom! It’s two years ago, and you’re sitting on our back porch in Virginia sipping a beer while I finish cooking dinner.)

Confession: we are vegetable farmers, and we are Southern, and until recently I just didn’t like okra very much.  It’s not that I found it offensive exactly. I was always happy enough to eat it in my husband’s gumbo, where, in his deft hands and alongside a rich roux and some smoky spices, its infamous slime is somehow alchemized into a velvety sauce. In a gumbo the okra itself almost disappears, which makes it quite easy to tolerate.  I also tried frying it, over and over again.  It was always okay.  It was certainly pretty to look at, and I felt I must be doing my body a favor by eating it, even if I had to choke it down.  I always felt virtuous eating okra, but I never had very much fun.

With apologies to the many awesome lunch ladies I have known, I am pretty sure the cafeteria at South Columbia Elementary School in Martinez, Georgia, circa 1984, is to blame. I remember dreary piles of the stuff, breaded and steamed and slumping forlornly, almost apologetically, in its compartment of the brownish melamine lunch tray. I looked at its dusty breading and its drab interior, utterly unconvinced, and occasionally gave it a nudge with my fork.  It yielded immediately, like pudding, and slid right back off the fork.  We got off on the wrong foot, okra and me, and I’m afraid now that I wasted more than twenty-five years holding a grudge.

Because this summer?  I’m on an okra bender.  I’m not sure what changed for me, exactly. We’re growing okra again after a hiatus of several years; perhaps I see those gorgeous plants with their flowers like delicate ivory trumpets and I just want to do right by them.  Maybe something clicked for me when my husband said, “I love okra because it’s the most vegetable-y of our vegetables.”  He’s right: when you cook it right, okra’s flavor is green and clean and bright, the very essence of fresh.  Maybe it’s because now, as a mother, I don’t want to waste any more time being virtuous.  What I want is joy at the table, a strong body and a curious mind and an open heart, a rich family life. I swear I’m finding all that in okra.

Some quick notes, and then a recipe.

Storing okra: Keep your okra in a plastic or paper bag in the fridge, unwashed, and use it within a few days.

Using okra: Please don’t bread it and then steam it. You could steam it very gently, just till bright green and still with some snap to it, and then eat it warm, drizzled with butter and a squeeze of lemon juice, or chilled, dressed with a bright vinaigrette.  Try it breaded and fried, braised, pickled, skewered and grilled, in stews, in curries, in place of squash or zucchini in ratatouille.

A word about okra slime: In Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone, Deborah Madison writes, “Okra is slimy, and rather than try to ignore this fact, perhaps it’s best just to admit that’s how things are.” Maybe that’s what changed for me this summer.  I’m not trying to wish the slime away anymore.  Instead, I’ve learned how to make it work in a dish’s favor.  In our favorite fried okra, it binds with a cornmeal and parmesan coating to create a perfect golden crust.  In our okra and tomato braise, it thickens the juices of burst cherry tomatoes and makes the most lovely sauce.  And of course it’s essential for thickening up gumbo.  Maybe thinking about it this way will help you, too.

Braised Okra with Cherry Tomatoes
(serves 4-6, unless you eat like we do, in which case: serves 2)

This recipe comes to us from our friend and former CSA host Noell. Don’t be fooled by its apparent plainness: this belongs in everyone’s summer arsenal.  It’s amazing eaten straight from the skillet, and pretty darn good eaten straight from the fridge as well.  It’s wonderful on top of quinoa and other grains, and it makes a great wrap or burrito filling.  Every time I take a bite I grin.

Quantities are approximate.  Use roughly equal amounts of okra and cherry tomatoes, and garlic to taste.

1 lb okra
1 lb cherry tomatoes
3-4 cloves garlic (or to taste), chopped
olive oil, salt & pepper

Warm a few tablespoons olive oil in a large skillet over medium-high heat.  Meanwhile, trim off the okra stems and then slice in half lengthwise, or slice into 1/4-inch rounds.  When the skillet is ready, add the okra and the chopped garlic.  Saute for about 10 minutes, flipping occasionally, until the okra begins to brown.  Add the cherry tomatoes, and salt and pepper to taste, and cover.  Braise 5-10 minutes, checking every few minutes.  The dish is done when most of the cherry tomatoes have burst.

There’s something restorative about waking up in a gabled room, particularly if that’s not where you usually wake up. On Saturday I woke a little before 7 to rustling woods, sunshine spilling through the small window at my feet, and the smiling brown eyes of my three-year old, who was standing next to the fairly tall bed where I’d spent the night. I grinned back at him. “Let’s eat something,” he said. So I climbed from under the heavy quilt and together we padded down the creaky stairs. I’d stayed up past 1 catching up with an old friend who was moving halfway across the country the next morning, but there was something about that sloped roof – it was the best nearly-six hours of sleep I’d gotten in months.

I made some coffee and poured the boy a bowl of cereal, and together we sat in a comfortable silence on the couch, breezes blowing the lace curtains across our shoulders. If anyone out there has a three-year old you will especially appreciate the sweetness of those quiet moments. He asked the occasional question – “Did you get a good night’s sleep, Mama?” “My footie pajamas are getting kind of small, huh?” – but mainly he stretched out with one foot on my lap and one foot on of the back of the couch and the cereal (no milk) on his belly, munching away.

A little later later the first of the others appeared in the kitchen. She poured herself a cup of coffee and together we three made our way down the back porck steps and across the yard. We paused to let the chickens out before winding on through dewy grass and gnarled apple trees, already heavy with green fruit, to the river. We’d walked the same path the night before, after a day of steady heavy rains, and found the river rushing and brown and clawing at its banks. This morning it was still fast and high, but a bit of pebbly beach was visible, and the water was clear. We sipped our coffee, and talked a bit, of crayfish and road trips and first gardens, and the boy threw sticks and stones into the wild current.

Later it was just me and the boy again. I sighed a little, feeling deeply at peace and missing our old farm. But mainly I rolled up my pants and kicked off my sandals and talked with my boy. I loaded his hands with rocks, and pointed out a slug making its way down a sycamore trunk, and tried skipping a few stones across the rapids. We stayed there an hour at least, nothing wrong in the world, not that morning. I knew it and hugged it to my chest to remember.

Later still, when three people and their luggage and a cheerful Golden Retriever had piled into one car, and we into another, and we had all pulled away from that red house in the woods, I thought about it all – running wild through a May thunderstorm in the middle of the Pacific fifteen years ago, drinking tea and dreaming big in Kyoto and Vancouver and Boston and New York and Portsmouth, that New Year’s Eve when we opened our champagne with a hammer in my parents’ driveway, that balmy May Sunday when she married us under the ash tree in front of 200 friends and family on hay bales, the graduations and jobs and relationships we’ve celebrated, the Big Decisions we’ve mulled over long distance, years too out of touch, years that brought us back together – I thought about it all, just enough to remember my own bigger picture, and I drove.

(joining Amanda at The Habit of Being)

Tara mentioned making fridge pickles from a recipe I posted on our farm blog a couple summers ago, and that got me to thinking it makes sense to migrate some of those recipes over here, to this blog that’s not a food blog.

I blogged for our farm, sporadically but earnestly, for four years, and there’s a lot of history there. I’m still not quite sure what to do with it all – it really doesn’t make sense to continue paying for the site. The land that we farmed is becoming something else. We’re not quite sure what, yet, but our story there is (nearly) over. On the other hand: it’s our story! I’m not sure what I want to do with all those pictures and words.

These pickles are part of that story. When it comes to putting food by, what I am is a master dabbler. Sure, I know a heck of a lot more than I did in my city days. I make jam every once in a while, but I freeze it every time. I am always happier when I can dig into lard I made from the fatback of our own pigs instead of reaching for supermarket butter. I do know how to make bacon and yogurt but I only do it sometimes. I think I am fondest of lacto-fermenting vegetables in small batches – it’s quick and easy and delicious and yay for living foods! But beyond freezing bone broth and freezer-friendly produce, none of this is an integral part of our kitchen year.

It’s not that I lack for excellent organic produce (umm…), and it’s not that I lack for inspiration. My kitchen bookshelves are really something to behold, and there are so many great online resources. There are questions of time, of priorities, of honestly assessing how much you can fit into a day, of choosing between sterilizing jars and snuggling up on the couch for another round of George and Martha. But the real stumbling block, for me? I am a big honking extrovert. I play very well with others and get pretty lonesome standing all alone at the stove. I need a class – and, dare I say, homework. I need to blanch the peaches while a mama friend gets the jars ready and our boys stir in the sugar. I need people.

I actually have a lard rendering date next Tuesday! That makes me smile so much I think I might march on down to the old milk room in the lower barn to see if there are any returned cucumbers from yesterday’s market. Cucumbers fresh off the vine are ideal, of course, but the point here is to make something delicious instead of letting something waste. And these fridge pickles? They do the trick.

As I said in the original post on our farm blog, these are a great beginner pickle for the curious-but-intimidated, but they’re also a really tasty way to work through a glut of cucumbers when you don’t have the time or the inclination to can. They are always good.

Fridge Pickles
adapted from Donalyn Ketchum

Crunchy, garlicky, and just sour enough, we can’t stop reaching for these. Pour a simple brine of water, vinegar, and salt over cucumbers, garlic, and herbs. Leave the jars alone for a few days … and voila! Pickles! They aren’t canned, so they need to be stored in the fridge. They’ll keep at least a couple months in there – if they last that long. Makes 6 pints or 3 quarts.

For the brine:
2 quarts water
1 cup white vinegar or apple cider vinegar
1/2 cup canning or pickling salt (kosher salt is also fine, but may result in cloudier pickle brine)

For the pickles:
Cucumbers, enough to fit snugly into your jars, washed well and sliced into spears
Garlic, 1-2 cloves per pint jar or 2-3 cloves per quart jar, smashed and peeled
Herbs (dill is classic; we also love thyme), 1-2 sprigs per pint jar or 2-4 sprigs per quart jar, rinsed well

Clean your jars thoroughly with soap and water. They do not need to be sterilized.

Combine all brine ingredients in a large pot and bring to a boil. Stir occasionally to be sure the salt dissolves completely. While the mixture is coming to a boil, prepare the rest of the ingredients.

Place a smashed garlic clove or two in the bottom of each jar. Add the sprigs of your chosen herb.

Fill the jar the rest of the way with cucumber spears. Really cram them in there – otherwise some spears will float above the brine when you add it, and this can lead to premature spoilage.

Add another smashed garlic clove to each jar – wedge it down between some cucumber spears so it won’t float when you add the brine.

Pour the simmering brine over the vegetables, being sure they are completely submerged. If your brine isn’t simmering, bring it back to a simmer before pouring it over the vegetables.

Put a lid on each jar.

Leave at room temperature for 2-3 days (less time when the weather is very hot, more when it’s cold) and then, if you can stand it, put them in the fridge for an additional 1-2 weeks.

We usually break into the first jar right away but give the rest of the jars the additional slow fridge fermentation before eating them.

Black-eyed Susan/Rudbeckia hirta. New York, July 2013.

On Sunday we mowed the back lawn. It’s a gently sloping patch, roughly triangular, less than a quarter acre in size, limned by our house, a large block of tomatoes, peppers, and eggplant, and a very old stone wall spilling through a tangle of poison ivy, catnip, and multiflora rose into the marshland I have to come to love.

We’d ignored the mower for a month at least in favor of things like slow father-son oil changes, dinner on the deck, parenting thises-and-thats, and general weekend puttering. (We met seven years ago almost exactly. This is the first time in our life together that we’ve had Saturdays like people mean when they talk about Saturdays. We have taken to puttering like you don’t even know.)

And so when those mower blades tamed who knows how many kinds of grasses and sedges, they also took down cheerful shocks of black-eyed Susans, hundreds and hundreds of red clover heads, regal stands of Queen Anne’s lace. Knapweed, fleabane, cinquefoil, white clover, yarrow, chicory, Carolina horsenettle. So many more I don’t know yet.

I ran out and picked a fat bouquet and stuffed it in a green glass pitcher and then leaned on the deck railing, frowning a little. I do prefer this midsummer jungle to the neat little windrows the mower left behind.

But then again.

A tiny storm of seeds and insects billowed behind the mower as the grasses and flowers fell, and the barn swallows began to swoop, ever opportunistic and efficient. It was hard to stay sad, smelling that fresh cut grass. I lifted my chin from my palms and went back down to the lawn and took the clothes off the line. I buried my face in the pillowcases and t-shirts like I do every time, never not grateful for the way they smell like beach towels and bathing suits draped to dry on beach chairs in the summer sun in Cape May when I was 12.

Volunteer sunflowers are unfurling below the birdfeeder. The cherry tomato plants are teeming with ripe fruit, enough to sell out of 200 half pints at market and still have my fill any time I fancy. I’m putting them in a simple corn and tomato salad, and on top of pizza, and I should roast and freeze a mess of them, but mainly I just want to stuff my face.

Which is all to say: all those flowers were going to die soon anyway, weren’t they? With or without my moping. I am happy to be here, now.

I read this Motherese post this morning with great interest. In it, Kristen weighs in gently on the whole “leaning in” debate, speaking a bit about work/life balance and more about her own ambivalence toward workplace advancement. It really resonated – with my own history and passions, and with where I’m at on this issue right now.

Like Kristen, a high-powered career never appealed to me. After college, I worked in a number of different family support and education capacities: first with a program that took American high school students on service learning trips abroad, and then with an early childhood literacy program and an adult GED program, both through AmeriCorps. After that I worked a brief stint as a preschool teacher before moving to New York City to work with an amazing small anti-poverty organization called Fourth World Movement. While I found all those jobs satisfying and meaningful, it was in New York that I felt most truly in my element: grateful every day to be surrounded by good people with a common ethos, challenged in intense but healthy ways to reconsider what I thought I understood about poverty, and welcome and necessary despite my own shortcomings.

When I first came to farming, I felt a real loneliness. My bosses and coworkers were lovely people. I loved the ache in my forearms, the tingle of sunburn on my shoulders and in the small of my back, and the faint semi-permanent black filigree on my hands familiar to anyone who has picked as many tomatoes as I did that summer.  I felt strong, and healthy. But if I had to choose between a lifetime supply of dead ripe organic Cherokee Purple tomatoes and world where we all tried our damnedest to exclude and judge less and love a whole lot more – I’d choose love every time. I really, really missed my people in New York.

But I was also in love with a farmer, and so I kept learning how to troubleshoot irrigation headaches, and how to tie a Florida weave, and how to to judge the ripeness of an eggplant. The next year I worked on a pastured livestock farm, where I learned to walk down a steep incline with a massive cedar fence post balanced on my shoulders, and that the best defense against poison ivy was to COVER YOURSELF UP FOR PETE’S SAKE!. I got pretty good at eviscerating chickens, and I can still tell you why oxtail has so much more flavor than a filet mignon, and I can also tell you it is totally possible to get a bruised rib from a Katahdin ewe.

It was near the end of that season that we decided to get married. And – despite many years of declaring I would never own a business and never be anyone’s boss – the next step seemed a natural one at the time: I became business partners with my husband. We continued operating his farm on leased land for one more season before buying our own acreage and moving four hours south the following winter to build our own farm from scratch.

I was a reluctant farm owner, and I want to be frank and say there were many times that keeping our business afloat felt like nothing more than sheer survival. We were constantly triaging expenses that all seemed equally necessary, and it was an uphill slog for us to earn a living wage from full time farming in an area where the local food scene was still young. But. But! I was also a necessary part of something much bigger than myself again – our farm itself was a living thing, with a rotating roster of crops and crew who kept life delicious and interesting, and developing relationships with our market customers and CSA members was a deep joy. I found ways to use my natural inclination toward recording and storytelling in the service of our farm; the stories and recipes on our farm blog were vital in explaining to new customers who we were and in encouraging current customers to stick with us. And when our son was born – bringing with him a whole new set of questions about responsibility and contentment and work – the fact that we were running our own business meant, in some ways, that we didn’t have to ask those hard questions about whether I would stay home with him or not. This is not to say it was easy. We couldn’t afford much childcare, and I struggled enormously to be as present as I wanted to be for both our son and our farm. But we did manage.

This post is not titled What I Learned About Running a Business with Your Mate, and it’s not titled What I Learned About Starting a Farm – although I sure as heck do have more than a few thoughts on both subjects. No, what I’m getting at today is that it seems limiting to talk about whether we should be leaning in or checking out or doing right by the women who came before us. For me, right now, those just aren’t helpful questions. What I need and what I can manage are always changing. I thought I knew for sure that I didn’t want to have the power and responsibility of running a business, but I figured it out, and right now I really miss it. I also thought I knew for sure that I wouldn’t be a stay-at-home mom; my own parents both worked full-time throughout my insanely happy childhood, and my dearest friends and coworkers in New York had jobs they loved and kids they adored, and that’s how I thought I’d do. And then my son was born, and all I knew for sure anymore was holding him, and the shape of our life at that point meant I could figure it out slowly. And these sweet first years of long walks and waiting for the wild blackberries to ripen and collecting eggs and getting really very muddy have been such a gift. But he’s bigger now, and we don’t have a farm anymore, and that old ache – to be a part of something bigger, something collaborative and meaningful – is back. We’ll see where it leads.

When Sylvia of Artsy Ants posted her summer reading list a few days ago, my heart went into full-on carnival mode. Or maybe county fair mode? I’m talking lights, bells, cotton candy, Whac-A-Mole, carousel horses and giant Holsteins, demolition derbies and dripping ice cream cones on hot summer nights with nowhere else to be. I guess what I’m saying is I felt happy. Things have been Oh So Serious around here. Happy sure is nice.

Like Sylvia, I used to devour books. I was the girl who had to have a book with her in the car if we were going anywhere further than the stop sign at the head of our street. When I was 12 I could think of no greater misery than making the two mile trek to the grocery store while my book sat at home on the kitchen counter. When I was 12 I could not tell my grandma how to get to said grocery store, TRUE STORY, because I didn’t make that kitchen-counter mistake often.

These days, though, I’m still figuring it out. Five books by the end of the summer sounds pretty ambitious, really. But I just finished The Midwife: A Memoir of Birth, Joy, and Hard Times, by Jennifer Worth, and I guess I’m feeling a little cocky. I loved it, so much. It made me think about motherhood, and also about the family support work I did in Pittsburgh and Peru and New York City before coming to farming. And it was just a wonderful read. Being lost in a book is such a profound pleasure. I want more!

So here we go, in no particular order:

Cold Sassy Tree, by Olive Ann Burns. I actually started this one a couple months ago, but set it aside when I found The Midwife at the library. I can’t wait to get back to 14-year old Will Tweedy and his take on a family scandal in a small town in 1906 Georgia.

Simplicity Parenting: Using the Extraordinary Power of Less to Raise Calmer, Happier, and More Secure Kids, by Kim John Payne, M. Ed., with Lisa M. Ross. I was reluctant at first to put a parenting book on the list. I’ve been trying pretty hard recently not to read parenting advice (exceptions made for books and articles with a Buddhist or mindfulness slant). There’s just too much of it. And while plenty of it is compelling, I’ve grown weary of all these voices who seem to think they know best. I’m ready to quiet the din. But this one has been perpetually on deck for the last couple of years, and I’d like to give it a go.

A Circle of Quiet, by Madeleine L’Engle. I do love me a memoir. And I do love me some Madeleine L’Engle. This is the first book in a 4-part series.

Revenge of the Lawn: Stories 1962-1970, by Richard Brautigan. I picked this book up a few years ago mainly because of a Brautigan quote my friend Wesley had on her (former) blog: “Sometimes life is merely a matter of coffee and whatever intimacy a cup of coffee affords.” I really think it might have been that quote that first made me sure Wesley was someone I needed in my life. (I was spot-on, by the way. She’s wonderful. My life is so much better for knowing her. Let’s talk more another day about the good stuff that happens when people we meet online come into our real lives.)

Mastering the Art of French Cooking (Volume 1), by Julia Child. No, I’m not going all Julie and Julia on y’all! But I would like to know (at least some of) my (many) cookbooks better. There are so many I could pick from, but Julia seems maybe the best place to begin. She has never led me astray. And for all my confidence in the kitchen, I’m often struck by how many French basics I don’t know. I aim to try five new-to-me recipes from this book this summer.

I’ve stacked the odds at least somewhat in my favor, in that I already own all these titles, but this is a 100% guilt-free list. If I don’t make it through all five books, or if I get distracted by some other wonderful volume – so it goes.

What about y’all? Did you finish anything good recently? What are you reading now? What’s on your library hold list or bedside table?

Three weeks ago I wrote that I was struggling to find time to write here, despite a head full of ideas. In the weeks since I have realized the truth about my not writing is a pretty tangled to-do.

Life here brims with daily blessings and wonder. For two weeks we watched three robin hatchlings grow at lightning speed, until Saturday, when they flew from their nest. There is more rhubarb here on the farm right now than you can shake a stick at. My son adores the whole farm crew and hightails it from our front porch to their back deck several times a day. I don’t know if they see him as more of an Urkel or a Kramer, but their patience and tenderness with him is a balm to my weary heart every single time. Yesterday we went out for lunch and ice cream and left the shop with two quarts of just-picked strawberries. As we did the rest of our errands I daydreamed, half drunk on their sweet perfume, about what I most wanted to do with them. Jam? Ice cream? Alice Medrich’s buckwheat shortcakes? My husband came home from work at six and we three piled onto the bench on our back deck with the box of strawberries and a bag of pistachios and together we polished off almost everything as the sun eased down the sky.

And the resources at hand here – cultural, educational, social, natural, culinary – are truly exciting. There are so many of them, and they’re so much closer than they were in Virginia. It’s really a delight to imagine the ways our life will unfold here over the years.

Still. I’m struggling. More than I thought I would. It’s partly the move from a farm where I was needed to a farm where I am not. I never felt I juggled motherhood and the work I did for our business with much aplomb, and as we prepared for the move I relished the idea of narrowing my focus to family and home for a time. But it turns out it feels good to feel necessary and quite a bit less good not to. I’m also struggling as a parent, to respond more often than I react, and to figure out what kinds of structure and rhythm we all need. And I’ve been reminded a few times in recent weeks of what an unkind place the internet can be. It has not been that way for me, but knowing that kind of heartlessness is out there makes me feel fiercely protective of my family, and perhaps also of my own pride, and leaves me wondering if I should be writing here at all. And finally, there is the small but steady voice I keep hearing, the one that says if I am going to be here in this space, perhaps it is time wrap up all this earnest talk of how difficult transitions are. Perhaps it is time to move on to something else, or at least something more.

Here’s what I know will help: time. Compassion, for myself and for the people I love. Rest. Good food. Movement. Meditation. Time. Family. Friends. Elders. Being of service. Time. Writing. Reading. Establishing rhythms and routines. Connecting. Time. A sense of belonging. A sense of purpose. Time. Moving at my son’s pace and trying to understand how he sees this new place. Staying busy, productive, and curious. Gratitude practices. Have I mentioned time?

______

When I was stressed in my New York City days, the surest quickest route toward well being and away from self pity was to just open my door. Sometimes I’d walk through Tompkins Square Park and toward the East River. Sometimes I’d catch the next M15 up First Avenue with no particular destination. But most often I’d just sit on our stoop and watch the city go by. For me, it was that same feeling you get staring up at a perfect and vast midsummer sky, that reminder that you matter, but only as much as the next person or tree or mosquito. “Oh yeah,” I’d think, “it’s not just me.”

So here I am, looking for a new stoop to sit on. I’ll keep you posted.

Round-lobed hepatica, liverleaf, or liverwort/Anemone americana. New York, April 2013.

Sakes alive! I have about 19 posts writing themselves in my head right this minute, thoughts on spring and motherhood and loss and gingerbread. But I’m struggling, a lot, to figure out when to write. Any magic tips or loving guidance?

I’ll be back here soon. In the meantime I highly recommend you make yourself and a pal some mint juleps and go raise your glasses in the evening sun. It’s not the answer to everything but it sure does help.

A couple weeks ago the spring peepers launched headlong into their moony chorus and I don’t want them ever to stop. A few years ago I found a copy of The Gardener’s Bed-Book: Short and Long Pieces to Be Read in Bed by Those Who Love Husbandry and the Green Growing Things of the Earth at an estate sale, or maybe it was at a fantastically Hogwartian junk shop near our old farm. Either way: I find it a (largely) addictive and delightful little book, even if author Richardson Wright does refer to the “infernal squallings” of the peepers. Me, I say their song is about the prettiest and most heartening thing I know. There I am, plodding along in my slippers, shoulders hunched in cold self-preservation over another cup of coffee, cracking the front door to check the weather and wondering if I can summon the wherewithal to suit up self and child for a bracing evening walk – and there they are! When I hear them I know for sure that we are on the other side of winter’s worst. (Did you know though that the cold-blooded peepers can tolerate sub-zero temperatures without dying? Whoa! It’s a pretty complex process; more here.) And they do most of their eating and, umm, merrymaking after dark and throughout the night – which is to say: they sing us to sleep.

So it’s moony peepers and moony me. Last week the forsythia woke up and this week it’s just exploding, fountains and fireworks of it everywhere we go. I don’t know what made me think we’d moved too far north for magnolias, because we haven’t – they’re everywhere too and instead of making me feel homesick they are just making me feel at home. Inside the high tunnels where we’ve been gleaning scraggly kale and rosemary, the greens are bolting and the herbs are flowering and the heady smell of it all makes me grin so wide I can hardly speak. And I’m not sure what’s redder: the maple buds against a sky that is one hour thick with thunderclouds and the next a blinding blue, or the robin’s breast in the pear trees behind our house, or the barn in the setting sun??

And the skunk cabbage! It’s huge now, up to my knees nearly and bright bright green, and as I walked in the marsh behind our house yesterday and the day before I saw that wherever the skunk cabbage is growing, nettles are too. Nettles! I will wait just a little longer, and then I will put on some gloves and get to work. I want lots of tea, and I want the buttery nettle soup a friend made for me in France 10 years ago this summer, and I want Nicole’s nettle tart. The marsh where they grow, half frozen just a few weeks ago, is carpeted in thousands upon thousands of tiny cotyledons. Is it too much to wonder if some of them might be watercress? This marsh habitat is so new to me. I don’t know its calendar yet at all.

Oh, friends. It has been a very long winter. This is how I am finding home.

“The Peace of Wild Things”

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Wendell Berry
The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry

At three and a half, our son seems to be doing that “kids are adaptable” thing with aplomb as he settles in up here amongst the stone walls and glaciated ridges. At three his feelings are also acute and immediate, and this long winter of preparation and packing was not easy for him. But now that we’re here and our days have some semblance of normalcy to them again, he seems to be taking in stride the loss of so much that was familiar. He’s so here, so now, and has just gotten right to work building up a brand new familiar. Of course the move means enormous changes for my husband too. But his days here are busy and new, and he’s the first to say he’s very much looking forward to a year without his nose buried in QuickBooks.

Me? In truth I half feel like I’m still treading water. I’m not melancholy. It’s nothing like October, when the decision to leave our farm was still so raw. But it’s not July yet either.

Case in point? This Hudson Valley winter. This, friends, is going to take some getting used to. No, it’s not Arctic. It’s not even New England. But it is COLD. And brown. And icy. And long. Perhaps I’ve been coddled by too many easy Virginia winters – because I did grow up in Pennsylvania, and I did live in New York City for much of my twenties. I’m confident that in time the heady southern springs will be less the thing I yearn for come March and more just a part of how we tell our son about the place where he was born. I remember that in the first months of my pregnancy in 2009 I thought I might burst with vernal delight, that clamor of blossoming trees and all that green seeming to cheer on the tiny new life in my belly. I suppose that bit of magic did set the bar for spring pretty high.

But I’m confident too that, soon enough, the northern bellwethers will come to be just as comforting as those Virginia redbuds and dogwoods and wisteria. Look at that amazing skunk cabbage in the marsh, two photos up – do you know it makes its own heat, upwards of 60°F above air temperature, melting its way through the frozen ground, confidently and without complaint, to thrust its speckled burgundy spathe through the mud?? Geese are everywhere, filling the skies with their glorious racket. And who could’ve expected I’d come to be so enamored of mud? If our boots are crusted with it and our floors splattered and smeared, can it be too long before I linger with my coffee at sunrise on the back deck?

If I’m half homesick, missing blossoms and Kaffeeklatsches and our land, well then, I am also half drunk on my own delight in all that is new. When were those stone walls built? What kind of rock are those cliffs carved from? Those evergreens are enormous – what are they? If these hardwoods ever get leaves again, will I know them by sight or will I need to go on long walks with my Peterson guides? What’s this – oh, ouch! It’s a chestnut! Right there in the yard! And look at those marshes! And all those ponds! And those vast black dirt onion fields! Of course there are people here too. They run diners and ice cream shops, and they know how to make the kind of bagels and pizza I’ve been missing for years, and they invite us over for breakfast, and they tell us where the playgrounds are, and the good Indian lunch buffets too, and how on this sweet green earth one can procure a library card. (You might think this would be easier to procure than, say, raw milk, but you would be wrong.)

From such diverse and abundant raw material we are beginning to piece together our days. Sometimes the skies are too grey and the winds too fierce, and my resolve to get us outside in all kinds of weather just doesn’t stand a chance against my kid’s grumps. On those days we bake, or we keep unpacking our books, or we take long and winding drives. But sometimes the skies are blindingly blue and so we tug on our boots and zip our coats and off we go. I tell him about cattails and we laugh as the dogs leap the creeks and I swear one day last week we startled a pheasant up out of the rushes. We stop at luncheonettes for bagels and coffee, and the waitress at one already knows that my kid would like two crayons, one red and one blue please, and she cuts the straw down to size for him special. We are missing our own vegetables like the dickens, but we need to eat fresh vegetables just the same, and it’s lots of fun trying new cabbages and squashes from the big Asian market. There is a great spot for coffee just down the road – I have not had a lovely little luxury like that since my NYC days. We’re looking up swim classes (what with all these ponds), and while I haven’t found a great spot yet for bulk grains and spices, buying fresh milk is as easy as going to the farm and paying for it. We’re trying out a weekly parent-child class at a small Waldorf school. On weekends we sometimes stick close to home but more often, so far, we are taking advantage of what seems like unbelievable good fortune: living within easy driving distance again of family and old friends. If things work out here, my son will grow up knowing his cousins and with loads of aunties both kith and kin.

So here we are. On bright blue days delight comes easy. On harder days I am trying to take cues from the skunk cabbage, burgeoning through the frozen mud, and of course also from my resident bodhisattva, who cries when he is sad, eats when he is hungry, laughs when life is funny, and gives the best hugs.

Last weekend I took the train into New York City all by my blessed lonesome. I did a great many fine things while I was there, one of which was buying a pound of triple-crème Irish Tipperary brie from East Village Cheese, just two blocks from my old apartment. Tonight I’m eating it alone in my cozy new house while a rabid lion of a wind rattles our eaves, whips through the branches of evergreens whose names I don’t yet know, and keens across the icy fields and marshland all around me. I took the cheese out of the fridge an hour ago and it hasn’t really come all the way up to room temperature yet, but I’m standing at the counter anyway, shaving from either side of it with an old paring knife. I’m eating it with a glorious slop of roasted grapes, scooped straight from the roasting pan with my fingers. I wish I could still drink wine, because it’s the kind of mood I’m in tonight. But I haven’t been able to since before I got pregnant, four years ago; now even a drop brings on a raging headache. So I’m drinking bourbon instead – a maple sour, made with maple from trees tapped five miles away!

(Maple sours changed my life, true story: I have known and loved a great many whiskey drinkers but I never could get on board until this winter. That’s when I started drinking these and now I’m all why-would-anyone-ever-drink-anything-ever-but-bourbon-ever??) 

My son is asleep, coughing and fitful, his tiny body still duking it out with a bullheaded cold that has plagued our whole family for close to a month. For an hour before he finally nodded off he lay curled in my arms on the recliner in the living room, his cheeks flushed and his eyes fluttering wearily as he coughed. I wish he were well. My husband is back at our old farm for the second time in the two scant weeks since our move, doggedly tending to all the outside cleanup that there just wasn’t time for before we left. I wish he were here.

Still, the night is not without its sweetness. I’m eating this cheese and thinking of the hot lunches we had every weekday at my old office in my New York City days (another true story). I was part of a volunteer corps and so none of us had much money at all, but we all chipped in two or three bucks every day and ate beyond our means, if eating beyond your means means warm food filling your belly, a table loud with the laughter and shouts of anywhere from three to twelve people, the reliable warble of the coffee maker as the lunch hour drew to a close every day. There was lots of spaghetti, lots of lentils, lots of roasted potatoes, lots of on-sale cheese, lots of Maxwell House. Sometimes I think I was never so well fed.

Of course I am married to a farmer now, and we eat beyond our meager means too, if eating beyond your means means eating dead ripe seconds Cherokee Purples and Brandywines with homemade (by him) mayo on homemade (by me) bread every lunch for weeks, gilding the lily sometimes with homecured bacon, or a fistful of fresh basil, washing it down with a gulp of fresh Jersey milk.

So this snow won’t melt. And the coughing won’t stop. And the truck won’t start. But I watch wild geese soar over my house every afternoon. And I can hear the creek from our back deck. And you should see my bookshelves. And one of my oldest friends came last night with coffee and porters and music, and stayed until late this afternoon. While the boy napped we slurped potato leek soup and talked of summer music, and new apartments, and work, and the lonely wonder of parenthood. Also I’m sleeping again.

And these grapes! Maybe if you make them your mind too will begin to slow and steady. I think they might be magic like that.

Slow Roasted Grapes

I think this method comes from All About Roasting, by Molly Stevens. It certainly has her stamp of sweet simple genius. I don’t have the book, though; I first ate these at my parents’ table in North Carolina sometime last year as part of a perfect ploughman’s lunch along with cheese, pickles, cold roast chicken, and sesame crackers. Sometimes I think if I could only eat one meal ever, over and over again for the rest of my life, it would be a ploughman’s lunch.

I’d never thought to roast grapes before but now that I know, I won’t ever stop. They are just, gosh, perfect. Jammy and forward and every good thing. Some of them caramelize a bit and you really might moan when you get one of those. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

You should really try these with cheese, and they’re excellent with roasted meats. But I imagine they’d also be good on oatmeal, or stirred into yogurt, or on top of ice cream, or maybe with a bit of whipped cream and pound cake, with some strong coffee to cut the sweetness.

1 pound seedless grapes
2 tablespoons olive oil or melted butter

Preheat the oven to 250°F/120°C. Line a rimmed baking sheet with parchment paper. Toss the grapes with the olive oil or butter, spread on the baking sheet, and bake for two to two and half hours.

Common reed/Phragmites australis. March 2013, Florida.

The early days of the week have, in recent months, found me writing weekending posts. It’s hard to overstate how grateful and glad I am that I chose to show up every week to write them. This is a tough season for me. Checking in like that has been a kind of meditation, a breathing in and out, a noticing. It has buoyed my fairly ragged spirit but it has also rooted me here. For all the stress, this is a precious time. I’m glad I didn’t miss it.

I don’t intend to stop writing my weekending posts, but it’s 3:00 am Tuesday morning, and I wonder if this week we could start a conversation about sleep instead?

Last week we left the house half packed and snuck away for a few days to my husband’s hometown on the Gulf Coast. It was bliss: coffee at sunrise on the quiet shores of the bay, a long solo walk on an empty beach, pizza, gumbo, spring peepers, bare feet, long talks at the breakfast table, and a second Christmas!

On Friday morning I woke to my son’s whimpers a little before 3:00 am. He’s three years old, and sometimes he wakes in the middle of the night. Add in a nasty cold, and the way travel disrupts our body’s rhythms, and his own stress about the move, and really it’s amazing he’s sleeping as well as he is. I slipped from under the quilt and pressed my ear against his door, but already his breath was deep and steady (if snortling) again.

I got back in bed but I was not even a little drowsy. I lay there for an hour, maybe two, staring at the moonlit ceiling, turning to the wall and pulling the covers close under my chin, trying the other side. I got up again, moved to the living room couch, and read for a half hour in the mustardy lamplight. I got back in bed. Nothing. My thoughts accelerated from busy to panicked. I’m never going to sleep well again, I thought. This is who I am now.

A little before 6:00 my husband turned to me and managed, still half asleep, to whisper, “Maybe you could take a walk.”

And like that, my panic fell away like undone shackles. I squeezed his hand and got out of bed again, padding down the length of the house in socked feet, stopping in the warm kitchen to make myself a cup of milky Constant Comment. While it steeped I pulled on a sweater and a hat and wrapped myself up in my scarf. I slipped out the sliding glass door and down the back deck steps and walked across the yard (strewn with thousands upon thousands of acorns from the low and sweeping live oaks) and there I was at the water.

Almost immediately I felt so much better. The bay lapped quietly and retreated in lazy rivulets, and a few seagulls yammered, and the light was as sunrises over wide sweeps of water are: profound, you know, and liquid, the kind of stunning that makes you stop looking for words to describe it. My mind steadied. I swear I could feel my pulse slow. I had one clear thought: I’m so damn lucky to live in this world. And then for a while I wasn’t thinking at all. It was just me, and that glassy bay, and some small black ducks diving for breakfast, and the reeds, and my son’s sandcastles. A few bellyflopping grey mullets.

I started thinking again. I thought of those breakfast table conversations with my husband’s grandmother. I thought of my own grandmothers, of all the conversations at their tables. I thought about how much we don’t learn from our elders, and I wondered if that has always been true or if it is something new. I wanted suddenly to read May Sarton and Madeleine L’Engle, maybe Eudora Welty, any writing I can get my hands on written by women when they were a generation or more older than I am right now. Who else?

I made my way back inside. It was pushing 7 and I expected to find the rest of the house creaking awake, but everyone slumbered on a little longer. I set a couple eggs to boil. Before long my husband appeared and poured himself a glass of orange juice. Our son wandered in a few minutes later, rubbing his eyes. My husband’s grandmother put on the coffee. The house filled with all those blessed mundane sounds of morning: the eggs beginning to dance in the pot, the gurgle of the coffee maker, the hum of the fridge, the brakes of a garbage truck outside.

__________

It’s been like this all winter. I find myself unequipped. I have always slept well. I’m a night owl for sure, but until recently, I always fell asleep, and back asleep, with ease. We coslept until quite recently, and even all that night nursing and all those octopus limbs in my face or my belly or my back didn’t faze me. I felt so much better rested than most of the moms I know. But now I lie awake for an hour, maybe two, most nights, before drifting off. If I wake in the middle of the night – to my son’s cries, to a barking dog, to a car horn – I am awake for hours.

I am almost certain this insomnia is caused by stress about our move, and I have coped in part by believing it would fade once we’re settled at the new farm. But I’m less certain about that these days. Without getting into the mud and the muck of it all, there are still loose ends here, lots of them, and they’ll remain even as we back the moving van out of the driveway and head north on Friday morning. Also, it’s been so many months. I’m concerned that my circadian clock is majorly out of whack, and that it’s going to take some real work to get it back into a more restful gear.

And I guess this is where I’m asking for help. Do any of you struggle with insomnia, whether situational or chronic? Have you come out on the other side, or at least made peace with it?

My mom, who also struggles with sleep, recently talked to me about “decatastrophizing” sleep. I like that. Because it’s true: for as exhausting as it is, not sleeping well is not the end of the world. You get up (and in fact when I do get out of bed I am strangely untired), and you make some coffee, and you make some breakfast, and you hug your family, and you get on with things. And maybe your temper flares, and maybe you can’t see the forest for the trees, and maybe you even get sick. But at some point you also have to call it a day, every day, and try again.

I’m not so much looking for tips on how to sleep better, although I would deeply love to hear whatever parts of your sleep stories you’re willing to share. But what I’m after especially is a more holistic understanding of what’s happening with my body, and any wisdom you might have on how to feel more peaceful about it all. Many thanks in advance.

“Be of good hope. Try to think in terms of ‘the long run’ and store up your honey like the bees.”
– May Sarton, July 18, 1954 letter to Madeleine L’Engle, May Sarton: Selected Letters 1916-1954

Sweet Annie/Artemisia annua. February 2013, Virginia.

So grateful for this practice of noticing and remembering some really delicious stuff, here in the thick of the move. For National Margarita Day on Friday, which brought joy to my packing, and for our whole grain waffles the next morning, which brought joy to my belly. For a child who called out gleefully from the backseat, “Turn that up, Mama!!” when this came on the radio, and then “Dance, Mama!!” when I was too still at the wheel. For a fantastic coffee date where we really did fit in a fair amount of adult conversation, even with our little ones at our sides. For the moment when I showed myself a little compassion and tossed the dry lumps of whole wheat tortilla dough into the pig scraps bucket and pulled out the tub of white flour. (I still want to talk about my seemingly Sisyphean efforts to find the perfect whole grain tortilla recipe – but not today.) For last night’s riff on our favorite new one dish meal: baked bratwurst with cabbage, carrots, and sweet potatoes, inspired by Dinner: A Love Story. For Connie Britton. For sleeping in. For this berried breakfast cobbler (two suggestions: top it with yogurt thinned with juice from the orange you’ve zested, per the recipe, and use salted butter – it does something amazing to the crust), and for the wee boy who did all the measuring and mixing himself. For the blue skies and blinding sun, and for the coffee I drank while the boy dug in the dirt and (ahem) threw dirt at the chickens. For a long midday snuggle with an under-the-weather bub who needed his mama.

And for this:

“Piano”

Touched by your goodness, I am like
that grand piano we found one night on Willoughby
that someone had smashed and somehow
heaved through an open window.

And you might think by this I mean I’m broken
or abandoned, or unloved. Truth is, I don’t
know exactly what I am, any more
than the wreckage in the alley knows
it’s a piano, filling with trash and yellow leaves.

Maybe I’m all that’s left of what I was.
But touching me, I know, you are the good
breeze blowing across its rusted strings.

What would you call that feeling when the wood,
even with its cracked harp, starts to sing?

Patrick Phillips
Boy

(joining Amanda at The Habit of Being)

December 2012, North Carolina.

Was it the way it felt to unfold ourselves from that long and rainy drive? Was it easing into that warm and laughing kitchen? Was it knowing that we’d granted ourselves leave, for one sweet week, to put all our complicated feelings about leaving our farm on a back burner? Was it because the roast came from our own pigs, raised outside in the sunshine and fresh air, with lots of room to run and root and plenty of good vegetable scraps and cracked eggs? Was it because we didn’t have to cook? Was it that long slow cooking is pretty much always the answer to our woes?

I can’t say for sure. But this slow roasted pork is one of the best things I have ever eaten.

Close-Roasted Pork with Ancho, Cinnamon, and Cocoa
from The Improvisational Cook, © 2006 Sally Schneider

This is really nice alongside some hearty rice and beans, and although I haven’t tried it yet, I am sure it would be phenomenal in a taco or burrito. You could also feed a lot more people with it that way. I can’t wait to try it that way this spring with some of our own cilantro, and maybe some avocado too. Oh, or how about shredded into a salad with lettuce, grapes or apples, chopped toasted walnuts, and maybe even some thinly sliced fennel if you have it?

In the original headnote for this recipe, Sally Schneider remarks that this is perfect for a dinner party because it’s so little work and it can be cooked ahead of time. True. But she also says it can feed eight people. If you’re not feeding ravenous farmers, and if you also have some fantastic sides on the table, that might be true too. But maybe double the recipe, if you can afford to. Because this stuff is INSANE.

Boston butt is the obvious choice for this recipe, but a picnic roast would also work well. The farmer’s wife in me feels compelled to encourage you not to neglect cuts of meat that are unfamiliar to you. After all, a pig is not made of bacon and ribs alone! The sooner you help your farmers work down their inventory, the sooner you get more bacon.

Another note: This is not my recipe. I am adapting it scarcely at all from the way it was originally written, since I didn’t make it myself and can’t speak to the process. I have not (yet) gotten permission to reprint this recipe, so I’m linking to the Amazon page for the book rather than my normal link to Goodreads. Sally Schneider’s books are wonderful and something pretty out of the ordinary – really highly recommended.

2 1/2 tablespoons Mole-Inspired Seasoning with Ancho, Cinnamon, and Cocoa (recipe below)
1 tablespoon plus 1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon sugar
About 3 1/2 pounds bone-in pork shoulder (try Boston butt or a picnic roast)
1 head of garlic, broken into cloves but not peeled

1. Season the meat. In a small bowl, combine the mole seasoning, salt, and sugar. Rub all over the pork shoulder and place on a plate. Marinate for 1 hour unrefrigerated, or 2 to 24 hours refrigerated.

2. Prepare the meat for roasting. Preheat the oven to 275°F. Place the pork in a Dutch oven or deep-lidded roaster just big enough to hold the roast snugly. Scatter the garlic cloves around the roast. Place a large piece of aluminum foil over the pot, then press the lid down securely. Alternatively, wrap the meat in a tightly sealed foil package (make sure the seam is at the top so the juices don’t leak out) and place the package in an ovenproof skillet or casserole.

3. Roast the meat. Roast the pork until very tender and practically falling apart, 3 3/4 to 4 hours. Transfer the roast to a platter and cover with foil.

4. Defat the roasting juices. Pour the juices into a sauceboat and place in the freezer for 10 minutes. Spoon off the fat that has risen to the top.

5. Serve the meat. Pull the meat apart with two forks or your hands. Pour some of the juices over and pass the rest. Save any remaining juices for heating up leftovers.

Mole-Inspired Seasoning with Ancho, Cinnamon, and Cocoa
makes about 1/3 cup

In a small bowl, combine 3 tablespoons ancho chile powder or sweet pimentón de la Vera (smoked Spanish paprika), 1 tablespoon dark brown sugar, 1 1/2 teaspoons ground cinnamon, 1 1/2 teaspoons cocoa powder, 1 teaspoon ground cumin, and 1 teaspoon dried oregano.

Virginia, June 2012.

I have watched the man figure out a heck of a lot more in the almost 30 years since that labor of love. He was strumming real chords on my guitar not twenty minutes after picking it up for the very first time.¹ He drove us safely from Düsseldorf to a gorgeous apartment building off the rue du Montparnasse in Paris one hot July afternoon in 1996, with only a little navigation help from me and only a little panicked yelling from both of us as we managed those winding one-way cobblestone streets in the days long before GPS. He can drive a tractor, throw a vase, soothe a fussy newborn, build a porch, roast coffee. I am pretty sure he still remembers how to use the dative case in German. Need a washer moved from Philly to the Bronx? A dance floor for your wedding? A cheesecake? No problem. My dad’s talent, cleverness, and generosity are a mighty triumvirate.

Needless to say, when I bought this 1961 Singer Style-0-Matic 328K off Craigslist from a woman named Wanda just a few months after my son was born, I turned to my dad immediately. He helped me wind the bobbin and set the tension and thread the machine, and together we sewed some simple big bottomed baby pants for one very cute cloth-diapered bum. That was also, sigh, the last time I sewed.

I didn’t – and don’t – have what I’d call grand ambitions for myself as a seamstress. But our life is very home centered and from scratch, more so every day. In the last seven or eight years we have replaced so many “boughten” (remember that from the Little House books?) and outsourced items and jobs with things we can grow or make or do on our own. I resisted this for a long time – not because I felt ill-suited to all the trial and error, but because I want to need people. I seriously worried that if we stopped buying vegetables at the store or going out to eat, we’d be standing on a very slippery slope – would we soon enough find ourselves living in a cabin in the woods fifty miles from anyone, well fed and hale but alone? But I’ve relaxed. I’ve learned there are a whole lot of ways to need people. Sometimes you pay them for a product or a service: other people pay us to grow their food, for example, and we pay other people to fix our transmissions, find our firewood, install our electricity. Sometimes you knock on their door and ask for a cup of sugar. Sometimes you put your baby in their arms and kiss them on the cheek and go out for a walk alone. Sometimes they bring you lasagna and wine when you have run yourself ragged with packing. Sometimes they are waiting for you to walk through their front door so they can pour your coffee. Sometimes they write a letter, or laugh at your jokes, or let you cry.

My point is, learning to do some things for ourselves has not made me need people any less. It has only made me appreciate all of us more.

My other point is, I need to know how to sew. And I need some advice.

A thought occurred to me two or three weeks ago, and it is so unlike me that when I said it out loud I think my husband almost wondered where his (nostalgic, dreamy, whimsy-loving) wife had gone and who this strange woman sitting in the kitchen was. The thought was: maybe I should sell this beautiful sewing machine and replace it with a new, or newer, model, one that will fit in a case, one that can be put in the back seat and carted to sewing lessons, one that can be stowed in a closet or on a shelf when I’m not using it.

I grimace thinking about it. My Style-O-Matic makes me smile every time I look at it. It is good to have simple beautiful things around. From the limited research I’ve done, it’s a solid machine, from a good era in Singer’s production history. It was well cared for by Wanda and by her mother before her. I still have our series of emails; she says her mother used it to make all her clothes when she was young, that it is super easy to use, and that it brought both of them many years of fun. I can almost see a seven-year old Wanda at her mom’s side, learning to oil the machine or sew a pillowcase. Can I really let it go?

And yet, our new house is so small. I don’t know where we’d put it. A more compact machine makes more sense in a lot of ways.

I don’t want to do fancy or involved sewing – not really thinking about clothes for myself.  I know – even anticipate – my ambitions might change as my skills evolve, but right now, I just want to be able to hem pants (I do not come from tall stock), sew curtains, chop up old wool sweaters I’ve felted and stitch them up into longies, sew basic farmers market aprons, make a duvet cover. Practical things.

I would be ever so grateful if the sewists among you would weigh in here. Keep the machine I have or get a new one? If I get a new one, what should I get?

1. It should be noted I bought that guitar in 1999 and still don’t know how to play it. Will happily barter vegetables, cookies, or lard for lessons.

Snow. February 2013, Virginia.

I am not a huge fan of snow. It wasn’t always this way. As a young child in Georgia, I only ever even saw the stuff once or twice, and it was pure fairytale when it happened. We moved north when I was still in elementary school, but the snow’s new commonness didn’t dull its magic. Even in my twenties, in New York City, I still fell for it hard – the way it softened the avenues, and in a way also softened us city folk to one another, as we all hunkered down with scarves and paper cups of coffee against the bitter winds on subway platforms, chastened for a spell by a force bigger than our busyness. As the thermometer dropped my first winter there, I took to walking everywhere I could; I’d had a rough winter the year before and figured the best path to a happy February was to be out there in the thick of it.

I don’t know where I lost the love. I just know that since leaving New York, when the snow falls – and here in central Virginia, sometimes that is every week or two during the winter and sometimes it is almost not at all – I am grateful for hot coffee and a blazing fire and the couch.

So. It snowed here this weekend. We were packing, furiously, and certainly I looked out the windows as I scuttled about the house with moving boxes and old letters and more coffee and more bags for Goodwill. That’s pretty I thought. Oh look I thought, it’s still coming down. But just as quickly I’d turn back to the boxes.

I don’t know what made me really see it. I was standing at a sink, drying my hands. I was looking through a west-facing window, at the giant oak near the house and at the old Paulownia and younger redbuds behind it and at the greenhouse behind them all. It was all very pleasant. But then my gaze fixed on the flakes not two feet in front of me, and then – it was all very quiet. I wasn’t thinking about how much there is to do in the next two weeks. I wasn’t wondering when the farm will sell. I wasn’t daydreaming about paint colors in the new house. There was only snow. I put down my hand towel and watched. The flakes were big and they were coming down hard, swirling just like maple seed pods.

The weekend – indeed, the whole last week – has been like that. That is: we leave in two weeks and there is much unresolved. Some of it will feel settled the minute our small caravan pulls onto the highway that first Monday morning in March. But we are months away – at best – from a truly clean start.

And yet: grace. Grace in the tireless focus and good cheer of my mother, who must have packed forty boxes of books single-handedly in addition to helping me turn all my mountains into molehills. Grace in the rusty nails and old linoleum and grace in every trip my father took to Lowe’s for more moving boxes, more plumbing supplies, more lumber. Grace in the laughter of our friends who came midweek bearing lasagna, bread, salad, and wine. Grace in the pot of soup shared with more friends the following night. Grace in the unexpected box of so-very-much-needed treats in the mail. Grace in our little guy’s sudden calm about the move. Grace in the smiling arrival of an old old friend who will farmsit for us for the next several months. Grace in Season 1 of Friday Night Lights. Grace in a pint of Newcastle and in paper trays piled high with chicken wings. Grace in the hum of the dryer, the warble of the coffee pot, the rising of the biscuits, the quiet of the snow.

(joining Amanda at The Habit of Being)

On Thursday morning I got in the car around 7am and drove away for a three-day work commitment. It was only a couple hours away, but it was the first time my son and I were separated overnight. Quite a rite of passage, for the both of us. And it was alright. He and his sweet papa held down the fort (farm) quite well without me, and I was so bone tired from the long days of work that there scarce was time to think too much about how strange it was. I think I feel proud of us both. I know that the look of joy in his eyes when we were reunited Saturday afternoon was one of the best things I have ever seen.

The weekend was full up with other gratitudes as well. The days passed so differently from my usual ones – no mothering, no cooking, no talks with my husband about our son or the move or Terriers. Just work, and lots of new and delightful faces, and many cups of coffee. I was expecting the long days and the thrill of helping to pull off a big project with many moving parts. But – I had forgotten about the perspective that can come with even just a little bit of distance. It’s a pretty special thing to get to peer through the warmly lit windows of your own life like that.

I thought about my life before farming (lots of sitting at a computer, lots of dreaming and planning and solving and trying with many kindred spirits) and I thought about my life now (lots of sun and mud and fresh air and cooking and mothering and doing, days and days of seeing just my family). I thought about working away from my family and I thought about spending every day with my family. I thought about talking for hours with adults and I thought about talking for hours with my boy. I don’t know what I’m going to do with all those thoughts, but I’m grateful for the chance to think them.

On Saturday night I was out like a light before 9pm with my boy. And on Sunday we had ourselves a city day, full of grilled cheese sandwiches and fallen nests and old stone steps and swings and skylines and skateboards and bell towers.

And now we pack.

(joining Amanda at The Habit of Being)

Well, here I am ready to reflect on the weekend and it is already the dark and cloudless end of a Monday, and only barely at that! It’s a good measure of how time has passed for me of late. Mostly, and particularly since I became a mother, our days here on the farm unfold in a way that’s not unlike our land itself: muddy sometimes, bruised knees for sure, but also rolling, green, expansive. But I’m staring down these last few weeks here like I’m shuttling through a tunnel on a high-speed train.

It’s okay. There’s a lot to do, and not much time, and there it is. But it makes me ever more grateful for the pockets of calm.

This weekend, although there was a very chilly market and furious house cleaning and showing the farm and lots of mama-has-to-work and too much Netflix for the boy, there was also: a coffee/bagels/One Morning in Maine date with the little man, pizza night for the first time in ages, dancing in the kitchen with both my boys, dreaming up the things we might grow in Orange County’s lush muck soil, chickens singing loudly at the blue skies, a long slow Sunday breakfast together, soup. And many clementines!

(joining Amanda at The Habit of Being)

Hakurei turnips. November 2012, Virginia.

I do so love a good list of links. But I’m also sensitive to what a mad racket we’ve got going inside our brains in this age of easy sharing. Stuck, I turned to my mom and best friend, and blog reader par excellence. Without hesitation she said: “Keep the lists short.”

1) Curried Sweet Potato Soup with Goat Cheese Biscuits from Joy the Baker :: I made both these a couple nights ago and both are out of this world. The soup is warm and wonderful, and surprisingly complex for the pretty minimal effort involved. The biscuits are phenomenal. I’m going to be making them a lot. Also, use what you have! I used up what I think was the last of our turkey broth from Thanksgiving in the soup, and I used lard instead of butter in the biscuits.

2) The Slow Web from Jack Cheng :: This is a long(ish) and deeply worthy read. What he says about how the randomness and frequency of the updates (in our inboxes, dashboards, feeds) stimulates the reward mechanisms in our brains really resonated with me … but really, so did every other paragraph. Yes, I say. Yes.

3) Homespun Mom Comes Unraveled from Shannon Hayes :: An oldie but goodie, I share this one as often as I can. Shannon went on to write the powerful Radical Homemakers: Reclaiming Domesticity from a Consumer Culture after this essay, and I can’t wait to curl up with a warm drink and her newest book. But that will have to wait until some spring week when I can explore the libraries near our new home. In the meantime – always – I can turn to this piece. She writes: “Somehow, on our paths toward this noble life, one more group of girls has fallen prey to another impossible feminine ideal. And I, for one, am crumbling under the pressure of Über-Momming. Our gardens are a mess, my kids are throwing up on the way to the market, my fingers ache from milking the cow, we’re running out of homemade soap, and attachment parenting is causing my back to ache.” (Also I like what she has to say about gin.)

And maybe I will write more about that. There’s lots on my mind. I’m reflecting a lot these days on what our ambitions looked like six or seven years ago, and on my first three years as a mother too. The tractor’s all tied up with all of that.

But right now? You know – the sun is beating down on my shoulders like it wants to be late May. My scarf is too heavy. The chickens are warbling and the dishwasher is running and my belly is full of curried sweet potato soup. I think I’m gonna chase this feeling.

Sunflower. July 2012, Virginia.

On my drive home from the library not an hour ago, I was listening to the latest The Kitchen Hour podcast. About halfway through, Meagan and her guest, yoga teacher and coach Kate Hanley of Ms. Mindbody, speak about the retreats Kate leads. Kate mentions trying to see yourself on your best day six months from now. And damn if that wasn’t exactly what I needed to hear.

I believe very strongly that feeling more peace is not about getting to the (totally imaginary) day where all my stress is gone, that I’ve got a whole lot of tools in my stress-reduction arsenal right now. My favorites, which I employ with seriously varying degrees of frequency and skill, are: eating real food, getting sleep, taking walks, meditating, practicing gratitude, dancing in the kitchen, and drinking lots of coffee with my friends. I think even when I can’t change a dang thing about what’s going on, these things are huge. I guess that’s when they’re hugest. It’s also when they’re hardest.

Things are hard right now.

But Kate mentioned six months from now and this image popped into my head, simple and crisp. It feels so lovely that I kind of want to just quietly tuck it in my pocket. But I’ll write it down and put it out there. With footnotes, because maybe the edges of this image aren’t so clearly defined if you’re not me:

It’s maybe 4:30pm on a clear late July Tuesday. I’m on our back deck¹ with my son and we’re grilling² whatever is growing then³ and maybe also some home-raised chicken. The peach and blueberry pie we made earlier is cooling inside on the kitchen counter. I’m happy because all the financial loose ends from our old farm have been tied up for a couple months now. I’m happy because later in the week I’m taking the train into the city, solo, for a People’s University where I used to work. I’m happy because my husband will be in from the fields in another hour and we’re going to eat this food and drink some cold beer while the sun goes down and the fireflies appear⁴. I’m happy.

Here’s to July.

1. We have a real deck at our new place!
2. It’s silly but I’m afraid of grilling; hoping this year is the year I get over that. There’s a fantastic double-page spread in Dinner: A Love Story (the book) where author Jenny Rosenstrach confesses her fear of grilling to her husband Andy in the form of a letter, and he writes back with a sweet and simple primer. You can get a taste over at this blog post on the same topic.
3. Zucchini and onions, maybe?
4. Are there fireflies in the Hudson Valley? Someone please tell me yes!

There’s no denying this weekend had its share of strain. Disappointing news. Frayed nerves about the coming year. Temperatures too low for harvesting Brussels sprouts or cabbage. And two of us a bit poorly while the third was gone all day at market.

But sometimes – when we’re lucky – illness can be its own kind of nurse. Sometimes it’s life arriving with a pot of tea and a pile of blankets and firm orders to Take It Easy.

So we did. Paperwork: ignored. Gallant parenting ambitions: abandoned for Netflix, applesauce, and back rubs. The boy napped early and long. I watched three episodes of Downton Abbey and drank four cups of tea. We were both in bed before 8.

Morning found us much renewed, and Sunday was all waffles, sausage, coffee, pajamas sticky with maple syrup and fresh-squeezed-by-the-boy clementine juice, a warm fire, a slowly diminishing pile of dishes at sink’s edge, and frequent dance breaks with Frankie Valli, Bill Withers, and the Bee Gees. A few hours of work now while the boys run errands and get bagels, and then an afternoon at the bowling alley with a mess o’ friends! A bracing tonic indeed, all of it.

How was your weekend?

(joining Amanda at The Habit of Being)

The decision to leave was very, very hard, but I don’t mean to write about that just now. Some months have passed since we decided. Our grief has faded, as it does. Our excitement is mounting, as it will. And in between … well, the devil is in the details, and right this moment? BLLLLLAAAAAAARRRRRRGH!

But I believe there’s grace in a muffin.

It’s hard, when you’re in the trenches, to act with all the perspective and poise that come so easy when things are … easy. Your fuse is short and your to-do list is a mile long and your worries pile up like so much dirty laundry and who knows when it’s all going to sort itself out? Who knows when things will feel calm again?

I guess these muffins say: “How does right now sound to you?”

Partly it’s that they’re so reliable. So many muffins sit at one extreme or the other: dry and regrettable, or loaded with oil and sugar and heavy enough to prop a door open. These aren’t like that. They’re lovely and toothsome, just sweet enough, with a perfect crumb – owed entirely to the leftover oatmeal, I believe.

But mainly it’s that if you get out your flour and your eggs and your milk and you begin measuring and whisking and stirring and scooping, you pretty much have to stop thinking about your mortgage. (You may have to think about how to get eggshells out of the batter if your kids are with you, but that’s a distraction I highly recommend.)

So maybe it doesn’t have to be muffins. It could be applesauce, or mayonnaise, or a soufflé. Or pie! But for me, this week, it’s muffins.

Leftover Oatmeal Muffins

We make these muffins a lot – two or three times a month. They’ll cater completely to your whim, the season, or the contents of your pantry. We most often use blueberries or mixed berries, frozen, for our extras. Sometimes we add the zest of a lemon too. Other nice combos: toasted fennel seeds plus raisins or currants (plump them first by soaking them in very hot water for about 10 minutes; then drain and add to the batter); dried apricots plus fresh and/or candied ginger; chopped apples plus chopped toasted walnuts; dried cranberries plus chopped toasted almonds plus a little almond extract … be bold! This week I upped the ante and used about a half cup each of frozen mixed berries, coarsely chopped chocolate, and coconut flakes. Yup, that’s more than the cup of extras I suggest below, but I was feeling a little brash – although I was pretty certain those flavors would complement one another nicely. They did. And the muffins were big! My point is, throw in what sounds good.

Also, thanks to Amanda for the original recipe and the heads up about using leftover oatmeal. That’s really where the genius lies in this recipe.

Update 11/2/16: When I first posted this recipe I called for two tablespoons of baking powder. That always seemed a little, hmm, alarming? We continue to make these muffins regularly and I find the leavening amounts in the updated recipe to work well.

1 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 cup whole wheat pastry flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon (optional)
1 cup cooked oatmeal
1/2 cup buttermilk or milk or milk substitute, room temperature (or gently warmed on the stovetop or in the microwave)
1/3 cup maple syrup, honey, or sugar
1 egg, room temperature if possible (try warming it in a bowl of hot water for a few minutes)
1-2 tablespoons melted lard or butter or coconut oil (other oils would be fine too)
about 1 cup extras

Preheat the oven to 400°F/205°C. Generously grease a 12-cup muffin tin, or use liners.

In a large bowl, whisk together the flours, baking powder, salt, cinnamon if using, and sugar if using. Add oatmeal, milk, maple syrup or honey if using, egg, and lard or butter or oil. Stir until combined but try not to overmix.

(I used to mix the wet ingredients separately and then gently combine them with the dries, and this is probably a good idea if you’re worried about overmixing the batter. But I’m an utter tornado in the kitchen, and for love of my chief washer of dishes I’m trying to use fewer bowls where I can.)

If you have a child who does not like extra stuff in his muffins, scoop one or two muffins’ worth of batter into your tin now. Fold your extras into the remaining batter.

Spoon the batter into the prepared muffin tins, filling each about 3/4 full. I find an ice cream scoop is perfect for this. Bake about 20 minutes, until lightly browned on top. Cool for just a minute or two in the pan and then pop them out and eat them warm, with or without butter, or let them cool on a rack.

Makes 12 muffins.

Eastern red cedar/Juniperus virginiana. January 2013, Virginia.

For years (truly) I have brushed away a pining to create my own space online. My doubts hung thick like fog:

I’m mothering and running a business and doing my share of keeping a home. And I want to learn how to do so many new things. How would I make the time?

If I’m going to take time away from family to do this, I should try to figure out a way to be compensated financially, right? But then I’d need to commit to regular, meaningful content. I already struggle with this on our farm blog and in some other online places. I struggle with discipline in many parts of my life, frankly. Why would this be any different?

How do I honor and respect my husband’s private nature and my child’s right to grow up well away from the public eye?

Will this make me too proud? Will it be too much navel-gazing?

I don’t want to inspire anyone. It can be a slippery slope, right, that space between sharing my joys and making people feel inadequate? That scares me.

And does the world need another blog? It can’t possibly.

But quiet and tenacious as the rising sun, that pining to write just kept showing up.

So.

I’ve decided I’m done with feeling tortured.

I’ve decided to name the notion that I can predict what and who will come into my life because of writing here for what it is: hubris.

I’ve decided – looking back over the last six or seven years of showing up on Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, our farm website, some other projects I’ve been a part of – that the net effect of all this showing up has been overwhelmingly positive. There has been more connecting, more compassion, less suffering, less feeling alone.

I’ve decided I want more of that connecting, and also a place where I can challenge myself to dig a little deeper, work a little harder, say a little more, ask a little more.

I’ve decided to be here.

I hope I can manage to walk that line between honoring my family’s privacy and talking about what it means to be in a family with grace. I hope I can welcome imperfection. I hope to celebrate these days that are the good flesh continuing and then to be able to look back on them too. I also hope I can manage to not take myself too seriously. That’s perhaps funny to say in a post like this, but it’s the truth.

This afternoon I was listening to Krista Tippett interview Jon Kabat-Zinn on On Being. That show regularly makes me weep, and today was no exception. I was listening, but my monkey mind was also thinking about this maybe-space of mine, and about how we are all enough, right now, right here, and can reminding one another of that be the main thing we do? Then toward the end the interview, Jon Kabat-Zinn read a poem by Derek Walcott. I burst into tears. Then I pulled into my driveway and sat down at the computer.

“Love After Love”

The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

Derek Walcott
Collected Poems, 1948-1984

Oh, friends. Can I tell you about this evening? Can I tell you about the amazing meal my husband made with a certain two-year old and his end-of-the-day sillies while I was getting some work done in a local cafe? Can I tell you about the killer Caesar salad with homemade dressing and croutons he made from a local baker’s bread and our own lettuce and cherry tomatoes and eggs and garlic and chicken? Can I tell you about the cheesy grits full of delicious butter and cheese? Can I tell you about the two-year old who screamed, “I don’t like grits I DON’T LIKE GRITS IDON’TLIKEGRITSICAN’TEATTHEM!!!!!” for a very long time and then proceeded to eat a giant plate full of Caesar salad covered in garlicky anchovy dressing?

This business of toddlers and food is a tricky one. Sometimes I want to pull my hair out. Sometimes it is so stressful I completely lose sight of the Big Picture, the one where this too shall pass, the one where I remember how important these power struggles are as our little people become bigger people, the one where I know he and we will survive his toddlerhood just fine.

I think that in those times where I can barely see past the end of my dinner fork, it is important to remember it’s not always like this. In that spirit I am reposting something I wrote a couple weeks ago over at our farm blog. I think it fits perfectly here.

As we ate these outside at the picnic table last night, in a spell of blessed cool after a quick little thunderstorm, I realized it was the fifth time we’d eaten them in under two weeks. I think that means they’re a winner. I think that means y’all need the recipe.

There’s a very small amount of grating and chopping involved, but really these fritters could not be easier. You grate a summer squash or two – I’ve learned that yellow squash, zephyr, and pattypan work best for our family and for a certain particular two-year old right now, but zucchini fritters are particularly pretty. You squeeze the excess water out of the squash with a dishtowel or paper towels – this is the one picky step, but it only takes a minute, and having tried skipping this step, I think it’s worth doing. You chop an onion – mince it, if you’re living with the same two-year old. Then you mix it all up with some flour, some cornmeal, an egg, some cheese, some salt and pepper, and you shape them into patties, and then you pop them in the oven while you set the table.  Easy peasy!

A word on picky eaters: we have one. It’s been humbling. I thought because we have fields and countertops and a fridge and two freezers all full of delicious vegetables, that he’d take to them right away. And in his first six months of exploring solid foods, he did. But then he started having strong opinions, opinions like: white and brown foods like milk, yogurt, butter, bread, cheese, crackers, pasta, oatmeal, and eggs are really quite sufficient when it comes to one’s diet. And you know what? I want him to have opinions. I want him to be able to disagree with me. I want him to figure out what he loves and what he doesn’t love. I think he needs my guidance, but I also think he needs my patience and my trust … trust that he’ll survive toddlerhood just fine, trust that he is doing what most two-year olds since the dawn of two-year olds have done, trust that he is developing just as he should.

When I was pregnant I proclaimed I’d never “hide” vegetables in food, but I’m coming to realize it’s more complicated than that. In addition to all the independent toddler stuff going on, I think little people have a very acute sense of taste and texture. I think maybe we need to take it easy on them sometimes. And if that means choosing yellow squash over zucchini sometimes, or mincing the onions instead of chopping them – well, I can do that.

I’ll add that our son loves to help me make these. “Mama, I want to grate!” he says, and so he does, with some help. “Dad, I can break the egg,” he offers, and so he does, and pretty well at that! “Let me squoosh it up, Mama!” he demands, and so he does.

And so we make fritters. Sometimes he eats them. Sometimes he just licks the ketchup off his plate. “Like a dog!” he says.

You should make them too.

Baked Squash (or Zucchini) Fritters with Garlicky Yogurt Sauce
adapted just a bit from The Yellow House

Kid-friendly! Quick! And easy too to make gluten-free – the flour in this recipe just serves as a binder, so replace it with your favorite gluten-free flour and you should be good to go. One friend replaces the flour with masa harina – that sounds really good to us! Also, while parmesan is particularly tasty in these, feel free to use another kind of cheese. We used mozzarella the first time we made these because that’s what was in the fridge, and they were still very good.

These are great with ketchup (our son’s favorite), a fried egg (my favorite), tzatziki, or the quick garlicky yogurt sauce below.

2 cups grated summer squash or zucchini, pressed between layers of a clean dishtowel or paper towels to absorb some of the water
1 small onion, minced
1/4 cup whole wheat pastry flour (or other flour – see note above)
1/3 cup cornmeal
1/4 cup Parmesan cheese, grated
1 egg, lightly beaten
salt and pepper

Preheat the oven to 400°F. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper or a silicone baking mat.

In a large bowl, toss the squash and onion with the flour, cornmeal, and cheese. Add the beaten egg and some salt and pepper, and mix until everything comes together. Use your hands if you like; it’s fun! It should have the consistency of meatloaf.

Using your hands, gently form the mixture into small balls (about 3 tablespoons of mixture for each fritter). Place them on the baking sheet and use your hand to flatten them into small patties about a half-inch thick.

Bake for 15 minutes, until golden brown on the bottom. (If making the yogurt sauce below, make it now – this will give the flavors time to meld a bit.) Then broil for 2-3 minutes longer. The fritters should be a lovely golden color. Good warm or at room temperature. Serve with ketchup, fried eggs, tzatziki, or the garlicky yogurt sauce below.

Makes 6-8 fritters.

Garlicky Yogurt Sauce

3/4 cup yogurt
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 clove garlic, minced

Stir all ingredients together in a small bowl. Taste, and add more salt if you think it needs it. Allow to sit for at least 20 minutes if possible to allow the flavors to meld.

Doesn’t that sound like something quaint to say when you’ve knocked over a bag of flour or grazed your knuckle because you were daydreaming about pie instead of paying attention to the cheese grater?

But for real: this is just some easy delicious food, and you should make some.

I suppose they look rather unassuming up there, piled on the plate next to a green salad. The list of ingredients is equally humble: potatoes, butter, salt, pepper, herbs-if-you-have-them-but-don’t-let-not-having-them-stop-you-from-making-these-for-dinner-tonight.

Don’t be fooled: underneath their plain Jane exterior, these potatoes are very exciting indeed. We’ve been making them for years, and we think the trick is in the dual cooking method: you start them in some sizzling butter on the stovetop and then slide them into the oven for a spell, where the skins get gorgeously browned and the insides go all light and fluffy and perfect. It’s really something.

Buttery Spudlets
adapted only slightly from The Passionate Vegetarian by Crescent Dragonwagon

A few quick notes … the original recipe calls for tiny new potatoes, and while the pictures in this post might look like new potatoes, in truth they are it’s-the-very-end-of-the-farm-season-and-this-is-what-we-could-scrape-up-from-the-bottom-of-the-potato-bin potatoes. But you can use plain old baking potatoes as well; just cut them into rough 1-inch chunks. This is what we usually do and I think we even prefer them that way! You can also substitute sweet potatoes for some of the regular potatoes – delicious. These potatoes seem to be the perfect side dish to just about everything. But they are also divine on their own with a fried egg on top and that is a perfectly respectable supper. We’re just sayin’.

2 tablespoons butter
1 1/2 lbs or so potatoes cut into 1-inch chunks (or small new potatoes)
1 teaspoon fresh herbs, chopped fine, if you have them (rosemary is really really good, and thyme is nice too)
salt and black pepper to taste

Preheat the oven to 400°F.

Melt the butter in an oven-safe skillet (you’ll need a lid too in a sec) over medium heat. Add the potatoes and cook for about 5 minutes, shaking the skillet once or twice.

Cover the skillet and slide it into the oven. Bake for 20 minutes.

Carefully remove the lid. Add the salt and pepper and herbs if you’re using them. Shake the skillet to mix everything up. Cook uncovered for 15 more minutes, giving the skillet a good shake every 5 minutes.

Eat up!

Saturday was my son’s second birthday, and it was a really good one.  I didn’t, in the end, get everything done I’d been planning: my dad and I had what turned out to be overly ambitious plans to build him an easel, for example, and I never did get around to making a birthday banner we can use for all our birthdays every year.

Still, when I think back on the celebrations, things really did go exactly as I’d hoped.  And I think it has a lot to do with the intention I set very deliberately when we started planning: Keep things simple. Remember that gathering together in celebration of this little guy – the eating and the laughing and the gratitude – is the point. Don’t get lost in the details. Don’t fret. Don’t fret.

And you know what? I didn’t! So what if the icing wouldn’t set, if the cornbread sank low in the middle, if the wood for the bonfire was damp, if the sink was full of dishes! We had ourselves a very merry day indeed. We cooked together and instead of stressing over whether dinner would be ready in time or what to do about that icing, we sipped wine and told jokes and chopped sweet potatoes and tasted the chili to see if it needed more salt. And then we filled our bellies with really really good homemade food and we sang and laughed for the birthday boy and as we sat around that fire at the end of the night, I felt an enormous peace.

Which brings me to my point: I think the kitchen is a great place to choose not to fret. It’s an easy place to fret, I know. So many people to accommodate, so many recipes to try, so many techniques to understand, and what must be five dirty dishes for every clean one you manage to wrangle back onto the shelf.

For me, personally, the kitchen is probably the place where I have the greatest ambitions, and so it’s also the place where I experience some of my deepest disappointments. There’s so much I want to do well in the kitchen: I want to make a realistic and delicious menu plan every week, I want to freeze and can and ferment, I want to involve my son as much as possible, and I want it to be tidy in there at least sometimes. And I do not do all of this well. Sometimes I feel really defeated.

I do think it’s really important to ask ourselves what kind of home we want, to have some kind of framework on which to hang the minutiae of our days, to have a big picture that guides us as we decide what can get done and what will have to wait. But I’m coming to think it’s equally important to learn how to let go. To choose not to fret.

Here are a few tiny little ways we’ve learned not to fret in our kitchen:

• I use salted butter in my baking and nothing bad happens.  Most baking recipes call for unsalted butter. Unsalted butter just doesn’t taste very good on toast or pancakes or sweet potatoes, so we never buy very much of it. I do try to keep a pound or so in the freezer, but I find I want to bake way more often than I remember to thaw that butter. So, I use regular salted butter. If I remember, maybe I use a bit less salt than the recipe calls for to compensate, but often I don’t even do that. I have had no catastrophes.

• We don’t peel our vegetables. I learned about not peeling from my husband, and it’s been very liberating! We do peel winter squash and onions and garlic, but that’s it – we don’t peel potatoes, carrots, zucchini, cucumbers, sweet potatoes, or beets. Everything seems to taste quite delicious, and I’m betting it’s healthier to boot. We do grow most of our own vegetables on our farm, so we know there’s no pesticide residue or wax on them. If you buy most of your produce at the grocery store, be sure to wash it very well if you’re going to join our little No Peel Revolution.

• I find most cultured dairy products can be used interchangeably. So I use what I have on hand — yogurt, buttermilk, sour cream — regardless of which one the recipe calls for.  If I don’t have any of those, I’ll add a tablespoon or two of vinegar or lemon juice to milk and let it sit for 5 or 10 minutes. Works great.

These really are small things. But sometimes a small thing is all I need – to find my footing, to remember to be gentle with myself, and to get on with the merry work of feeding my family.

How does it work in your kitchen? What tips can you share for keeping it simple and not getting lost in the details? Please share!

(some potatoes we didn’t peel)

 

I am of two minds about cookbooks.  If you’ve ever sat in the comfy chair in my kitchen with a cup of coffee or a glass of wine, you’re probably laughing out loud right now, because you’re remembering my enormous cookbook collection, the one that doesn’t even fit on one six-foot bookshelf.

I’ll post a picture sometime.  I’m not kidding.  ENORMOUS.

I adore cookbooks.  That shelf overfloweth but I still got a new cookbook last week and, umm, another one is on its way in the mail.  It’s probably all to do with what they represent to me, which food writer Laurie Colwin summed up very nicely in her book More Home Cooking:

Cookbooks hit you where you live. You want comfort; you want security; you want food; and you want to not be hungry; and not only do you want these basic things fixed, you want it done in a really nice, gentle way that makes you feel loved. That’s the big desire, and cookbooks say to the person reading them, ‘If you read me, you will be able to do this for yourself and for others. You will make everybody feel better.’

Right?

Only, sometimes I think we have forgotten how to feed ourselves – that we have lost our confidence and intuition in the kitchen, that we are at least sometimes overwhelmed by the task of planning a week’s worth of square meals for our family, that the idea of cooking from scratch without a recipe can feel as impossible as driving blindfolded.

The reasons for all this are probably pretty complicated, and I don’t mean to attempt a tidy explanation here in this post.  But I think the answer is just to cook.  To cook more.  To cook often.  To cook alone and with our partners and with our kids and with our friends and with our neighbors.

And there are times when I think my beloved cookbooks get in the way. I know that sometimes I’m paralyzed by choice – at any given moment I might have four cookbooks piled atop one another on the kitchen island, each with nine recipes bookmarked. Other times I pass a recipe by because I don’t have dried rosemary or I’m out of lemons or I don’t have the right kind of mushrooms or I only have chicken stock and not beef stock.

But I’ve been rereading all the Little House books over the last couple years and there’s never once mention of a cookbook.  I’m going to talk about Ma Ingalls for a minute here – cautiously. I don’t think we need to work like she did to feed our families well. She spent almost every waking hour of every day of every week of every month, all year long, keeping her family fed, and that’s not what I’m urging. I also don’t mean to romanticize the adversity or the loneliness or the dangers of frontier living. But gosh … Ma worked up a blackbird pot pie when the blackbirds were eating all their corn, and she made her own sourdough when blizzards kept the supply train from bringing essential pantry items like yeast, and there was (almost) always fresh homemade butter on the table. Caroline Ingalls did not have a giant cookbook shelf, and she did not have food blogs, and she did not have Facebook. She didn’t have measuring spoons or an oven thermometer either – or even an oven at all, for many years.

So how did she do it?

Well, first off, she managed it all because she had to, because if she didn’t figure it out her family would starve.  That’ll motivate you.

But that’s not the whole story, of course.  We know she cooked with her sisters and her sisters-in-law and her neighbors and women at church.  We know her daughters cooked alongside her from the time they were very young and so I think it’s fair to assume she did the same as a little girl.

And I think that when you do something your whole life, you’re not scared of it – it’s just something you do. Maybe it starts as something someone teaches you but then it becomes second nature. I want to give that to my son.

When I am feeling like I do not know what to feed my kid – when he has refused everything except bread and yogurt and pretzels for four days – when we’re out of baking powder and the milk has gone sour – when what with putting in another load of laundry and stubbing my toe on a Matchbox car and changing diapers and writing a new post for our farm blog and trying to figure out how many CSA shares to offer next year and going on a long meandering walk in the woods with my son and looking at mushrooms and wading in the creek and forgetting about my to do list for a while – when what with all that it’s all of a sudden 6:30pm and I have not even thought about what to cook for dinner —

— well, sometimes, when all that is going on, I make applesauce.

It’s not dinner.  But I swear to Pete it’s food.  Good food.  Easy food.  Real food.  And I can do it without a long list of ingredients, without three burners and five bowls, without stress. Without a cookbook.

Simplest Applesauce

Use whatever kind of apples you have on hand, and as many of them as you want. I used three Honeycrisps for the pot above.  Apples you’ve neglected for weeks in the crisper drawer or apples that are bruised from when your toddler threw them at the dog work great here.  I’ve listed some optional ingredients, but I recommend making this applesauce with just apples and water the first time.  Apples are naturally sweet and flavorful and become even more so after the gentle heat of cooking. It’s seems almost a miracle to make something so good out of almost nothing.

apples
water
optional: one cinnamon stick or a good shaking of ground cinnamon, a little honey or maple syrup

Quarter and core your apples. I never peel mine.  Cut the apple quarters into chunks – a young child can even do this step with a plastic knife – and put them in a saucepan or Dutch oven.  Add just enough water to come about an inch up the sides of the pot, maybe a little less.  Add any optional ingredients now too.

Cover your pot, turn the burner on medium-low, and cook until the apple chunks are tender, about 15 minutes.

Remove the cinnamon stick if you used it. Purée with an immersion blender (the easiest way, if you have one), or purée in batches in a food processor, or mash with a potato masher.

Lasts maybe a couple weeks in the fridge and for a long long time in the freezer!

This soup is really very good.

And after the initial effort and swearing required to peel your winter squash, it’s really no trouble at all – maybe twenty minutes of your time while your baby naps or your toddler hides the dog’s food under the living room couch and in your rain boots. Ahem.

I’m going to confess: my crockpot, a wedding gift, gathered dust for a few years after we got married. I wanted to use it, really I did … but I just didn’t know quite how to integrate it into my cooking.  I was 30 when I got married.  By that point I felt pretty confident in the kitchen, and I just didn’t understand what it could do that I couldn’t do.  Well … I have a two-year old now, and I get it.  Also, I love it.  LOVE it.

And it’s not just for soups and roasts! It’s my favorite way to cook a pot of beans, and did you know you can make jam in a slow cooker too?  Tales for another time.

For now let’s talk about the soup: it’s warm, it’s gorgeous, it’s a little spicy, and it’ll fill you right up.  Really quite the thing for these chilly October nights.

Slow Cooker Winter Squash Soup with Curry and Coconut Milk
adapted from Better Homes and Gardens

You can use almost any kind of winter squash here.  Butternut is a classic, and we’ve also made it with a deep orange kabocha (that’s the squash in the photo at the top of this post). We really like the little kick this soup gets from the Asian chili sauce, but you can certainly leave it out if you like.  Finally, our curry powder is fairly salty and we like the soup as is, but if you have a low- or no-salt curry powder, you’ll probably need to add more salt. Taste before serving and add additional salt as needed.

1 winter squash, about 2 pounds, peeled and cut into 1-inch pieces
1 medium onion, chopped
1-4 cloves garlic (depending on your feelings about garlic!), minced
1 tablespoon brown sugar or whole cane sugar
1 tablespoon curry powder
2 cups chicken or vegetable broth
1 14-oz can unsweetened coconut milk
1 tablespoon fish sauce or soy sauce
1 teaspoon Asian chili sauce (like Sriracha) (optional)

Combine all ingredients in slow cooker, cover, and cook on low 4-5 hours or high 2-3 hours. When the squash is soft, use an immersion blender to puree the soup until it’s smooth and velvety.  You can also puree the soup in batches in a food processor or blender – be careful!  Or you can use a potato masher; the soup won’t be quite as smooth but will still taste delicious.  Ladle the soup into big bowls, top with a dollop of plain yogurt or sour cream or a squeeze of lime juice, and serve with lots of bread!

Variation:
For a nice protein boost, add a cup of dry lentils at the beginning — very tasty!

This soup also comes together beautifully on the stovetop. It requires more tending but cooks up in about an hour. Saute the onion and garlic in some coconut oil or olive oil until soft, and then add the curry powder and continue to saute for about a minute, until nice and fragrant. Then add the rest of the ingredients, bring to a boil, turn down to a simmer, and cook until the squash is soft. Then use your immersion blender to proceed as above.

When the weather starts to turn, do you crave soup too? Leave your favorite recipe, or a link to a favorite recipe, in the comments!