Sliding into fall.

Summer.  It's over.  Today I steam-cleaned the carpets with one of those things that's like a winnebago, but sized like a stroller.  It weighs about as much as a motor home and is as noisy, but when we're done we can return it to the drugstore and our carpets are soft and clean.  Steam cleaning carpets is an extraordinarily satisfying chore.

I know summer is officially over  because when the sun came out and the breeze blew warm and dry I didn't think, "Ahh, nice day."  Instead I thought, "Ooooooh, Indian Summer."   And I have to say that I'm a little worried that's a racist term, but it's such a flattering term.  If it is racist, will someone please let me know?

It is mid-september and my winter coats have been hauled up from the basement and aired, my sundresses and sandals given a good shake and stored away.

I will miss raspberries, fuzzy and soft as earlobes but better, because you can eat them.

I will miss being able to go cut flowers from my garden for dinner parties, and having meals outside.

I will miss the warm afternoon sun shining through my husband's frosty martini.

I will miss having friends say, when we go to pick up our daughter after a play date, "Do you want some salmon?  I caught it a few hours ago."

So, I will miss summer, and all the mild warmth and enduring sunlight a northwest summer delivers.  But, and this is something really exciting, I discovered a new reason to love winter, and that that reason is steak grilled in one's own fireplace.  I happened upon this situation by accident, because it started drizzling and I didn't feel like going out to fire up the grill.  Now I will grill all winter, over coals and from the comfort of my sofa.

My daughters and I had a night alone recently.  We try to make it special, and this night alone was made special with cocoa, a fire, and a big ribeye, sprinkled with salt and pepper and placed on a rack - the same rack we use for cooling cookies - then propped up over some coals.  The beefy, fatty smell and the sizzling sound made for the perfect appetizer.  We ate only the beef, quite filled up with cocoa as we were, sitting before the fire with grease running down to our wrists. 

Home baked bread will be another good thing about this winter.  I've learned to make Jim Lahey's 24-hour no-knead bread and I may never buy bread again.  Kneading?  Who needs it?  If you're able to mix yeast, water, flour and salt and let it sit for 24 hours, you could have a loaf of this every day.

Bread, beef, fire.  Winter might not be so bad, after all.

A Practically Perfect Day

I had the best day last week. 
First, I got a fat wedge of a hand-written letter in the post. 

I had forgotten the sneak-away-with-it pleasure a thick letter brings.  This one, from a loved one in Florida, lasted through a glass of Vinho Verde while I sat in a comfortable chair in the back yard and watched my daughters throw crepe-paper streamers over the swing set.

Then, my husband brought home a paper bag of vegetables that the parent of one of his students grew.

This is a beautiful sight, no?  I wanted to eat all of these, at the same time.  Figuring that if they ripened simultaneously they could be cooked and eaten the same, I chopped and tossed them into a pot with olive oil, salt and pepper.

While that cooked I went to check on the girls.  One quietly read a book on the sofa while the other had dragged her sleeping bag out to the yard and put herself to sleep.

The sight of her, cuddled down in a patch of sun on one of our last days of summer, made me happier than even snowflakes that melt on your nose and eyelashes.

I cut a few of the last sweet peas while she slept. 

She woke up thirty minutes later, sweet and happy and smelling of toasted baby skin.  We ate sitting on our back steps, in the sun, waiting for bats.  The tang of the tomatoes, the sweetness of the beets, the full meatiness of that red onion and the mellow bottom of the zucchini were amazing.  I had four helpings and then felt sad that there would be none left for lunch the next day.

These are a few of my favorite things.

Slow As Peas

Today I woke up to a cold drizzle pattering on my tent - a sound that meant my sister, her children, my daughter and I would be sadly catching the nine o'clock boat from Shaw Island back to the mainland instead of the noon boat.

I moved the little camp stove to a dry spot beneath a fir and made coffee, then delivered it to my sister to help her get a move on.  I wish I could say this is a bad picture of me, but I think it's what I really look like.

Today was cold and rainy, but here is where I spent yesterday, so I couldn't be too upset.

While my youngest daughter and I were in the San Juans, the garden exploded.  The roses looked like this,

the rhubarb, which I'd practially harvested to death in a week-long binge of rhubard crisps, looked like this,

and these feathery little mystery plants popped open sweet blue stars to cleverly hide the ripening blueberries.

What are they?  I think they came courtesy of the birds who sit on the telephone wire above the garden.   Thanks, birds!

In spite of the cold, rainy day our homecoming was good for other reasons, too.  A loved one's biopsy came back negative (I want to say "came back happy"), my husband was home from a conference in Denver and my oldest daughter from a trip to Mount St. Helens with my mother.  With all this garden blooming, good news and being happily reunited from our adventures we decided to celebrate in the best way possible - with a slab of pork big as a mud flap.  Dinner was ham steak all crispy and caramelized from the pan, fresh corn on the cob, Wild Wheat's Swiss Peasant bread and buttered peas from our garden.

That golden head is my daughter helping me pick some peas.

Then, we shelled them.  It took time.  It took two Session beers' worth of time.

After we shelled, pretending to be captive kitchen servants in the castle of the evil queen, we had a lovely bowl of peas.

A small bowl.  Shelling peas is a bit of work.  Back in the day women must have either loved doing this because it meant they could sit themselves down and chat for a bit, or they hated it because it took forever and there was so much else to do, like beating rugs and churning butter.

I've got a Hoover and my butter comes in fridge-door friendly little sticks, so for me shelling peas was lazy fun.

I heated a pan and melted some of that butter, adding to it just a little olive oil.  When it was bubbling hot I put the peas in.  With them were a few snow peas for those visual taste buds.  After a minute or two I poured it all into a bowl, squeezed some lemon juice over it and sprinkled on kosher salt. 

They were so good.  They were extra good with the ham, the corn, and the hash browns Joe made.  The bag of empty pea pods and corn husks sat by the front door, waiting to make the worms in our bin wriggle with happiness, I ate tangy peas pinched in a piece of soft bread, Ruthie told stories of Mount St. Helens, Iris ate about three ears of corn and Joe told stories of jumping into a river with his colleagues in Denver.  Rain drops fell gently against the windows but my shoulders felt toasted from the Island sun I lay beneath yesterday.  We were home again, home again, jiggety jig and all we love are well.  It doesn't get much better than that.

A Net

I had the misfortune to see a man jump to his death from the Aurora Bridge a few days ago.  He was on the outside of the railing, bright in his colorful tie-dye t-shirt.  In his hand he clutched a piece of paper as he leaned back and looked over his left shoulder at the water way down below.  I thought, "He's going to break those glasses!" 

I've seen this before and rehearsed what I should do, which is screech to a stop, jump out and start begging the person to get down and knock it off, but with little kids in the car I couldn't do that. Plus, I had a vision of starting to speak and then seeing him let go. It would be my fault. So, helpless, I drove past. It felt terrible.

As I continued north and reached the end of the bridge, watching him in the rearview mirror, he vanished.  He was just about here -

- and then he wasn't.

Of all the emotions I felt - anger, frustration, sadness, regret - the one I ended the day with was gratitude, and here's why.

My neighbor and I saw the suicide as we were driving home from watching a play at the Seattle Childrens' Theater.  We didn't know, until that morning when all the kids were playing out front and the adults stood around chatting with coffee, that both she and I planned to go to see the Musicians of Brementown, she with her oldest and I with my youngest.  Because of this - the life I live with neighbors congregating out front - I wasn't alone when we saw the man on the bridge. 

Later that night my family joined some good friends for dinner.  The kids dove into spaghetti and meat sauce, brilliantly made out of leftover meatloaf, while the grownups ate a perfectly mellow potato and leek soup, lifted mussels out of their shells before dunking chewy bread in the broth, spun linguini with seafood around our forks and washed it all down with a crisp and sweet Riesling.

And we shared stories and sadness, because my friend has also seen a man fall (leap? jump? dive?) to his death off the Aurora Bridge.  It helped to have someone understand the dark confusion and distraction that consumes you after seeing a stranger's suicide.  The wine helped too, of course, and the food, the sound of the children chattering away from the nook in the kitchen.

In this way the day ended with the realization that I'm fortunate to have a net beneath me, a group of friends who appreciate good food, good wine, and gathering around it.  When sadness descends I'm quickly comforted by those people and things I'm lucky to have in my life, luxuries like mussels and Riesling, blessings like neighbors standing around with coffee while the kids play. 

And that's really what I want this blog to be about - these treasures.  They are things we can all wrap around us, something I wish the man on the bridge had been able to do.

Prunes and Olives, Together at Last

Today I heaved the bins of summer clothes up from the basement, flung shorts and skirts around my bedroom and decided what to keep, what to give away, what needed mending. I pulled all the wool and double-thick stuff out of my drawers and closet, thought about what needed drycleaning, what I'd store and what I could shed. The whole afternoon felt delicious and kind of preparatory for heat, which made me think about Puerto Rican Chicken Pie.

The best thing about Puerto Rican Chicken Pie is that it doesn't have much chicken in it. Instead, it starts with little slivers of bacon getting crisp, then a chopped onion and diced ham. Chicken is part of it, but it doesn't play the starring role. Tomato sauce, green olives, chopped prunes, vinegar, capers, sweet red chilies and the pork make up the bulk of the pie. This makes me think that chickens are a delicacy, somehow, a little yard bird that's tossed into the pot after the pantry has been raided.  I normally avoid any and all things that have green pepper in them, but this pie is so rich that it needs the green pepper's grassy bitterness.  Here it is in the early stage, before the tomato sauce, capers and chopped prunes go in.

The recipe is a patient one, the kind that requires an "A, B, C," and "D" collection of ingredients, but it's not difficult and the flavor - like a tangy gumbo in pastry -  is unlike anything you've ever had. If you want the recipe, I'll send it to you.

Once all the ingredients, with the exception of the hard boiled eggs (I know! Is there anything that's NOT in there? No. There's not.),  are simmering on the stove and you have a 30-minute breather, you use that breather to make your pie crust.

Pie crust gets a bad rap for being tricky, but it's not. There's a reason we say, "easy as pie," and the reason is that pie is easy. Luckily, my friend Nancy taught me an important trick - put the flour and salt in a bowl and blend with a fork, put the shortening in the bowl and blend with a fork until it's like sand, and then - and here's the secret trick - once you add the iced water barely fluff it up, just enough so that it begins to clump together. Imagine being able to do that with laundry, pull it from the dryer, give it a toss and you're done. That's what you do with your dough. Don't bother with the cuisinart. Washing that thing takes five times as long as making pie dough with a fork and bowl.

And I know, it's the rolling of the dough that bogs the project down, but I have a trick for that, too.  I learned this trick one beautiful July weekend on Vashon Island while staying with the family of a college roommate.  After spending the afternoon picking cherries, the wasps so drunk on juice they bumped happily against us before diving in for another guzzle, my friend's mom made a cherry pie using bacon fat as her shortening.  As if that wasn't tip enough for one afternoon, she then rolled her dough out between sheets of Saran Wrap, quickly, with no sticking, and keeping the counters clean.  I've never been successful with Saran Wrap because it wrestles me and wins, so I use a kitchen trash bag.

Take the bag and slit the bottom so it's a tube.  Throw a little flour in there. Then, loosely gather half of your dough and put it in a trash bag. Don't worry if it's in particles, because rolling will make it stick together.  Make a little Ayer's Rock/Uluru with it, sprinkle some flour on top and start rolling.

Work the center first, then the edges.  Every once in a while lift the bag from the dough, flip the whole thing over, lift the bag from the dough, and rotate so that you're sort of making a circle.  It doesn't matter if the edges look rough, just pull dough off and fill the gaps and roll a little more.

Then, all you do is put your pan in there upside down and flip the whole thing over.

Take the other half of the dough and repeat the process.  To move the dough to the top of the pie, just roll it around your rolling pin.

Do the usual folding and pinching, and poke a little design in the top.  I made a pig, to be clever.  Then, bake it.  Forty minutes later, this comes out of the oven, and it is so good you'll think you have a parade in your mouth.  Your only problem will be burning your tongue because you can't wait for it to cool.

And just look at that flaky crust.  That crust makes this a breakfast dish, too, one that will make you think summer is almost here.

Gnocchi and Cream Puffs

I am not an incompetent person. As evidence I share two recently completed projects:

A closet, to replace my swaying, tippy Ikea clothing rack,



and some curved shelves that both remind me of my grandmother's kitchen and neatly fill an empty space.



Neither of these projects is flawless. In fact, I took particularly flattering photos. If you looked closely you'd see all sorts of mistakes - split wood, a bar that's keeping my slightly warped plywood straight, lots of spackle. But I don't really care about those things, because one of the best pieces of wisdom I ever heard was, "If it's worth doing, it's worth doing badly." Keeping that in mind has freed me up to attempt all sorts of things that might otherwise be too intimidating.

Too bad that doesn't work for food. And that's where I want to bring up the topic of gnocchi. Fun to eat, fun to say, but harder to make than it should be. It's boiled balls of dough, right? The Jews have a version, the Nebraskans have a version, the Germans do it and so do the Italians. Damn the Italians for making the hardest one, because of all those cultures I enjoy Italian food the most. I am part German, which may be why spaetzle (is all boiled dough fun to say?) and I are copacetic, but I really thought I could get the gnocchi down.

One of my problems is that I'm not a totally focused cook, and I think you have to be in order to cook really, really well. That's why there are professionals. That's also why you don't see restaurants teaming up with preschools - cooking with small children around is hard. Cooking really well is almost impossible. So this may be why the gnocchi didn't turn out. I probably interrupted my vigilance to read a book, put an outfit on a doll, do up a button, or find a shoe.

Which brings me to pate de choux, which is what you have to start with to make gnocchi according to Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Before you go down the road of wondering why I picked up the French cookbook when wanting gnocchi, remember that they share a border. It made sense. Unfortunately, it didn't make gnocchi. Instead, the result was a sort of potato soup. "It's good," my sweet husband said, dribbling sage butter over the gloppy mess as though it were just the way he liked it. "Mmmmm," he hummed, spooning up another bite, "the butter helps."

The butter didn't help enough, and I would not recommend allowing Julia Child to guide you through gnocchi. The next time I'm up for ricing potatoes through my mesh wire strainer then rolling each little ball before gently dropping it in a simmering pot, I'll go with some online recipe. By an Italian.

But enough of the failed gnocchi. To hell with them, really, because what we got out the leftover pate de choux were eight little cream puffs, and they were perfect.



I spooned the dough into a sandwich bag, bit off one corner, squeezed out sweet little mounds of gold onto some parchment paper and baked them. Then, we whipped some cream, made a little chocolate glaze (but not too much, so the girls would sleep) and ate them by the fire.

My girls licked the whipped cream bowl, too, because licking bowls, spoons and beaters is the best way - I think - to get someone to fall in love with cooking, and my guess is that their memory of the evening is one of perfection.

So to conclude, let's trust each region's contribution. Italy for gnocchi, France for cream puffs, Nebraska for dumplings, and so on. Some things - like gnocchi - are worth doing only if they can be done fairly well.

Gravy

We had a really warm spell here in Seattle. It lasted a while, long enough to get my husband and I over our annual "We have to move somewhere warm!" period.

Now, of course, it's really cold. I even had to lay a sliced up hefty sack over the little seedlings and the juicy leaves of rhubarb, recently unfurled, so that they wouldn't all freeze and die.

But before it was really cold, when it was warm and balmy and bright, I realized that I wasn't quite ready to let go of winter for one simple reason: gravy.

Winter means gravy. Beef gravy on roasted potatoes. Chicken gravy on the peas, mashed potatoes, and coating a slice of bread. Gravy is good in so many ways.

One of my favorite gravy options is chicken pot pie, because it's basically gravy pie, and what could be better than that?



This pot pie was nothing fancy. In fact, it was a lazy pot pie. I used up some old frozen pie crust that we've had since Christmas. We usually make our own crust, but it's nice to have some on hand. I threw in some spinach because we didn't have peas like I thought we did. We didn't have chicken stock, so I used water and made a broth with kosher salt, the chicken fat juice and pot liquor from cooking the spinach, onions and carrots.

The thing about chicken pot pie is that you can be lazy. You can be the lazy diner queen of shortcuts, and it will taste good. Why? Because it's pastry, gravy, onions and chicken. It's hard to mess those up.

Gravy - in any form - is one reason long, dark, cold winters here in the Northwest can be endured until March. Somehow, I never crave chicken pot pie in the summer. Too rich, maybe. Too much stove time. But now, in the wobbly time between deep winter and long summer days, chicken pot pie is just right.

Radishes

Here's the thing: I love radishes.

And by that I don't necessarily mean only eating them. I mean the fact you can plant some radish seeds, be the worst gardener in the world, and still have radishes sprout from the earth. Radishes are a forgiving, hardworking little vegetable.

When I plant radishes, I am rewarded with a whole cluster of success. They sprout in neat little pairs of heart-shaped leaves. They grow quickly. They are easy to pick once they're big enough to eat, easy to rinse, and good with a little butter and salt. Salt if you use sweet butter, otherwise, a little butter, and some more salt.

Cut a cross in them, press a little butter in, sprinkle a little salt from between your fingers, and eat them.

Radishes make you feel like you garden well, have a tongue for spice, and understand butter.