Because I Said So.

Dad lift.

Today I decided to give my daughters a great treat and take them skiing.  We had a lazy wake up and a leisurely morning eating pancakes and putting on long underwear.  I was so proud of myself for not pushing an early departure and just being a cool mom, and you know what pride goeth before.  That's right.  A twelve-year old's tantrum.  She went from excited about the braid in her hair to throwing herself on the bed and refusing to go in about five seconds.  "I don't want to go!" she sobbed and screamed.  "Can't you understand that?  Why do I have to go?  Why can't I just stay here?!"

Somehow, I got her out of the house and into the car.  I write a lot about resilience in children, but this piece is about resilience in parents. 

A friend recently shared this depressing article on how terrible my generation is at parenting, which made me think of how much more tedious and time consuming parenting is when corporal punishment isn't acceptable.  I told my mother I hated her once and got slapped across the face. I never did it again. Like her peers, my mom used whatever was within her reach if she didn't feel like using her hand - hair brushes, wooden spoons, the flyswatter - so when I mouthed off it took my mother about 2 seconds to do her parenting thing, then I sulked or cried or got an ice pack while she got back to whatever my misbehavior interrupted.  Now parenting involves all this talk, discussion and consequences and debriefing. And because it takes a long time, I don't think we're doing it.  We get sick of the whole "life coaching" part of modern parenting and abandon it mid-effort, so we lose our authority.  I tell young teachers nothing is more important than following through when they threaten a student with a consequence.  I'm not sure my generation of parents is as consistent with following through as we could be.

This article links how we negotiate with our children over things like broccoli to our loss of authority and a child's increased anxiety and uncertainty.  I thought of it while driving east on I-90 and realized I should have simply said, "Because I said so," when my daughter asked why she had to go skiing.  I didn't have to talk about skiing as a life pleasure or important northwest skill.  I could have just made her go skiing because I'm her mother.  I can do that.  She's twelve, and I still know more about everything than she does.

By the time we got to Alpental both girls were excited and happy, but if you've been to the bunny slopes you've seen and heard angry, scared and wailing children.  Sometimes the parents lose it.  I've seen parents hit, drag, shove or yell at hysterical children, but today the parents were resilient. They set aside their own pleasure to force the joy of skiing on their children, whether the children wanted a piece of that joy or not.

"Noooooooo!"

Rest and a snack.

A little push.

It reminded me of the "forced marches" my parents made us take when we were young, long hikes on Palomar where our cabin was, with cans of Coors and Tab banging against our kidneys through our thin nylon back-sacks.

Not loving it. Yet.

We didn't hate forced marches, but we didn't love them. It didn't matter. We had to do them because my parents said so, and they knew best. Now, hiking is one of my greatest joys.

Few of the kids I saw today really wanted to learn how to ski or snowboard.  Most of them wanted to go sit in the car or just play in the snow, but their parents wouldn't let them.  Being in a beautiful place and patiently, resiliently teaching your child the skills she needs to do something valuable is easier, perhaps, than tenaciously following through on a consequence for her back talk or misbehavior, but it serves as a good example. Here's what I was reminded of today:

1) Know why I want my children to do something, but don't try to explain that in the moment.  It's okay to make them do it because I told them to.  I know more than they do, something that makes their existence more secure.

2) Set aside my own agenda.  If it's important for them to learn something, it's going to take time for me to teach it. 

3) Sometimes I have to push or carry them up the hill if I want them to come down it.

4) Rests are good, and so is food.

5) If I keep my cool and have fun, it's easier for them to keep their cool and have fun.

6) They might not have fun now.  They might hate me now, but they'll have fun later. For parents, later's everything.  It's our job to prepare them for later whether they like it or not. 

More importantly, it's our job to prepare them for later whether we like it or not.

Strength and Surrender

A few days before Christmas and our trip to La Push I battled a case of Norovirus so violent I spent most of the night unconscious on the bathroom floor.  A few days later, when my friend suggested a rigorous hike from Third Beach, out on the Washington coast just south of La Push, to Taylor Point I was a little nervous I hadn't fully recovered.  Turns out, I hadn't.

I think a lot about resilience, both with the students I work with every day and my own daughters.   

I work in a setting that has seen far too much bloodshed - a school.  I tried to get a total for school shootings since 1996 when I became a teacher but scrolling through the long, long list on Wikipedia was too painful.  Try it.  The names, the numbers, the reasons are too much to interpret.  The overwhelming majority of the murderers are boys, boys so incapacitated by emotional pain they find a gun, carry it all the way to school, and murder.  In our culture girls learn and are taught more coping strategies for dealing with emotional pain than boys.  The image of a sobbing teenage girl and her cluster of friends asking for a bathroom pass may be a stereotype of teen angst, but it's also a how-to.  Overwhelmed?  Share the burden with your supporters.  Gather them around you. Put things on hold.  Cry.  Talk.  Unload.  Feel their hands and hear their words and for awhile, let them carry your pain with you.

It wasn't very long into our hike that I started to question whether my body was going to make it.  From Third Beach you climb a series of cliffs using rope and driftwood ladders.  My legs would not lift my weight.  I finally asked my friend Abi to push on my butt.  I'm not kidding.  And, like the champ she is, she did.  She pushed and I pulled, and between the two of us I made it up the seven rope climbs to the top of the bluff.  In this picture I am wondering if I can lift myself one more step.  I'm also embarrassed.  It's embarrassing to be weak. Look at that kid above me just flying up the cliff!

We stopped for a tea-break and snack and I did not feel good - faint and tissue paper weak.  I knew I should sit on the trail and wait for the return of my friends and daughter but thought that would be scary, so I continued on, knowing full well it might be a huge struggle to return. Finally we reached Taylor Point, where I lay on the sun-warmed rocks, drank a Pedialyte my friend Priscilla put in my water bottle, and tried to regain my strength.  I might have slept.  Eventually I opened my eyes to see a Bald Eagle flying about thirty feet above us, gloriously huge and graceful, effortlessly in its element. Abi gave me some chocolate. 

On the return, Abi took my backpack. Here she is, going down the same ladder I struggled to ascend.

I felt guilty, like you do when you pack a heavy camera you don't feel good enough to use and someone else has to carry if for you, but she persisted and I let her because I am smart, and I am female.  At 13, Abi would have insisted on coming to the bathroom with me if I was crying and hurting.  In our forties, she insisted on carrying my backpack.  Women are taught to do this from a young age.  Our daughters, Abi's and mine, witnessed this, saw me sick, flat on my back, saw Abi take my backpack, saw me surrender.  Two minutes into our return trip my nine-year old daughter said, "I'm too tired!" as she stretched her little legs up big steps, so I pushed on her butt to help her up the hill. Here we are, resting on the way home.  I'm resting on my back.  Again.

I know men have this in them too, the ability to ask for help, but they need to be louder about it.  Men need to teach boys how to share the burden.  Mothers are going crazy teaching their sons to be as emotionally healthy as girls, but no amount of didactic conversation from mother to son gets as much done as boys seeing it happen between men.  Google "what to do if your girlfriend dumps you" and then Google "what to do if your boyfriend dumps you," and see how men are encouraged to put up a front, gain revenge, and inflict pain.  See how women are encouraged to remember their strengths and lean on friends for support.  Men need to change the media messaging.  Uncles, teachers, neighbors and the fathers of friends, you all need to start modeling surrender and support.

My daughters are being taught all the right lessons.  If they don't get them from me they get them from movies, magazines, their friends and their culture.  They learn the most important lesson of all - when and how to ask for help - from all the women they know.  It's our boys I worry about.  It's the boys who don't see men relinquish the backpack, the rejection, the insecurities, the pain to a friend.  It's the boys who don't grow up seeing men rely on each other that I worry about.  Boys are trained to offer help, but they're not shown how to ask for it.

We often ask fathers to do more, to give more, but maybe we should be asking them to be really loud about asking for help.  We should be asking them to hand the backpack, or worry, or fear, or pain to someone else.  We should ask men to start teaching boys how to ask for help, and how that surrender creates strength.

Raising Girls and Making Piroshkis

Piroshkis might be straightforward - filling, dough, egg wash - but puberty isn't, and neither is parenting.

When we made our list of favorite meals in preparation for spending Christmas in our beloved cabin #33 at La Push I was surprised when my 12-year old asked for an encore of piroshkis.  Last year's were bland and dry, the pie dough tough and mealy at the same time, but she said she loved them. I added them to our list and tried to think of how to alter the recipe to make them better.

The day after Christmas I diced onion and browned meat for said piroshkis while the girls brought the World Wrestling Federation to life in their bedroom of our small cabin, young bodies flung from the bed off the log walls and to the floor, shrieking voices making the lights swing on their chains. Like parents do I marched into their room and said, "Go outside!"  My nine-year old put her coat on and went outside.  My 12-year old spiraled into a hysterical anger that included every wrong done since 2003, said she was not going outside because it was cold and slammed shut her bedroom door.

My husband took the dog and the nine-year old to the beach.  I was left making piroshkis - ironic piroshkis of love! - with a twelve-year old assigned an hour of bedroom imprisonment for calling her parents "jerks."

Minutes 0-15: hysterical sobbing and various things like, "...doesn't make any sense!!!!"
Minutes 16-20: daughter cleverly escapes bedroom lockdown because she has to "go to the bathroom."
Minutes 21-30: daughter emerges from bathroom and declares she's going to beach, tries to be Marshawn Lynch in getting to door / end zone.
Minutes 31-45: daughter returns to room crying hysterically, calling me a "hypocrite" for not letting her go to beach.
Minutes 46-60: daughter plays quietly in her room with journal, Legos, imagining her mother's gruesome death, pretending she's Adele, etc..

Meanwhile, I made piroshkis. As I rolled the dough and my daughter made her "I'm taking back my life!" escape attempts, I wrestled with the urge to dismiss her hysteria as hormone-driven emotional mindlessness, because that's what we're trained to do with adolescent girls.  We're trained to see them as witless passengers on some hormonal roller coaster. This makes us discount them, their feelings, and whatever objective they're fighting for. Adolescent boys get angry and we think, "My god!  He's exhibiting emotion!  This must be important!"  Adolescent girls get angry and we think, "Hello hormones!"  It's not okay.

I spooned filling - filling more moist than last year's because of a liberal addition of leftover fat from Christmas Day's prime rib - into circles of dough and thought about what it is to be female in our culture, how we minimize female rage by attributing it to hormones, how we think it's funny when young women attempt to exhibit power and autonomy by throwing tantrums - tantrums thrown because they haven't yet learned how to harness anger into persuasion and change.  We see their aggression as an entertaining lack of control, like how we laugh at videos of poor people fighting over discounted T.V.s on Black Friday.  My daughter wasn't flung into hysteria by her hormones, she was angry that her mother interrupted a really good wrestling match with some random order to go outside.

Unlike piroshkis, which can be quickly improved by adding a quarter cup of fat, approaching an adolescent girl's misbehavior from a feminist's perspective is complicated.  I had to hold my daughter accountable for her unacceptable and disrespectful language toward her parents but at the same time I had to recognize her anger and teach her how to express it more effectively.

Inspired by my brilliance in crafting a pastry brush from a torn paper towel for glossing the piroshkis with egg wash, I went into my daughter's room to debrief the situation once her hour was up.

Here's how I imagined it would go:
Me:  blah blah respect blah blah anger blah blah articulate your needs
My daughter:  Oh mother, you're so right.  I'm sorry.  I love you.

Here's how it went:
Me:blah blah respect blah blah anger blah blah articulate your needs
My daughter: Okay. Sorry. So can I go to the beach now?

You can control a piroshki's moistness, but you can't control the reaction of a strong-willed young woman.  So I confirmed she had heard me, which she claimed to have done, and sent her to the beach.

After all this I was exhausted, drained from trying to overcome the sexism of my era and be the best mother the species has ever seen.  How much easier it would have been to have just slapped her, kind of a "You're strong, I'm strong!" mothering strategy that suddenly seemed both feminist and effective. I pulled the piroshkis out of the oven expecting them to be a worn-out mess, beaten by conflict, over-worked and leathery, but they were perfect. Juicy, savory, with a crust both flaky and toothsome.  A hundred times better than last year's.

I ate one, looking out the huge picture window at my loved ones playing on the beach, thinking how next year I might do a better job of getting my kids outside, my daughter might do a better job of arguing her case, and we'd have someone other than Donald Trump in the White House.

Failing those lofty ambitions, at least I could make a really good piroshki.

Persimmons

My maternal grandparents had a large backyard that stepped down into a San Diego canyon in shady tiers of fruit trees - tangerine, avocado, persimmon, plum, fig, lemon and loquat.  One of my clearest memories of my grandfather is of him lifting cardboard flats of produce out of the trunk of his sedan when he visited, or carrying them out to load into our VW van when we visited him.  Flats of avocado, apricots, tangerines for juicing, loquats, figs - my grandparents were a CSA before CSAs were a thing.

My grandfather was raised on an Iowa farm, the 3rd of 11 children.  My grandmother was a city girl, born and raised in the blossoming metropolis of San Diego, but San Diego is a place where fruit trees grow like corn and she was born to a mother who let nothing go to waste.  She was raised not amid fields but among fruit trees.

Fruit trees grew on the small property owned by my great-grandparents, and every picture of my grandmother, her parents and her sister and then later, my grandfather, mother and aunt is taken in front of a fruit tree.  In this picture of my grandmother and my mom you can see the ladder leaning up against a loquat tree that grew on my great-grandparent's property. I'm sure there was a flat of loquats on the kitchen counter, waiting to be put in the car.

Here's my gorgeous grandmother and dapper grandfather in front of the same tree.  My grandmother made the clothes you see in these photos.  I know that's what people used to do, but she was particularly good at it, as my great-grandmother was and my mother is.












I've been thrown into this nostalgia because last week I saw my colleague and mentor Ron carrying a weighty brown paper bag full of persimmons down the hall of my school.  I got all excited, like you do when you see a bag (or a cardboard flat!) of beautiful home-grown fruit, and five minutes later he came into my office cradling four of them, like an offering.

When you grow up with flats of tree fruit needing homes, you grow up learning that fruit cannot go to waste. To use up persimmons my grandma made Persimmon Cookies. They were horrible.  They were ginger-colored, fluffy, and had nuts and raisins in them.  I ate them because even as a kid I knew making persimmon cookies was one way my grandmother showed her love for us.  Also, my parents were health-conscious and I was sugar-deprived.

My grandmother was driven, and not the most gentle of women.  She returned to university when my mother and aunt were young teens and she became a high school English teacher.  It's not easy, as I know, to be a working mother or a college student and a mother.  Right now I'm all three - in grad school (again), working full time and raising two beautiful girls.  I'm similar to my grandmother in another way, too. She often had a "hard done by" mentality.  A by-product of her admirable and relentless work ethic was a bitterness, a "why can't any of you help out more?" attitude that I am often guilty of.  It's difficult to slow down and soften up when your to-do list never ends and your internal engine says "go go go."  Here were four gorgeous persimmons, begging to be used.  One more thing on my weekend's to-do list.

Yesterday, I took a good long look at the persimmon cookie recipe, lovingly encased in plastic in my grandmother's recipe box that I now own. I felt myself slipping into a sort of bad baked-good PTSD, so I put the recipe away and pulled out some cookbooks.  My 9-year old came in, highly tuned as she is to any cooking project. She wanted to help.  We all know that any project involving a 9-year old is a project that takes longer and requires more cleaning up, and I wanted to get this done and finish folding laundry.  I said, "No honey, I just want to get this baked."  She went to read in the living room, and I remembered my grandmother.

I remembered standing by the stove while she taught me to cook a skinless chicken breast with Pam - a delicious low cholesterol treat for my grandfather.  I remembered her letting us put a little Mocha Mix into our cereal to give the blue nonfat milk more opacity.  I remembered her patiently letting us squeeze mountains of tangerines into juice.  She may not have slowed down for her daughters, but she slowed down for us.  I called my daughter back into the kitchen and let her and Ruth Reichl get to work on some spice cake.

Reichl's recipe called for pumpkin and apple, but my daughter decided pureed persimmon would do just fine.  Here she's modeling the "C" grip for safe cutting she learned at school.

Pumpkin-Apple Cake suddenly became persimmon cake, and the magic of cooking turned an item on the to-do list into a memory, my daughter and I whisking eggs and scraping a perfect cup of sugar, peeking in on cakes to see if they were done.

The house smelled good.  I shoved the laundry into a corner.  It could wait.

The persimmon cake was perfect, moist, dense and spicy. We had seconds, then thirds. My mom stopped by for a visit and a slice. I sent her home with a Tupperware flat of cake.






In this way a woman's life echoes down.  She may be cranky, she may waste her time on laundry instead of the children she loves. She makes mistakes, but every once in a while the right decision is made.  Sometimes it takes a fruit one can't bear to waste to pause the endless grind, warm up the oven and put what's really important at the top of the list.

Meeting my Daughter

Yesterday started with my daughter telling me to "stop being a Butt."  Like Butts do, I had nagged her to hurry up and get ready to go, which sent her into a hair flinging, backpack swinging, name-calling rage.  "You cannot talk to me that way," I said, feeling powerless and lame and old, something that did not result in her wrapping her arms around me and telling me how much she loves me.

Angry, hurt, wondering where I'd failed as a mother, I'm embarrassed to say I gave her the silent treatment on the way to school and stormed into my office without even telling her I loved her. I'm sure that showed her.

This stage of parenting is something you have to experience to believe.  We've all been snotty adolescents, but loving one with all your heart is like cave diving - unknown, deadly, and terrifying.

I've taught adolescents for more than twenty years.  I know them.  I get them, but my daughter has become a stranger.  Not too long ago I was highly tuned to my daughter's needs.  Tantrum?  "She's hungry," "She's exhausted," or "She's anxious."  Now, tantrums seem to be caused by my presence in the room, the sound of my voice or my loving touch, and it is not predictable.  At 5:15 I'm Mommy, the center of her world.  At 5:19 the sound of my voice makes her want to throw up.

Luckily, I teach in a middle school.  When I left my daughter yesterday morning I moved among hundreds of children her age whose faces light up in delight when they see me, as hers does when she sees her beloved teachers.

At lunch my students gave me a great gift.  I stood on our field in the pouring rain and ripping wind, and children came out like they do to run, and cartwheel and race, and gambol around outside free from paper and grades and the plastic torture-devices that are our blue plastic school chairs.  These two simply wandered, arms linked, raising their faces to the rain and holding onto each other in the buffeting wind.

I wondered if they ever called their mothers "Butt," and then realized it didn't really matter.  Even a child who calls her mother names becomes this child when she's twelve years old and with a good friend.  My daughter was, even as I took this picture, being this child with her friends somewhere in our school.  She was this child to her teachers, adults just like me except that she adores them all the time.  She would be this child with me again.  Children have goodness in them all the time.  For adolescents particularly, it's the setting that determines whether or not it's safe for that goodness to be shared.

After school I took my daughter to a coffee shop she loves near our house.  Though not too long ago I knew her so well I could read her needs and fix them with Cheerios or a cuddle, I felt a little awkward and shy, as if meeting her for the first time.  She talked about things that matter to her and told funny stories about things that happened during her day.  I packed away my "I know you so well" certainty, outdated as knowing how to make a cassette for a friend, and worked hard to listen and learn.  She was funny, and goofy, and raw in that way people with confidence but no polish or self-consciousness are.  I realized I liked this person even more than I liked the baby, toddler, and little girl she once was. This person was new to me.  This person had something to offer I couldn't anticipate and didn't already know.

I'd like to say we talked and then held hands and danced across a meadow afterwards, best friends forever, but the truth is we drank our drinks and left a little respectfully and guardedly, like new neighbors who'd just met in a driveway.

I'm glad she's moved in.

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.