Postcards From the First Day of Summer

1) This is the time of year when the bloom of garden excitement begins to fade. You know, the weeds are coming back after initial clearing but there's not much in the way of food. At least not yet. It appears, though, that my early efforts may pay off in the form of yellow squash. Note to self: look up summer squash recipes.

2) This month's issue of Country Living featured a cover line that read something along the lines of "Summer's Perfect Wine" or somesuch. Turns out the editors have become fond of a particular "summer white" which I have loved for some time.

 We usually pick up a couple cases for summer fun but this year we bought three. One doesn't mess around in the face of media madness, you see. If you were to come to my house for dinner between, say, the end of May and Labor Day this is what I'd pour for you.

At $8ish dollars a bottle, Famega Vinho Verde is hands down the best affordable fizz you'll ever buy. Do you think less of me for waiting to take delivery of my three cases before recommending that you, too, seek it out?





3) I'm reading cookbooks again after a long hiatus. Through a convoluted path I've become a late addition to the Claudia Roden fan club (if there isn't such a thing, there ought to be - Claudia, call me!). Although I am not particular to Spanish cuisine, I'm relishing a slow, deliberate read of The Food of Spain. This book is absolutely amazing. Literally epic in scope, the first 100 or so pages is nothing short of a culinary history textbook. Roden traces Spain's intertwining Christian, Jewish, and Muslim histories that are the underpinning of every summer's breathless tapas articles. Truly extraordinary and I insist that you go buy a copy immediately, if not sooner.

4) We're enjoying a very nice lack of extracurricular activities at the moment. Baseball and dance are over and there's little movement on the scout (girl or cub) front. The next six weeks stretch luxuriously mayhem-free. There are some camps on the calendar, of course (in our town, parents who do not abundantly enrich their offspring during summer break are considered reportable to the U.N.), but until football and cheer begin August, it's nothing but old-fashioned summer fun around here. Firefly-chasing, popsicle-licking, tree-climbing, dog-hugging summer fun.

It's glorious.

Walk Without Flinching

So. How are you then? Me, I've been on an extended pout and am quite ready to see the back of summer, if not 2010 in its entirety. You know those times in your life when people you otherwise sort of enjoy say things like "God doesn't give you what you can't handle" or "Even the darkest clouds have a silver lining" and you kind of want to punch them except you don't because your sainted charm school instructor might well rise from the dead and haunt you, thereby resulting in even less sleep then you've recently enjoyed? You know those times? That.

The less said the better.

In between pouting and the occasional dainty tear poised ever-so-fetchingly at the corner of my right eye, I've spent a good amount of time this summer trying to feed my family in ways that won't kill them. Oh, yes, that's right. You haven't heard. I say "not kill them" instead of "not kill him" because we now have in hand the Girl's allergy assessment and blah blah blah, it turns out she's nearly as unfeedable as her father albeit in a slightly different way.

Because nothing thrills me as much as solving a problem in a way that involves as many trips to the library as possible, my recent list of check-outs reads like someone with a very troubled constitution, indeed. With allergy-free and celiac-aware publications hitting the shelves at what seems to me to be a rapid pace - perhaps it is less so to people with more experience in these matters than I - there is plenty from which to choose for guidance. One would think that there would be no trick at all to ridding oneself of troubling foodstuffs. At home, anyway. Let's not talk about restaurants for a spell, as we're not really speaking at the moment.

Vegan and vegetarian cookbooks are near useless for their reliance on wheat and soy products. Gluten-free resources often feature bean flours and nightshades heavily, both of which are very strictly limited for us. I found one book I adored, only to discover that it called in nearly every recipe for an ingredient that is priced upwards of $27 a pound. Then there are the recipes that sound wonderful but turn out to take not unlike library paste (which, now that I think on it, probably has a wheat binder and therefore cannot be eaten by at least two people with whom I live).

Interestingly, among the cookbooks most useful in retooling my kitchen and dining table weren't intended specifically for special diets at all. Jamie's Food Revolution: Rediscover How to Cook Simple, Delicious, Affordable Meals, in particular, was helpful for reminding me that simple is better and there are few - if any - of my family's problem ingredients in fresh food, humbly prepared. Likewise, Everyday Food: Fresh Flavor Fast: 250 Easy, Delicious Recipes for Any Time of Day, helped me retain the notion that a decent, healthy meal prepared and served sometime this century (even when I've had a bad day at work and tonight is riding night and...) is not necessarily an impossible mission. No need for special or shockingly expensive ingredients, no need for deprivation, and no need for substitutions when a bit of redirection is possible and even desirable.

Hey, is that a silver lining I see?



P.S. If you're looking for a bit of inspiration for simple, seasonal meals, I recommend these for clear and concise directions and a refreshing lack of jargony references to specialty products:

I bet you're all just aflutter wondering who won the copy of The Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving. I'm right, yes? I can see you afluttering from here.

But! This is the moment for which you've been waiting, ducks. The lucky winner is Rachel (of blackberry jam fame). Rachel, if you would e-mail me your snail mail address at hotwaterbath AT gmail DOT com I'll get the tome out to you right away. Congratulations and happy canning!

I hope all who hoped to win will stick around through the summer and experience a little canning company. We'll pickle, we'll jam, we'll dice and slice...fun for all, but especially those who want to make something.

A bit of clean-up before tackling our next adventures:

1) It occurs to me that my current blog layout looks horrible. I liked it for a while then we got a new computer with one of those big ole' screens and it didn't work so I tweaked and now it doesn't look nice on any screen. I'll work on that.

2) Melissa asked if I'd been reading Stephanie Meyer's paranormal romance. No, but thanks for the tip. I've been cuddling up with Kresley Cole, J.R. Ward, Charlaine Harris and Michelle Rowen and will now happily add Ms. Meyer to the list. Between these and my alarmingly large Regency habit, I may never get to real cult-chah again. Oh, don't look at me like that. I've also been reading a lot about Abigail Adams and white holes, so it's not like I've totally chucked serious reading. Just mostly.

3) I have a little tradition of assigning myself summer projects. One year I read nothing but E.M. Forster (those days are apparently over; see also point number two, above), another year I needle pointed wildflowers on cocktail napkins. Then there was the summer that I drank only G&Ts, each made with a different brand of gin (not all my projects are of a self-improvement nature). This year I've decided to put my Netflix subscription to good use and watch as many movie and/or television adaptations of the works of Jane Austen as I can find. Brainiac is afeared for his movie watching life, groaning every time one of the red envelopes arrives in the mail (although I believe that he secretly enjoys the spectacle, entreating this or that character by yelling at the screen the way he might in reaction to an ill-conceived football play. Gives me a giggle, actually) but I think that movies are an excellent project for the Now in which I find myself. It's possible to knit, pit cherries, snap beans, needlepoint, play Battleship, write letters, coo over block towers and, yes, blog all while comparing and contrasting the various approaches in Austenolatry.

So, busy as a bee. You?

So I mentioned a bit ago how I'd had this lovely discussion with a woman named Lauren Devine of Fresh Preserving, the Ball Corporation's public face of home food preserving. We had a delightful chat that veered, in my very unjournalistic fashion, from recipe testing and development to getting started with canning to risk management and (my) whispered confessions on that point. Lauren stared with Ball as an intern and is now the company's official canning professional/cheerleader.

At the conclusion of our talk (the results of which I'll be posting in the next day or so) Lauren offered to send me a copy of The Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving. What a dear, I thought, and accepted on behalf of my legions of fans, adding that if she didn't mind too terribly much I might just have a little contest to pass it along. The next day two copies arrived in the mail, one inscribed to little old me. After reading the inscription I turned back to cover and noticed that Ms. Devine is a co-author of this encyclopedic home canning reference. And I hadn't known.

To those of you who don't know, this is kind of like meeting Jerry Garcia and, not realizing it, figuring him to be a lonely man away from home on business and inviting him to dinner (no, wait, I actually did this...finding out after the fact who he was and that his little band was in fact playing in town that night). Maybe it's more like unknowingly stumbling upon Martha Stewart in the local craft store and engaging in a bit of a chat over which glue gun is better for making, I don't know, whatever. Or sort of like bumping into Condoleeza Rice unawares and blasting those out of touch, inside-the-beltway folks in D.C.

Embarrassing, in other words.

I won't dwell, though, as I am not generally a dweller. Instead I think we should press on with all good intentions on this little drawing scheme. Agreed?

Here's the deal: leave a comment on this point and the post in which I relate the details of my discussion with Ms. Devine. Of all the folks who comment in both posts, I will draw one name and that person will receive a copy of The Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving delivered straight to his or her door. I'll do the drawing this coming Wednesday.

What do you think? Good? This is a lovely book, filled with all kinds of neato things that can be made and enjoyed by beginners and experienced canners alike. Good luck to all!

Well, I think you can put my accomplishments down as "incremental". I did manage to make the pickled green tomatoes and even took a picture to prove it to you. Do you know, though, that pickled green tomatoes don't really look all that nice? I used a cold pack (raw food put into sterilized jars) and at the start they were a brilliant emerald green. After processing they're more a greenish whitish tone and...not lovely. I'm sure I'll appreciate them in winter's martinis where I don't really have to look at their rather ickish color.

With the rest of the green tomatoes, the non-cherry sized ones, I don't know. I had tossed around that tomato mincemeat idea but...I really don't want to end up with a bunch of jars of something that no one's going to eat. I only know one person (my dad) who enjoys mincemeat and he probably means the real thing when he says that. Does anyone actually make mincemeat anymore, or is it all this veggie and fruit business? The recipe is nothing more than a chutney, although a non-spicy one, and it just might be nice in little button-sized tarts at the gingerbread house party. See? I talk myself out of something and then talk myself right back into it again. No wonder I don't get much done. Too busy prevaricating.

And worrying. I haven't yet finished the gift for my oldest sister because I've been so totally exhausted from a few nights in a row of worried awakeness. I come from a long line of overnight worriers. My people, they could have been clog dancers or ice wine makers or a political dynasty but no, their contribution to the world is worry. All night long for nights and months at a time. It is, literally and figuratively, tiresome.

I won't tell you what I worry about - some of it totally legit scary stuff, some most of it ridiculous - as I don't want to set you worrying and don't wish to further imprint the list on myself, but here are some things I thought about in between bouts of breathless panic:

1) Where I might have laid the lavender thread I bought to finish a pillow case for the Girl. The poor girl gets the most incredible knots in her hair from sleeping on cotton. Mom to the rescue (maybe) with lavender satin pillowcases with a bit of Daisy Kingdom fabric peeking out from inside. I could use white thread, sure, but where is the lavender?

2) Would everyone like a bit of chocolate bread pudding this weekend? I haven't made any in a while and it's supposed to be kind of rainy and yucky, if unseasonably warm. Maybe I'd be better off waiting for a colder day.

3) Whether or not I should start reading the Outlander series. I've been very keen lately to find books that won't feed this cycle of worry - I want nothing that Julia so aptly described as "depressing, depressing-but-redemptive, intensely thoughtful, or nonfiction unless it is funny". Where Outlander falls in these requirements I don't know, but people keep telling me I need to read it.

4) Whether Jane Brocket's The Gentle Art of Domesticity is going to be made available here in the States.

5) Why is it, do you think, that last year we had few apples on the apple trees but rather too an abundant a showing from the gingko but this year the reverse was true with lots of apples and mercifully few gingko berries. Those of you know understand what a highly fruiting gingko tree is all about also understand why we're so happy about the switcheroo and probably also get why we're trying to figure out what happened so we can encourage it to happen again next year and the year after and so on.
6) Reading older books and memoirs of days gone by can be very helpful with the worrying stuff. It's very nice to know that despite a drought in France in '49 that convinced the country that the end times where near, coupled with crushing shortages and rationing of just about everything, did not stop Julia Child or anyone else there at the time from enjoying what there was to enjoy, no guilt involved. I also appreciated reading of Delia Lutes' belief that the Christmas celebrations she knew as a child in the 1880s were nothing at all like the "soul killing" consumption-oriented orgies of the "children of today" (Lutes wrote in the 1930s). And in The American Frugal Housewife, Lydia Marie Child bemoans the focus that mothers place on their children's clothing and activities - to the detriment of their useful educations, and that so many of her fellow citizens spend more than they earn trying to match the lifestyle of the wealthy and famous.

In short, it is nice to know that the more things change...and with that in mind, perhaps tonight I will finish my sister's gift.

The last two weeks have been a blur of activity, although I'd be hard-pressed to tell you exactly what I did. There was weeding and the ever-present weed prevention efforts (file under: hope springs eternal), some watering, some dehydrating (more cherries), a spot of reupholstering, and on and on, with little actually finished. No, wait, we did finish reading Prince Caspian much to the Boy Wonder's disappointment (which came hand-in-hand with an excited rally over the next selection, Neil Armstrong: Young Flyer). Prince Caspian is a lovely tale of renewal, hope and restoration and a wonderful thing to read if you are, as I am, somewhat depressed about current events. And the Neil Armstrong book, well, it has its charms, too. The entire Childhood of Famous Americans series is admittedly a bit twee, but they do present compelling portraits of some really remarkable people in the process of becoming who we know them to have been. You know, child being the father of the man and all that, and as bedtime stories they really are nice. There is probably a reason there aren't many profiles of bond traders or product managers in the series - nor compliance specialists, for that matter (which is how I spend a good chunk of my day)- but it's not something in which I'll delve into too deeply here.

Anyway, where was I? Oh, yes, getting things done. On that page I've been meaning to shout out to my former roommate and occasional commenter Meg to congratulate her on the addition of two (I think) children to her family. I dearly wish everyone in the family a lifetime of love and a smooth settling in. If she were in the room with me I'd ask if she ever looks back at the girls we were and wonder how we got from there to here. Myself, I'm shocked on a regular basis.

So here we are, waiting for enough beans to come in to make dilly beans, enough blueberries for jam or pie filling (actually, I prefer turnovers but you know what I'm saying) and perhaps even enough zucchini to become sick of it - although it's hard to believe that point could possibly come, this early in the season. Meanwhile, I've tasked Brainiac to the project of making some kind of rain barrel water-off-the-roof collection system, a job which I sold by reminding him that "specialization is for insects" and he probably shouldn't spend all his free time on keeping our cars running, and I'm trying to work out - again - how to knit. I think my problem was trying to knit left-handed, when clearly (it seems to be now) a girl who throws right and bats right probably ought to knit right, too, even if she writes and eats left. Right?

It appears that someone at my local library has recently developed an interest in food issues outside of how to cook dinners in thirty minutes or less or creating a gour-may meal with a carefully chosen selection of boxes and cans. I know this because the complete works of Morgan Spurlock have materialized on the New Arrivals shelf, alongside any number of items by Michael Pollan and something called The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved, which I could not put on my wait list fast enough (alongside another new offering, Food Not Lawns). Somebody at the acquisitions desk, it seems to me, is trying to make a point.

In addition to essay and theory a number of cookery books have also appeared, books which focus on what I think of as real cooking of the kind that my great-grandmother might have done. Among these are a number of canning books and I was thrilled, before my overdue fines became too high for me to do so, to check them all out at a go.

As it turns out only one of them really interested me, Frances Bissel's Preserving Nature's Bounty. And even it I was prepared to dislike upon reading the author's declaration that the book was about "[using] what friends might bring you from their country home." (Note to self: acquire better class of friends, see also: country homes.) In the end I came to appreciate the books despite the annoying introductory material because the recipes are unique and straightforward and sound really delicious. The organization is good, too, with recipes pertaining to a given food item gathered together - the mango section, for example, has mango ketchup (!), mango lime jam (!!) and mango salsa all together instead of all the jams in one place, all the salsas in another and all the ketchups off by themselves somewhere. I love this because if one finds a great buy on mangoes it will be easy to find things to do with mangoes without having to page through the entire book looking for mango recipes to compare. Genius.

When not reading canning or food theory books, I've been gardening with the kids. Spring gardening in particular is great with children because so much of what I can plant right now in my zone comes up really fast. We planted radishes, lettuce, beets, and spinach and will do more of each of these in a week or ten days or do. The rest of my garden plans are complete - tomatoes, squash, green beans, scarlet runners, peppers, strawberries, some new blueberries - and are nothing glamorous, but still enormously satisfying.

Some time ago I received an e-mail from a nice woman named Renee Pottle asking if I maybe would like to take a look at her cookbook I Want My Dinner Now!, published by Hestia's Hearth. She explained that she wrote the book after a long career in Home Economics and teaching to help harried families eat healthier dinners. Seeing as the topic is on my mind almost constantly I happily agreed and a short while later a copy arrived in my mailbox.

Like other books with similar themes (the best known of which may be Saving Dinner) the book is aimed squarely at moms who probably have something other than cooking that they'd like to be doing or who find the job taxing. Ms. Pottle cleverly includes sixteen weeks of menus, shopping lists of basic pantry items and a chapter of rudimentary recipes all designed to get a kitchen up to speed, as it were, as well as good kitchen safety and hygeine information. These basics are covered quickly, but thoroughly, and a beginning cook will find them understandable and easily incorporated into a daily routine.

The recipes themselves are well laid out and written for either two or six servings, a nice touch, and organized into chapters with descriptive - albeit cutesy - titles like "Let's Use Those Appliances" and "Throw It In the Oven". It's evident that Ms. Pottle leans toward a solid, middle-American sensibility with regards to food. There is nothing particularly challenging, but slight touches of the exotic in the form of mild curries, the inclusion of rice noodles and Thai spices keep things from becoming too pedestrian.

I warned Ms. Pottle that I wouldn't write about the book unless the recipes I tried actually worked. To a one, they did. Many of the recipes don't fit into my family's taste at all - there are many in the sweet-and-sour and fruit-with-pork vein, which I do not care for at all - but those we did try worked well. Steve's Jambalaya was quite nice, not to mention easy, as was the ziti with bacon - a sort of riff on carbonara. None of the recipes has overlong lists of ingredients, great for a developing home cook, and the instructions are very clear. Someone looking to learn a few basics from a non-threatening source with no foodie agenda could do very well with I Want My Dinner Now as a sort of primer on the subjects of variety, technique and just generally how to get started.

I have two issues with the text, neither of which really take away from the book's overall goals. One has to do with the inclusion of ingredients like dried, minced onion and instant minced garlic. Ms. Pottle recommends them on the grounds that onion and garlic don't keep well, an assertion that startles me as I keep both around quite successfully for months at a time. Sure, proper storage conditions are important and I think it would have been great for readers to have been informed as to what they are. She steers clear of processed foods in general, which is great, but I wish she would have gone a little farther in this regard.

The second issue has to do with the thorny subject of authenticity. Long-time readers know that I am not a bugaboo on this subject although I do appreciate a glance in its direction. (This may be a good time to introduce the Hot Water Bath Authenticity Scale, with Sandra Lee of Semi-Homemade Fame at zero and Madhur Joffrey representing authenticity as a concept at ten. I am about, oh, say, a six or seven.)



I Want My Dinner Now makes no claim whatsoever to presenting authentic anything, so I realize it's not entirely fair to judge the book on such terms. Even so, a recipe for paella that doesn't include - or even mention - saffron kind of bothers me since saffron is kind of the whole point. Now, I've certainly made paella-esque things in my time, rice dishes that contained, say, chicken instead of seafood and no saffron (mostly on budgetary grounds) and I have no problem with the inclusion of a similar recipe here. My objection is that no effort is made to explain what paella really is, or why it's been altered for the book, perhaps for reasons of cost, skill or accessibility to a harried or beginning home cook - all perfectly valid and simply not addressed. Similar lapses are present for the curries, a "Thai" chicken which includes salsa, as well as something called a Ratatouille Bake, which features seasoned stuffing mix. In my opinion, if one is going to adapt or Americanize well-known and well-loved international recipes, one really ought to explain why.

Neither of my complaints is worth passing the book by altogether, though. Renee Pottle has accomplished what many cooks really want to do (including, if I may add, Amanda Hesser, as she describes in an essay in Cooking for Mr. Latte) by creating a repertoire of solid, dependable, enjoyable dishes to return to again and again. A developing home cook or even a reluctant family chef looking to make the job easier may well find a lot to like in I Want My Dinner Now And I am certainly going to make that Jambalaya again - the kids loved it.

Cookbooks are like anything else that someone might enjoy - as every golfer with an assortment of tee-bedecked ties or second-grade teacher with a cupboard full of apple-shaped coffee mugs knows - in that, once one's interest in cooking and cookbooks is found out by friends and family at large, one invariably receives as well-intentioned gifts all manner of odd, duplicative or even plain old icky examples right alongside the true treasures. And so it has been for me.

Recently I decided to cull my cookbook collection, both as a cookbook-specific effort to retain only those with true personal value and also as part of a broader intent to reduce the amount of stuff in general that we're currently carrying. Culling required me to engage in the thoroughly enjoyable task of rereading many books I hadn't cracked open in some time to decide where they fell in the culling sweeps. Some, once special favorites, were no longer right for my kitchen, but I knew another cook who might enjoy them. I felt good about these knowing that they'd remain in my world even if under different ownership. Others I could see no clear use for - they were either too strange, too narrow in subject, contained too many errors or were just in some other way unkeepable. (Aside: Why do cookbooks seem to be the least edited of any genre of book? I swear that some people believe that writing cookbooks involves nothing more than slapping some recipes on a page.) These were put into the free box at a neighbor's yard sale and then moved onto a local thrift. The collection remaining consists of cookbooks that I feel comfortable will carry me through another decade of cooking. They are solid, practical, well-written, instructive and, in more than one case, sentimental.

In August of 1992 my youngest sister and I traveled to San Francisco together to visit family and celebrate our graduations, hers from high school and mine from college. We visited with our father's sisters and our grandmother, skulked around the city, and thoroughly enjoyed being so far from our typical routines. Our grandmother had moved to the Bay area when we were very young and visits were few and far between (in those days, even calling long distance really meant something - remember when you'd get off the phone to take another call if it was long distance?).

Grandmommy, as we called her, was a home cook in the best sense. We eagerly awaited her Christmas box every year, not so much for the knitted scarves it inevitably contained (although now I treasure those I still have) but rather for the jams and jellies, candies and nuts they contained. She dried apples picked from her apple tree - years before Ron Popiel tried to get us all to buy dehydrators off early morning television. And on our visit her kitchen talents did not disappoint. Her peach tree was producing well and we enjoyed homemade peach daiquiries before dinner and her famous, memorable peach pie after.
Less than three months after the trip, Grandmommy was dead. In retrospect, it's clear to me now that she had been dying even as she served us dinner but I'm still not sure if she knew it herself. No matter, really, I suppose.

My only request of my aunts handling her estate was that I might have some of my grandmother's recipe files. A few weeks later I received in the mail an accordian file full of clippings, scribbles and pages torn from magazines along with three community cookbooks from her near four decades of living in and around Pittsburgh. The cookbooks remained unopened by me all these years until just the other day. Each of them, for different reasons, remained in my "keep" pile. And one has original recipe, enhanced by my grandmother in her characteristic loopy script and customary green ink, for peach pie.

Isn't it funny how a book can sit totally unreferenced and unconsidered for, oh, 13 years before all of a sudden becoming an heirloom? Peaches are still more than a month away for me but I can say with some certainty that my kitchen will offer forth at least one pie this summer, with many thanks and much love.