h o m e * e c o n o m i c s

it seems we are on hiatus

I'll be back when I get my ducks in a row. Or maybe when they're lined-up-ish; I don't want to stay away forever.

il faut cultiver

Sorry if this harshes your August mellow, but we have been talking and playing a lot of school lately. For long stretches of most days we are "Teacher Mommy" and "Schoolgirl Bee." Even Baby Dear and Baby Love and the finger puppets have gotten in on the act; in the lower lefthand corner of the picture, you can just make out a black shock of hair belonging to Teacher Ernie, holding forth from his foam tee-pee as the babies pay rapt attention. A month from today Bee will have had her first day of school. We are all pretty excited.

What I need is garden school. Imagine how you would feel if you had never made so much as a box-mix cake successfully, and suddenly you were in charge of feeding a family of four nutritious and appealing meals three times a day. That approximates my feelings about our yard. Having never even kept a houseplant alive, I am a little nervous about doing right by a woodsy quarter acre. I want to keep the good stuff healthy, organize the chaos, introduce some beauty, plant some vegetables, and have fun. Heavens!

I'd hate to lose the hydrangeas; they must be hardy if they're in so many yards here, right? This freshness was a few weeks ago. Andrew, who is good at pruning and clearing brush and hacking suffocating vines off of trees and digging dirt for potting and all that stuff, says that they are hard to do in.

It was Andrew who insisted that we buy baby tomato, cauliflower, and cucumber plants as soon as we got here. The day was hot, Bee was not happy to be at the nursery, and I did not like the idea of spending our limited money and time on plants that would almost certainly be gobbled up by our hordes of rabbits and chipmunks. But at that point in the early stress of unpacking and getting settled, it was not worth having a disagreement about a few plants. I must admit that it has been fun to watch them grow, even though the critters have done all the eating. We were left with three green tomatoes in a pot, and I looked forward to the day when we would harvest one tomato per family member, since we thought our animals were more interested in flowers and leaves than fruit. Alas, two days ago there was only one tomato left; and yesterday there were none.

(I already have a sense that gardening will be full of life lessons and fraught with metaphor. While I was noodling around gathering photos and thoughts for a blog post, our tomatoes were eaten. A garden, it seems, can bear only so much procrastination, moving on whether you're ready or not. Also, we saw a garter snake on the fourth of July. He has not made another appearance, but he is on my mind: evil temptation or fruitful knowledge? And while I'm in parentheses, may I admit that after the first time I potted something--basil for the back porch--I looked down at my hands and thought, with displeasure, dirty. I am not yet on good terms with dirt. Or worms, even though I know they are good guys in the garden. I think--no, I know--I am driving Andrew crazy with my attempts to buy dirt at the garden center instead of using the dirt in our yard. I am one-half in thrall to the square foot gardening guy and one-half hoping to minimize my contact with worms. I know, lame.)

Despite the disappointment of the tomatoes (and the general discomfort with dirt), I am trying to be good about just diving into things instead of heeding my instinct to read five books before starting. I planted fall lettuce in three places, one of which is a planter covered with a homemade chickenwire cage. It occurs to me now that we could try radishes again, too, since our tabletop attempt in San Francisco was not a success. Food has been an afterthought (and, says my scale, an ill-advised comfort) for most of this summer, but I did find--finally!--a way of eating radishes that I love, thanks to At Home with Madhur Jaffrey. I made these on the fourth of July to nibble instead of chips before hamburgers. They were popular with Bee, Andrew, and his parents, but my mother and sister, who ate them on a different occasion, thought they were a little "stinky." Good for nibbling, good for lunch with bread and goat cheese, here are Madhur Jaffre's seasoned radishes:

Remove greens and stringy tails from one large or two small bunches of medium radishes (you want about 12 medium, although I have also cut down large ones). Wash well and cut into bite-size chunks. Toss with 1/2 teaspoon salt, 1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper, and 1 tablespoon red wine vinegar. Toss every once in a while for three hours, then drain and serve.

Yard work comes more naturally to this dolphin and to Bee than to me. Thank goodness for their help.

the packing paper flurries have subsided

There's still plenty of settling in left to do, but we are no longer wondering where the clean socks are or consulting The Spreadsheet to find extension cords and batteries. Last week I repeated a dinner (Greek salad), and the other night I made popcorn (a failed batch--boo!), and not long before that I baked banana bread on the hottest day of the year (worth it). We've had dinner guests and houseguests. I have a library card, a dump sticker, and a Massachusetts drivers license. We've re-learned leaving the house in July without a sweater and resisting the urge to scratch mosquito bites. So I guess you could say we live here now. So far so good.

Between the adorable rabbits and the handsome tall trees, will we manage a kitchen garden? That's the big question.

moving stats

Feet used in the U-pack trailer: 16 Threats of domestic violence: 1 (me to him) Hurtful profanities: 1 (him to me) Resolutions to move to an ashram and have no things and no relationships: 1 (me) Hours of television watched by the Bee: oh, hundreds (to quote Bridget) Trips to Tartine in the final week: 3 Regrets: too few to mention (except for this one, which is that I regret eating so few burritos in the last two years) I can't tell you how many boxes there were in the end, because in the end numbers and spreadsheets and color-coding were abandoned for tossing and taping. We'll see how that went when we get there in two weeks. For now Bee and I are recovering at the seashore with my family while doughty Andrew wraps up his work. Next time from New England, kids. p.s. if you must move cross-country, which is obviously a horrible idea, may I recommend not doing it at a time of record high gas prices. that is all.

is she really still talking about packing?

Yes.

This was a few weeks ago, packing while watching Metropolitan. I had just concluded a purge of sentimental correspondence and objects from late adolesence and so was gratified when one character said, "I don't want to go through the rest of my life with the mail I got when I was sixteen." Truthfully, she's a rather unsympathetic character, not the kind you'd want to take cues from, but I'm having an anti-paper moment. To go with us, books and letters must really mean something, or at the very least offer the possibility of a few hours of future amusement.

I have had a stack of very old Cooks Illustrateds getting dusty on an absurdly tiny table in the corner of my kitchen the whole two years we've lived in this apartment; the whole two years I've been meaning to punch holes and stick them in a binder. Not long ago I finally steeled myself for that task and discovered that I didn't even want to keep them. (Most of them.) They were a great help when I was learning to cook, but now I don't have the patience. And I have my own ideas. I kept only the ones with sentimental recipes (spinach lasagna! Chinese chicken!) and a few about grilling, a new technique for me to explore now that we'll have our own little patch of grass.

I'm at the point in packing where I am confronted with dozens, nay, scores of little problems such as this:

 
a tiny box containing an escort card from a wedding (marriage long since dissolved), buttons from an old dress of my mother's (popped off when I tried to squeeze in while pregnant), mateless pearl and fake diamond earrings. Should I purchase a Caboodle for odds and ends that can't be tossed? It's enough to make me turn back to the papers and the books. Having bestowed the flower of my youth upon the publishing industry, I'm a champ when it comes to boxing up books. I'm surprised, though, by how unnecessary most of them seem now. Like those Cooks Illustrated magazines, they mosly sit around unnoticed and unlikely to be reread. I've fallen in love with ebooks. The only books I really need to be able to hold, I think, are children's books, cookbooks, and big gorgeous books with lots of photos. I'm sending as many of the others as possible to the secondhand store.

We're still taking dozens of boxes of books with us, of course. After all, I am the kind of person who discovers while packing that she has stashed two cast-iron skillets under a shelf in the family room.

 
Two steps forward, one step back! I was less chagrined about the extra (and extra-heavy packing) than about the fact that I have a small skillet perfect for toasting spices and somehow didn't know it. I put it to work the very next day to make pork and poblano tamale pie from a year-old Bon Appetit that had been hiding among the Cooks Illustrateds. This was a very popular dinner with the eaters; to the cook it seemed a bit fiddly and complicated for something so down-home, but even she had to admit that it was tasty.

And speaking of Bon Appetit, someone told me she thought the first issue under the new editor--"the Italy issue," cover featuring spaghetti sans Gwyneth--was not so great. When I bought it to investigate, it turned out to be full of things I wanted to cook, which is all I really care about. The prose (if captions and headers can be called prose) is often a bit affected, it's true, assuming a just-one-of-the-people attitude that comes off as condescending: New York editors trying to figure out how to talk to the rest of the country instead of simply assuming that readers are intelligent and interested in food. Why should a food magazine have to make a show of being anti--forgive me--foodie? Anyway, I really liked Oliver Strand's pasta tips, although I haven't tried the recipes yet; I did make and enjoy this Amatriciana. (Bellinger trivia: in our first few months together, Andrew made me spaghetti all'Amatriciana one night. When I complimented the dish and asked him where he had learned to cook it, he looked confused and said, "I learned to cook it by eating it." And that is how people with very different personalities end up together.) As for Gwyneth as covergirl, I can't address that now except to say that I am surprised by how upset people are--and I'm a former Gwyneth-hater! It's just Bon Appetit, people. If seeing Gwyneth there is enough to irritate you, then the rest of your life must be a bowl of farmers market cherries.

So I can't give up either of these copies of Bon Appetit, old or new; there's too much to cook. My other beloved magazines and clippings I'm trying to scan when I can't take the packing anymore. Wouldn't it be sad to lose track of this?

it ain't so much a question of not knowing what to do

Weirdly, I get anxious when I go a long time without posting here. I'm always carrying a couple of posts around in my head, trying out different phrases, wondering if this is too boring or that is too negative. The fact that nobody really gives a flip fails, somehow, to make it easier to sling posts. It doesn't help that earlier this year I came down with an acute case of uneasiness when it comes to disseminating other people's recipes without permission. Before I know it, I'm a month behind, I have 39 uninspired pictures of asparagus in my iPhoto, and getting something up begins to feel like a physical necessity. Usually I vibrate in that state for a bout a week before sitting down and typing. I wish I knew why.

I've always been a procrastinator. For a long time I practically cherished my vicious dawdling, as if it were a cute quirk along the lines of freckles or being quick to blush. These days, however, I am constantly renegotiating my relationship to NOW. I also try to be gentle with myself, but it's hard to strike the right balance.

So here I am, rewriting sentences in my head all day most days, the way I have since late adolesence, before I had ever even heard of a blog. Does everyone do this, or is this why I became an editor?

Bee picks up words and phrases and tosses them right back out at us. Are you thinking what I'm thinking? This is a crazy system. Are you kidding me? Papa, is your dinner delicious? It's nothing to worry about. While I wash dishes she chats with Super Why, Santa, and sometimes even Zeus. A year ago she seldom put two words together; heck, she seldom put two syllables together, relying on shortcuts such as "oash" for "ocean." Now she comments, asks, and invents all day long.

Like a tape recorder or a parrot, she allows me to hear myself in new, seldom flattering ways. I now know that I must say "hey" far too often, because it is her favorite word. Hey, mama! Hey, mommy! Hey, Robin! HEEEEY!!! All that time spent pushing words around on the mental page has not, I fear, had any effect on the elegance of my speech.

I swear, while I was working on "WONDER," "BLT" just came together beneath it without my help. A sign, surely? Unfortunately, I am almost at the point where I need to start researching juice fasts or cabbage soup diets--or something. This month I have allowed myself to do a lot of craaaaaaazy eating. Box number 54 was taped up this morning, and I'm thinking that box number 55 might-should contain all my baking tins and the hand mixer. Not that baked goods have been my only problem--my last shreds of shame stand between you and a story about a pepperoni pizza delivered while I packed and caught up on Glee--but moderation is especially hard to maintain when confronted with Ad Hoc brownies, which I made for our last dinner-with-friends here (Zuni pasta with cauliflower and broccoli, salad, brownies, easy-peasy). Although the Bon Appétempt post that inspired me to make these mentioned their three sticks of butter, I was still rather amazed/appalled to see three. sticks. of. butter go into a little 9" square baking dish. The resulting brownies were called "superb" and also "the best brownies I have ever eaten," but let's face it, they are basically a kind of chocolate-butter emulsion. (If you make them, I recommend serving them with vanilla ice cream, whipped cream, or at the very least a glass of milk. You need something cool and barely sweet against that dark richness.)

On a not entirely unrelated note, I will take this opportunity to opine that it should be more normal for women to wear shorts for swimming. Although delicacy prevents me from listing all the reasons, these two should suffice: it's so comfortable, and unless you're Gisele, your modesty will not rob the world of any significant measure of joy. For more than a decade an ancient pair of Roxy boardshorts have been part of my bathing costume. This year I bought cheap Old Navy boardshorts before discovering an Athleta catalog offering a nicer array of swim shorts (and skirts!). A resource for modest mamas and other girls who cain't say no.

what you need and what you don't

When I’m casting about for dinner ideas, it sometimes—not often enough—occurs to me to simplify a recipe or side dish from Sunday Suppers at Lucques. I love, love, love this cookbook, but every component of every recipe seems to call for a tablespoon of fresh thyme, each of which I will pay for with approximately 1 hour of my life. (Don’t try to tell me you can just strip the leaves off the branchlet; apparently I have an extremely powerful thumb and forefinger, for this never works for me.) Usually you can skip the fresh herbs and supporting rare ingredients and still turn out something a little more intriguing than your usual Wednesday supper. Well, than our usual Wednesday supper.

Last week I finally tried Goin’s farro and black rice with green garlic and pea shoots (hold the green garlic, hold the pea shoots). I’ve had a bag of black rice around since I read an article about its antioxidant properties, but a surprising new strain of anti-Asian-food sentiment in this house has kept it off the table. Although folding it into farro sounded weird, it tasted and looked lovely, and it required neither the soy sauce nor the bok choy I had been leaning on. My taste memory is failing me here; the best I can come up with is earthy, sweet, and chewy.

Heat a medium saucepan over a medium flame for about a minute. Add a glug of olive oil and let it get hot; add half a chopped onion, one dried chile (she always uses arbol), and a bay leaf. Cook for a few minutes, stirring often, until the onion has softened but not colored. Add 3/4 cup black rice and stir to coat with oil; cook and stir for about a minute. Pour in 1/4 cup white wine and reduce by half (mine cooked away almost immediately). Add 4 cups water and 1 teaspoon salt and bring to a boil. Turn heat to low and simmer about 40 minutes, uncovered, stirring occasionally. When the rice is cooked through but still firm (taste it!), drain it and discard the chile and bay leaf.

While the rice is coming to a boil, heat another medium saucepan over a medium flame for about a minute. Add a glug of olive oil, the other half of the chopped onion, 1/2 teaspoon dried thyme, and a bay leaf. Cook for a few minutes, stirring often, until the onion has softened but not colored. Add 1 cup farro; stir to coat with oil and then contine to stir and cook for about a minute. Pour in 1/2 cup white wine and reduce by half. Pour in 4 cups water and 1 teaspoon salt and bring to a boil. Turn heat to low and simmer, uncovered, for 25-30 minutes, until the farro is tender but not mushy. Drain and discard the bay leaf.

Stir the black rice and farro together. Taste for salt, season with pepper, if you like, and serve with a drizzle of nice olive oil. Serves at least six, I think.

I had hoped my hippie co-op grocery would have the green garlic and pea shoots, but no luck; instead we topped this with broccoli rabe sautéed with garlic and red pepper and called it a meal. After my worries that this would be denounced as punitive vegetarian fare, Andrew said it was delicious, beautiful, and filling. Bee, who has become both picky and fickle, ate a smidgen of broccoli rabe and left the rest behind. Although I would usually skip the wine in a recipe like this (unless I had a bottle of dry vermouth open), I was glad to have an excuse to pick up a bottle in the middle of a particularly harrowing grocery run (hair pulling, cart-licking, screeched demands for cheese).

The leftover farro and rice nicely anchored my lunches several days running (there it is with cabbage slaw leftover from fish tacos). I’ve been grateful to have something fast and filling, since I am determined to finish ahead of schedule—for once—with this packing, which makes those old single-gal-in-Brooklyn moves that used to thrash me look like the child’s play they were.

I packed up all the china and crystal. I laid out the silver and counted it, which I failed to do the last time we moved across the country (I do not, by the way, like being able to toss that phrase around). There were only two things that seemed not to have made it from New York to California: my old boat of a wallet (the joke is on the person who took that, since it was full of defunct membership cards) and the silver gravy ladle. My mother and I remember the gravy ladle but can’t prove its existence; I do not intend to be so vexed again.

 

We were still in the middle of Downton Abbey while I was packing the fancyware. On good days I thought of how much I would love to have breakfast brought to me on a tray full of Herend Chinese bouquet in orange, so I could leisurely pick up the paper and pour my coffee in bed. On bad days I thought we never use this stuff and it makes no sense to have it unless one also has an appalling number of servants to take care of it. Modern families should do as all the earnest young Northern Californians do and stock their cupboards with sturdy Heath, as beautiful everyday as it is for special dinners. But we’re leaving California, aren’t we? The politics and the careful grooming may be long gone, but the department of pretty things is one in which I am still decidedly southern. I love my fragiles and worry more than is healthy about whether they will break. It finally occurred to me that, however little sense this makes, the way Andrew feels about retirement accounts is the way I feel about china, crystal, and silver. He worries about having enough money for old age. I worry about having enough place settings for a Thanksgiving table full of (unimaginable, still unimaginable) grandchildren.

It is, in general, with less angst that I’ve started packing inessential kitchen equipment: tortilla press, miniature tart pans, icing bag tips. Then I find things that send me into thoughtful paralysis, things like the empty cans I’ve been saving to make Karen DeMasco’s brioche baked in cans: should I recycle them now and find new cans in Massachusetts? (This is a bigger deal than it sounds, since we no longer eat canned beans.) Should I wrap them well in good intentions and tuck them into a box, confident that they will not just clutter up our new cabinets? Or should I just go ahead and make the brioche now? All I know for certain is that I don’t mind packing the boxes—to be honest, I even like this sort of big, straightforward project, with its cheerful bustle and tangible results—but I do not like puzzling out what should go in a box and what should go to the Goodwill.

 
It was making my head explode, so I canceled the moving container I had reserved and switched to the guys who charge you by the foot. Aluminum cans...you're good to go!

thirty-five things I've done since the last time I posted

{this is a Kate Spade ad from 2000, I think, scanned from my recently unearthed personal collection}

I want to post about most of these things in depth, but the time has come to acknowledge this as laughably unlikely. So here, instead, in list form, are 35 things that have been keeping me busy, happy, and full. There is a recipe, or rather a suggestion of sorts, if you make it to the end. Since the last time I posted, and not in this order...

1. I turned 34.

2. I flew to Boston, fell in love with a house in Wellesley, and made an offer. Now we're in contract, knock wood/cross fingers/etc. Believe it or not, I'm actually starting to look forward to leaving San Francisco.

February dinners

I am emerging bleary-eyed from a trance induced by online real estate, and this on top of a heck of a bread bender--the first thing I did yesterday morning was to preheat the oven for a pizza made with Tartine dough, an appetizer for Bellinger Tartine loaf #3 (longer, colder rise; less dramatic holes; wimpier crust; excellent taste, especially good with salami). (And since I really am in danger of having "bread" become my only hobby/primary interest, I must add that Tartine Bread offers a pizza technique new to me, which is to use your fingers to press in a little trough 1/2 inch in from the edge of your dough round before you begin to stretch and shape it, thus ensuring that the crust is full of air bubbles. Perfect!) Ahem. Houses. Few things are as engrossing as click click clicking through all those pictures, imagining all the slightly different ways of living; but it's hardly productive, since I'm not there to see them right now. I told myself I'd do something before bed, and so I'm going to post our February dinners. One less thing knocking around this drafty mind.

i did it

As you know, about a year and a half ago, we moved from Manhattan to San Francisco in order to be closer to Tartine. I mean, the Ferry Building. No, wait, it was for Andrew's work. Or was it Tartine? It's hard to keep track here in the land of the Lotos Eaters. Whatever the case, we're down to our last few months here, so Bee and I have been trying to stop by Tartine once every week or two, lest we find ourselves regretting morning buns not eaten.

Tartine really is all about the morning bun for me. Okay, and the croissants, of course, I'm not dumb. Do you know that I've never even tasted the famous bread? Until the bread book came out, I actually didn't know it was possible for any old person off the street to buy the bread. I had heard that you had to be on "the list." It turns out that you, yes you, and I can buy it, if we call three days ahead and pay in advance (and then also stand in a line? I'm not really clear on that part).

But why not make it at home? You can spare 15 minutes a day for the next three weeks tending a starter, can't you? Call it your meditation practice. And really, haven't your pants been feeling extra loose? You look like you could use a slice of bread.

When I first saw and read about this book, I thought, no no no no no, I do not need to get into making a starter, and I don't even like sourdough bread that much. Although it was hard to resist another beautiful book from Tartine, I just knew that a bread-baking adventure was not what I needed. It was reported that the basic bread recipe went on for pages on end; the very thought of such a recipe drove me to bed for a contemplative nap. But then the January Martha Stewart Living included a condensed version of Chad Robertson's recipe, and it was on. The man advocated dipping hunks of bread in vinaigrette; what kind of stomachless fool would I be to ignore whatever else he had to offer? If I could bake a decent loaf of bread from the Martha version of his recipe, I would buy the whole book.

In a development that will surprise exactly no one, I procrastinated starting the starter, reluctant to commit. Once I had started it, however, I actually looked forward to its daily feeding, despite the fact that I really don't like getting my hands all ooky. The early days were thrillingly full of promise. In the dark middle period, I worried that my starter wasn't showing enough activity, so I started randomly tweaking because I figured it might be dead anyway: a few times I let it sit for 36 hours instead of 24, and I made it dryer or wetter according to some instinct I certainly didn't believe I had. It never started rising and falling predictably, the way it was supposed to, but neither did it start smelling or looking foul, so I kept at it. Almost four weeks after beginning, when I made a levain that floated (the first one I made never did), I baked.

And the bread is terrific! I suppose my mental tag for this kind of bread is "levain" or "country," "sourdough" being something I tasted and didn't like when I was eight. I didn't realize that the crusty brown Frenchified bread I've enjoyed all these years was probably made from a starter.

My first loaf puffed up gorgeously. (You bake this bread in a covered Dutch oven.) When I cut in I realized that this was because its interior holes were far too large. I think I let the final proofing go on a little too long, worried that my room was too cold; or perhaps my improvised shaping technique is to blame. Nevertheless, it looked and tasted wonderful.

The second loaf, with its lower ceiling, looked as if it might have a more conventional structure. But it turned out to have rather large holes in its middle, too.

Not ideal for a tuna fish sandwich, maybe, but this did not keep us from making croques monsieur! DIVINE. I followed this recipe, skipping the potatoes, using aged cheddar instead of gruyere, and slathering with slightly less bechamel than called for (plus 1/8 teaspoon cayenne in the bechamel).

Again, I followed the Martha instructions for the bread, which apparently differ slightly from the book (and might be a little more precise? I still don't have the book in my hands but hope to soon). My only changes were fiddling slightly with the starter as described above and failing to slash the top of my unbaked bread with a razor blade. I looked to this post from SFWeekly for moral support, and it led me to this page at Breadtopia, which gave me the information I need to keep my starter alive (I hope) without feeding it every single day.

Since I had pretty much convinced myself that my first attempt at this loaf would not work out, I was extra pleased when it did. It has given me unrealistic faith in the less successful parts of our tabletop garden. The bean and chickpea plants are thriving (perhaps because Bee greets them with a hearty, "good mornin', beans!" several times a day), but our carrot stumps, avocado pits, citrus seeds, and funny pineapple top have yet to show new growth. Undeterred, sustained by bread and hope, we plan to plant radish seeds.