Apricots on a Green Plate
Small paintings are really hard. I had no idea. I have a feeling I wasn’t a very good painter the last time I tried to go 9 x 12 inches, and with some increase in ability comes the need for enough space to swing the arm from the shoulder – get some muscle into it. I have some plums set up next, on the same size board, so that when I start an 18 x 24 drawing next week it will feel huge.
And onions. Alan D. gave us onions from his garden – huge, beautiful beasts that will probably keep till March in down cellar if I stop bringing them upstairs to admire them. Here’s a sample, with our evening tea for scale.
So, I had 11 oz of spinach – doesn’t sound like a lot, but that’s one of those giant plastic clam shell cases that is or is not recyclable, depending on the whim of the guys at the Strawberry Hill Transfer Station. I was sick of trying to find room for it in the refrigerator, and slightly miffed with myself for buying it to begin with. The Boy is away at School and I should be cutting my food purchases by roughly 50% (he’s thin, but he is a 6′3″ teenager and accounts for about half our food when he’s home). The spinach will not keep until mid-winter break. Then I remembered an old, old recipe, maybe from “Recipes for a Small Planet”? I can’t find my battered copy of that old faithful, so here it is from memory:
Spinach Patties
1. In a large skillet, heat the olive oil over medium heat. Add the onion and, if using, the other vegetables, garlic and saute until soft and translucent, then add the spinach and cook just until most of it has wilted a little. Transfer the whole mess to your food processor. Pulse just a few times – think uniformly chopped, not puree. Add the eggs and pulse a few times again, until they are incorporated. Here you’re going to find that I’m always in a hurry, again. You could let the mixture cool a little bit, so that there was zero chance of the eggs cooking on impact with the hot, just-out-of-the-frying-pan veggies. You could. Or you could add them, pulse a few times and then dump quickly into a handy bowl and add the matzo meal, salt, pepper and stir quickly to cool it down that way. Perfect. If the mixture is too loose, add a little more matzo meal – not too much – the mixture thickens as it stands. This can be stored in the refrigerator for a day, or over night for a very nice brunch.
2. Pick up the mixture with kitchen spoons and scrape it off into the hot frying pan, like cookie dough. In batches, fry the little balls until golden brown on the bottom (this doesn’t take very long, about a minute?) then turn them and squish them flat with the spatula. Drain on paper towels. Serve warm, accompanied with lemon wedges.
I made these with a side of rice and sweet chili sauce, but they are also good with feta cheese, toasted walnuts or (gasp) bacon. Also I should warn you that this recipe makes what I have begun to think of as “too much for two people”. On the other hand, I’m sitting here at 11:15 EST and having two with some vodka, so you know they won’t go to waste.
Generally these OHA posts are all about food and the way people cooked the dickens out of it around the turn of the last century, or possibly the one before that. But in the olden days they did more than overcook seafood. When the sun went down and chores were done, my maternal grandfather researched genealogy at his rolltop desk. My mother remembers him calling long lost relatives in New York state, noting marriage lines and cross referencing maiden names. His four children could recite the Barnard line back seven generations: Raymond, Louis, Judah Harrison, Judah Pinney, Ebenezer, Francis and Joseph.
All his work on the family line is gone now, lost with the rolltop desk. A few years ago I inherited a family bible (or three) and tried to begin again. After a few weeks the piece of vellum I had taped to the wall had grown to 5′ x 6′, with extra pieces flapping all over with the names of children I’d forgotten and second marriages. I had to take it down when winter really set in and we started up the wood stove so as not to end the family line in a house fire.
Two years later I tried my first software genealogy program. It sucked – I think that’s actually the technical term. Family Tree Maker 1.0 was deeply flawed, structurally unsound and compulsively tidy. No one ever remarried, had step children or came into the line undocumented. In my family it’s not unusual to have one set of siblings marry another set, and then the remaining two marry after their spouses have passed on. This kind of behaviour is hard on probate courts and software, and don’t even get me started on gender issues. FTM 1.0 hated my family so much it eventually stopped working altogether.
Two weeks ago I bought a copy of Family Tree Maker 2010, because winter is setting in and I knew what would happen if I started taping big sheets of vellum to the wall behind the wood stove. I never thought I’d be plugging software on this blog, but this product is more fun than a video game. Well, any video game that’s not GTA IV.
My favorite of the Barnards has always been Francis. Referred to as “Deacon” Francis in the lore, he married Lucretia Pinney in 1740 when she was 19 and he was 21. Starting in 1743 they had 13 children: Lucretia, Lydia, Irana, Aaron, Moses, David, Sara, Elizabeth, Elijah, Ebenezer, Samuel, Elihu, Caroline and Francis, Jr. They lived in the same town I grew up in, and my mother often told me of the sign on the side of the house that proclaimed:
The house stood on Duncaster Rd. until 1989. I have a vivid memory of the sign, but now I can’t remember if I saw it myself or simply heard the story often enough to make it real. In ‘89 they took the house down and the Wintonbury Historical Society put up a plaque in honor of the sons. Tonight I’m going to fire up the program and record the daughters, too.
