Archive for March, 2010

Celebrating the return of images

Monday, March 29th, 2010

with new work. This is “Watermelon and Pears”, pastel, 24 x 18 inches on board.

I have one more drawing planned from my set-ups in the hoop house over the summer. The light in there is diffuse and very white. I plan to start the 2010 flower season by  constructing a table-top  in the house to take advantage of a large south facing window for compositions with bright slanting planes of lights and shadows, yellow highlights and winking green glass bowls. I’m looking for an abrupt transition from Renoir to somewhere past Janet Fish – can’t wait!

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Technical difficulties. . .

Sunday, March 28th, 2010

This blog is broken, sadly. The only problem is with uploading images, but of course I’m all about the images. We’ll be taking down the site later  today and putting something back up and quite possibly no one will be the wiser. On the other hand, this might be a new and unrecognizable entity by Monday and it’s only fair to leave a message.

I memorize a poem each season, using the time I spend commuting to work and the conference calls and meetings to which I go, but am not expected to contribute past putting out the occasional fire.  My choice for Winter 2010 seems strangely appropriate, so I’m leaving it here as a placeholder. “You, if any open this writing. . .”

Epistle to be Left in the Earth

…It is colder now
there are many stars
we are drifting
North by the Great Bear
the leaves are falling
The water is stone in the scooped rock
to southward
Red sun grey air
the crows are
Slow on their crooked wings
the jays have left us

Long since we passed the flares of Orion
Each man believes in his heart he will die
Many have written last thoughts and last letters
None know if our deaths are now or forever
None know if this wandering earth will be found

We lie down and the snow covers our garments
I pray you
you (if any open this writing)
Make in your mouths the words that were our names
I will tell you all we have learned
I will tell you everything

The earth is round
there are springs under the orchards
The loam cuts with a blunt knife
beware of
Elms in thunder
the lights in the sky are stars
We think they do not see
we think also
The trees do not know nor the leaves of the grasses hear us
The birds too are ignorant
do not listen
Do not stand at dark in the open windows
We before you have heard this
they are voices
They are not words at all but the wind rising
Also noone among us has seen God
(… We have thought often
the flaws of sun in the late and driving weather
pointed to one tree but it was not so.)
As for the nights I warn you the nights are dangerous
The wind changes at night and the dreams come

It is very cold
there are strange stars near Arcturus
Voices are crying an unknown name in the sky

Archibald MacLeish

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Compass Harbor

Saturday, March 20th, 2010

Wednesday I had a stuffy day, full of stuffy doctors’ offices stuffed with sick people and lab tests, so when the end of the day rolled around, I took a walk.

Compass Harbor was the home of George Dorr, Acadia National Park’s first superintendent and the “Father of Acadia”. Dorr Mountain looms over the foundations of the house that are all that’s left from the Great Fire, and the stone stairs that sweep down to the ocean. Huge trees have grown up along the easy walk from Rte. 3 to the Harbor, including many exotic escapees from the formal gardens that once surrounded the estate.

I walked down the trail (you can’t really call it hiking) all the way to the point, and the view down Bar Harbor and the Porcupine Islands. Bald Porcupine boasts a 2,500′ breakwater that protects the harbor from southern storms. Local legend has it that J. P. Morgan paid for the Army Corp of Engineers to build it in 1918, to keep his 340′ yacht “Corsair” from rocking too much during cocktail hour. Meanwhile, George Dorr was building “Dorr’s Swimming Pool” – a much more modest project that still involved several tons of cut square blocks of granite. The walls enclosed a shallow part of the harbor with a sandy beach, so that his caretaker’s children could paddle safely in the warmer water no matter what the tide. You can still see the blocks, forced apart now by storms, and the little beach. Somehow the unseasonably balmy day and the setting sun gave the rich man’s project a little glow of affection; lessened the annoying overlay of privilege and exposed the huge, ruined, expensive project as a passing gift from an old man to someone else’s children.

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Potato and Green Onion Fishcakes

Monday, March 15th, 2010

My mental picture of Ireland includes green rolling hills, green pastures, greenstone houses and the occasional peaceful lake. I don’t immediately think of the ocean, but Eire is an island, after all, and most of the Irish recipes handed down through my family involve fish. I learned this recipe “by hand”, that is, I watched someone make it and then joined in. I don’t have precise amounts for the ingredients, but it’s a peasant dish and the measurements aren’t critical to having a good meal out of it. The recipe is also a little more complicated than I would generally make for a weeknight dinner – lots of pans and dishes complicated. On the other hand it’s cheap and absolutely wonderful. You have been warned.

You’ll need a potato ricer and: 1/2 pound white fish (I use haddock); 4 medium or 5 small boiling potatoes (I like Yukon or Caribe); 4 C chopped spinach (about 1/2 pound fresh); 3 green onions, chopped; scant 1/2 C matzoh meal; 2 large eggs, beaten;  salt and pepper, oil and butter for frying. This amount serves 2, generously.

Peel and cut the potatoes into chunks and cook until done – you’ll want them uniformly soft for ease of ricing.  Drain them in a colander so that they cool a little and won’t cook the eggs when you add them later. In a 10″ skillet poach the fish in water with a little white wine and lemon juice until opaque and flaky. I like to drain and cool the fish on a cake rack so that it doesn’t add too much additional water to the mix. In another large skillet saute the green onions until soft and add the spinach and cook until quite done.  You can add a 1/2 tsp sesame oil at this point if you like. I”m pretty sure my ancestors did not. Dump the spinach and green onions into a large bowl.

Clean up all the dishes and pans and let everything sit and cool off for a minute.  Now rice the potatoes into a another large bowl and let them stand. Flake the fish off the cake rack into the bowl of spinach (nicely cooled so that it doesn’t overcook the fish. My ancestors were a patient people, at least when it came to fishcakes). Add the beaten eggs and mix gently and not too thoroughly, add the matzoh meal the same way. Season with a 1/2 tsp salt. Add this mixture to the riced potatoes and mix until you can pick up spoonfuls of more or less cohesive batter on a large spoon.

Heat the large skillet with oil and 1 Tbsp of butter. Drop large spoonfuls (about 1/4 C) of the mixture in the pan, fry until browned, flip over and squash with the flat of the spatula. Repeat until done. I remember meals of just fishcakes – vegetable, starch and protein all-in-one – but I like these with a green salad and a piece of soda bread full of whiskey-soaked currants and caraway seeds. And the new Betterbee catalog. Paradise!

Fishcakes and the Betterbee catalogue - paradise!

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Time like an ever rolling stream,

Saturday, March 13th, 2010

Bears all its sons away.

They fly, forgotten, as a dream

dies at the opening day.

Today I walked down our road and across the highway to the woods beyond, where Kittredge Brook winds down to Somes Sound. The place has unpleasant seasons; clouds of mosquitoes from Memorial Day to the Fourth of July,  caked white mud and burnt grass in August, cold wet muck in October and featureless white for as long as there’s snow. March seems tolerable. The muck was still mostly frozen under foot, the February flood has receded and the water is pure, showing off its orange tannin underbelly. New England’s answer to howler monkeys, the  pileated woodpeckers, were calling from the flood-dead maples, the deer I startled were fairly fat and sleek for this time of year, and something heavy splashed into the stream, but didn’t bother me. It was a good day.

Rules for walking in the woods alone.

Tell someone where you’re headed and approximately when you will be back, and then stick to the schedule. If no one is around, leave a note. I know it’s hard to fathom, but we don’t have cell phone reception here.

Bring your stick.

If you’re not following a human trail, try to follow a deer track. Deer are stupid, but they do know the best way through the terrain. If the track veers off for no good reason, go right along with it.

If you get wet, go home – preferably by the most public route possible, such as a road or snowmobile trail. You may still die of hypothermia, but this is your best shot at someone finding out what happened to you.

Bring a hat. You’re warm now, and you’ll get warmer walking, but at some point you’ll need a hat.

It is not necessarily paranoid to bring a few emergency items along.  A whistle, a pack of matches and a flashlight aren’t going to slow you down that much. Don’t bring a compass if you don’t know how to use one because it’ll just make you mad when you get lost.

If you have your camera (I always have a camera) and you see something interesting, stop and take a picture. No matter how well you re-trace your steps you will never see that thing again. I have no idea why.

The verse above is from “Our God Our Help in Ages Past”, by Isaac Watts and was the hymn Winston Churchill chose for his funeral.

The busy tribes of flesh and blood,
With all their lives and cares,
Are carried downwards by the flood,
And lost in following years.

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Jerusalem Airlift

Thursday, March 11th, 2010

Jerusalem is an adjective in my family; it denotes a similarity in a New World object to something from the Old. Jerusalem artichoke (Helianthus tuberosus) isn’t even remotely related to an artichoke, but the taste is similar. Jerusalem Cherry, (olanum pseudocapsicum), is a member of the nightshade family with poisonous fruit – small, round, bright red fruit that look something like cherries. The Old World names were good enough, but the distinction had to be made lest you make a fatal pie out of New World cherries.

My family wrote hundreds of letters when I went away to college. Going away to college was new, but they’d had experience with going away to war and that’s how they approached it. Hundreds of letters about food. About their lives back home, actually – but I’d never realized that food was so much the overarching motif of those lives. I’m working the letters up into a collection. The Old World sent food, but the New sent a facsimile – a Jerusalem Airlift.

Mary came back to the Firehouse after, and we arranged platters of meats, breads and salads for 100. They gave us much more and also sent a beautiful whole ham for Mother and Ben. Dad cut it in chunks last night with the big knife so it could be divided easily. Mother froze the bone for soup later on. PS Thought I’d send nuts – maybe you can use a hammer and something for a pick.

It is supposed to snow this afternoon 2 – 8″ stopping around midnight. I am working overtime tomorrow, then on Sunday we are having your father’s birthday party. He wants that coconut pineapple cake of Doris Watkins’. It always falls apart, but he always asks for it.

I have plenty of excerpts to work with, and hope to begin setting up material to draw as illustrations. (I’m going to skip the ham.) A perfect frontspiece for the book, I think, will be a picture of me standing ghostly in the back yard, holding a layer cake.

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Key limes in the grocery store,

Sunday, March 7th, 2010

make Key Lime (or Mexican, or West Indies lime) pie. That’s just good sense. I use a recipe that someone cut out of a Gourmet magazine nearly ten years ago (it wasn’t me – I don’t cut things out of magazines).  I’ve long since memorized it, but I dug out the original clipping so that I wouldn’t steer you wrong. And yes, it’s the same four or five ingredients I remember, but I have made some adjustments over the years.

The recipe allows for using bottled lime juice, and even recommends a brand. Don’t do it! When key limes appear in your grocery store (or who knows – on the tree in your back yard), then you can make this pie. Absolute proof of this is the fact that you’ll need 1/2 C plus 2 Tbs of juice to make this pie, and that’s exactly how much juice the limes in that silly neon green one pound bag will produce. See? Cosmic.

So. Buy the bag. Allow the limes to ripen in a cool dark place for a few days, until some  are slightly mottled with yellow spots and the skin has thinned. Roll one under your palm on a flat surface to break some of the membrane, then slice off about 1/2″ from one end. Insert your wooden lemon-juicer, or your fingers, and allow the juice to dribble into a large, stable container – like your 2 C pyrex measuring cup. You don’t want to knock this over. Oh, and if you have any papercuts on your hands, or like me, having been pruning blackberry bushes lately, you’ll know. The juice will be pale, rather opaque green and smell wonderful.

For crust

  • 1 1/4 cups graham cracker crumbs from 9 (2 1/4-inch by 4 3/4-inch) crackers
  • 2 tablespoons sugar
  • 5 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted

For filling

  • 1 (14-ounce) can sweetened condensed milk
  • 4 large egg yolks
  • 1/2 cup plus 2 tablespoons key lime juice

Make crust:
Preheat oven to 350°F.

Stir together graham cracker crumbs, sugar, and butter in a bowl with a fork until combined well, then press mixture evenly onto bottom and up side of a 9-inch (4-cup) glass pie plate. Actually, these days I use an 8″ pie pan. They’re a little harder to find, but with the Boy at college I can stand to have less pie around the house. This recipe works well either way.

Bake crust in middle of oven 10 minutes and cool in pie plate on a rack. Leave oven on.

Make filling and bake pie:

Whisk together condensed milk and yolks in a bowl until combined well. Add juice and whisk until combined well (mixture will thicken slightly).  Pour filling into crust and bake in middle of oven 15 minutes. Cool pie completely on rack (filling will set as it cools), then chill, covered, at least 8 hours (or put it in the freezer for about half an hour after it is mostly cool. Keep checking to be sure it does not really freeze.)

Goes well with whipped cream, and an expectation of Spring.

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In like a lamb.

Saturday, March 6th, 2010

Today was a March afternoon disguised as a June morning. Beautiful blue sky, 50 degree temperatures and just the slightest breeze to give the balmy calm air some variety every once in a while. I had to do errands all morning, but after 1:00 I changed shoes, found my safety googles and hauled the pump sprayer out of the cellar. I used All Season dormant oil today – it is petroleum based and not organic-rated, but it is a remarkably passive way to deal with all the various pests that over-winter on fruit trees. I add a few tablespoons of Crocker’s Golden Fish Oil (don’t open it in the house) every time – it adds “stickiness”, is a terrific foliar feed, and repels deer. Perfect. Both these substances are fairly innocuous as pesticides go, but you won’t like them in your eyes, hair, clothing – wear goggles and rubber gloves, please.

Then I went to check on the bees, and found them boiling over like an unwatched pot. I had to reach into the mass at the front of the hive and open the gate-stick a little farther. Fortunately they’re very accommodating even when just waking up, and all that happened was that I had to brush them off my hair, and the back of my neck, with a pine b0ugh.

Soon the fruit trees will wake up, too, and there will be honey in the comb!

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Jumping the gun.

Thursday, March 4th, 2010

“Jumping the gun” refers to a contestant in a race surging ahead of the starter’s pistol. If there was a “ready, set, go” for spring, I’d be penalized for getting seriously ahead the game.

Last Tuesday I stayed home from work to bring my mother to her doctor for a complicated consultation. After the bad news and instructions we had soup at the Morninglory Bakery to strategize and get a little closure. Then I brought her to her house for a much-needed nap and took myself home for an unscheduled afternoon.

The weather was lovely Tuesday afternoon. A side effect of the long February stretch of rain is that the temperature has held steady at around 38 degrees, night and day, for a week. On my way in to the house I noticed that the garden beds by the front door had thawed, and that a few parsley and lettuce plants from last fall were green and sprouting. It wasn’t much of a stretch to consider planting out some of those seedlings from down cellar, so I raced upstairs, changed into garden-ready-wear and had at it.

I roughed the soil with a hand fork, removed dead foliage, protected a few surviving lettuce seedlings (they look pretty good!) with straw and planted:

3252TZ Toraziroh (45 days) Open-pollinated. Brassica alboglabra A robust performer with just the right kind of mustardy zest. Rapidly develops prolific yields of very dark green large leaves distinctively but not overwhelmingly pungent. In two years of trials won many favorable reviews from brassica lovers. Stems, also edible, have a flavor somewhat like pac choy. Relatively slow to bolt.
3221TS Tatsoi (45 days) Open-pollinated. Brassica rapa (narinosa group) What grows quickly, can be seeded as late as August and withstands frost? Yes, Tatsoi, also known as Tah Tsai. Anne Elder picked it all fall into December even after a snow melt-off. In winter it was still not burnt by cold and remained sweet. “A dream come true for snow-dwelling beings craving greens.” Survived Roberta’s overwintering trial. Spoon-shaped thick dark green leaves make beautiful compact rosettes with mild brassica flavor. Good stir-fried and in soups. Will come back when cut. Since our purchaser Nikos Kavanya first brought it to our attention, it has become an essential ingredient in our salads and mesclun.
3218SP Senposai (40 days) F-1 hybrid. This exciting green, developed in Japan, is a cross between Japanese Mustard Spinach (Komatsuna Brassica rapa) and regular cabbage. Round medium-green leaves are wonderful in okonamiyaki or for braising. A spring sowing will stand the entire summer (even through drought) and well into fall before bolting. Can be overwintered in warmer climes or used for spring greenhouse salad production because it grows so rapidly. Open plant habit requires 12–18″ spacing.
3223YN Yokatta-Na (21 days baby; 45 days mature) Brassica rapa (narinosa group) F-1 hybrid. Quick-growing and versatile, this is the same cultivar we formerly sold as Yukosai Bitamin-Na. Tolerating both heat and cold, it can extend your season at either end, while simultaneously broadening your culinary range. Use it either raw in salad mixes or cooked in stir fries. The deep green tender leaves, though flavorful, lack the mustard “bite” found in so many Asian greens and can be harvested as a cut-and-come-again crop or at maturity.
Then I watered everything in and covered the bed with Agribon. Salad in 21 days! Maybe.
All seeds and descriptions courtesy of Fedco.  And the next tool in the garden is going to be a sickle from Maine Scythe Supply.

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Spaetzle

Monday, March 1st, 2010

Spaetz is Swabish for “Sparrow”, so spaetzle are “little sparrows”. I’m not really all that clear on the relationship between small, soft egg noodles and baby birds, but whatever. I like it, and I think that’s what I’ll call them from now on.

I made spaetzle last night, and forgot to take a picture of the finished dish, which was delicious and quite attractive. The recipe is extremely easy and fresh pasta is such a treat – it’s really wonderful to be able to make it without an expensive pasta maker and the extra work of drying and tempering. I’d even suggest this for a work-night dinner; fast, uses common ingredients and is capable of being reinvented with every sort of leftover.

For this recipe you will need a colander with large holes, say 3/8″ diameter. Several sources suggest using the large holes of a cheese grater, but the surface is small and hard to hold above the pot. I bought a .99 cent plastic colander at the grocery store which works beautifully or you could buy a spaetzle-board for about $12.00.

You can tell I got a little carried away with the colander. . .

Spaetzle for two or three – the recipe doubles easily.

2 eggs, 1/3 C whole milk, 1/4 C parsley, minced; 1/4 tsp salt; 1 1/3 C all-purpose flour. Mince the parsley very fine.

Bring a large pot of salted water to boil. In a large bowl, add the eggs, milk, parsley and salt and mix well. Add the flour a little at a time while mixing – the dough should be a little runny. Let it sit for 10 minutes. If it sits longer than that, it will begin to “bind”, so add a little more milk at that point.

Carefully hold the colander over the pot of boiling water (or place the spaetzle-board across it), spoon the dough into the container and then push the dough through the holes with the back of a wooden spoon. Wriggly “little sparrows” will drop into the water, fall, and then rise as they cook. I wait 3 or 4 minutes, but taste one at about 2 minutes. They don’t take long to cook and a lot depends on the consistency of your dough.

Drain the cooked spaetzle and, when most of the water has run off and they begin to dry, spread them on an oiled cookie sheet (I use a Silplat) until you’re ready to use them.

For the basic dish, simply saute the spaetzle in butter and serve with applesauce.  I toss them with roasted broccoli and sauteed leeks, topped with Parmesan, but I’ve also had them with tomato sauce, with a glaze of reduced cider and topped with bread crumbs – go nuts!

We had creampuffs for dessert, with creme anglais and chocolate ganache. Next post is the recipe, which is blindingly easy.

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