windows birds roots
Chores and errands were a relief, really. I was happy to spend last weekend entirely preparing for my mom to come for Xmas. Without leaving my crossroads, I gathered a few more gifties, topped up the pantry, and picked up the laundry. The sidewalks puddley and slushy not just wet, and the winter weather seeped through my black flats; it is warm for December in Brooklyn.
This is the first time in 32 years I was not in the Midwest for Christmas. Now that everyone’s estranged and I’m perhaps the strangest of them all, my mother traveled to my apartment across from the Russian bodega where I bought her shiny, wintery wrapped candies with brown bears on blue, squirrels on pistachio green, and white daisies on shiny cherry red and again on shiny tannenbaum green. Even the slender boxes of berry juice there look festive, the Cyrillic writing swirling with Moscow snows. I pulled one of these from the cooler and one of the handmade caramel layered wafer cookie things from the sweets corner of the crowded glass counter. At the other end, sausage rings sit one on the other over one ring in the center holding the whole meaty stack upright, the centerpiece to the sausage and coldcuts display.
Leaning on a clear foot of glass, the blondest of the shop ladies holds her face tilted up to watch the Russian soap on the tv in the corner just above and behind the half-stocked dairy case. I felt crowded between them; the women on the show all wear very tight pants. Her face ripened with a smile.
You’re buying such beautiful candies!
my mom’s coming…for Christmas.
O, she is! That is wonderful! Where is she from?
Chicago.
How long has it been since you’ve seen her?
Let’s see – I think, a year, I think. It has been a long time.
O, that is so great—now she comes! It is my son’s birthday today, and I will go home after this shop, and make the table. Make the cake too. And my mother, she called, she said—I am coming. I will meet you after the shop. So she is coming, and we will make the table, and he will have such a good birthday. And your mom is coming. That is wonderful! Now she comes, and she is your best friend!
I smiled and bought a bag of bright clementines too. Jangled the bells going out.
In the crosswalk, three feet from where I stood and twenty to where I live, an Italian man in a Russian hat, holding out his arms at half flap, his boots resisting all the wet, his face lit in the suppressed excitement of a man who flares most often, almost exclusively, in anger.
A hawk—I saw him; I saw it— if you looked, you saw it— fan like, his tail, the man’s thick fingers, exposed like mine so cold and wet, spreading like feathers.
It was a red tail hawk.
He proclaimed it in and out of the traffic zizzing through the flattened puddles. He broad stepped between the crosswalk, curb, and parked cars, looking up every four words, trying to see the bird again. His black & grey eyebrows telegraphed the miracle to each of us— the bright-coated couple leaving the diner, the small flock of Hassid boys, and me. I followed that human lightening bolt back to his eyes, brown. We smiled together, circled up with the great bird I never did see.
I wanted to give them both soup; here are soup recipes for you instead.
Two recipes, the Miso Awesome Soup is a take on a “recipe” from Morgan, my beloved kitchen witch, and the Winter Root Soup originates in a favorite recipe and what the farmers’ market had in good supply. This recipe has made certain friends of mine come off looking like kitchen studs at dinner parties. You might want to pick the thyme while in good company or watching a movie. Persnickety business, thyme picking.
My mom came; she picked the thyme. We had the soup for Xmas dinner.
I wish my digital camera was working to show you this and the other components the feast my mother and I made together for ourselves. We also had ginger/chickpea/garlicky salad on fresh spinach and watercress and a flat of Turkish bread on a wooden cutting board with small bowls of toppings: fresh butter, goat cheese with lemon zest and thyme, and apple bits & clementine sections in lemon and honey. She scooped the fruit on the chickpeas, which was brilliant. A bottle of Riesling chilled in the windowsill, leaning against the glass over the dark garbage courtyard. We wore aprons I made and took smoke breaks out there.
The grand finale—Amaretto Dream Cupcakes. Almond extract instead of almond slivers, makeshift buttermilk, and the midnight close of the meal was too late to break out the noisy hand mixer to beat the frosting so I whipped cream with more amaretto. We plopped it onto our tasting array of mini-cupcakes ( we experimented- stuffing with blueberry-raspberry jam, chocolate chips, and apricot jam) and sprinkled chopped pistachios and grated nutmeg on top. We had these with mugs of Sleepy time tea.
I hope to post a few more recipes before this breather in work is over…stay tuned.
Lemony Gingery Veggie Stock
Fill your big and heavy pot with clean water and put it on the stovetop to boil. Scrub two fist-sized turnips, a potato, and two carrots (the ones so big you cannot imagine using them for anything in the kitchen). Trim any stems or roots. Trim four stalks of celery too; rinse them if they are dirty. Toss all these veggies in the pot.
Press three cloves of garlic under the flat side of a knife and peel. Break three inches of ginger into pieces. Cut a lemon into quarters. Toss all of this into the pot.
Bring the water to a rolling boil then let it fall back to a simmer for half an hour.
Stem any mushrooms you have about for this recipe or any others. Wipe them clean and add to the stock. Pour in a few cups of water. Cover and bring back to boil then simmer half-covered for another hour or so. Stir occasionally, and use the back of the spoon to squish the ingredients gently, especially the lemons.
In your sink, set a colander in a bowl or pot large enough to hold all that hot stock. Pour the stock through and using cheesecloth or the back of a wooden spoon, mush the veggies to squeeze their best stuff into the broth.
Let the broth cool and store in jars in the frigidaire. Or you can use it right away to back soup. Viola:
Miso Awesome Soup
The amounts here are for a generous bowl for one voracious feminista yogi. This soup is quite adaptable by size – feed your feminista yogi flock!
Bring a pot of water to boil and cook a handful of udon noodles. The corner health mart carries an organic brand that comes in 8 oz packets with three bundles of noodles, and one bundle is just right amount for a big bowl. (One big bowl eating is typically friendly cooking for one eater, one broke but taste-conscious eater. Those inspired, sexy soups, pastas, and salads you whip up for dates with your one true one want a roomy, gorgeous bowl. Right now my favorite is a ceramic piece that heats up comfortingly in my lap when I sit cross legged on the couch. This bowl, runny with glaze in cinnamon, oatmeal and cream, is my flat mate’s handmade treasure. I gotta find my own perfect piece; I will let you know how the quest goes.)
Slice two or three scallions (green onions). Peel and mince an inch of ginger and two cloves of garlic. Slice three or four thin slices of chili. Chili is highly subjective; know thyself.
In a medium sized sauce pan, heat a few teaspoons of vegetable oil and sesame oil. When a flick of water sizzles in the oil, lower the heat and add the chili, garlic, ginger, and scallions along with some sea salt and black pepper. Add two to four tablespoons of tamari.
Clean off your mushrooms—any kind you like, of course. I used the smallest possible shitakes and creminis, carefully de-stemmed and cleaned with a paper towel. Sauté the mushrooms briefly in the fiery oil, about five minutes, until their heads are glistening and glossy brown.
Pour broth over the frying mushrooms, about 3 cups. Bring broth to a boil.
Halve a lemon. Snip a cup or so of watercress and add it to your bowl.
Lower heat and with the soup at a low simmer, squeeze in the lemon juice from both halves and stir in two tablespoons of miso. Bring back to a fine simmer and pour over the delicate greens.
I eat this with two tools: chopsticks and a big, shallow spoon.
winter root soup with thyme butter
As you begin, let a stick of butter sit at room temperature. Pick thyme. I mean, throughout the process, pick thyme or pick a bunch to begin with or have a friend picking thyme. You will want three – four tablespoons and those leaves are itty bitty.
In a heavy stockpot, heat a tablespoon of olive oil and two tablespoons of the butter.
As you chop the following parade of veggies into hunks the size of walnuts, toss them into the sizzling fat. These are the winter veggies that called to me at the Grand Army Plaza green market, and they can easily be substituted with veggies that call to you—any winter vegetables in the same starchy, peppery, rooty family, like rutabaga (maybe also cauliflower). If organically farmed, those with thin skins keep it on for the soup.
Slither the papers off of one small red onion. Quarter it and halve the quarters. Smash, peel, and roughly chop into thirds three cloves of garlic. Scrub and chop four Yukon gold potatoes and two medium-big carrots. Peel and chop one celeriac and three golden turnips. Pry the hide from four kohlrabi and chop. Slice an apple in half, quarter and core it.
Sauté the whole pile up, stirring occasionally, for about ten minutes. Sautéing them lets the sugars caramelize, deepening the soup flavor. Meander through the chopping process; chop the onions and garlic cook for a few minutes while you do some other small task for the dinner, picking thyme or zesting things. Let each grouping of veggies – from the alliums to the sputniks—have a moment at a clearing in the center of the pot.
Cover your roots and fruits with stock and bring to a boil; lower the heat and simmer for 40 minutes to an hour. We used a quart of stock and topped up with water.
Near the soup pot, set up a blender (your hand-me-down from Titi Marie or the neighbor’s kitchen—this soup is worth borrowing the equipment if you haven’t got it). Puree the soup in batches, ladling a generous amount of broth into the blender with the veg parts to run it all velvety thick.
Scooping with the wooden spoon we used for stirring, I added three generous plops of Greek yogurt. It probably amounted to a cup. Then stir in a 1/4 of whole milk. Maintain heat until very hot but do not boil after you’ve added the dairy.
Stir thyme into the softened butter; about three tablespoons of fresh thyme into the remaining stick of butter.
Ladel soup—gorgeous saffron color—into bowls, add a fatty pat of thyme butter, let melt a bit, and swirl on top of the soup. Weep for joy for the bounty provided.
To veganize: increase the initial olive oil, omit the yoghurt/milk, using so milk if you are so inclined but I don’t think that is even necessary and pretty luxurious at the veg purée stage. Add the thyme near the end of cooking and just stir in, drizzle a swirl of olive oil on top.
Adapted from the epicurious recipe white root vegetable soup with thyme butter, Bon Appétit | December 2001.
absence and books and shoes
it has recently come to my attention that you read this blog—with some regularity and anticipation.
In light of this news, I apologize for my temporary absence. To earn pay for rent and loans and such, I have been working to plan this event that was, throughout its span, a 7-day a week endeavor. In the last month, even my sparse late night bloggings had to go. They were not the only bit of my life to be neglected into oblivion, including my sacred kitchen goddess bit.
I was eating a lot of pizza. Pizza! Also, drinking seltzer water directly from liter bottles. I can get myself talked into a passable if delusional Slow Food-y, local business supportive justification for the pizza, which I buy not from that anti-choice pizza chain or any chain but from whichever older-than-me, tiny Brooklyn place I happen to be near. This weak front fails to address the grossness of all that cheese to my body and takes a fingers-in-my-ears approach to where that cheese comes from. This also happens to be the distinct eating pattern of my ex-lover who rounded out her diet with pepperoni, cereal, and cheese’n’crackers.
She worked mad hours when we were together. Back then I gave her a hard time while loving to cook for her. Now, oh—I have pulled-up to her drive through and sat at the window in complete understanding. This working working working craziness: it becomes next to impossible to eat well. One needs either time or money to eat well or…exuberant and precise planning, which is not my forte. Coffee/cigarette breaks became my forte.
A sad state had come to pass- I was not horribly put off by the airplane food on the flight to London on the eve of the big to-do.
The day after this big who-ha ended, I pulled up in a cab at the Islington home of a couple, friends of a friend who was also visiting them. (At some live reading, I will tell about the lesbian cab driver giving us her lover-by-lover tour of London.)
Crossing their threshold, I struggled, wobbling over, taking off my shoes and turned into the living room, with the cat scuttering across the wood floor, looking back over his tail, my adorable coworkers seducing him with purrs and pets and cooing; my friend and her friend rollicking in their cute loud American girl reunion. The fogged autumn sun coming in through the huge front windows despite itself.
Hot coffee, platters of warm croissants, nutella, jam.
And I wept. Inside, I wept with the unraveling of releasing of relief. Which suddenly feels like joy.
I stayed with them for several days of Turkish and Indian restaurants, lingering afternoons at pubs, home cooked pasta dinners from the organic market and leftovers of everything picked-at over days.
Wandering the gayborhood of London, I found an all-you-can-eat vegan Buddhist buffet, clattering with plates and piled with flowers, for EIGHT DOLLARS. I ate so many bean paste sesame balls the kimono ladies were tittering.
And the novelist/investment banker half of the couple gave me the perfect short story for the time: Cathedral. Go on, find it. It is in a collection by the same title.
This short story kicked off a post-life-sucking-job reading frenzy, and I have gone through some delicious pages in the past few weeks. Among them, the 100 pages I read of That’s so you! before gifting it to one of the young women I worked with on this project.
It is a collection edited by Michele Tea; the tagline is Women write on self-expression through fashion and style. I am a Michelle Tea devotee—more power to you sister for earning your way in the world by your writing. Her write-up on that new turn in her life is as sweet as her nerdy queer femme intro. Her childhood lavender-on-lavender glam ensemble far out-shines my own ballerina inspired obsession at 7. I wore the grimy pink leotard endlessly, sleeping in it or hiding it at night so my mother couldn’t wash it lest—god forbid— it be in the washer or dryer and not ON ME.
Another So you! highlight: Kate Bornstein’s journey from being sent home from school for copying the wrong side of the tracks cool to her current soul satisfying outfits by Betsey.
Oh, Betsey Johnson! of the cartwheels on runways and pink pinkity pink on black designs on netting and tattoo inspired prints on velvet mini-dresses, and now – shoes. Sweetart candy for princess trash tootsies…coveted by moi. My only clothes purchased with large sums of money I never really have are a few pieces by Betsey. The first dress of hers that became mine, I swore wouldn’t fit, but the red maned shop girl stood with her heat against my back, zipped me into it sharply, yanked me back a hair’s width closer to her, and whispered, “You just needed a little help, Scarlett.”
The netting and sequins slung in the bottom of that big pink bag, I walked swinging and whooping hand-in-hand with my best friend through DC’s Georgetown. She and my mom co-gifted me the dress for my birthday. She was wearing her dimples and mighty ass, and I was wearing short, pale hot pink hair that I cut myself. We were yelling indirectly at the sorority girls, whose cab we later stole (instigating a full year of bad cab karma, but it was exhilarating at the time). Yelling about how she thinks she can wear Betsey Johnson but she cannot wear Betsey Johnson; I am the girl who wears Betsey Johnson! And we made out on the corner in our tattoos and piercings.
So go check out this book – I am going to get myself a copy and finish it.
I am so glad to know you read this blog, and for that, I want to share a little thanksgiving:
Beets with balsamic and honey
slice the leaves off a bunch of beets, maybe four or five tennis ball sized beets. Scrub each bleedy red beet enough that the hoary skins are mostly scrubbed away. Trim off the tail, and you may need to take a paring knife to the knobbily flat end. Slice each beet in half then each beet half into three or four wedges depending on the size of your beets.
bring about two inches of water to boil in deep fry pan (i used a deep non-stick sauté pan with straight sides). Lower the heat to the water is at a simmer; add the beet wedges and simmer covered for about ten minutes. Uncover and pour off most of the water, keeping about a half inch in the pan. Return to the flame.
pour about a quarter cup each of balsamic vinegar and honey over the simmering beets. Cook uncovered over daringly high but not fully turned-on heat until the vinegar and honey reduce to a thick syrup (a reduction). This takes about 15-20 minutes. Every 5 minutes or so, turn the beets and swirl the thickening sauce in the pan.
Serve over shredded beet greens or fresh arugala (rocket!).
Mashed potatoes
Scrub and quarter a pile of potatoes; use about 1 ½ spuds per person. This pseudo recipe works with 4-5 potatoes; adjust accordingly. An earnest entreaty here: use organic potatoes so you can leave the skins on with an easy mind. In fact, thanksgiving is a perfect holiday to build a meal entirely on your local green market’s organic bounty – find this holiday’s best spirit and celebrate the real harvest of your community’s farmers. If you are lucky enough to have a garden or a window box, cook what you have grown with your own hands and love from the spot of earth you are caring for. Sorry for the preachin’—back to potatoes! Yukon golds are buttery and pretty in the mashing.
Boil the potatoes in a pot just big enough to hold them covered with water, about an inch of water over the tops of the potatoes. Boil until soft, about 10-15 minutes; poke with a fork to tell.
Strain the potatoes, and rattle them around in the strain to begin the mashing. Dump them back in the hot pot, and mash them with ¼ stick of butter and about ¼ cream. Wooden spooks, big forks, or the potato masher hand tool are all effective mashers. The gadget specifically for mashing spuds (essentially a handle on a flat disk with holes of some sort) is one of the few specialty tools I own, and it has more uses than one would first presume: cookie dough, hummus, applesauce, and- obviously- myriad mashed root veggies are all cake beneath the smooshing grid of the mashed potato masher.
Thanksgiving mashed potato up-grade: In a mortar and pestle, grind together sea salt, fresh rosemary needles, red pepper flakes, and black pepper. Stir into the spuds. Serve. Eat. Nap.
Ridiculously good chard tart
Thaw a package of puff pastry. More power to you if you make your own. Puff pastry is so labor intensive, however, that even the most ambitious cooks typically buy it, like phyllo dough.
Chop a pile of chard. Oh—that sounds so brute! considering the chard we had in hand this November. After the bunch was rinsed, I held a leaf up like an X-ray, a stained glass, to the window, and with the sunlight shining through, it was a cartooned tree of tall, cumulous shape in sea-vegetable Green with Fuschia branches, pink veins edged in lit white. Layer the leaves on top of each other and roll like a cigar, slice from the end to your fingers to make long shreds. Then slice across these shreds to make bite sized pieces.
Peel and chop two shallots. Toast a handful of pine nuts in a dry skillet. Zest a lemon (again – organic, the peel!). Hold these ingredients in little bowls or dishes until you are ready to incorporate them into the dish.
Heat your oven to 375º. Heat a shallow skillet over medium heat to cook your greens. Melt about a tablespoon of butter and toss in the shallots. Let the shallots cook for a few minutes (3-ish) and then toss the shard over it along with half the lemon zest. Cook the greens down, stirring occasionally. About 10 minutes total. Let sit in the pan with the heat off.
Stir together ½ a cup of Greek yoghurt and ½ a cup of feta cheese along with the remaining lemon zest.
Crush ¾ of the pine nuts in whatever way is easiest in your kitchen. I crush them on a cutting board with a wine bottle, not rolling pin style but screwing and crushing with the round bottom. Stir the crushed pine nuts into the greens along with a handful of currants.
On a cookie sheet, layout a full sheet of puff pastry and turn up the edges all the way around to make a crust. Pinch over about a quarter inch and use your fingertips to squish the folded over edge into the main body of the dough. Spread the feta and yoghurt along the pastry. Spread the chard mixture on top of the creamy layer. Sprinkle with more feta and the whole pine nuts. Bake at 375º for 15-20 minutes or until the puff pastry is golden. Let rest for 10 minutes or so, slice into squares, and serve hot.
