raspberries + tarragon = sin

The raspberries are in at the farm and they are super delicious, maybe more than any year previous. But this is exactly how I feel about the raspberries each year. Certainly this is the best they have ever tasted.

The town is emptied out because it is August. The students aren’t back yet and everyone and her brother is on the Cape or in Rhode Island. The sun and the air are perfect, especially at the farm.

I like to pick the tarragon in the herb garden. I don’t think anyone but me uses it. I think I single-handedly keep it robust, for you see, when you pick tarragon, it causes it to keep growing. Brookfield Farm tarragon the best tarragon I’ve ever eaten. It will not grow for me at home, neither in my garden nor in a pot.

One year I could not stop eating tarragon. I would pick it and eat it, lots of it. I think it affected my health. I didn’t grow an extra limb or anything, I just suspect it was acting on my hormones, something deep inside of me, bad. It made me a little crazy, I wanted to eat it at all hours.

I like the way tarragon makes my mouth kind of numb. I am experiencing a resurgence in my craving for it, only this year I have been eating it and then picking raspberries and popping them in my mouth. It is a taste sensation, I tell you, and I won’t be surprised when raspberry-tarragon desserts start showing up in fancy-pants restaurants from coast to coast.

When I eat the tarragon and pick the raspberries, I feel sinful, like I’ve gotten away with the Devil. The raspberries are in the accessible garden, directly across from the tarragon, so they are not for the regular farm share. That raspberry patch is way in the back of one of the main fields and not yet part of our share. I only eat a dozen or so of the raspberries at at time from the accessible garden and sometimes I think the sin is that there are so many overripe raspberries because no one is eating them at all.

Ah, summer. The real deal.

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little blue float plane

I love this photo and I made it my whateverthehell photo on Facebook. You know the photo that once you switch over to Timeline you can put up a photo that’s even bigger than your profile picture? This may have been from our last beach day. Was that still August? Yikes. No, I think it was already September. Jeez. I can’t remember and I don’t want to think as hard as I’d need to to figure it out, accuracy be damned!

I like this little float plane.

Today, the leaves were perfect. We drove up out of the Valley and as the air is colder at night up in the hill towns, the leaves were already looking like they had peaked. But they haven’t. Just some of them. It was raining and damp so the colors popped as you know they do.

I loved this little float plane and some kid must have left it on the beach because it was near sundown and the plane was all alone. I had my eye on it for a few hours. I wanted it. I wanted to take it home. As the tide came in, I kept moving it up the sand so it wouldn’t float away and pollute the water even more than however polluted it already is. As if this made any sense. Like Holden Caulfield in his innocence and naivety thinks he can save the kids.

When I finally approached the little float plane, it was much cheaper than I had imagined it was from a distance. I had this image in my head like it was some superior plastic and like it was a real plane somehow. It had the power to fly me away or to keep me overnight at the beach so I could live on the beach every day, just a tide of mornings with my little blue, solid and superior plastic plane, to a tide of nights. Me and my plane and the beach and the tides. An endless end of summer.

The plane was full of little gaps in the plastic, little seams that let the water seep in so that it didn’t really float like I thought it would when I placed it on top of the shallow ocean. It sort of tipped its wing and then I didn’t want it. I only wanted the perfect little plane of my imagination.

That is wrong on so many levels. First, I was going to steal the plane. I mean, really. That was the first thing. Then, when I got the courage up to get closer to it after a couple of hours of keeping my eye on it, I didn’t even want it because it wasn’t good enough. It’s just a crappy plastic plane made in China that will stay here on the earth for thousands of years, not breaking down, probably choking a beautiful aquatic mammal. But look. I got it. This is the way it was for me, the way I first saw it. I know you can see it, too. Look at the sand and the light. It really is perfect after all.

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Thankful Thursday–Maine, etcetera

Thankful for getting invited to our friends’ place way up north in Maine.

We didn’t see any moose on the drive in (daytime) and maybe we won’t see any on the way home, but it’s exciting just to know they are around.

It’s been 9 years since we have been up here and now that we’re here, we wonder why we couldn’t make it work sooner.

There’s a lovely breeze blowing across the porch of the Main Hall, the loons are calling, the water is lapping all around, and the best darn wind chimes are joining in as well. I hear the water hitting the 100-year old rowboat.

It feels like late summer, but it’s just early August. That’s what happens in New England; moreso the farther east or north you get. The sun sets by about 8:30, much earlier than where I grew up in Michigan and Ohio (since they are toward the farther western reach of this time zone) and evening temperatures start to dip.

It’s enough to be grateful for. Really good people, one of my oldest friends and a couple of her kids, good food, fresh air.

Here you can see a photo of the last remnant of my birthday cake, which was given to me last Friday (because it was the best opportunity to have one with the 4 of us all together even though my bday was a couple of weeks ago). I didn’t plan this, but here is how the last of the cake was cut. Except for the water spot on my lens which is plainly visible, this is as good as it gets:

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Thankful Thursday–Old Fan, New Fan

I’m feeling a little off today and thought I might need to bitch, rant, and curse. This is why I need forced gratitude.

Something happened recently–I think I missed the last time I’ll ever have my period, IN MY LIFE! This has been part of me for 34 years, and POOF, it’s gone. I think it’s been over 3 months. But if you know anything about menopause, you know that at least it’s unpredictable. A woman could never know it would be her last period. There’s no goodbye to plan for, just waiting to see if any blood will come again.

Look, I know it’s not popular to talk about menstrual blood, but fuck it. Those stupid ads where a pad is shown absorbing water. It’s like it’s a fucking diaper or something. But as Paul says, what do you want them to do, show real blood? Maybe, I think.

I told my acupuncturist that I was sad because maybe I didn’t get to say goodbye to my period and she said maybe my body will hear this and I’ll get my period again with a vengeance. Funny.

The other thing is that at 48, I’m jealous of my friends who are 54 and 55 who still bleed. This makes me older than they are on some level, you know. Fuck it.

The washing machine blips at me

I am in the kitchen, you in your “new” office in the basement

Annie in her own bed (for once)

I need to be grateful, making my lists

So what do I love today?

Fans, old metal fans

If I could understand physics at all, I would know why this design never goes out of style

curved metal petals in a ring around the center to push the air along

I think of fronds and woven grasses on the ceilings of huts in hot places

I had this huge old metal fan that probably my own family got used (that’s how my dad was) and I used it for a long time.

In our old circa 1920 house, you could stick the thing right in the window and it was beautiful. In this house, the windows are too narrow with no sill and short (about 18″ high, if that) and they only open to 45 degrees.  But I used to prop the monster right on the floor to move the air through our stupid long ranch-house anyway. Clearly, the thing needed some attention–the cord and motor were pretty rickety–and because it weighed a ton, it would clank and bang against my legs when I carried it up from the basement. So I found this older guy in Northampton who still knew a thing or two about metal, motors, and repairable small electrics. He fixed it, for all of about 15 bucks. Ed. His shop is so cluttered, dark, and dusty, I don’t know how he breathes or moves around the lamps and hand-mixers and toasters without knocking everything over or how he knows what he’s fixed or not. He wears a big button-down shirt, full open to his large tanned belly, and he has piercing blue eyes in his large face.

Anyway, I brought the hulking beast (the fan, not Ed) home, set it up on the floor. That motor was so damn powerful, it’d knock over a lamp. But I walked away for about a minute and the damn thing started sparking and set the [45-year old] carpet on fire. That was it. I had to let it go.

I still have a large metal box fan that I bought at a tag sale in Stow, Ohio for ten bucks. It works pretty well and Ed fixed the cord on it, too. Just a little afraid to use it…

Those were the days, hunh?

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Twinkly Cooks! Garlic Scapes Pesto

I am sure that no one in my family shares my love for Garlic Scapes Pesto.

I started making this stuff for the first time last summer on the suggestion of a friend. Previous to that, I would bring home a handful of scapes from my farm share, and with a puzzled expression, not unlike one you might see on the face of a country rube with a piece of straw dangling from his mouth in an old 1960’s cartoon, I would chop a few into a stir fry or onto a fresh green salad, to no accolades and with no desire to do it ever again.

I found many recipes for Garlic Scapes Pesto on the web last year. I credit this one to dorie greenspan with a couple of tweaks by me.

1 C (appx 10-12) garlic scapes, roughly chopped

1/2 C hand-grated* parmigiano-reggiano

1/3 C extra virgin olive oil

1/3 C toasted, slivered almonds

appx 2 tsp fresh lemon juice (squeeze it baby!); additional lemon zest if you like

1/2 tsp sea salt

freshly ground pepper to taste

Put all ingredients, save the cheese, into a food processor and chop until uniformly blended and to your personal preference for smoothness

After you have transferred every last bit of the pesto from the food processor into a glass (or ceramic) mixing bowl, add the grated parm-reg until well-blended

Put the pesto into an airtight container and refrigerate. Use it whenever you want, even on a midnight kitchen raid while you are watching a dirty French movie. I don’t think it will make you fat, even if you eat a cupful all at once.

I have found that the pesto stays fresh for around 4-5 days after it’s refrigerated. If you want to be like twinkly, you’ll double, triple, or quadruple the recipe (see note below) and you will freeze smallish portions for later use. Like next week and the week after because you will never get enough of this stuff. I dare you to try to have even one batch left when the snow flies. But wouldn’t it be loverly if you could make it last that long?

*after experimenting last summer with this recipe as well as with recipes for traditional basil pesto, I have found that adding the cheese into the food processor has a detrimental effect on both texture and flavor. Also, in typical twinkly fashion, I make huge batches of things so as to maximize my TIME SPENT PREPPING/COOKING to FOOD YIELD ratio. I freeze the garlic scapes pesto sans cheese (and so should you).

HOW DO I EAT IT? Well, I eat it on crackers for lunch, every day until it is gone. I eat it on wheat linguine noodles with nothing else or with cooked chicken added. I am eating it right now atop an Ak-Mak. You should do these things if you know what’s good for you and you should write to me with any new ways to eat it that are delicious.

And look, I’m gonna use the same goddamn photograph I used in yesterday’s post. That’s how little I like to work. I didn’t even reduce it like yesterday. God am I lazy.

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Thankful Thursday

Google images

garlic scapes

garlic scapes pesto (perhaps I will post a recipe tomorrow–?)

food, eating, food, eating food, food in general, dreaming about making delicious recipes, even if I never make any of them, eating delicious food that someone else makes, more food

the arugula I mentioned in a post a while back? I love it mixed in fresh green salads–fresh greens right out of the farm field with the best homemade effin’ dressing in the world (recipe soon–??)

fonts (but maybe not enough to pay $30 a year on wordpress to change them on my blog)

the 3 cases of classic Dentyne that came to my door a few days ago

my kids, home from school

my kids, in camp away from home some of the time

sleeping in oh my god do I love sleeping in

money: having it, having enough of it, having more of it

friends….you already know that I love my friends and that I form intense bonds with people; but also, I really love my kids’ friends (well, except for that one boy who put a sucker in my hair that one time about 10 years ago…wait, that’s a lie, that was my nephew, 20 years ago and I’ll bet one of his own 2 sons have already karmically paid his debt)

the advent of summer (though not the thought of the already-short New England days getting shorter)

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