Dayenu

“You’re different,” said Anat Baniel, the guru behind San Rafael, California’s Anat Baniel Method, when we visited yesterday. We’ve been coming here for therapy for years now, on the suggestion of multiple friends in San Francisco, all of whom have run across Liz Preuitt (of Tartine fame) and her family, who also have also used the method with their daughter.

“When you first came, you were more stressed out,” she continued, looking straight at me in her unnerving way. “Now, it’s like you’re calm. Like you got something out of your system.”

“I did, I guess,” I said hesitantly. Going to Graham’s therapy was his realm, not mine, and I wasn’t sure whether I should mention the book. But I did. “I wrote a book about it. That helped.” She wanted to know everything.

“Anyway, it’s good to see,” she said, stopping the infinitesimally small movements she was performing on Graham’s spine. Keep going, I thought. I’m not paying you hundreds of dollars to look at me. “Things change, you know. I see it all the time. Parents change.”

I was quiet, willing her to continue working on Graham’s back. As she moved again, her words sunk in. Things do change. And sometimes, it takes an outsider to notice them.

I am, in a word, Jew-ish. I have a good Jewish nose and I can pick the skin off a chicken with the best of them, but I am not religious. There are, however, parts of Jewish traditions that resonate deeply with me. Every Passover, that means matzo ball soup, and the concept of dayenu. The first you know. The second is technically a thousands-of-years-old song—one whose Hebrew words and tune are completely unfamiliar to me—whose words translate roughly to “it would have been enough.” Literally, in a nutshell, it thanks God for all he’s done for the Jews. But the spirit of it, in my atheist mind—the part I take with me each year—is simply being thankful for what you have. And this year, I have a lot to be thankful for.

It would have been enough, I think, if A Year Right Here had been published at all. It would have been enough if my dear friend Hannah Viano had created such a beautiful paper-cut image for the cover. It would have been enough if I’d just gotten to read at my local bookstore. And of course, it would have been enough if Graham had just been Graham, even if he hadn’t learned to walk, and if I didn’t now notice, after a week of twice-daily therapy, that he’s starting to walk heel-toe, instead of plodding each foot onto the earth like I imagine the dinosaurs used to walk. But there’s been so much more, this year, that this spring really does feel new and alive in a different way.

It feels like rebirth for many reasons: Because today, a story I was once afraid to tell is out in the world, in a form I am very much proud of. Because today, our little family is happy and healthy, even when some of us have work that carries us outside Seattle. And because this week, as Graham turned 8, he walked independently across a street, without a hand to hold, in his neon orange New Balance kicks.

And somehow, all that has been letting me make my own changes. This is my last post here. Soon, Hogwash will live in the archives of my own personal writing website, where favorite recipes like nettle pesto and caramelized rhubarb jam (and old posts) will still be accessible. It’s been 11 years since I started writing here. There’s still more to write, of course. (There’s always more.) But this—here—was enough.

I’ll leave you not with a recipe, but with a text I look forward to every single year: my brother’s Haggadah. Traditionally, it’s a guide to thankfulness, but as you know, he rewrites the classic for a pithy, political, sometimes off-color take on the Exodus story. This year, as you might imagine, it’s funny as hell.

The Uncle Josh Haggadah Project (2017)

On Fall, Death, and Ramen

The transition from summer to fall has felt like an abrupt one in Seattle this year. As if someone was holding a heavy door open for me kindly, and then let it close without any warning. But it’s not like we didn’t know it was coming. We knew school would start, with all its associated meetings and responsibilities. We knew the weather would change. And we knew, of course, that our dog would eventually pass away.

This week has been gorgeous in Seattle, but colder. It’s different to spend the day’s early hours huddled around coffee cups not just for their caffeinated contents, but also for their warmth. I’m back to throwing on the kind of fleecy pile sweatshirt that, if it were made for an infant, would have ears on the hood. Every morning, I wonder whether they make them for grown-ups with ears. I just looked it up on Etsy, and the first thing I saw was a photo of a dog that reminded me of Bromley, with a hood covering her ears.

It would have been a travesty to put a hood over those velveteen ears. In fact, if I had to pick a body part, I’d say I miss her ears the most. When she was dying—it wasn’t any of our other worries that got her, but a new tumor on her spleen that had grown suddenly soccer ball-size and began pushing on her lungs, making it hard for her to breath—she let us pet those ears. It was as if she’d known, for 13 years, that if she refused to let us near them all her life, but let us touch them as the vet put her to sleep, we’d forgive her for everything else. For eating the one-pound donut and the bag of flour and the bag of sugar and the garden greens and the dog beds and the toys and the tomato plants and, just a few weeks ago, a whole box of little foil-wrapped juice pouches. We did, as she was dying. We forgave her for everything. And I think in her own way, she forgave us for ever having expected a dog who might pee on command or greet people kindly or come when called. Jim’s lip wavered dangerously and I sobbed, but it ended just the way it was supposed to—calmly, easily (if there is ever such a thing), and (we like to think) without much pain. But the house feels colder without her. It’s as if we’re learning now that her bed’s spot in the fireplace, which we really only chose out of convenience, was heating our whole house.

 

That must be why when my friend and mentor Kathy Gunst sent me her new cookbook, Soup Swap, it felt like a very large condolence card. I can’t be there now, but I can help you make soup, it said. And that will help your heart. More than any person I know, Kathy cooks to heal people. And her soups have always healed me.

It occurred to me to look for a soup made with the kind of beef bones Bromley used to love. When I was interning for Kathy a million years ago, and I used to bring Bromley to her house when we tested recipes, we’d give Bromley a big bone in her back yard, so she wouldn’t bother us. Opening the book, I discovered a short-rib ramen recipe. It looked like the kind of thing I could imagine Kathy feeding me in her big, airy kitchen on a cold fall day. Eat this, she’d say. You’ll feel better.

Also, admittedly, it looked like a really good vehicle for kimchi. As if my new habit of eating it on eggs each morning, to the soundtrack of my husband’s constant reminder that I spent years steadfastly refusing to eat kimchi, wasn’t enough. As if the silky, rich stock Kathy prescribed for her ramen wasn’t already incredibly flavorful.

In the end, it was the ultimate warm-up. It was the comfort of ramen and the healing powers of a good broth and the heat of the chili-flecked kimchi, all scooped up together in each bite. It was Kathy (who knew Bromley as a tiny puppy and understands how simultaneously relieving and devastating it’s been to lose a difficult animal), doing what she does best—giving me an edible hug from across the country, full of every flavor I could possibly need.

Short-Rib Ramen with Kimchi (PDF)

This super-rich short-rib ramen comes from Kathy Gunst’s Soup Swap, a book that celebrates that great fall tradition of gathering with friends to exchange recipes and nourishment. I’ve done a few similar swaps in the past, and the concept appeals to me—except when, as is the case with this elixir, the soup at hand is something I want to keep all to myself, generosity be damned.

At the heart of it, this is her recipe. But because I was trying to tailor the ramen to my own crowd at home, and to my current obsession with kimchi, I changed a few things. This recipe is a much-edited combination of two of her recipes—first, a short-rib version of her Rich Beef-Bone Broth (which can probably cure anything), and then her Short-Rib Ramen with Soy Eggs. (One of the things I love about the book is that while it offers clear, approachable recipes for just about every one of my favorites, it also leaves room for creativity.)

I used dried ramen noodles that I cooked separately in boiling water, but almost any sort of noodle will do for this—try udon or somen, if you prefer, or fresh or frozen ramen.

For the short ribs, you want the English-cut kind (with larger, meatier chunks) rather than the flanken-cut kind, which are long and thin and have smaller pieces of bone in them.

Serves 4.

For the short-rib stock
3 pounds short ribs with bones
1 tablespoon olive oil
2 tablespoons tomato paste
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
1 large onion, peeled and quartered
2 medium carrots, chopped
1/4 cup apple cider vinegar
3 sprigs fresh thyme
6 black peppercorns
4 garlic cloves, crushed

For the ramen
2 large eggs
8 ounces ramen noodles
Raw kernels from 1 fresh corn cob
1/2 cup kimchi
1/2 cup roughly chopped fresh cilantro
1/4 cup julienned green onions (white and light green parts only)
1/4 cup julienned fresh ginger

First, a day before you plan to serve the ramen, make the broth: Preheat the oven to 425 degrees F. In large, heavy pot or Dutch oven, coat the meat with the olive oil and tomato paste and season with salt and pepper. Add the onion and carrots. Roast for 1 hour, turning the meat and vegetables every 15 minutes, or until the ingredients are deeply browned. (The meat won’t be quite cooked.) Remove the pan from the oven and add the vinegar, scraping up any brown bits on the bottom of the pan, then transfer it to the stovetop and add the thyme, peppercorns, garlic, and enough water to cover the ingredients by about two inches. Bring the stock to a boil, then reduce the heat and simmer for 2 hours, scooping off any foam that rises to the surface at the beginning and adding water as necessary to keep the water level about 2 inches above the tops of the ingredients. Transfer the beef to a plate to cool, strain the stock, and transfer it to a large bowl. Let the stock come to room temperature, then refrigerate it overnight.

When the short ribs have cooled enough to touch, use your hands to shred the meat. Transfer it to a small sealed container and refrigerate overnight.

When you’re ready to serve the soup, remove the stock from the fridge, scoop off and discard the congealed orange-hued fat, and transfer the stock to a large saucepan. When the stock is hot, season to taste with kosher salt, if necessary.

Fill a two-quart pot with water and bring to a boil. Carefully add the eggs and boil for 6 minutes, then use a large spoon to transfer them to an ice bath, leaving the boiling water in the pot. Cook the ramen in the water according to the package instructions. While the ramen cooks, peel and halve the eggs.

To serve, pile the cooked, drained ramen into four big bowls. Add the reserved short rib meat and corn, and pour the hot stock over the meat and corn until the liquid comes almost to the top of the noodles. Garnish each bowl with some of the kimchi, cilantro, green onions, ginger, and half an egg. Serve hot.

Dear Bethany Jean

You are a Seattle writer I admire greatly but do not actually know. You recently wrote a great story on tea kettles. It had everything—what to look for in a kettle, wary warnings, and a reminder of the ultimate goal. A tea kettle, you said, should boil water. It was funny. The thing you article failed to address, however, was what to do when you already own the wrong one. I’m writing you for advice.

The most significant problem with my cast-iron kettle is that you can’t touch it. Sure, if the thing is stone cold, you can do what you want. But if it’s hot, well, it’s iron. You only have to accidentally touch it without oven mitts a few times to remember the smell of your own flesh searing. The first time, not thinking, I just tried to pick it up without protection. The second time, it was just the lid, which doesn’t have any sort of heatproof material its knob. The third time, I picked it up after it had just been on the stove while I was cooking dinner, and didn’t think hard enough to realize it would be hot. I should hope I’ve finally learned my lesson, but you never know. At teapot is, as my brother Josh says, a tool you use to do dangerous things before you’ve had coffee.

It has other problems. You can’t pick it up, for example. Correction: When it’s cool, you can pick it up, as long as you have strongish arms, which I sometimes do, and two hands free. But it’s not the type of item you can sling across the stove willy-nilly on the way to the toaster. It requires planning and conviction and oven mitts. And two free hands.

Another thing: that damned lid. It’s a disc of iron that fits nicely into its home in the top of the pot when the pot is upright. But it doesn’t stay attached to the body of the kettle, so it’s forever clattering off when I forget to remove it before pouring out the water. I do that when I realize, in a huff, that the water has been boiling for 4 minutes while I sit on the couch without coffee. See, the kettle doesn’t have any sort of whistling mechanism. When the water boils, the best sign you get is steam coming out of the open spout, so if you’re not standing right there, it could go on forever. That spout is also slightly lower than the lid, so if you fill the kettle more than about three-quarters full, water explodes out of the spout at the boiling point. (Spoiler: It’s hot.) Sometimes I just stand over the kettle and the open flame, waiting for the water to stop bubbling out so I can pick the thing up with my protected paws.

And then there’s the question of keeping water in it. Since iron rusts, you can’t keep water in a cast-iron kettle. So every time, when you’re done making coffee, you have to empty it out. (Don’t forget the oven mitts.)

The kettle is the antithesis of perfect. It’s not just that there’s something wrong with it. It’s that besides how it looks, and the fact that it does indeed boil water when put to a flame, there’s nothing actually right with it.

However, my husband gave it to me for Christmas. My husband, who is generally style-blind in the kitchen, noticed our old yellow Le Creuset had begun to take on the wear and tear of age, and had started to acquire an even drip of yellowish grime around its widest part, from so innocently lounging through dinner preparations too close to pans spluttering out stray droplets of hot oil. And he bought me a cast-iron kettle that is, at face value, extremely sexy. He bought me a kettle, when I hadn’t asked for one, and he took the time to find something beautiful. His face even got all blushy when I opened it.

So you see, Bethany Jean, buying a new kettle isn’t really an option. In fact, as I wrote this, at 5:32 a.m. on a Friday morning and filled with teapot angst, I poured myself a fresh cup of coffee and slugged it own, only to spray it all over it couch, because it was too hot. This is a teapot that can sense infidelity.

You wound up steering clear of the stately $200 number William and Kate got for their wedding (what a handsome thing!), opting instead for the $29.99 grocery store version. But what, pray tell, would you do in my position? For the record, though our kitchen isn’t small, it’s not large enough to use and hide an alternate kettle for use when my husband isn’t looking. (I’ve tried.)

The only option I seem to have now is to live with it, and let my husband make the coffee in the morning. To make cookies in the afternoon, feeling very sorry for myself the whole time, and heat the water for afternoon tea in the microwave.

Yours in crisis,

Jess

What We Don’t Eat

It’s always been hard to judge Bromley’s misery properly, because she’s been a miserable, hateful sort of creature since the beginning. She’s almost never affectionate, and pouts constantly, and whines if she smells food but doesn’t get to eat it (which, in my line of work, happens often). She hates rain and children and men with beards, and feet without shoes on them, and people touching her feet, or her head. She’s the cranky neighbor and the crazy lady on the corner and the mean librarian, all rolled into an aging, stinky, always-hungry beast. As we talked about putting her down, my husband and I stared guiltily at each other, each thinking our own version of the times we’d wished aloud that she’d just hurry up and die already, so we didn’t have to clean up the remnants of the individually-packaged kids’ juice boxes she’d opened with her big maw and strewn across the living room rug, or wonder how she’d gotten to the shoulder-height bag of cat food. Thinking about how different she was from the dog we thought we were getting, almost 13 years ago.

Bromley comes from good eaters. When we arrived to pick her up for the very first time, her mother was counter surfing. We should have known then.

“SYRI,” bellowed Syringa’s owner, before Siri became a terrible name for a dog. The red bell pepper Syri had claimed from the cutting board dropped to the floor. Innocent eyes begged forgiveness.

From the moment we got Bromley home, she was the same kind of scavenger, ripping open entire bags of sugar, stealing donuts off the counter, sneaking bites of steak directly from a hot grill, and generally failing to understand that the kitchen counters weren’t dog domain. She learned to stand in the center of the kitchen and not move, ever, interrupting the so-called kitchen triangle so effectively that we could never get from the refrigerator to the stove or the stove to the sink without running into her unmoving bulk. When we scolded her, she looked up at us with what we soon came to call “filet eyes.” She knew she was beautiful from a very young age, which didn’t help.

Outside the kitchen, she was cold and loveless. She refused to be petted. She hated being touched. She generally hated other dogs, too. No matter how much time and money we spent training her, she only paid attention to us if we had food in hand or if she was seated on some sort of couch. For years, we joked about giving her away.

But about two months ago, our big Rhodesian Ridgeback plum stopped eating. We’d taken her in to have her various old lady lumps inspected, but until then, while she was partially deaf and blind and starting to lose her barking voice, there hadn’t been anything actually wrong with her. Not eating seemed like a giant red flag.

That same week, she fell up the stairs. She was ambling up them after eating her breakfast in the laundry room downstairs, and her back paws slipped out behind her on the polished wood, just a stair or two from the top. I heard a yelp and a thunk, as all 85 pounds of her hit the floor, and ran to find her stuck, chest and front paws prostrate on the top landing, with the back paws pads-up behind her. I had to lift up her backside so she could gain enough traction to finish the job. She was very embarrassed.

“I’d say 90 percent of our clients let their dogs live too long,” said the admin at Bromley’s vet, when I called to ask how one knows when it’s time to put her dog down. “We see a lot of dogs that suffer for way too long. And not eating is generally not a good sign.”

I dropped my phone, collapsed into the bed beside my snoring hound, and sobbed into her fur until she wiggled away, grossed out by my storm of affection. That afternoon, I brought her in for a check-up, but again, there wasn’t a single definable something wrong. The vet insisted it was our choice, but made sad little nods and pursed her lips a lot.

And so we went into discussions, round and around, trying to decide whether it’s better to wait until a dog shows definite signs of the end-of-life kind of aging before putting her out of her misery, or to have her anesthetized before anything tragic happens, and save her the pain. I bought her lovely hunks of beef leg bones to chew and thought about what we’d do, if we gave her a day of her favorite things before it was all over. We’d take her to the beach, of course. I started planning a steak dinner goodbye party in my head.

Because she’s the dog we got, we have loved her. And because we were heading out of town, and because a few days after seeing the vet she simply started eating again, we didn’t put her down.

Instead, we gave Bromley to my husband’s parents for two weeks, and left for our spring break road trip, hoping she’d be there when we returned, and that no one else would have to do what we hadn’t been ready to do ourselves. And the first day they had her, they wound up in the emergency room.

It was an abscess in her foot that had clearly been there for a long time, said the ER vet, and, later, our own vet. Weeks, maybe, or longer. It was likely the sign of bone cancer or a deep bone infection, they thought, but just in case, they’d treat it like a random foot infection. They cleaned it and drained it, and put in stitches, which fell out as the wound worsened, and put in staples, which fell out also, and put in more staples. My in-laws shepherded her through multiple rounds of pain medications and antibiotics, and Bromley became famous with all the vet techs. When we returned, my in-laws had had the patient in their home for two full weeks. They’d covered their rugs with puppy training pads to prevent the blood from Bromley’s wound from staining everything. The injured leg was wrapped in a big purple bandage more appropriate for a 12-year-old girl than a 12-year-old dog.

And when we came home, Bromley seemed upbeat. She was eating normally. She seemed happy to see us, even. We took her in to get her staples out, three weeks after the ER visit, and the vet leveled us with her steady, sweet gaze.

“There is a chance that it could just be a tissue infection,” she said defensively. “But honestly, I’d say I’m 99 percent certain it’s either a cancer or a deeper bone infection.” She recommended an X-ray, which would tell us which it was. The cancer could theoretically be treated with amputation, and a bone infection would require a month or so of IV antibiotics.

Jim and I looked at each other. We knew we couldn’t amputate one back leg of a dog who could no longer reliably stand on two. And since every vet visit left her shaking and bereft, sending her to a dog hospital for a month would be devastating to her. We told the vet we didn’t need the X-ray and left, chewing on her warning that sometimes, bone cancers can take over in a matter of weeks.

At home, we spoiled her rotten. I bought fat, fresh spot prawns for grilling, and we ate them, but saved all the shells for her dinner bowl. I let her eat corn straight off the cob, in little bites. I fed her the crusts from Graham’s lunchtime sandwiches. We committed to buying canned dog food, which is outrageously expensive, and smells not unlike excellent pâté.

A few days later, my husband left on a business trip. I took Bromley in for her final foot check-up, and the vet declared it healed—healed better, in fact, than she had thought it might. Bromley wove her bumpy body between my legs as well as she could, like a toddler burying her head in her mother’s legs to hide. It was as if faced with her final moments, she’d decided she did actually have some love to share. As I was leaving, I suddenly decided I should ask to have the foot X-rayed. Off went Bromley, shaking terribly, with the perennially peppy vet, who seemed to pity me because I was about to learn the method nature had chosen for my dog’s execution.

But the vet came back with a funny look on her face.

“I’m happy to tell you that I think I was wrong,” she said. “I can’t find anything. Her foot looks completely normal.”

“Normal?” I asked, surprised and almost crestfallen. “Let me see.”

I couldn’t believe that there could still be nothing wrong, but as far as my amateur eyes could see, the dog’s injured paw looked the same as the normal paw, which the vet had X-rayed for reference. How many lives does this dog have? I thought to myself.

Bromley has never been easy to love, so with the good news came relief, but also an enormous wave of shame. I know my job is to love this animal as long as she lives, but part of me hoped—honestly, guiltily hoped—that something was finally really wrong with her.

And somehow, Bromley knew. When we got home, she became strangely sweet. She started following me around the house, like she had something interesting to say but kept forgetting. She sat next to me if I was sitting on the floor—close enough that I could pet her, which wasn’t something she let us (or anyone else) do regularly. She didn’t stop drooling or snoring or peeing in the wrong places at the wrong times, but instead of the mean, reclusive cat we’d likened her to her whole life, she finally became a dog.

In return, we’ve started treating her like one. We’ve started petting her, because finally, she’ll let us. Last weekend, when Graham passed out in the middle of the living room floor, she took a nap next to him. And I actually cuddled with her. It took her five whole minutes to realize something unusual was happening and she stomped away.

And in the kitchen, we’ve simply kept spoiling her, because if a large dog can live almost 13 years eating all the human food dogs are supposed to avoid, a few more scraps on top of her pâté certainly won’t kill her.

Last night, we had spot prawns again, heaping piles of messy garlic- and chili-studded creatures on a platter for our own dinner. We sucked the sweet meat out of their shells, and heaped the tails and legs into a big metal bowl, which we passed on to Bromley on the back porch. She looked up at us in lucky disbelief, as if wondering whether perhaps they might be poisoned. We nodded and pushed the bowl closer. My husband and I hugged each other, somehow deciding, after 12-plus years, that we’d simply love Bromley the way she wanted to be loved. Because sometimes the sweetest thing you make isn’t what you eat, but what you don’t.

Spot Prawns with Garlic, Chilies, and Lemon

If you’re really going to do it right, eating spot prawns should be done with an apron on. That way, you can snap the tails off the creatures right as they come off the grill, slurp the juices off their legs (and out of their heads, if you’re so inclined), peel the shells off before dredging the tender, sweet meat in any lemony butter that remains on the plate, then wipe your hands on your front with reckless abandon.

In a pinch, whole fresh shrimp are a good substitute, but nothing beats the sweetness of spot prawns from the Pacific Northwest.

Serves 2 to 4.

1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter

3 garlic cloves, finely chopped

1 teaspoon dried red chili flakes (or to taste)

1 medium lemon

1 pound fresh spot prawns

Preheat a gas or charcoal grill over medium-high heat (about 425 degrees F).

In a small saucepan, melt the butter over low heat. When the butter has melted completely, stir in the garlic and chili flakes. Zest the lemon and add that to the mixture, then slice what remains of the lemon into wedges and set aside.

Put the spot prawns in a large bowl and drizzle the butter mixture over the shellfish. Using your hands, scrape the leg side of the prawns against the bottom of the bowl, so each creature gathers up as much garlic as possible.

Grill the prawns for 1 minute per side, with the lid closed as much as possible, or until the prawns turn a deeper shade of pink and curl. (You want them cooked, but just barely.) Transfer the hot prawns to a platter, and serve piping hot, with the lemons for squeezing over them.

 

The Manhattan Project

When the anesthesiologist asked Graham which flavor he’d like for the drugged oxygen kids often get to initiate the anesthesia process before surgery, he responded with complete certainty. “I usually get bubble gum,” he explained, nodding coolly. Like they’d asked his favorite color. It wouldn’t surprise me if Graham, who has mild cerebral palsy, has at six spent more time in hospitals than many people do before forty. And as he settled onto the table in the operating room—for the first time, completely unafraid—it occurred to me that even though we’d told him he was having surgery on both legs, and even though we explained that he might be in some pain afterward, and even though we’d described in kid-friendly detail that it would be a long road back to his version of normal, he had no clue what was happening.

Neither did we, really. Going in that day before dawn, we knew that choosing the New Jersey surgery, as we came to call it, meant travel to the east coast and a week’s worth of recovery and therapy in New York City afterward. We knew that compared to the more traditional approach to hamstring and calf muscle lengthening, which was the ultimate goal of the procedure, the New Jersey surgery (really called selective percutaneous myofascial lengthening, or SPML, or sometimes “percs” for short) required far less superficial healing and a significantly shorter recovery period. We also knew that none of Graham’s Seattle therapists—a smattering of well-trained, intuitive, and effective physical and occupational therapists and alternative medicine folks—had ever coached a kid back after SPML surgery. But ultimately, we didn’t know what would happen in the OR. In theory, part of the reason SPML works is because rather than completely anesthetizing the patient, the surgeon keeps the kiddo partially awake during the surgery, so that he can make changes to the muscle based on active muscular response rather than based on assumptions he makes on how the muscles work while watching videos of, say, the kid walking around in Seattle. So while we went in planning for Graham to have various “bands” of muscles lengthened (in ways not appropriate for detailed description on a food blog), we didn’t know how difficult those bands would be to stretch, or how many bands might be effected, or exactly where the needed band-lengthening might be located on his body.

While Graham was coming out of the lighter anesthesia (to be clear, he doesn’t remember anything), the surgeon came to see us in the waiting room, briefly relieving us from the clash between the receptionist’s gospel music and the emergency coverage of that morning’s lightening storms on Long Island. He looked at us, then ran his palm down the entire length of his face, with all the fingers on one side and the thumb on the other side, like he was wiping a memory off his brain so he could give it to us. The surgery had been longer and more involved than he’d expected. While he’d known Graham’s hamstrings and calves were very restricted, he was quite surprised at just how tight they’d been, given Graham’s level of function. It made me wonder just how much pain Graham had been in all these years, walking around with his little arm crutches day after day, toes on point like a ballerina’s from the calf and hamstring tension his altered neurology caused. “And we ended up doing the triple play,” Dr. Nuzzo added, describing how he’d also loosened bands in Graham’s adductor muscles. “The recovery will be longer than we talked about yesterday, but he’ll do great.” All I heard was his New Jersey accent. Da recovery will be loingah dan we tawlked about.

Graham came out of surgery hurtling angry words and ultimatums. “I’M NEVER GOING ANYWHERE UNTIL THESE CASTS ARE OFF,” he hollered, sobbing. “YOU CAN’T DOOOO THIS TO ME!” He tore violently at all the various tubes and machines connected to his body. Nurses came running with needles. As the valium set in and the IVs came out, he calmed down, and we eventually made our way back to our dank, dark old hotel room, where we more or less stayed for the next 48 hours, watching all six Star Wars episodes, adjusting and readjusting the cantankerous air conditioning unit, coloring Graham’s casts with Sharpies, and generally coaxing our drugged little boy through his post-operative discomfort. Seeing him so immobile was sad; watching him realize that he’d be depending on us to sit up and sit down and use the bathroom was heart-breaking. He’s worked so hard to be independent, but I don’t think I realized how much pride he took in doing things himself.

Once the wounds had stopped bleeding and we’d passed the most acute recovery period, we moved into a small apartment on the upper west side of Manhattan. We rented one of those beefy off-road strollers—the kind we’d given away just the previous year, certain we’d never have a use for it again—and started in on a sad-kid-unfriendly routine of twice-daily neurological therapy and supposed sightseeing. It was a different view of New York, to say the least. We thought spots like the Natural History Museum and the Liberty Science Center might distract Graham from his pain and annoyance, which they did—but only until they frustrated him more. Each time the initial excitement over a place like the Lego store wore off, he just got depressed. No child wants to be stuck in a stroller and on therapy tables all day. He was a sad sack, as an old Cape Cod friend would say.

In my head, the whole time, I called it The Manhattan Project, in spite of the militaristic implications. But we were in Manhattan. And our world had totally changed.

On our last day, a full week after surgery, we met some friends at a grassy park along the Hudson. They brought their five- and two-year-olds, and much to our surprise, a game of hide-and-seek sprung up. Out of nowhere, our completely sedentary little patient was crawling around on the grass, even rolling down little hills, doing what he could to smear New York City mud into his unwashable casts and bruised little knees. The combination of friendship and dirt had finally propelled him back into the universe. There were grass fights. And even smiles.

After returning the stroller the next day, we took a car to the airport in Newark, New Jersey, carrying our two weeks’ worth of luggage and a big, still mostly immobile boy. While my husband checked us in, I explained to Graham that we’d be borrowing a wheelchair to go from the check-in area, through security, to our gate. He burst into hot, frustrated tears. “I can just walk,” he insisted. (Until that point, he’d put a little weight on his legs to use the bathroom, but hadn’t taken steps, even with assistance.) He awkwardly hoisted himself to his feet with his walking sticks, and promptly crumbled to the floor. We gathered him up and placed him back on the bench. “Okay,” he conceded. “But I’m only using it until security. Then I’m walking to the gate.” We nodded.

The airport’s security line was vacant, but dutifully cautious. “Hi there, buddy!” cheered a friendly TSA guy with blue latex gloves. “We’re going to wipe this piece of paper over your chair, and then you can go, okay?”

Graham was quick to spit out a response. “This isn’t my chair!” he protested. “I don’t have one of these.” He pushed one of the armrests away from him, like he was distancing himself from something smelly. “I don’t even know how to use it.” It was heartwarming to see my handicapped kid identify so strongly as not handicapped, but as we wheeled toward our plane, I could only wonder how long it would be until Graham was on his feet again. Days? Weeks? Months? We still didn’t know. We’d arrived in New Jersey with a happy, mobile Graham and we were leaving with a much altered, much sadder, much less capable version of the same and no real known path back to normal (or better).

Now that we’ve been back in Seattle another ten days, Graham’s trajectory seems positive, albeit bumpy. At home, he’s basically crawling and participating in life per usual if he has a friend over; it’s like the mere presence of another small body erases the physical memory of the surgery. (When they leave, he collapses on the floor in a teary heap.) In therapy, he started bearing weight on his legs, and even walking in short bursts between two parallel bars. We got out the walker he used before his arm crutches, and he’s started taking a few steps at a time with that. He insisted over and over that taking the leg casts off would leave him magically new and strong. But predictably, those casts came off, and the proverbial rug was ripped out from underneath us. Each day is different. Every morning, he’s sore. He asks if he can play, but typically, we wake up and go straight to therapy. And each day, he gets stronger.

The Manhattan Project has knocked us all off balance, really. My husband’s back is wonky from lifting and carrying Graham. I woke up with mysterious searing foot pain yesterday that is completely gone today. It’s been the kind of month that takes you so many places that you no longer know how much strength it takes to close your own refrigerator. At home, even ten days later, my husband and I strangely keep swinging our fridge door almost closed, but not quite.

So in the kitchen, it seems to make sense to stick with the basics—to things that we know will always work. Things we trust Graham will eat, because it’s clear his body needs good fuel right now. Below is a recipe for one of his favorite things—we call it “yellow chicken” around here. It’s not especially pretty, but in our house, it’s reliable.

Today, we’re going camping, and taking a few sticks of yellow chicken to eat in the car on the way. It feels crazy, packing everything up again between therapy sessions and heading into the mountains. But since the surgery, one thing has become clear: nothing motivates our kid like hanging out with his buddies. So off we go, in search of friendship and dirt.

Also: Check out my kids’ lunch series this week over at The Kitchn, called Think Outside the (Lunch) Box. There’s info on what to pack and how to pack it, and (especially for other moms of kiddos with fine motor challenges) the best lunch box ever.

Yellow Chicken Noodle Bowls with Broccoli and Peanut Sauce (PDF)
In our house, kid chicken consumption is erratic; Graham will eat chicken legs right off a roasted bird, but won’t eat plain chicken breast meat. One of his favorites, though, is the kind of turmeric-tinged chicken satay we order from our local Thai take-out spot. This version is made for him—grilled over medium heat, not high, so the chicken gets marked but not charred, and served with a coconut-based peanut sauce that my husband and I make mild, then kick up with a bit more sriracha.

Use this recipe as a guide for any similar dish—you could use soba noodles and leftover grilled peppers instead of the broccoli, pork instead of the chicken, etc.

12 six-inch bamboo skewers, for the chicken

For the bowl
4 tablespoons canola oil, divided
2 teaspoons freshly grated ginger
1 teaspoon ground turmeric
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
1 pound boneless chicken breast meat, cut into 1/2-inch strips the short way
One (14-ounce) package pad Thai rice noodles
2 heaping cups broccoli florets (from a 3/4-pound head of broccoli)

For the peanut sauce
1 (13.5-ounce) can coconut milk
1/2 cup creamy peanut butter
2 tablespoons fish sauce
2 tablespoons lime juice
1 to 3 teaspoons red Thai curry paste, or to taste
2 teaspoons freshly grated ginger
1 teaspoon sugar
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt, or to taste

Place the skewers in a shallow pan and add water to cover. Set aside to soak for about 30 minutes.

First, marinate the chicken: In a mixing bowl, stir together 2 tablespoons of the oil with the ginger, turmeric, and salt, then add the chicken breast strips and turn to coat all the pieces evenly. Cover and refrigerate for about 30 minutes.

Next, bring a large pot of water to a boil. When it boils, turn the heat off, add the rice noodles and submerge them. After a few minutes, stir the noodles, then add the broccoli florets, and let both sit for about 10 minutes in the hot water, until the noodles are al dente and the broccoli is bright green. Using a slotted spoon, scoop off the broccoli and transfer to a bowl. Drain the noodles in a colander, rinse well with cold water, transfer to a big bowl, and toss with the remaining 2 tablespoons canola oil. Set aside.

Meanwhile, in a small saucepan, combine all the sauce ingredients. Bring to a simmer over medium heat, whisking until smooth, then simmer for 5 minutes, stirring occasionally. Season to taste with additional curry paste and salt, and set aside.

Preheat a gas or charcoal grill over medium heat, about 400 degrees F. Drain the water off the bamboo skewers. Thread the marinated chicken strips the long way onto the skewers.

When the grill is hot, brush the grates as clean as you can. Grill the chicken pieces for 4 to 6 minutes, turning once only when the chicken releases easily from the grill grates.

To serve, toss the noodles with about two thirds of the peanut sauce, then pile the noodles into bowls. Top with broccoli and chicken skewers, plus additional sauce to taste.

The Gourmet Century

“Laura Marshall just had TWINS!” hollered the instructor. Whoops erupted from around the room. But in the dark, cultish spinning studio in Marin County, I couldn’t see who this woman was, or why I should care. At that point I much preferred it just be me, my ragged breathing, and the glowing EXIT sign. That Laura Marshall seemed to be in the front row dominating my first SoulCycle class soon after popping out a couple babies did not help me feel less exhausted or more fit. The instructor’s voice thundered on through her microphone. Maybe we should consider being more like Ms. New Mother, she suggested—stronger, even, since the rest of us hadn’t just given birth. “Raise. Your. Standards,” our waifish leader repeated to the beat of hammering pedals. I think I was supposed to be impressed, or possibly motivated.

But I am not the Laura Marshall in the front row. I am neither the Lycra-clad Energizer Bunny who bounced about in front of me nor the agro she-man who grunted beside me. There in the back row last April, on bike fifty-two, elbows bumping sweat-slicked neighbors’ arms, I was the wheezing newbie thirty-something who wore bike shorts. (No one wears bike shorts to SoulCycle. It’s a cycling class, but you don’t actually use the seat.) I looked lame. I was just trying to find a way to pretend I was pedaling hard and out of my saddle without actually lifting my butt off the seat.

In the end, I survived, if survival can be defined as panting for 45 minutes afterward in front of a tall iced coffee and a chicken salad sandwich my arms were too tired to hold. As I waited for my heart rate to come down, I weighed my options. Sign-ups for the Gourmet Century, a 100-kilometer bike ride-slash-eating-experience that winds its way through the hills outside Portland, Oregon each July, were the next week. I needed to decide whether I really wanted to do it. On one hand, I had started training. I could congratulate myself for getting back into road biking, even though my experience to date that winter had consisted only of riding my bicycle on a trainer (a little gadget that goes under the back wheel and allows you to pretend-ride in place without actually moving). If I signed up, I could sleep a little better knowing I’d already started pedaling. I could participate in a theoretically fun ride with my husband and some of our more cycling-savvy friends—a ride predicated on the theory that the only thing better than cycling is cycling with consistent gourmet food provisioning all day long and a big dinner and lots of wine at the end. But if I signed up, I’d also have to train more. A lot more. I’d have to ride up real, live hills, instead of gliding along peacefully in the relative safety of the garage. If I didn’t sign up, I could probably avoid thinking about Laura Marshall again, but I couldn’t think of any other good reason not to ride. On April 1st, when the registration page opened, I pressed “submit.”

I’m not one of these people with an illustrious athletic history. I flailed in gymnastics as a child, thrilled for the floor routine music but too uncoordinated and inflexible for the rest. I stunk at ski racing. I limped through college crew. As an adult, marathons and triathlons never interested me. But none of these things had been paired with a daylong eating schedule, complete with mobile espresso machines and fancy Portland chefs. For the first time, I felt engaged in a training schedule. I was interested. As the spring rolled along, I began riding two and three days a week—something I’d never done before. I rode at my own leisurely pace, but still, I was moving, often next to Tracy, my friend and unofficial coach. I became Tracy’s Padawan cyclist, following her around to learn things I thought I already knew: how to yell at offensive vehicle drivers, how to open a packet of energy gel blocks while riding, how to relieve numb or cramping hands. When I bought the wrong new bike seat (which, I learned the hard way, is referred to only and always as a “saddle”), she sent me to a special physical therapist who specializes in bike fitting and injuries. (It’s not a place that makes a person who’s broken both collar bones in bike wrecks feel comfortable about deciding to ride more.) I bought a very white, very hard saddle—an experience that required a very awkward young man to propose that perhaps I needed a different seat because my pelvis and its associated parts have widened since childbirth—and wrapped my bars in white tape to match, because that’s what you’re supposed to do.

When June hit, I’d survived a 28-mile ride (with hills!) with Tracy. I rode 37 miles with my husband in the rain without screaming at him or myself. And once I’d passed what I considered the halfway point—the point at which I’d ridden half of the distance required on Gourmet Century day, July 18th—I started talking a big game. I told everyone who would listen that I was training for a Big Ride, and that it was going to be Type 2 Fun, at least. And that my goal is to finish without crying. (If you’re not aware of the classifications, they’re easy: Type 1 Fun applies to an activity that is fun both in reality and retrospect. Type 2 Fun may require suffering in the moment, but is enjoyable when you look back on it. Type 3 Fun—the type that, truth be told, applies to much of my athletic history thus far—describes an experience that is neither fun in the present nor when you think about it in the past.)

“Wait,” said a friend. “I don’t get it. Are you eating or riding or both?”

Her confusion was understandable; when I explain the Gourmet Century, I usually get flustered and hopscotch between my reservations about the riding and my excitement about the eating. I’ve been training for both, focusing on eating while training to make sure my body is up for the combination. But stomaching anything halfway through a workout has never been my issue. Surviving the workout itself is another story. I started attending a spinning class more regularly. (The instructor, Tommy, always seemed to look directly at me when, after big pretend hills on our stationary bikes, he’d bellow, “This is not a working recovery period. This is work.”)

My friend Sarah and I hyphenated a hilly 40-miler with brunch and lemon drop shots (her idea) at mile 25. Two weeks ago, I rode 52 miles with the editor of A Year Right Here–the full story of the ride will be a chapter in that book–complete with stops for bacon-cheddar-avocado breakfast sandwiches and copious quantities of caffeine. I’ve learned that I can keep a decent tempo on a decent hill if I sing Anna Kendrick’s cups song from Pitch Perfect a gazillion times in a row under my breath. (Try it. It’s annoying but it works.)

I’m told some who sign up for the Gourmet Century are intimidated by the variety and quantity of food the organizers expect one to consume along the way. The pre-event email, which I received earlier this week, read like an ode to all of Portlandia, and it didn’t even include the dinner plan:

At mile 19, you will have the chance to refill water and snack on a selection of small morning offerings. Lunch will take place in the field at Sun Gold Farm, 33 miles into the ride. Rick Gencarelli of Lardo and Grassa will be putting a delectable spin on his farm-fresh approach to lunch […] 56 miles in, riders will find themselves at Chris King‘s barn for an afternoon serving of delicious charcuterie and small sandwiches by Chris Carriker of 23 Hoyt. Salt and Straw ice cream will be on location to cool everyone off, and there will be a barista to give you a quick caffeine fix.

A wave of satisfaction flooded over me when I read that email. Finally, someone understands how I want to exercise.

But in that same email, one thing got me: instead of 62 miles, which is the technical equivalent of 100 kilometers (and the distance I’d trained for), the email reminded riders that we’ll be going 68 miles. And in the days before the event, the six-mile differential has started to intimidate me terribly. Suddenly, I can’t imagine my legs lasting that long. How will I garner the strength for 68, when 52 felt like a thousand million miles already? The last six seem like they’ll be my personal equivalent of NASA’s trip to Pluto–achievable, perhaps, but never-ending. Eating seems like the obvious solution, but I instinctively assumed the carb-loading habits of my youth are no longer applicable. Yesterday, I wrote my coach.

“Fat and protein,” texted Tracy. “And hydrate. Carbs not needed until day of.”

I wrote my uber-athlete friend Lindsay, who will be running 100 miles in Vermont the same day I’m riding them in Oregon, to ask the same. “Eat your face off with carbs from lunch Thursday to lunch Friday,” she countered. “Then normal easy-to-digest dinner Friday and regular breakfast Saturday.

And so last night, at T-minus three days before the event begins, in addition to being plain old nervous, I found myself in the awkward, unfamiliar position of not knowing what to eat. Feeling paralyzed, I thought that instead of thinking about what might show up on a nutrition label, I should eat for my foods’ personalities. In a tangle, a salad came together right on my cutting board: I chose robust radicchio for toughness, spicy peppers for spunk, and preserved lemon for surprise, because I’m sure I’ll need to find all those things inside during the ride on Saturday. I added chicken for sustenance, then handfuls of the arugula and parsley from my little front garden–they refuse to stop growing, which seemed appropriate–and tossed it all together into a big, kick-ass salad I’ll probably make six more times before the ride. (I’d call it Rad Chicken Salad if I could keep a straight face while doing so, but I can’t. And on a bike, laughing makes me swerve, so it seems like bad luck.)

My only regret now is that I can’t serve it to the enigmatic Laura Marshall. I never saw her face, but from the back, she didn’t look like the kind that eats. Perhaps the next time I visit Marin County, I should go back to SoulCycle with a rad chicken salad, just so I can share it with her afterward. “Raise. Your Standards,” I’d say.

And then I’d tell her how I survived a 100-kilometer bike ride without crying, and ate exorbitant amounts of really delicious food along the way, and that it was a much, much more enjoyable way to exercise.

Chicken and Radicchio Salad (PDF)“

I could eat this salad for a century—or more, if the parsley that perches on every edge of my little raised bed garden was still growing well. It combines big chunks of chicken with leafy, colorful greens, preserved lemon, and a spunky vinaigrette, for a lunch that eats somewhere between a salad and a sandwich. If you prefer, throw in a handful of toasted walnuts and a little bleu cheese, and balance a hunk of good bread on the edge of your plate.

To use the preserved lemon, cut a whole one in half, then cut it in half again. (They’re squishy in the center.) Using a small, sharp knife, cut the flesh of the quarter lemon away and discard. Then, with the peel flat on the cutting board, make cuts parallel to the cutting board to shave away any additional flesh and pith that remains on the peel, until only the yellow zest remains. That yellow zest is what you want sliced into thin strips for your salad.

Note that this is a recipe for one meal (in my stomach, anyway). Double or quadruple it as needed. For a crowd, you could plate the greens right around a roasted chicken, for something a little fancier.

Serves 1.

1 tablespoon finely chopped Mama Lil’s Peppers (or similar spicy pickled peppers)
1 tablespoon apple cider vinegar
1 teaspoon Dijon mustard
1/2 teaspoon sea salt
2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
1 cup leftover cubed chicken (about one breast, cut into 3/4-inch cubes)
1/2 small (1/3-pound) head radicchio, cut into 1-inch hunks
1/4 cup Italian parsley leaves
1/2 cup baby arugula
Julienned zest of 1/4 preserved lemon

In the bottom of a big bowl, whisk together the chopped peppers, vinegar, mustard, and salt. Whisk in the olive oil until blended, then add the remaining ingredients and toss until all the leaves are coated with the dressing. Serve immediately, right out of the bowl or piled onto a plate.

Scones for scarred eyebrows

It’s just been that kind of month (or two). With mercury in retrograde, our lives have become a comical progression of errors and mishaps. One Sunday, Graham ripped his eyebrow open falling into a metal support beam on the ferry home from Lopez Island. The following Tuesday, I got caught in a rain squall that turned to hail twenty-something miles into a bike ride. Then that Thursday, my husband got clipped by another bike commuter on Seattle’s busy Burke Gilman trail (which he avoids, as a hard rule, except just this once). I found him cowering on the couch when I got home, bruised as much inside as out. He sported a good slice across the bridge of his nose. Just as it began to look good and healed, the cat came home with a matching cut, and Jim spent the later half of an evening in a room full of yowling animals at the local pet emergency room. It’s been the ides of March, but for three whole weeks.

So straying from a baking recipe isn’t what I should have been doing, even if I knew that Cheryl Sternman Rule’s recipes are always bombproof as delivered. But the astrology site I consulted—I’m not normally into this sort of thing, so I had a lot to learn—says “intuition is high” when mercury is in retrograde. I figured that if I started with one of Cheryl’s new recipes from Yogurt Culture, and tweaked it just a little, I’d probably still be safe. I was right.

That Cheryl’s book (which, yes, is all about making and using great yogurt) uses yogurt in place of other dairy in baked goods appealed to me from the start. I don’t always have cream in the fridge. I always, always have Greek yogurt. Her scones—really, a recipe she tweaked from her friend Coco Morante—appear in the book with granny smith apple and a sweet cider glaze. I’ve retooled them in my kitchen with everything from rhubarb to fresh Bing cherries— and they’ve become a staple. “SCONES!” screams Graham. He eats them top-down, smashing the icing directly into his face.

More happened before I decided to share them with you: my credit card and telephone were both accessed by strangers. There was a rash of break-ins on our street, which we somehow dodged but which left a wash of sadness up and down our block. I made spectacularly underbaked banana bread, an annihilated an attempt at empanadas. I burned egg after egg. It just hasn’t been a good few weeks. But according to the experts, this mercurial problem was all set to end on June 11th.

But when I leaned toward making a blueberry-ginger version of Cheryl’s sweet morning treats for Graham’s last day of kindergarten today, there was no Greek yogurt—just buttermilk. So with the buttermilk, and the wrong kind of sugar, and a slightly different glaze, it wasn’t really Cheryl’s recipe any more. But somehow, she was there, laughing off the catastrophes with me the way she was in culinary school, more than a decade ago. And damn if they weren’t still delicious.

Hello, Mercury. Glad to have you going back in the right direction again.

***Cheryl Sternman Rule will be at Seattle’s Book Larder on June 25th at 6:30 p.m. to talk about Yogurt Culture.***

Blueberry-Ginger Buttermilk Scones (PDF)
Based on the green apple scones in Cheryl Sternman Rule’s book Yogurt Culture, which are in turn from her friend Coco Morante, these blueberry gems don’t actually contain yogurt. Buttermilk gives them their signature tenderness! I’ve tested these scones with both regular all-purpose flour and pre-made gluten-free blends (Pamela’s and Domata brands). Both methods work; you’ll need to flour the board you use to form and cut the scones a bit more if you’re using gluten-free flour, to prevent the dough from sticking to the board. Brush any remaining flour off the scones before baking.

Makes 8 scones.

2 1/3 cups all-purpose flour (regular or gluten-free), plus more for forming scones
1/4 cup light brown sugar
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon ground ginger
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
1/2 cup (1 stick) cold unsalted butter, cut into 10 pats
3/4 cup plus 4 tablespoons lowfat buttermilk, divided
1 large egg
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 cup fresh or frozen wild blueberries*
1 1/4 cup confectioners’ sugar, sifted

*If you use frozen blueberries, you my find you need a little extra flour on your work surface to prevent the dough from sticking.

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F, with a rack in the center of the oven. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper and set aside.

In a large work bowl, whisk together the flour, brown sugar, baking powder, ground ginger, baking soda, and salt. Add the butter, and, using your fingertips or a pastry cutter, squish the butter into the flour mixture until all the chunks are about the size of large peas.

In a small bowl, whisk together 3/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons of the buttermilk (reserving 2 tablespoons for the glaze), the egg, and the vanilla until smooth. Pour the liquid mixture over the flour and butter mixture, and mix with a wooden spoon just until it forms a big shaggy mass. Using floured hands, knead the dough a few times, until it begins clumping together. Add the blueberries, then knead a few more times, until you have a cohesive dough. (It’s okay if the blueberries get smashed.)

Turn the dough out onto a floured board and pat it into a 7-inch circle about 1 1/4 inches thick. Using a large knife, cut the dough into 8 wedges, like you’re cutting a pizza, and arrange the wedges on the prepared baking sheet with plenty of space between them.
Bake the scones for 18 to 22 minutes, until the scones are firm on top and the undersides are golden brown. Once they’ve cooled enough to touch, transfer the scones to a rack to cool completely.

While the scones cool, in a medium bowl, whisk together the confectioners’ sugar and the remaining 2 tablespoons buttermilk until a thick glaze forms. Drizzle or pour the glaze over the warm scones. Serve immediately, or let the glaze harden as the scones cool completely and serve.

A throwback, and a lentil salad

The first time I flew into Regan National Airport in Washington, D.C., I think, was ten years ago. At the time, I was a personal chef—a private cook to people ranging, in order of preference, from devout foodlovers looking for a bit of a break on their summer vacation, to people looking for a more creative take on catering for larger parties, to heiresses looking (as far as I could tell) to flaunt their wealth to their Hyannis counterparts.

I was flying from Cape Cod to DC to drive to one of four or five homes owned by the rich Texan client a friend had dubbed Priscilla Princess. She belonged to the last client category. At her home on Cape Cod, she had a lawn man and an herb woman and a daily housecleaner and a personal assistant and an orchidist who arrived a couple times a week to make sure the arrangements in the bathroom were still perky. There were so many people helping her with life’s necessities that in my view, she almost ceased to exist. Catering dinners at her place always required an assistant, never because the food was so difficult—she didn’t have the taste for anything too adventuresome, and loved repeating dishes—but because inevitably another person was required to decide whether we’d plate on the Tiffany or Versace china, and whether the antique shrimp forks would work when there wasn’t an extra in case someone dropped one. Typically, the friend I’d roped into helping knew that if she wasn’t chopping herbs (“Jess!” the princess would wail from another room. “Don’t forget the pineapple sage is there in the back!!!”), she’d be following Priscilla around, nodding obediently as she took instructions on how far each wine glass should be from each plate and how big a piece of flourless chocolate cake she wanted for dessert. (“Oh Jess! The chocolate basil for garnish!”)

I think I did the job right. I organized everything through her personal assistant, because the Princess was allergic to email. I made the boring orzo salad she loved for her to have for lunch the next day, with the olives I had to order from Peru. (Maybe it was Argentina? I’ve blocked them out.) I scrubbed the Sunkist stamps off lemons in advance when I couldn’t find her required organic ones, and I smiled and presented the meal when I was supposed to in my pompous chef’s jacket, and in general, despite her difficulty, I really did enjoy it all. It was virtual reality—one in which I could buy whatever I wanted, at whatever cost, save the wine, which she limited to $20 per bottle. And she apparently enjoyed having me, because a few times, she paid me handsomely to fly down to her place in Virginia to cater a weekend’s worth of meals for her 25 or so closest friends.

It was a monster of a plantation in Virginia horse country, with a twenty-something-bedroom main house and servants’ quarters and guest houses here and there that each far outstripped an average large home in size. She and her husband had separate horse stables, which were not to be confused with the racehorses’ stables. (I believe the place was on the national register of historic homes, but I can’t remember the estate’s name. Shame on me.) We—my “assistant,” usually a good friend, and I—would stay in a four-bedroom apartment above the estate’s original horse stables, which I believe had been turned into an antique car showroom of sorts. For whatever reason, the heat didn’t work in the apartment, so we spent our days in a sweltering kitchen, churning out meal after meal, and our nights freezing in hard twin beds. “A kitchen should be warm, don’t you think?” she’d crow before dinner as she closed the windows we’d opened. Then she’d disappear to claim her place at the head of a massive table fitted with a servant’s bell under her foot. (It was actually a nice way to know when they were finished eating.)

The thing I remember most strongly, though, are her refrigerators. In the kitchen—a space roughly the size of my home’s current upstairs, fitted with a ten-person mahogany table in the center that we had to meander around each time we had to use the sink, oven, refrigerator, or trash can, which is to say, often—there was a bank of clear-doored Sub-Zeroes whose shelves’ square footage approximated that of a small grocery store’s. When I FedExed the pumpkin ravioli from Citarella that the Princess had to have from New York, it didn’t fit into her refrigerator plan. There was the place for milk and the place for fruit and the place for the grandchildrens’ food and the place for premade snacks, but there was no place for meat, or anything remotely “unsightly.” The ravioli were orphaned.

Downstairs, in the so-called slave kitchen—the Princess always whispered the word “slave”—there was also a walk-in refrigerator, which is where the ravioli ended up, on top of the duck breasts. One time, when my friend Michaela and I had been in Virigina long enough to get good and tired, we snuck down to the walk-in. We rested on the concrete floor with our feet elevated and drank Cokes. We iced our foreheads with the ravioli and made fun of her porcelain chicken collection.

Each time her gaggle of guests prepared to leave, the Princess hosted a lunch in what she called The Palm Room, which was a grand lobby-esque space not unlike the dining room in The Plaza Hotel near Central Park. (There were weird monkey statues everywhere, for some reason.) We made platters and platters of tea sandwiches, and salads, and deviled eggs, and lavender shortbread.

Once, at the last minute, the Princess announced she wanted to add a lentil salad to the lunch menu. I’d grown accustomed to her weird whims—if you want to plop a Maryland crab cake into that potato soup, lady, you go for it—but we had no lentils, and it was nearing noon, and the plantation was thirty minutes from anything. I said no. She pouted the rest of the day.

Since then, when I make anything with lentils, I think of Priscilla Princess. I think of the way she could somehow say my name with a Southern accent, rising in pitch and volume every time. “JaaayyyyUUSSSS?” she’d start, sugary sweet. “Just a quick question. Would you mind making that osso buco on the old stove on Saturday, when we have dinner in the blue house? I know it doesn’t really work, but it’s so pretty, and I’d love for the guests to get a feeling for how it was to cook a century ago.” I think of how sorry I felt for her sometimes, when I realized that the stress of not having the pillowcases in all twenty-something rooms match the patterns popular in the 1700s (when the estate was built) was actually causing her physical discomfort. And I think of how sad it was, and probably still is, that she liked really boring food.

And so here I am now, flying into Reagan again, this time for a conference, where no one will tell me how to wash my hands or how many lemon thyme sprigs are required on each plate—with a lentil salad on my tray. It’s an asparagus and pea version from home, and it’s spilling herbal perfumes into the seat beside me in a way that makes me feel like I’m getting back at my neighbor for taking up more than his paid share of the plane. We are bumping over Chicago (something that always seems odd to me when the sky is clear, despite my vague awareness of airflow science). I’m thankful I’ve made the salad a second time, so I don’t find myself lunching on a bag of beef jerky and stale nuts. I’m thankful that I don’t have an orchidist, or work for a person who feels she needs one. And I’m thankful that life has taken me to a place where I make lentil salad when and where and how I want, with ingredients from a refrigerator that is always too full and an herb garden that, despite total neglect, actually grows something useful.  

 

Springtime Lentil Salad (PDF)

In hindsight, this salad looks like the offspring that might result from a debaucherous night involving the lentil salad and the raw asparagus salad in A Boat, a Whale and a Walrus, but it wasn’t intended to mimic either. It’s a result of two things: first, the need for a lighter meal before a bike ride, and second, the green riches springing forth from my garden in the forms of parsley, chives, and mint. Serve it as is, with a few things alongside, or pile it onto steamed brown rice, like we did, for more of a complete meal.

I used the nettle pesto I make every spring, but basil pesto (even a good jarred version) will work nicely.

Serves 4 with rice, or 6 to 8 as a salad.

4 cups water
1 cup small black lentils or beluga lentils, rinsed and picked over
Kosher salt, to taste
1 tablespoon freshly squeezed lemon juice
2 tablespoons apple cider vinegar (raw, unpasteurized preferred)
8 tablespoons good extra-virgin olive oil, divided, plus more for drizzling
1/2 pound skinny asparagus (about half a bunch), ends trimmed, cut into 2-inch sections
1 cup fresh shelled English peas
1/4 cup roughly chopped mint leaves
1/4 cup chopped fresh Italian parsley
2 tablespoons chopped fresh chives
1/2 cup pesto (made with any combination of herbs and nuts that appeals to you)
Crunchy sea salt

In a large saucepan, heat the water to a boil. Add the lentils and cook at a simmer, stirring occasionally, for about 30 minutes, or until tender.

While the lentils cook, in a small bowl, whisk together the lemon juice, apple cider vinegar, and 7 tablespoons olive oil to blend, adding salt as necessary. (Keep in mind that lentils like a lot of salt.) Set the dressing aside.

Heat a large saucepan over medium-high heat. Add the remaining tablespoon olive oil, swirl to coat the pan, then add the asparagus and peas. Cook, stirring occasionally, for 3 to 5 minutes, or until the vegetables are bright green and slightly charred in spots. Transfer the greens to a big platter to cool.

When the lentils are cooked, drain them in a fine-mesh strainer, then transfer them back to the warm pot. Add the dressing, stir gently to combine, then stir in the mint, parsley, and chives, reserving a few pinches of each for the top of the salad, if desired. Add the asparagus and peas to the lentil combination, stir a few times, then heap the salad back onto the big platter.

Serve the salad warm or at room temperature, drizzled with additional olive oil and garnished with extra herbs and crunchy sea salt.

A Year Right Here

In the fall of 2013, when we returned from a 3-week stay in Provence, my husband and I had a bit of a hangover. It was less from the 42 bottles of wine we’d consumed collectively with various visitors over long lunches and drawn-out dinners, and more from the extended thrill of exploring new things, from the heady combination of having the little Citroen that could and no schedule. We agreed we’d had the trip of a lifetime. And over the course of 2014, as we were reminded time and time again that the same magic mix of time and freedom and savings might not present itself again for years, we mourned. The downside of taking the trip of a lifetime is that once you’ve taken it, it’s over.

Then last fall, an east coast acquaintance visited Seattle. She’s someone I’ve met many times but haven’t spent much time with, and as she traipsed her way through The Emerald City—through my own neighborhood, at times—I watched it on social media with the same interest and bewilderment I felt as I watched another acquaintance journey through Morocco. It became clear that the Seattle visitor was treating her trip here the same way we’d viewed our time in France; she skipped from market to café to restaurant to farm, ending up, more often than not, back in her own rented dining room, with food from the region and a good bottle of wine. She made me realize that while Provence was lovely, we live in a pretty epic spot ourselves. (Isn’t that why we moved here?) That while I skipped with joy at the prospect of picking up fresh lamb from a local butcher across the Atlantic, I had grown blind to the possibility of buying crab off a dock so close to home. That while I swooned when our French hosts brought wine from a friend’s vines, I forgot I knew folks who make cider right here in Seattle.

And so it came about that rather than pining for a full year in Provence, that sabbatical from life so many of us began imagining with the publication of Peter Mayle’s A Year in Provence, I began daydreaming about how I’d spend a year in the Pacific Northwest, writ large, if I could go anywhere within a day’s drive of Seattle. If I could learn about anything. If I could talk to anyone. And if about half the time, I could take my family with me.

This month, I started working on A Year Right Here: Essays on Food and Life in the Pacific Northwest, due out on bookshelves in (gulp!) the spring of 2017. And by “working on,” I really mean planning for, because at this point, my poor beleaguered calendar isn’t sure what hit it. I’ve signed up for a hunter’s safety course. I have a shellfishing license. I’ve sized my child for a wetsuit he may or may not permit me to put on, for a winter surfing trip also linked to a restaurant off the coast of Vancouver Island. I’ve planned a chicken coop for the backyard, which involved bribing ten friends into digging out iced-over waterlogged grass on a cold-for-Seattle January 1st, hauling flagstone til my fingers (literally) bled, and, tangentially, installing a fire pit where the grass had been. (You’re not the only one who has asked whether we plan on roasting old chickens in plain view of their former coopmates. We won’t.)

I don’t know how many wine corks I’ll collect over the course of the year, but I’ve started a bucket, right on top of the bookshelf. And on Saturday, we’ll make the long, winding, likely rainy drive up Vancouver Island from Victoria to Tofino, through the Douglas fir trees, to a crab shack whose supposed location I know only in relation to a Gas-n-Go, because it apparently has no address.

So it’s a new year, and for us, that means new adventures, right nearby. This year, Hogwash will be full of outtakes–everything from our upcoming surf lesson, slated to take place in 40-degree driving rain, to the meals I can’t write about in the book, to the sad stories, like the one I’ll inevitably face when I mark the anniversary of a barn-burning accident with two lovely cheesemakers near Yakima, WA.

Don’t worry, you don’t have to go anywhere. Just stay right here.*

If just talking about surfing in January makes you cold cold, head for the hot-and-sour soup recipe I made this week for some of the generous backyard diggers, as repayment for spending the first day of the year hoisting dirt up into rickety wheelbarrows and piling it into big mountains on our front lawn.

And just think: you won’t even have to pick up a shovel.

*Or follow me on Instagram (@jessthomson)

Fresh Fall Hot and Sour Soup (PDF)

This is not traditional Chinese hot-and-sour soup, but it was born close by. Down an easily forgotten staircase near City Fish—the Pike Place Market’s oldest fish shop—Pike Place Chinese Cuisine serves fantastic fare with an astounding view of the Sound. Start your market trip with a bowl of its pork-studded soup, then march upstairs to gather ingredients for this brightly hued vegetarian version, which has the same punch of white pepper and vinegar but uses fresh fall farmers’ market ingredients, such as mushrooms, kale, squash, and carrots.

Outside of chanterelle season, you can use all shiitake mushrooms.

Active time: 45 minutes
Makes 4 servings

3 tablespoons cornstarch
3 tablespoons cold water
1 teaspoon sugar
1 tablespoon soy sauce
3 teaspoons dark sesame oil, divided
8 ounces tofu (about ½ package)
3 leaves lacinato (aka dinosaur) kale
1 tablespoon canola oil
2 carrots, peeled and shredded
½ delicata squash, seeded and shredded
¼ pound chanterelle mushrooms, rinsed, trimmed and thinly sliced
¼ pound shiitake mushrooms, rinsed, trimmed, and thinly sliced
6 cups vegetable or mushroom broth
¼ cup plus 1 tablespoon white vinegar
½ teaspoon freshly ground white pepper
1 large egg, beaten

In a small bowl, blend the cornstarch, water, sugar, soy sauce, and 2 teaspoons of the sesame oil together with a fork until combined, and set aside.

Cut the tofu into ¼-inch batons and set aside. Cut the tough ribs out of the kale and slice the leaves horizontally into ¼-inch strips. Set aside.

Heat a wok or large soup pot over high heat. When hot, add the canola oil and the remaining teaspoon of sesame oil, then the carrots and squash. Cook for 1 minute, stirring, then add the kale and mushrooms. Sauté for 2 minutes, until the kale has wilted. Add the broth, then the tofu, and bring to a simmer. Stir the cornstarch mixture, add it to the soup, and bring the soup back to a simmer, stirring occasionally until it looks a bit thicker and almost glossy. Remove the pan from the heat, stir in the vinegar and pepper, and taste for seasoning—you’ll probably want a bit more vinegar and/or pepper. Stir the mixture around in a circle once or twice, creating a gentle whirlpool. Stop stirring and drizzle the egg into the swirling liquid—it will cook upon contact in long, thin strings. Serve immediately.

*(c)2012 By Jess Thomson. All rights reserved. Excerpted from Pike Place Market Recipes by permission of Sasquatch Books.

When we weren’t looking

It’s been a whirlwind, this year. At the start, when we knew 2014 would bring surgeries and leg casting and umpteen hours of therapy for 5-year-old Graham (“FIVE AND A HALF,” he’d scream), I’ll admit I wasn’t excited. I just wanted it to be over.

But a few Friday nights ago, Graham walked right across the living room floor. In our house, with no physical therapist in sight. And then he walked around the first floor, in the little circle you can make when you leave the dining room to get something in the kitchen, but forget it’s really in the office, then somehow make it back to the dining room without losing your mind. And then he did it again, over and over, giggling uncontrollably. And then he fell with control, which was really the most significant thing. My husband and I danced around him the entire time, hands on sharp corners, ready for the inevitable crash. It never came. He just walked and walked, like it was a game, until he decided he was done. It was a game—a game he suddenly seemed to know he might someday win.

I wrote a friend with our holiday YouTube video recently, which chronicles how far Graham has come this year. She has a kiddo in a similar position with cerebral palsy, albeit much younger. “Tell me M will be able to pull to stand one day,” my friend pleaded. Her email exuded the same dangerous desperation I’ve felt so many times; waiting for the walking is wanting good strawberries in winter and healthy news from a doctor and the fat college envelope. But it’s all those feelings rolled into a bracing sweet-and-sour moment that pops up a thousand times a day, over and over, day after day. I said once that having a child with cerebral palsy isn’t disappointing, it’s disorienting, and that still holds true. But suddenly I’m much less dizzy. Suddenly, that persistent moment—the wanting moment—matters less and less.

It must have happened when we weren’t looking. Like fall does, when you’re busy looking at the things that happen in the fall, or, in my case, like a lupus flare does, when you’re busy doing the things you can do when you’re healthy.

Here’s a recipe that happens almost when you’re not looking, from Passionate Nutrition, which comes out next week. It’s not walking, but it’s still quite spiffy–a scoop of this and that, all whirled up into an easy dip that I package in small containers to tote around town for snacking when I’m on the go (think crackers, cucumbers, and carrots). It’s an intriguing thing to set out for guests, because few people associate kimchi with anything besides Korean food, and it’s also a great way to get a little dose of healthy bacteria into your body every day. And—the most shocking news of all—Graham likes it. On crackers, spread all the way to the corners, eaten off a cutting board that’s seen three generations of haphazard snacks.

Bring on the New Year, people. You never know what might happen. But at least you’ll know you’ll have a snack.

Crudites with Kimchi Cream Cheese Dip (PDF)

Not everyone likes kimchi straight, which is why when I help people start incorporating it into their diet, I often give it a little bit of a disguise. Blended into cream cheese, it makes a dip as addictive as the packaged soup mix dips of our youth. If you don’t have a food processor, just mash all the ingredients together with a fork. It won’t be as smooth, but it’s just as effective.

Since this travels well (and tastes great at room temperature), it’s a good go-to snack to leave in the fridge at work or bring on trips.

8 ounces cream cheese (cultured, if possible), at room temperature
1/2 cup unpasteurized kimchi (with juice)
1 teaspoon sea salt
Cut raw vegetables, such as cucumbers, carrots, celery, radishes, cauliflower, jicama, broccoli, or snap peas, for serving

In the work bowl of a food processor, pulse the cream cheese, kimchi, and salt until smooth. Serve with the vegetables or transfer to a sealable container and refrigerate for up to 2 months.

Change It Up:

Stir in 1 cup fresh crabmeat or drained, canned crabmeat. Transfer to a small baking dish, bake at 350 degrees F for 10 minutes, and serve as an appetizer at room temperature, topped with additional kimchi. (You’ll lose the dip’s original beneficial bacteria, but it tastes great.)

Add 1/2 cup cream and use as a dip for artichokes or a sauce for grilled chicken or salmon.

*(c)2014 By Jennifer Adler with Jess Thomson. All rights reserved. Excerpted from Passionate Nutrition: A Guide to Using Food as Medicine from a Nutritionist Who Healed Herself from the Insider Out by permission of Sasquatch Books.

A new staple

If I could rewrite Thanksgiving tradition to include something a little more convenient and versatile than stuffing—a more colorful, more nutritious mixture of ingredients that really did stay perky overnight—it might look something like this fallish grain salad. Spiked with lemon and rounded with olive oil, it’s a colorful hodgepodge that comes together in about 20 minutes and passes as almost anything in my kitchen: as lunch on its own, as a bed for grilled tuna or roasted chicken, or as a nest for a poached egg in the morning. It’s wonderful warm, but equally delicious at room temperature, when the more subtle flavors of the parsley and pecans shine a bit brighter.

Of course, if this were served in place of stuffing at Thanksgiving, there would be gravy, and while this salad is many things, I don’t imagine it making friends well with gravy. Which is why someday soon, I will make both.

Warm Quinoa and Radicchio Salad with Pecans, Parsley, and Goat Cheese (PDF)

Note: You can toast the pecans on a baking sheet at 350 degrees F until sizzling and a shade darker, about 10 minutes, but in a rush I toast them by simply cooking them in the microwave for a minute or two.

TIME: 20 minutes
MAKES: 4 to 6 servings

2 cups chicken or vegetable stock (preferably homemade)
1 cup raw quinoa (any color)
1/2 teaspoon sea salt, plus more for seasoning
1/4 cup plus 1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil, divided
Half of a medium (3/4-pound) head radicchio, chopped
Stripped zest and juice of 1 large lemon
1 cup toasted pecans
1 loosely packed cup Italian parsley leaves, roughly chopped
3 ounces goat cheese, crumbled
Freshly ground pepper (optional)

In a small saucepan, bring the stock to a boil over high heat. Add the quinoa and 1/2 teaspoon salt, stir to blend, then reduce the heat to low and cook, covered, until the quinoa has absorbed all the liquid, 12 to 15 minutes, stirring just once or twice during cooking. Set aside.

Heat a large skillet over medium heat. Add 1 tablespoon of the olive oil, then the chopped radicchio. Season the radicchio with salt, then cook, stirring occasionally, until the radicchio softens, about 5 minutes. Add the lemon zest and the juice of half the lemon and cook, stirring, for one minute more.

Transfer the quinoa to a large bowl or serving plate. Layer on the pecans, parsley, goat cheese, and cooked radicchio. Drizzle with the remaining 1/4 cup olive oil, the juice of the remaining 1/2 lemon, and additional salt (and pepper, if desired) to taste, and toss all the ingredients together a few times. Serve warm or at room temperature.

The salad keeps well, covered in the refrigerator, up to 3 days.

How it ends

About a year ago, well before 7 a.m., I woke to the telltale click of the screen door being closed extremely carefully. We have a slammer of a screen that doesn’t fit its home squarely; the silent slam is a trick only the most well practiced guest can perform. I scrambled up the stairs, more curious than afraid. Half a pink salmon sat in a plastic shopping bag on the shoe bench just inside the door, right next to my XtraTufs. I picked it up, knowing one of our builders, Richie, had left it there for me. His wife had planned to fish that morning, and he knew I was jealous. “Hope you can use this,” said his note. I could still feel the warmth of his skin on the handles of the bag.

At the time, I was testing recipes for A Boat, a Whale, and a Walrus: Menus and Stories. Renee Erickson and Jim Henkens and I been tinkering with the smoked salmon recipe, and as I tested and retested, I relied on the builders to be occasional judges—of that salmon, and of the French-style apple cake, and of the braised pork shoulder I served to six or seven of the guys in that last week of remodeling. That final meal was a sort of congratulatory lunch that doubled, for me, as a way of testing a huge handful of recipes in one day and serving the food to a crowd piping hot at midday so it didn’t sag on the counter until dinnertime.

I’m not sure they realized then how closely I watched their faces as they ate, and how much I appreciated that salmon, and another guy’s homemade bacon, and that they somehow kept the water on at all the right times as they intentionally shattered and rebuilt the basement and all of its associated plumbing.

My hope, at the beginning, was to leave the builder a book and some banana bread as thanks. When the bananas had wilted sufficiently on the counter, I tweaked the book’s zucchini bread recipe to incorporate them. The zucchini bread, as it stands, is perfect. (I can brag like that because it’s not my own recipe: It’s perfect, people.) I like it for its spice, and for its fine texture, and for the fact that it uses olive oil, so you don’t have to wait for the butter to soften. But if you’re going to make a perfect banana bread out of a recipe for perfect zucchini bread, a few things about it need to change—the substitution of bananas for zucchini, for example. I gave it a bit more backbone with bread flour, omitted the lemon zest, and tinkered with the top. Ultimately, though, it’s just the same bread, all dressed up for fall. (Honestly, with the exception of my cousin’s killer homemade sugar pumpkin pie, I’ll take a pumpkin-seeded banana bread over pumpkin pie any day.)

It baked up big and beautiful, just like it does at The Whale Wins, so that when you cut it into slabs, it eats more like cake than like a breakfast bread. I carefully sliced part of it for us to keep for snacking, and wrapped the rest in foil for the contractor.

When I signed the book for the contractor to pick up and share with Richie, I suddenly felt like the process of writing this particular book came full circle. Perhaps strangely, it’s often not the book’s release or its appearance on store shelves that makes me feel like a project has grown proper wings. For me, a book’s real launch happens when I thank the people who helped me get ‘er done. When I mail a huge stack of books media rate to the book’s recipe testers, and send copies to my siblings, and bring what I’m starting to call The Big Blue to the coffee shop that offered me a seat for at least three quarters of the project’s writing. The book’s circle will close next week in New York, when I’ll give my last book to a tester coming to the event there on Monday night, and I’ll hug her in person and say thanks for the invisible hours she put into it, too. Only then, to me, will the book be finished.

Yesterday morning, as I twisted the doorknob to put the book and the bread on the bench on the porch, my husband announced that our cantankerous gas stove had shot up a plume of blue large enough to trigger the gates on the emergency stove-buying portion of our bank account. We’ll be getting a new unit (suggestions welcome!), which means we’ll have to saw away the two-inch granite apron securing the existing stove in place, which means we’ll need to call our contractor. I put the banana bread on the dining room table.

“Maybe I’ll just leave him the book,” I told Jim. “Otherwise it would be bribery, right?”

No, it was most certainly not appropriate to leave the contractor a book and banana bread before calling him in again. And, well, clearly I’ll need strength for stove shopping.

Pumpkin-Seeded Banana Bread (PDF)

In the world of zucchini breads, Renee Erickson’s rules all. This banana bread, made by adapting the zucchini bread from The Whale Wins that appears in A Boat, a Whale, and a Walrus: Menus and Stories, has the same sweet, spiced background that makes the zucchini bread so addictive—plus a crunchy layer of shelled pumpkin seeds that, for me, act as a harbinger of deep fall. Note that at The Whale Wins, the zucchini bread is pan-roasted in butter and served with crème fraîche and sea salt. That’s not going to hurt this banana bread, either.

Use a good extra-virgin olive oil for this recipe; you’ll taste it in the final product.

Active time: 30 minutes
Makes one 9- by 5-inch loaf

Unsalted butter, for greasing the pan
2 cups (about 256 grams) bread flour, plus more for dusting the pan
1 1/2 cups granulated sugar
2 teaspoons ground ginger
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
1/4 teaspoon fine sea salt
3 very ripe bananas
3 large eggs
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
1 cup extra-virgin olive oil
2 tablespoons demerara sugar
1/2 cup shelled pumpkin seeds

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Butter and flour a 9- by 5-inch loaf pan, and set aside.

In a large bowl, whisk together the flour, sugar, ginger, baking powder, baking soda, nutmeg, and salt, and set aside.

In another bowl, mash the bananas with a large fork until only pea-sized pieces of fruit remain. Whisk in the eggs and the vanilla. Add the olive oil in three stages, whisking it in until completely incorporated each time.

Gently fold the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients and stir until no white spots remain. Pour the batter into the prepared pan and sprinkle the top evenly first with the demerara sugar, then with the pumpkin seeds. Bake on the middle rack of the oven for 70 to 80 minutes, or until a skewer inserted between seeds in the center of the loaf comes out clean. (It should rise right to the top of the pan.)

Cool the bread in the pan for 15 minutes, then turn it out onto a cooling rack and let cool completely before cutting into fat slabs.

Enough

It’s been a very delicious year in my house. I worked with Renee Erickson on A Boat, a Whale, and a Walrus: Menus and Stories, due out in September, which has been, hands down, the most rewarding, most thrilling work experience I’ve had in my career. (I’ll take spot prawning and crabbing as a day’s work over fact-checking any day. Same for traveling to Normandy to learn about oysters. Ditto for working with and writing about a chef who is as devoted to beauty, writ large, as she is about where she sources her ingredients.) In cookbook terms, we worked hard and fast–at least, it seemed fast to me, until I started Passionate Nutrition, which was the writer’s equivalent of running a marathon with no training. The overall effect feels like swimming to the ocean’s surface after being released by a submarine far, far below.

Now, though. I’m back at the surface, after a year under water. Boat comes out in September, and Passionate Nutrition comes out in December. I’m intensely proud of and excited for both books, and feel so lucky to have been chosen as the writer for each. And now, theoretically, I have time to pick my head up and look around for what’s next. (I’ve had time to read, which in and of itself is cause for celebration.) Only, reading The Map of Enough made me wonder what I’m really trying to see.

The Map of Enough, by Molly May, a woman three or four silky threads over on the web of life that seems to connect us all, is a lovely memoir about the significance of place and self-exploration. The book sees life through the eyes of a woman who spent her childhood and young adulthood identifying as a happy nomad—a person whose soul craved travel and adventure—who decides to build a yurt by hand with her now husband. After growing up in a constantly mobile family, she’d always needed to move. In fact, for the first part of the book, I didn’t think I’d be able to identify with her at all. I was born all settled down. I can’t take a two-hour car trip without unpacking myself properly into the front half of the car. To me, the concept of building a house you could just pick up and move anywhere seemed antithetical to the concept of having one in the first place. If you build a home, it means you want to stay right where it is, right? Building a yurt is pretty close to the bottom of my lifelong to-do list, right down there with visiting the Arctic (where my husband is now) and riding a bicycle across the country (which is where you’ll find my sister soon). I’m the girl who always had all her school supplies lined up and labeled a week before school started. If I’m going somewhere, I want to know when, why, where, and for how long. I make reservations. People who build yurts by hand aren’t reservations people.

Reading is funny, though. The more I read about Molly’s need (or lack thereof) to pick that yurt up and move it someplace new, the more I associated her Montana life with my own work habits. Every time she flashed back to childhood memories, living in Spain or in Mexico, I saw myself–but my in my working life, instead of my personal life. I saw myself jumping from project to project the way she’d jumped from country to country, sometimes, like Molly, self-defining more by the jumping (Higher! Faster! Over a new stream!) than by the projects themselves. It threw me into a tizzy over the definition of one word: enough.

I don’t want to go anywhere, like Molly did. (We also remodeled our basement in the last year, so we’re not moving anywhere.) But I have been wondering, the way she did, how to know when I’ve had enough of something. And what’s the difference between getting enough, in the sense of being full, like when you eat, and having enough, as in being sick of something? It’s a fine line.

For me, clearly, enough relates to cooking and writing and writing about cooking. Of course it does. We all want to do well in our work, and as a freelancer, there’s no annual review. There’s the wave of self-satisfaction and pride that washes over when the mailman brings a big blue cookbook to your doorstep, but there’s no promotion. There’s no real benchmark. There’s no paperwork that says, Well, Jess, that’s enough for this year, well done. I guess I’d like an owl to fly through the window with a letter that reads: There, now you’ve got three more until Success. Walk down Greenwood Avenue. Take your third left, then the first right. Your next idea will be hiding in a small box in front of the red house. Books bring me pleasure, but these two offer no more of a path forward–and no more real sign of enough–than the first did. Is it enough to write someone else’s story, rather than my own? Is it enough to work during the school year, but not much over the summer this year? Is it enough that I’m writing recipes for this blog every week or so, but that they never seem to make it onto the screen? Is it enough to make money writing for a corporate magazine no one reads?

Enough seeps across the cracks to the rest of life, too. I’ve declared this The Summer of Graham, because before our kiddo starts kindergarten, we’re doing an intense amount of various therapies with him. There were three weeks in leg casts designed to increase his ankle flexibility, then a week in California for an alternative therapy, and now, where I sit writing and pretending not to watch at all, he’s working with his favorite physical therapist, learning how to use the crutches he’ll have inside his kindergarten classroom. Is it enough? Right now it’s three hours of therapy every weekday. Is it too much? Where’s the line? The kid clearly has the capacity to learn, physically, and in that sense the therapy is “working.” He can make sideways steps now while hanging onto something, which means he’ll be more successful going to the bathroom by himself. (Huzzah!) But he also needs to be a kid. It’s summer. He needs to run through the sprinkler and eat sand and fall down the stairs. (Check. Check. Check.) He needs to play Candy Land until he drives his parents crazy. (Check.) But are we summering enough?

You have issues with enough, too, I’m sure. They’re different issues. But they’re there.

There’s a habit Molly has, explained in the book, of getting in the car and just driving when she’s feeling the need to move. Ultimately, to me, the habit was helpful; it signified that while we’re always looking to define enough, the definition changes when we step away. Last spring, I thought for a bit that I’d had enough of food writing. (Well, that, or I thought I’d never find a project as great as A Boat, a Whale, and a Walrus again, and I got depressed.) In the cracks, I wrote a story about skiing, and a story about noise, and a story about cycling, and now, food seems pretty lovable again. I got in the car and drove away–metaphorically, anyway. I came back, and now food seems like enough.

Now, I think, I need to explore–not just how to define enough, and how have enough, but how to not have enough, too. The other day, sitting on the couch while a random batch of fig jam bubbled away on the stove and Graham played happily, I got a little bored. I had a moment of (dare I say it?) summer. It felt so, so good. And in that small moment–hanging out with my kid, with the windows open, and only vague plans on the horizon but all Graham’s school years in front of me to work on whatever comes next–I felt like I’d found the recipe for enough.

Now, if I could just get that small moment of enough to last longer.

The Uncle Josh Haggadah Project, v. 5.0

The family I was raised in is not, by any stretch of the imagination, one based on coddles and cheerleading. We give gruff pats and solemn nods instead of hugs and high fives. We send each other photos of our gruesome cycling injuries. We make fun of each other and throw each other in the snow. But every year, no matter how close together or far away we find ourselves, we are silently united by Passover–or, more specifically, by the knowledge that we are all reading from the same proverbial book, laughing at the same jokes, stumbling over the same Hebrew words.

Each year, for now five years running, my brother Josh puts together a politically-inflected Haggadah that both shortens the Seder–because who are we kidding?–and makes it interesting and relevant. This year’s version tackles Obamacare and gay marriage (but, I noticed, avoids addressing the Super Bowl, which was hard for the family’s Bronco fans).

Enjoy, however you see fit. This year, my parents will be in Idaho, and my sister will be in Montana, and my brother will be in Oregon. We will introduce an uninitiated family to Passover here in Seattle, as we often do, and they won’t know how much we bastardize the blessings and possibly won’t care. We’ll drink plenty of wine (no way will it be Kosher), and enjoy a menu I’ve yet to plan, and children will run screaming, and we’ll remember, as we do every year, to simply be thankful for what we have–namely, for our families, and for those that step in as family when family can’t be around.

Click on the link below for the full Haggadah, 2014-style.

The Uncle Josh Haggadah Project, 2014 (PDF)

Dear Ms. Jones: Twenty Kindergarten Admissions Questions You Should Have Known to Answer

Dear Ms. Jones,

 

Thank you for submitting your child’s kindergarten application. Unfortunately, it appears you failed to understand the nuances of our admissions procedure. For parents like you, we have a special set of questions aimed more specifically at obtaining the information we really wanted, which you should have inferred when we said “Tell us about your child.”

 

Please complete the following questions and return the form to us by yesterday.

 

1. What is your child’s preferred second language?

2. Which code(s) does (do) your child use to write iPhone apps and new games (besides HTML)?

3. Is your hopscotch court mosaic made of hand-painted stones or seashells you gathered while volunteering in Thailand?

4. Can your child operate a 3D printer unassisted?

5. How many wells has your child built in Uganda?

6. Has your child recorded an album? If not, why not? And what is his/her instrument of choice?

7. What are you planning for your child’s next birthday party?

8. How does your child manifest his/her Chinese zodiac sign?

9. Is your anchor tattoo ironic or honest?

10. Describe your home’s most cherished artwork.

11. What is your child’s yogic mantra?

12. List all past and planned (future) Halloween costumes. If applicable, include notes on how you built/sewed/sourced/traded the materials.

13. If we send your child home with a live animal, how long will it survive in your home?

14. What is your child’s favorite ethnic food to cook at home?

15. Was your child raised in cloth or disposable diapers?

16. Has your child ever eaten an Oreo? (We value diversity.)  

17. What methods of renewable energy does your family depend on to offset your existence on the planet, and how does your child participate?

 

ADDENDUM 

18. Please attach your family crest or logo, and explain how and why it represents your family’s core values.

19. What did your child name your chickens, and why? Please attach photos; we would like to see their grooming habits.

20. Please attach your child’s educational mission statement.

 

Thank you for your time.

 

The Admissions Department

Beat.

It hardly seems appropriate to say Happy New Year, but here it is, 2014. Thinking retroactively, here’s what was on my winter to-do list:

• Finish edits on a cookbook
• Take a time-out
• Gather every preschool germ Graham brings home and filter it through my system
• Pitch stories to magazines I’ve never worked with before (some Not! About! Food!)
• Do my taxes
• Finish details of our basement remodel
• Take a writing class
• See a kid through two surgeries
• Apply to private and public kindergartens for said kid

In my mind, two months in, the last thing is the only thing that really happened.

“It’s not the school that’s bad,” soothed my husband one wintry morning. “It’s the system that’s bad.” I sniffed over the phone, and tried to compose myself on the damp bench outside my gym, where an impromptu conversation with the principal of our local elementary school had reduced me to tears and snot and hiccups. My purse sagged open into the dirt of a giant potted plant. But Jim was right. The principal had never met Graham. And he hadn’t, as I’d insinuated, actually told me that my son didn’t belong in his halls. He’d just said he wasn’t sure, and refused to speak with me further, because I hadn’t followed the (totally top secret) prescribed order of operations.

In Seattle, where public schools are arguably better than those in many spots across the country, the process of enrolling a child with special needs in a typical kindergarten classroom requires patience, time, and emotional stamina. In the past week, I have been told to enroll, not to enroll, to fill out the special education form, not to fill out the special education form, that the special education form doesn’t exist, to fill out the school choice form, not to fill out the school choice form, that I need to appear in person to enroll because of the choice form, that I shouldn’t have appeared in person to enroll, that my special ed form will be shredded, that I’m already enrolled, and that RIGHT NOW I’ll be enrolled anyway even though I shouldn’t be standing where I’m standing and don’t need to enroll.

Now, Graham is officially enrolled in our local public elementary school. Will we end up there? Time will tell. At least we have a back up plan. Does that mean the system beat me? Or did I beat the system? This parenting thing is not for the weak.

Out of the blue this morning, when I was getting whiny over all this school nonsense, Graham decided to take the stairs to into his current classroom for the first time. A friend put him up to it and offered to take his walker to the top, and he just agreed. Like it was the most normal thing in the world. Like in his little way, he was saying Mom, I got this thing beat. See?

(Thanks, kid. You sure do.)

Grilled Beets with Herbs and Preserved Lemon (PDF)
In my house, beets make excellent decorations, but they’re rarely the main event—mostly because I tend to chop them up and shove them into salads more quickly than they can stand up for themselves. Here, they shine between layers of crème fraîche and fresh herbs, punched up a bit with preserved lemon.

If I haven’t made my own, I buy preserved lemons at Picnic in Seattle, because the owners, Jenny and Anson Klock, do a consistently excellent job. To use them here, cut them into quarters. Push the lemon’s meat out of the fruit and discard it, then use a small knife to trim the thin white layer of pith away from the peel. Once you have just the yellow peel, it’s ready to chop and use.

Serves 4

3 fist-sized red beets, roasted, peeled, and cut into 3/4-inch rounds
2 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil, plus more for serving
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
2 tablespoons crème fraîche
1/4 cup lightly packed fresh herbs (leaves only)
Peel of 1/4 preserved lemon, pith trimmed, very thinly sliced
Chunky sea salt, for serving

In a large bowl, mix the beet slices together with the olive oil and salt until well blended.

Heat a grill pan over medium-high heat. (You can use a regular heavy-duty pan instead, if you prefer.) When hot, add the beets, and cook, undisturbed, until well marked on both sides, 6 to 8 minutes total, turning the beets once during cooking.

Meanwhile, smear the crème fraîche onto a serving plate. Pile the beets on top, then scatter the herbs and preserved lemon on top. Drizzle the beets with additional olive oil, sprinkle with chunky sea salt, and serve.

Sunny Side Out

It might surprise you to learn that I’m not a very voracious reader. I’m an airport fiction kind of girl, and the titles I’ve read aren’t Titles, in the classic sense, except where food is concerned. Like my taste in music, my taste in reading veers to the trashy, unless the topic is short enough to fit between the covers of The New Yorker magazine. Did you have higher expectations? I’m sorry.

Actually, I’m not. Because here’s the thing about expectations: they’re bunk. (I’m sure I’m missing a huge point here from Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, but I didn’t read that book either, and late at night in my faded pink bathrobe, when I do what little reading I do, I don’t care.)

A dear friend recently wrote a sagging email of sorrow. It was a real whopper—the kind of thing that reeks of tears and ice cream, at the very least. She said a lot of the things happening in her life weren’t what she envisioned or hoped for. Her life isn’t meeting her expectations. I nearly exploded with frustration. It still astounds me when people hew to their childhood expectations—not because childhood dreams are bad, but because I think being an adult requires taking the time to dream up something new. It requires forks in the road, even if they’re sometimes dangerously pointy forks. It requires flexibility. It requires adjustment.

No one expects to have a child born with cerebral palsy, or to develop lupus, or to break her collarbone on the 4th of July. No one expects two speeding tickets in the same week.

Then again, no one expects to land her dream job at 25, or feel totally satisfied with her shoe collection. (My mother just sent me this pair.) I didn’t expect to spend the bulk of 2013 working with an incredible chef whose fingerprints will forever be found on my cooking and on the way I approach food. And clearly, I didn’t expect to suddenly have thicker hair at 35.

I guess what killed me about that email—I should probably admit that it was sent months ago, but it’s been tailing me since—was that there are so many things this person also didn’t expect of her life that are positive. She has a thriving career. She has a gorgeous, happy child and a supportive family. Somehow, though, none of those things seemed to matter.

So here’s your holiday assignment, if you’re an expecter: if you find yourself turning into Eeyore while you’re doing your Christmas shopping, or ruffling through your cookie recipes, or digging through the files that have been stored in the garage for five months (which is what we’re doing this weekend), make a list. Make a real list, on real lined paper, the way we did when we used the pads of our digits to communicate instead of just their tips.

On one side of the page, you can whine. I didn’t expect my dog would become such a pain in the ass. Let it out, sister. Why did the contractors forget to put heat in the bathroom? Bitch and moan. I hate that my husband has started to snore. But really give it your best, okay?

Then, when you’ve wrung out the bad stuff, turn the paper over. On the fresh side, jot down the good things. I didn’t expect to write a cookbook using recipes from this website that could theoretically raise money for lupus research. Dig deep. I didn’t expect to be able to do a chin-up at all, even if my husband was holding enough of my body weight to make him sweat. And include the small stuff. The glue is holding on the teapot that shattered on the way back from France!

Are you done yet?

There. Read both sides again. Now, put the paper up somewhere where you’ll see it fairly often, sunny side out. This is how I live; the hard things are there, but I only look at them when I need to.

On the harder days, I turn the paper over, and scribble the most recent offense down with a dull pencil, so the lead smears into the cracks of my left hand. Then I get out the cast-iron pan and make a bacon-studded hash that looks like just potatoes and eggs, but is really made with golden beets and celery root. It’s a sneaky sort of breakfast, and it looks a bit homely, but the flavor always beats my greatest expectations. And it reminds me, like I wanted to remind my friend that day, that there is always, always a bright side.

You just have to get good at finding it.

Golden Winter Breakfast Hash (PDF)
Simmered until almost tender and seared in bacon fat, golden beets and sweet celery root make a delicious, golden-hued alternative to the traditional potatoes in breakfast hash. Add a bit of goat cheese and a poached egg, and you’ve got a breakfast that will turn any dull day around before it even starts.

To peel celery root, use a heavy-duty peeler to get every bit of skin and dirt off, or simply use a small, sharp knife.

If you’re concerned about timing, cook the hash completely and let it sit in the pan, covered, while the eggs poach. The hash won’t mind.

Serves 2
Active time: 20 minutes

1/2 pound good bacon, cut into 2” pieces
3 medium yellow beets, peeled and cut into 1” pieces
1 baseball-sized celery root, peeled and cut into 1/2” pieces
1 tablespoon kosher salt, plus more, to taste
1 large shallot, thinly sliced
1 teaspoon chopped fresh thyme
Freshly ground pepper
2 ounces goat cheese, crumbled
1/4 cup fresh parsley leaves (no stems)
2 large eggs, poached

In a large cast-iron pan, cook the bacon over medium heat, turning and rearranging occasionally, until crisp, about 15 minutes. Transfer the bacon to a paper towel-lined plate, eating about half of it casually as you cook. (Seriously. Who can wait?)

Meanwhile, combine the chopped beets and celery root in a saucepan big enough to hold them comfortably and add about a tablespoon of salt. Add cold water to cover, then bring to a simmer over high heat. Reduce heat to medium and cook, stirring occasionally, until the celery root is almost tender but not ready to fall apart, about 8 minutes. Drain the vegetables and set aside.

Drain about half the fat off the bacon pan and discard. Reheat the pan over medium heat. When the fat begins to sizzle, add the shallot and cook, stirring, until it begins to soften, about 1 minute. Add the thyme, season with pepper, and stir to combine. Scoot the shallots to the edges of the pan and add the cooked vegetables. Cook, undisturbed, for about 5 minutes, or until the beets and celery root have formed a nice brown crust. Stir the vegetables and cook again for 3 to 5 minutes, undisturbed, or until the mixture is nicely browned all over and the celery root is soft.

Crumble the remaining bacon and add it to the vegetables, along with the goat cheese and parsley. Season to taste, if needed, and serve in two heaping bowls, each topped with a poached egg.

Chemin St. Martin

I cut my toenails twice while we were in France. I did it slowly and carefully, always before it was too late, which is the opposite of what I do at home. And that’s how our three weeks in France went—slowly, carefully. The days unfurled. We found our route before starting the engine of our little Citroen rally car. We watched the ivy on our stone house turn from emeralds to fire as October progressed. We wandered. Time passed at a thick liquid pace, each day surrendering into the next not with the violent crash of fatigue we know at home, but with a shrug and a lazy turn of the covers. I relearned how to live.

Over those three weeks, I realized how many things I’d plum forgotten how to do, like listen for birds and make paper airplanes and walk down stairs softly and eat just cheese for dinner. Now, as my last day here dawns at the airport and I break out my husband’s computer to type for the first time in three weeks—not to actually work, but because the words just seem unavoidable—I wonder what I’ll take home.

First, there will be memories of the house in Provence, including the crumbly mortar between the stones that formed one wall of our little bedroom there. The house was old, clearly—although in France, 1904 is practically infantile for a residence—and it since the wall used to be the outside of one building, before the home we rented was tacked on, it clearly wasn’t meant as a morning headrest for an American coffee drinker. When the wind blew, the mortar sometimes loosened a bit and I had to pick it out of my hair.

The houses, which look like Siamese twins from tiny, narrow Chemin Saint Martin but don’t have any awareness of one another from anywhere inside, are collectively called Mas de la Laiterie. They sit on land that was once the town diary, and until the 70’s, when modernity stomped in for real, folks picked up their milk in what’s now our living room. Then the whole place was purchased by an old French Resistance fighter who had retired and, with 3 buddies, apparently started a little travel business called Club Med. The owner lived in our house, and the offices were in the original house next door until the firm outgrew the space and sold the older house to the current owner, our landlord. The resistant lived to a ripe old age before passing, at which point our landlord bought the house we’re in as a rental property. In typical French fashion, the two houses technically have the same address, and save the entrances, which are on different streets and are a good 500 yards apart, it’s difficult to describe the difference between the two if the landlord’s dog, aptly named Caffeine, isn’t home.

Anyway. That’s all to say that we came to France with one plan, which was to rent a fantastic place and spend time with friends and family. It worked. We lived just outside the medieval walls of Pernes-les-Fontaines, a town known for its 36 working fountains. It has an old-school boulangerie with a giant indoor cast iron oven—the kind Bob Cratchit must have bought his bread from—and a single popular café, called Café de la Place, where we spent lunches drinking cheap, delicious local rosé and feeding our child his abominable but dependable French diet of frites and ice cream.

Some days, we’d wander the town, hitting one of the two local aire de jeux with Graham, but more frequently, we’d start the morning with a map, tracing our fingers over the towns we’d seen and the towns we still wanted to explore. We consulted the market calendar and scouted parking and packed the car and left, mostly in quest of a view and something to eat for dinner. It was an ideal existence. We had time to talk, the three of us. We all read books, including one on raising kids with special needs that will, we think, lead to a sea change in the way we’re approaching cerebral palsy. We slept enough to make up for the last decade.

Paris was busier. We had a tiny hotel room and a short list of things to do and friends to see and places to eat. We walked and walked and walked, and rode enough escalators to satisfy Graham for at least a month. We taught Graham to drink out of a teacup. When Jim and Graham pulled away in a taxi, leaving me to go to Normandy for a few days to finish the last photographs for the book I’m working on with Renee Erickson and Jim Henkens, I burst into tears. We had fun, our little family.

Today, honestly, as I see the pink tinge on the puffy clouds outside, it’s all run together a bit. My muscles are sore today—more from drinking wine, I think, than from actual athletic use—but my brain isn’t tired. And that was the other goal, if I remember. We wanted to stop thinking so much.

I wonder how I’ve changed, flying back. I have a bit more luggage. My French is certainly better than it was when I arrived. And in my back pocket, stuffed between the list of antiques markets I found in an old Gourmet magazine and the receipt for my carrot and duck mousse sandwich, I’ll carry the memory of the three weeks we spent as a family in Provence, paying attention to where we were going, and what we ate, and to each other.

I hope I don’t lose it.

When May Flowers

Photo by Lara Ferroni

This, people, will be a tumultuous spring. I can feel it. My arugula is flowering faster than I can eat it. The rhubarb in my garden is higher than it should be for the last day in April, and tomorrow we’re slated to see final plans for our big basement remodeling project. In the meantime, between book edits and my quest to find the perfect antique cast iron utility sink, there will be jam–simple, oven-roasted jam. I’ll have it on hand for the mornings the construction crews shut the water off on accident, and as a snack for stoppers by, and, of course, at a few upcoming book signings. Come say hello.

May 1: Orca Books, Olympia, WA, 3 p.m.
May 4: Costco, Kirkland, WA, 1 – 3 p.m.
May 5: Molbak’s, Woodinville, WA, 11 a.m. – 2 p.m.
May 11: Costco, Aurora Village location, Seattle, WA, 1 – 3 p.m.

Caramelized Strawberry-Rhubarb Jam (PDF)
Here’s a jam that takes instant gratification into account. Start with a trip to the farmers’ market. Buy a flat of strawberries. Eat a pint right there in the sun, chatting with friends, and down another pint on the way home — if you’re on a bike, congratulations. (You must be a Seattleite.) Now you have four pints left, which you’ll roast in the oven with bits of fresh rhubarb until they’ve both caramelized into a deep, brownish burgundy. It’s easier than regular jam because there’s no stirring involved, but the result, with its sweet, deep flavor, is even more toast-worthy.

4 pints small, ripe strawberries, hulled
1/2 pound rhubarb, chopped
1/2 cup sugar
Juice of 1 large lemon (about 3 tablespoons)

Makes: 1 pint

1. Preheat the oven to 350°F.
2. Combine the strawberries, rhubarb, sugar, and lemon juice in a large roasting pan. Mash about 25 times with a potato masher, until all the large chunks of fruit are gone, then roast for 1 to 1½ hours, stirring once halfway through, or until the fruit has melted into a jam and no liquid runs down the pan when you tip it sideways.
3. Store the jam in small jars in the refrigerator for up to 2 weeks.

Excerpted from Dishing Up Washington by Jess Thomson with permission from Storey Publishing.

Definition: Chameleon Writer

When I was in San Francisco last week, a fine, thin layer of buttery yellow pollen settled into the exterior corners of my car’s windows. I returned with watery eyes and a flooded calendar, and now, plumped with the delayed mental energy of a long weekend with colleagues from all over the country, it feels like a new year. But it’s not just the flowers.

I shouldn’t be surprised. The ides of April affects me this way almost every year. I feel new. Most years it’s because the part of season changing toughest on my body is finally over. Some years I feel new simply because those buds bloom. One year, it was because we had a child. Last year, it was because I started Benlysta, my no-longer-new-to-me lupus medication. And this year. This year, oh gracious, ever-surprising life, you have given me something to get ruffled about that doesn’t require additional trips to Swedish Hospital. It’s a new job. Only, it’s not really new.

I am a food writer, among other things. My job has lines, lots of lines. There are lines that define what I do on a weekly basis—I write for Sunset magazine quite regularly, and I dig around for new ideas, and I inevitably test a random recipe or two from a new book or for another person’s book or for, say, Highlights or Arthritis Today magazines. There are lines that define what I do on a monthly basis—I write for Edible Seattle, and on this blog, for example. These lines are the constants on my calendar. They are my structure.They are my steady dates.

But outside those lines, very little of what I do is well defined, beyond the computer on my lap right now. Recently, my 22-year-old sister fantasized a day when she might know what she wants to do for a living. I told her I still do the same. She wasn’t exactly spirited by my comment, but it’s true. I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up. So when I lifted off for the IACP conference in San Francisco, I had very little in the way of an agenda, but I did wonder whether other food writers—other authors with travel writing habits or photography habits or even sometimes-sidelined mosaic-making habits, anything—know what they want to be when they grow up.

What I do know about my job is that besides that faint weekly or monthly outline, I tend to be somewhat of a serial monogamist. I jump into projects and start swimming, breath held, eyes down. Most recently—and apologies for not having mentioned it sooner—I finished the text portion of a manuscript with the crew at Ivar’s. It’s a whale of a cookbook, based on dishes at the restaurant’s three full-service locations, that will be released this summer, to coincide with Ivar’s 75th (!) anniversary as a Seattle institution. It was fun to write thousands of words in Ivarese—a punny combination of history and educational fishspeak—but even more satisfying to learn the workings of a company run so well, by such a casual, understated, wicked smart management team.

Working with Ivar’s made me realize that part of what I love about writing cookbooks with other people, other chefs, or other business owners, is the jumping in itself. I like the challenge. I like the unknown depth. And landing in San Francisco, foremost on my mind was how to decide between being a ghostwriter—someone who writes cookbooks with and/or for other people—and being my own brand, with my own recipe style, and my own distinct voice. I felt torn.

So I asked people. The response astounded me. Why can’t you do both?, people asked. Somehow, twisted up in the details of each project and in the attempt to form a real writing identity, it hadn’t occurred to me that I could always be both. Giving my brain over to projects I enjoy but might not conceptualize myself (or even take credit for in the end) doesn’t mean giving my writing voice away for good.

Still, I’m a person who works by definitions. So for now, for this new year of work, I’ll call myself a chameleon writer. I can change shades with the weather and the sun, and when life and health get in the way, I can hopefully sit on a rock in the sun, just breathing, like I did for most of February this year. In and out. In and out.

And when the weather turns, and the tides change, and another project comes my way—this next one, should I sign on for it this week, is an absolute dream—I’ll find just the right color and jump.

These days, my sister is working as a baker in a small town coffee shop. It’s hard not to be motherly and tell her she’s doing just the right thing, trying her hands at new things as the opportunities present themselves. It’s hard not to tell her over and over that she could really be good at anything she set her mind to doing, and that diving into something new doesn’t mean leaving behind whatever stays on the shore on a given day or month or year. Mostly, though, it’s hard not to take my own advice to heart.

Here’s a cake that understands what it means to be a chameleon. Make it in one pan, as a single layer cake, with a simple pouf of whipped cream and perhaps a sliced banana or two on top, and it’s a 12-minute miracle. Gussy it up by baking it in two separate pans and smearing the layers with a cardamom-scented cream cheese frosting, and by golly, it almost looks like a birthday cake. Either way, it depends on moisture from bananas and Greek-style yogurt. It works with either all-purpose or gluten-free flour. (I’m curious to try it with a mixture of rice and oat flours.) I personally find it’s as happy on my breakfast plate as it is shared with friends after a celebratory meal.

And as far as I can tell, deep down, it doesn’t really matter how you make it, because you can always make it a different way the next time.

Two-Timing Banana Cardamom Cake
Laced with cardamom, this stir-and-dump cake is a good, reliable crutch for the dessert-desperate if it’s cooked in one pan. (Serve the cake warm, with whipped cream and sliced bananas, if you’re so inspired.) Or fancy it all the way up and cook it in two pans, for something of a celebration. Bake the cakes for about half the recommended time, then serve them layered with a basic cream cheese frosting, made by whipping a stick of softened butter with 8 ounces softened cream cheese, 1/2 teaspoon vanilla, 4 cups confectioners’ sugar (sifted), and cardamom to taste.

TIME: 10 to 30 minutes active time, depending on your day
MAKES: 8 servings

Vegetable oil spray
1 3/4 cups all-purpose or gluten-free all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon ground cardamom
1/4 teaspoon salt
2 very ripe bananas, well mashed
3/4 cup sugar
3/4 cup (6 ounces) plain nonfat Greek-style yogurt
2 large eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla
1/2 cup vegetable oil

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Spray a 9” cake pan with the vegetable oil spray and set aside.

Whisk the flour, baking powder, cardamom and salt together into a mixing bowl and set aside.

Mash the bananas in the bottom of another mixing bowl. Add the sugar, yogurt, eggs, and vanilla, and whisk until well blended. Add the dry ingredients and the oil, and gently fold the batter together with a spatula, just until no dry spots remain.

Pour the batter into the pan and bake the cake on the middle rack for 35 to 40 minutes, or until the cake is lightly browned at the edges and just barely beginning to crack in the center.

When the cake is done, let it cool for about 10 minutes. Run a small knife around the edge. Using oven mitts, place a cooling rack on top of the cake pan and flip the cake and the rack together. Remove the cake pan, so the cake is upside-down on the rack. Place a serving plate upside-down on the bottom of the cake, and flip the plate and the rack together, so the cake is now right side-up on the serving plate. Serve warm.