garden weeps, beckons, scatters uproarious: honey mint ice cream
Walk past my house -- I dare you -- and do not startle, mutter to yourself, call out a soft word of admiration direct from your marrow. Despite my clutter and half-skills and haphazard scattering of effort, energy, garden mysticism, August on my street is glory. The grape vines are the first to call to you, yes, their curling witch-fingers brushing on your cheek, your skirt, my pretttty... they say, creaking in the breeze. The lavender pokes purply, elegant and pastoral at once, echoing, imitating flatteringly, the ebullient row in front of my neighbor's home. There are sunflowers, now, cocking their cackling heads, throwing back chins and gulping in sunlight. The figs, big-handed, slow-drooping their fat sticky teardrops, they have their flowers inside, says Heather. Imagine that.
It's the mint, though, the mint that catches you. I wouldn't have planned this, didn't in fact want it at all, these rootling creepers sliding their leggy rhizomes through my precious dirt. They frill out in a patch of dark mushrooms, composting better than black plastic; they shoot up among the garlic; they worm their way under the fence and up through the lavender, the rosemary, the thyme. I wander in the front yard on my sprightlier days, grabbing big handfuls from the rootbase, curling fingers into earth and pulling with all my strength. My uprooting scents my fingers, my clothes, the air around me, and this is what you notice as you walk by. "I love your garden," you'll say to me, while I grunt and sweat and wish I were neater, more organized, more nurturing. Wish I'd never planted mint. "Thank you," I'll say, gulping back weepy confessions.
I no longer see recipes with mint and smack smug satisfaction, free in my yard, I've spent too many errant hours lying piles of it on my front walk, hoping the mood will strike me to collect leaves by the gallon-load and wash, dry, squirrel away. For what? There will always be mint.
And now there will always be mint ice cream. It started backwards, a quart-and-a-half of mint chocolate chip from Trader Joe's, memories of childhood favorites, 'twas mine, a question, "shall we make this?" And, hours later, a discovery: that nothing else in mint ice cream would ever matter again. It's complex and utterly simple, this honey mint vanilla ice cream, come, walk, pick of my mint, do this too. Ice cream is easy.
...more and comments
peel, slice, jar: nectarine lemon marmalade
It is Sunday, and I am holding church at my kitchen sink. I have scrubbed the ceremonial ceramic-on-steel with baking soda and sea salt; my fingers are pink and near-raw from hours in the hot water, washing plates and water glasses and stainless steel pots. I have brought to this aged font these orbs, licentious and bawdy, pink and blush-red and saffron and crimson, possessed of a scent so sensuous I gasp, open-mouthed, slurping, lip-licking, hungry to my very bones.
The faucet is on, again, this time cold and pure, sent kitchen-ward from mountains far and high, near and smoldering. Hood, Tabor, I have visited these stately reserves on my gasping summer runs, I have seen from whence this water flows. I wash the nectarines and grasp, hold, sharpening my knife before slipping the tip into the base of each fruit. X, stigma or signet, cauterization. 
I turn to the vat of bubbling water and, fingers gentle, final, plunge into the surging well. A minute. Just.
The blanch, this boiling water bath, softens the fruits not just to the touch -- and I lift them out with slotted spoon, gently, gently -- but to the light; the colors meld and flush, as the final burst of orange-pink before the sun's light disappears at night, seaward.
...more and comments
cafemama's life in the kitchen : food sustains us
It has been explained, to us, to married women and young, passionate career-ists and fathers, but especially to mothers, that our greatest desire is for convenience. All we need is not, after all, love; it is prewashed presliced precooked prediced prebaked presweetened wrapped up and with natural flavors added. With that, we can express our love with the minimum of work, only having to spend time in the buying.
We have done this, pushing piles of cookbooks off our counters whose titles express how busy are these modern lives. We will get all these recipes completed in less than 30 minutes; these other ones will provide the illusion of care, mess, agony over detail. Our media tells us jokes about women who buy cupcakes and roast turkeys and pretend to have made them, when in fact the career's demands were too dear to spend minutes (even 30), oven-bound. We are supposed to see ourselves in these images, we are supposed to laugh.
Our laughter is shrill, forced. We are hurting. Our children are hurting. Something neither we nor the men and women who work on tall hills, each sporting a doctorate or two, can explain, is rising up within these beloved-but-poorly understood. It lashes out, wraith-like, it raises high a dagger of this is wrong and plunges it into our throats. Gasping, dripping, bloody, we reach: for hope, a mantra, a tool. Anything to sustain us.
Something deep within us, an ancient wisdom from very near the dawn of familial ties, rooted in the earliest flush of prolactin -- the mothering hormone -- tells us that food is the answer. And food is not a subject we have been taught, it is alien to our areas of expertise. We know many things, how to dissect a sentence and write a convincing brief and balance an income statement. We know how to navigate office politics and write a resume that blithely eliminates our motherhood from a potential employers' concerns. We know how to work several voice mail systems and install Ubuntu.
But give us a box of peaches, a sharp paring knife and a case of pint canning jars and, even with this desire-that's-deep -- to know from where comes our food, to challenge our sugary addictions, to loose our kids from toxins like BPAs and pesticides, to fill our homes full of golden jarred treasures whose worth will not now, not ever, be traded on any exchange -- what rises in our veins, our throat, our souls is not life-giving pride, but fear.
I've felt the fear too, and breathed deep, swallowed, prayed, and conquered some of it, taking my food life by the shoulders and wrestling, Jacob-like, until I understood. We stood there at my kitchen sink, eye-to-mirrored-eye, and the charge that shook us deep in our bellies was the satisfaction, the quiet of whole, real, inconvenient food.
I am writing a book about this food, this food life. I cannot wait for you to taste it; sample, here.
august 12 . 2010
