Tool Time

What is it about house projects that’s so empowering?
And, when they don’t work out so well, so emasculating?
It’s just a dripping faucet, right?
Well, not exactly.
For me, fixing a dripping faucet (which I did, successfully, all by myself, for the first time, two weeks ago, not that I’m bragging but that is one tight fixture) is victory and independence and proving myself to – who? It’s not like anyone is watching, arms crossed, daring me to try, taunting me with the phone – “here, if you can’t manage this yourself, just call a handyman!”

It is notable, and perhaps relevant here, that I think of my dad every time I pick up a tool – partly because whatever tools I have are likely from his old workshop, where they were neatly lined up along a peg board, partly because if I’m proving anything to anyone it would be to him, and partly because I miss him and wish he were still around to teach me about tinkering around the house.

Or maybe not that last bit. Because there was always a lot of cursing and sweating involved in dad’s house projects. He was a perfectionist and, well, house projects and perfectionists make uncomfortable partners. It was hard to help him much, because everything had to be just so. But I did stand by and hand him tools, waiting for what seemed like hours until I could do something useful. Get me that Philips head, he’d say, and I’d pray I’d pick the right screwdriver to hand to him.

So I know the difference between a Phillips head and that other kind of screwdriver. I know that you have to press, hard, as you turn it so you don’t strip the screw. I know how to paint with a roller (make a “W” and then fill it in). I know “righty tighty, lefty loosey.” I own a drill (I love using the drill, RRRRRRRRNnnnnnnnnnnnRRrrrrrrr). But I’m still lacking a lot of the vocabulary of the do-it-yourself tribe.

That didn’t stop me from tackling a hole in basement ceiling this weekend. I’d been delaying this project, alternately telling myself it would be no big deal – it’s a small hole – and dreading the inevitable impasse I would encounter. Would it be not knowing how to cut drywall? Measuring inaccurately? Using the wrong adhesive to fix the stuff to the ceiling? If it’s not perfect the first time, there will be much gnashing of teeth and who needs that? But wait! I don’t have to gnash my teeth. I am not my father. In fact, my own handy-woman mantra is, go ahead, the worst that can happen is it won’t work, and then you’ll just try again, another way. Or get someone to help. And if that happens, I comfort myself by remembering all the things I can do. I may not be an expert at drywall, but I make a hell of an apple pie. For example.

So I started in on the drywall project, reading up on drywall patches (love the internet), gathering all the tools I’d need, removing the cabinet that partially blocked the hole, and evening up the gap so I could cut an tidy rectangle of drywall rather than a more difficult, dog-legged piece (good advice from an online instructional). Then I asked a more experienced friend to take a look to be sure I was on the right track, before figuring out how best to attach the drywall to the ceiling beams.

As it turns out, my friend wound up doing most of the work for me, wielding a tape measure like it was an extension of his hands. He’s a professional carpenter, and while I envy his innate ability to Fix Things, I am mostly just grateful that he stepped in and fit what would have been a day-long project into the space of an hour or less. All that remains is nailing up some trim and painting – both tasks I can easily handle.

I learned: spackle and joint compound are two different things. You need a special spreader thing for joint compound – not a putty knife. You can skip the whole joint compound thing if you use trim instead. And you can use the pruning saw to cut trim, in a pinch. Which I did. This morning.

At one point I brought my 16-year-old daughter down to see the project in progress. This is drywall, I told her. This is a utility knife. Do you know the difference between a Philips head and that other kind of screwdriver?

We'll have to work on this some more, but hopefully she’ll have a bigger vocabulary to use when she begins to tackle her own house projects. She already knows how to bake an apple pie.

Inspirational Pizza

There are people who sit around in bars and coffeeshops, brainstorming far-fetched ideas that seem incredibly brilliant at the time, coming up with inventions or one-of-a-kind enterprises no one else has considered – and then they go home and get ready for their 9 to 5 jobs the next day and forget about their schemes until the napkin they sketched them on resurfaces, crumpled and faded, in the pocket of an overcoat.

Jon Roberts is not one of those people.

He and a friend, Scott Smith, came up with an idea then followed through.

After baking pizza together in the homemade, wood-burning pizza oven in Jon’s back yard, the two decided to build another oven – this one on the back of a pickup truck. Now these two young guys bring brick-oven pizza to the people, firing up the 1,800-pound wood-burning oven at music festivals and farmer’s markets and vineyards, where they are regulars, and at private parties and other events as they come up. The pizzas are organic and use locally-grown ingredients. Last year, Jon sold 1,500 of them at a local music festival in Floyd, Virginia.

The business is called Dogtown Pizza, named for the mountain holler where Jon lives, in the Blue Ridge near Floyd.

If you had told me two years ago that you wanted to build a concrete oven and cart it around to bake pizza – with organic, local ingredients, no less -- I would have rolled my eyes and called you a dreamer. Recently I’ve learned that dreamers can also be do-ers.
Thanks, Jon, for the lesson.

If you’re not in or around Floyd County and Dogtown, dream your own dream and make your own pizza. In the time it takes to order and wait for delivery, I can put together a fabulous pizza with fresh garden chard and garlic – and they ain’t got that on the menu at Domino’s. Not that I’m bragging. I’m just sayin’.

Here’s my recipe, for a quick, barely-has-to-rise dough and toppings. The trick is to set your oven as high as it will go – unless you have a pizza oven your backyard, in which case you’re way ahead of me!

Way Better Than Carryout Pizza
1 tablespoon yeast
1 cup warm water
1 teaspoon sugar or other sweetener
2 tablespoons olive oil
2-1/2 cups unbleached white flour (or mix with whole wheat)
Pizza sauce – homemade or jarred
Toppings – your choice, see below
Mozarella – almost a whole block (16 oz?) shredded (I usually use Sargento) or use fresh
Dissolve yeast in water. Add remaining ingredients. Stir 100 strokes (or knead, if you’re like me and love the meditative quality of working the dough in your hands).
Cover with a warm, damp cloth and let rise five minutes (really!)
Roll the dough out on whatever you’ve got for baking – a pizza stone, if you’re lucky, a cookie pan, if you’re like me. I sprinkle a little oil on the pan to keep the crust from sticking. And I like to begin to flatten the dough with my marble rolling pin, then pick it up and practice spinning it around like the pizza guys I remember from a good pizza place I remember from college. That only takes me so far, though, because I’m not very good at it and because my cookie pan is rectangular, not circular (and you get a circle when you spin the dough), so I use the rolling pin to finish getting the dough nice and flat on the pan.
Slather the dough with pizza sauce, supplemented with extra dried oregano if you like that (I do). Sprinkle grated mozzarella all over – fresh mozzarella is a real treat, just know that it won’t melt to look the way you expect a conventional pizza to look.
Top with your favorites. Mine vary, but include chard or spinach lightly sautéed in olive oil; thinly sliced, raw garlic, tossed with olive oil to soften; fresh basil leaves from the garden; and roasted red pepper slices.
Bake 10 to 13 minutes at 475 or as high as your oven will go.

Squashing Envy

My garden feels especially tiny this week.
Maybe that’s because I saw one impressive spread out in the country over the weekend. Garden envy? Could be – but I’ve adopted my daughter, Clara’s, approach to such things. Instead of being envious, I’ve decided to be inspired.

First inspiration: rows upon rows of harvested butternut squash. They stand on their bulbous ends, all sizes lined up together on a shelf like soldiers fighting against industrial agriculture and fast food and chemical fertilizer and all the commercial madness these particular gardeners are working hard to avoid. They are an entire winter’s worth of wholesome, organic food, along with crates of sweet potatoes and a root cellar full of beets, carrots, onions, potatoes and parsnips.

Second inspiration: the rows of flourishing chard and mustard greens and kale still growing in what remains of the season. Abundant mounds of cabbages covered with plastic to protect from cold; cold frames full of spinach and bristling with different kinds of lettuces.

Back home on the edge of the city, just knowing that these gardeners will rise with the sun to tend the gardens and work within the rhythms of the season, takes the frantic edge off urban living.

I reassess my own veggie patch, think about where I might fit a cold frame, consider how to enrich the soil so my chard grows past its current stunted height. And, of course, I plan for a couple of healthy hills of butternut squash in next year's garden.

Cats and Dogs

The gingham dog and the calico cat
Side by side on the table sat
'Twas half-past twelve, and (what do you think!)
Nor one nor t'other had slept a wink!

Many people think it’s a cozy, sweet thing to work at a computer with a cat in your lap. And it is. I sit on the phone talking to Mr. Bigwig, typing away as he spools off quotes for the article I’m writing, and I’m happy to have finally caught him on the phone between appointments and important meetings and trips to the gym or whatever else he does. And all the while, I have this warm, living thing in my lap, purring away.

Until the dog comes in.

Nala the dog and Milky the cat are still working out how to be in the same room together. Things have gotten much better recently, which is why I kept the door to the office open on this particular day, risking an encounter while I am on the phone. Maybe not such a good idea.

It must be close to noon, when Nala usually goes out for a romp with her doggy friend down the street, so she is anxious for my attention, and begins to nose around my leg. Where the cat is curled up. I swivel in my chair, so the dog can’t reach the cat – but Nala just goes around to the other side. The phone is wedged between my ear and my shoulder and I’m trying not to let it slip, and trying to hear and type what Mr. Bigwig is saying, and trying to think of my next question, and trying to keep the dog from actually licking the cat and the cat from clawing the dog and possibly me.

After much furtive swiveling, the dog lets out a sharp yelp of frustration and I finally give up and ask Mr. Bigwig if he could please hold on one minute. He is a very approachable Bigwig, and says yes, of course. So I push what I think is the “hold” button on the phone, but it’s actually “flash,” meant for switching over to a second phone call, but there is no second phone call, just two animals ready to rumble. I have hung up on Mr. Bigwig. Somehow I manage to ease Milky off my lap and lead Nala back out of the room, close the door, discover my telephone mistake, and dial Mr. Bigwig to apologize for cutting him off.

I was having issues with my staff, I say.

Something's Good and Fishy

I have driven by this place more times than I could possibly count, but it’s off my radar screen. There are an amazing number of these sorts of places, spots that are part of my universe, in that they are right in front of me, but not, because I don’t really see them, my eyes slide right by. This one is a “Spanish” market. I don’t know how this happened, but “Spanish” somehow now means any culture that speaks Spanish – in the case of our Takoma-Langley area, that would mean Central American, mostly. And I’m pretty much Anglo-Saxon, even though I speak (barely) passable Spanish. And, I do buy Goya black beans from the Shopper’s Food Warehouse Latino aisle, and I know what queso blanco is. But I’m most accustomed to pretty conventional American groceries.

The Atlantic Market just isn’t in my regular route of Places To Go.

I thought it would be a colorfully crowded, jostling-and-full-of-people type of place brimming with papayas and mangos and dried fish and cans of fruit juices that looked vaguely familiar from trips to the Caribbean. That’s what the market at the corner of University and Piney Branch is. But this is a spacious, tidy grocery store with plenty of room to move about. I couldn’t even find mangos (though I did see papayas and those canned fruit juices, plus Clara’s favorite Salvadoran cookies).

And they have fresh fish. Lots of it. Cheap.

You can choose your fish already filleted, or choose the whole fish, and have the attendant clean it for you. I chose the latter, thinking how clever I was to choose my own fish – someone, somewhere taught me to look for clear eyes on a fish, to be sure it’s fresh, so armed with this fact I feel all seasoned and like the daughter of a fisherman (which I am). Some of the fish eyes, at this market, were clear, some not so much. I chose rockfish, partly because their eyes looked good and partly because I couldn’t believe it was only $3.99 a pound. Wow! I used the tongs lying on top of the ice in which the fish was packed, nice and neat along a tray that separated me from where the fish cleaning guys stood (are they called butchers if they’re dealing with fish, not meat?). I picked up a couple of rockfish and put them in one of the big white plastic bowls, then asked the fish man to please clean it. And he totally understood English, which was a relief because my brain couldn’t race fast enough to put “clean” and “fish” together in Spanish (though now that I’m sitting at my computer at home, of course, it comes to me, maybe not conjugated properly but I could have gotten the idea across)

So I watch as the fish is scaled and gutted, and remember doing this with my dad, the scraping of the knife against the scales, the squish of the innards as they leave that nice, neat belly cavity, and how macho I felt, at age 8, being able to handle all this without getting squeamish. I realize the fish man intends to leave the head on, but I’m not making fish stew (and have never used a fish head before) so I ask him to take the head off, and then I ask that he fillet it.

The filleting process is nothing like what I remember Dad doing – Dad was a finesse man, and painstakingly worked a very sharp knife along the bone to get a perfect fillet, losing very little meat along the way and rarely leaving a bone. I know he was rolling over in his grave as the fish man butchered this fillet, but I didn’t mind – there was still plenty of meat and I wouldn’t mind picking the bones out. Especially at 3.99 a pound. Except that he weighed it before he filleted it so I paid for the head and guts – maybe that’s why most people keep the head?

Anyway, I’ve found a cheap place to get good fish. They had enormous blue fish for $1.99 (same deal, pick the big fish, they clean it for you), and Spanish mackerel, and tilapia (pre-filleted or whole) and shrimp and crabs – and it all smelled clean, another sign of a good fish shop.

I pan-fried the fish and it was sweet and delicious, with just a bit of butter I’d combined with lemon and lemon rind. And there were fewer bones than I’d expected.

The Atlantic Market is in the shopping center at New Hampshire Avenue and University Boulevard, in what’s known as Takoma-Langley Crossroads – in the part where Toys R Us used to be. Bonus: their avocados were 69 cents a piece, and perfectly ripe.

How to Roast Pumpkin Seeds

First go the Sunday farmer’s market and, after you’ve tasted the little tiny pears and decided you must have a half dozen along with the Braeburn apples and the orange-est sweet potato you’ve ever seen, and after you’ve marveled at the size of the broccoli (which you can’t seem to grow properly yourself) and imagined it in a wok with cauliflower and maybe some of that baby bok choy, after you’ve run into one friend and traded Halloween stories and another who you catch up with over coffee – after all that, go home hungry.

In your kitchen, put “Drag the River” in and think of the friend who sent you this CD from your home town in Florida, and think of everyone back home and dance by yourself in the kitchen while the dog looks on. Then take out the cute little cooking pumpkin you bought last week at the market, but never got around to cooking. Cut around a couple bad spots. Hope it’ll still taste good.

Preheat the oven (and don’t forget to take it off the “preheat” setting, like you did last Wednesday for the baked potatoes). Cut up the pumpkin with the energy you now have from one too many cups of morning coffee (but really, how could you resist, as Heather’s coffee at Summer Delights, Sunday only, is the best in town), and follow the recipe you got from James Ricciuti, who does this great Sunday market thing of his own out in Olney (James runs Ricciuti’s Restaurant, and several times each season takes a bunch of fans from the restaurant to the farmer’s market down the street, and back to the restaurant to cook up the season’s best in his great little kitchen. Cooking lesson and lunch, all in one. Yum.)

Season the pumpkin with what you’d think are pumpkin pie spices but what turn out to be perfect for a salad. Toss ‘em with some olive oil and put ‘em in the oven and, while they cook, fish through the gooey pumpkin guts on the counter to separate out the seeds. They go on a smaller tray, all spread out by themselves. Into the oven.

Sit down with the Sunday paper. Then hear that funny popping sound

This has never happened before. Maybe these seeds were a little overripe? They did look plump. Take the seeds out and hope they’re not under-done. Note that a couple fell on the floor of the oven. Turn to clean up some of your pumpkin skin mess, then turn back and see

Flame.

In the oven. A pumpkin seed on fire.

You are alone in the house. You don’t have a fire extinguisher. You think quickly, open the door of the oven (no, no, no! My friend Captn Jarboe from the TPVFD says CLOSE the oven door if there’s a fire!! And why the hell do you not have a fire extinguisher?!?). Oven door open, feel foolish while blowing on the little tiny flame and thank God it actually goes out.

Still saying prayers, grab the tongs and try to get the seed that is still smoking at the bottom of the oven so it doesn’t catch flame again. Burn your hand as you slide out the bottom rack so you can actually reach the little smoker. Grab the other two seed escapees while you’re at it.

A few minutes later, the pumpkin is finished. It’s a tiny bit mealy – but the spices are fabulous, so it’s still an addictive little roasted treat. It’ll combine beautifully with roasted pecans and fresh apples, from today’s market, plus fresh greens and a vinaigrette.

The pumpkin seeds are a little too chewy. But things could be worse.

Put “fire extinguisher” on your Home Depot list.

Sunday Breakfast

Breakfast comes in all shapes and sizes. Last Sunday was a particularly wonderful one.

I’d actually considered going out to breakfast, an occasion in itself. Breakfast, in my world, is rarely a stack of pancakes or French toast or even eggs-over-easy delivered to the table, unless I’m on the road for some reason – another rare occurrence. Breakfast is usually a (delicious) bowl of oatmeal (add apples, raisins, fresh ginger and roasted pecans), or a pile of fresh fruit and maybe toast, and always a good cup of coffee. Invariably, at home.

I did have coffee, and I don’t know, probably fruit, last Sunday. By 10:30 or 11, I was ready to hit the Farmer’s Market, one of my very favorite Sunday pastimes: walk to market, visit with friends, enjoy the sunny weather, buy some apples, peruse the greens, debate on whether to spend $5.99 for 8 ounces of Cherry Glen goat cheese (because it’s locally made! And it’s delicious. I wound up going for the buy-3-get-1-free, and splitting the order with a friend).

The twist this Sunday was that I met Clara there, after she’d spent the night at a friend’s house. (For those of you new to the blog, that’s my 16-year-old daughter and one of my most favorite companions.) She was starving, so after much considering of fresh, local veggies and gabbing with friends, I told her I’d take her to breakfast. How generous, I thought. She looked doubtful. It was a beautiful day. I think she wanted to stay outside, and some of the produce we’d gotten really was irresistible.

So we bought a beautiful loaf of asagio bread from the Stone Hearth Bakery stand, sat down at a sunny bench in the middle of the market and opened our market bags. Out came the goat cheese. Cheese on cheesebread – don’t knock it ‘til you’ve tried it. There was also a purple pepper from Wheatland Vegetable Farms, and fresh arugula from my favorite market stand, Twin Springs (my son Tyler worked here last summer PLUS they have fabulous peaches and honey crisp apples). Clara put together these perfect little parcels, with a modest chunk of rustic bread, a nicely portioned smear of goat cheese, a chip of pepper and a bit of arugula. Mine were a little more haphazard, but she was sweet enough to make me one when I started eyeing hers with envy. Then she came up with rolling the pepper and cheese inside a piece of arugula. The girl is a born chef. We washed it down with cider so pure it tasted like drinking whole apples.

This was one of the best breakfasts ever, no table, eggs, pancakes involved.

Optimistic Gardening

In an effort to utilize as much yard space as I could for growing veggies, I created a bed on the northwest side of the house last year and planted a few volunteer tomatoes and some peppers to get it going. My reasoning: the bed, although it doesn’t get a lot of sun until late afternoon, is beside a brick wall, so it gets plenty of absorbed heat from the brick to warm the seedlings and, later, the plants and the fruit I hoped would be tumbling off the vine and into my kitchen.

The peppers (poblanos and bell) produced well – the tomatoes not so much, but I figured it was about them being volunteers, and all.

This year, I decided to be optimistic: I not only purchased tomato seedlings, but planted cantaloupe seeds as well, reasoning that the vines could climb structures I placed along the brick, and when the fruit came along, I’d sling them in old scraps of pantyhose made into miniature hammocks to support the weight of the melons (a trick I used successfully in a previous garden). Both tomatoes and ‘lope plants grew up and out – but didn’t fruit until very late. Finally, in October, I got a handful of small but delicious tomatoes. And one lone melon, still green on the vine.

So optimism pays off. A little.

I can't resist showing off my best crop this year, too: look at that gi-normous carrot!

I Finished My Third Brain and Other Cooking Adventures

Clara has been busy in the kitchen. Funny the things she can create – yes, after 10 p.m. Two nights ago it was three brains – most delicious. This has got to be my favorite school project of all time. I didn’t even get psychology at Vero Beach High School (though I do remember philosophy, and humanities, my favorite classes). Biology is as close as I got, and all I remember is textbook, textbook and more textbook.

Clara, however, gets to create a model of the brain. Out of rice krispie treats. Of course, the rice krispie twist was her idea – the assignment was just to create a model, and other students chose clay, or created mobiles – one, she reported, used cauliflower, which also has a creepy kind of resemblance to an actual brain, but isn’t nearly as tasty as rice krispie treats.

Clara’s brains had to be in triplicate in order to have space to label all the parts properly. I haven’t heard the term amygdala probably since college biology – if I even heard it then – but in the past week I’ve heard it twice, once in the kitchen and once in a roaming conversation about how we try to overcome our brains’ primal fear/fight-or-flight mechanism through careful training and plenty of psychotherapy. I love having a child in high school, it makes me want to devour her textbook and learn all the things I missed or have forgotten when I was her age. They all seem so much more relevant now.

Clara’s brains turned out beautifully. Multi-colored affairs, the rice krispies, carefully molded into brain-like shapes, were smeared with colored frosting to differentiate frontal lobe from cerebellum from hippocampus and more than a dozen other parts. She stuck toothpicks with little paper flags attached into the brains to label each one. Clever girl.

She thinks her teacher approved, once she saw that the labels also revealed brain function – and once she tasted the parietal lobe.

In other, not so successful kitchen projects this week, Clara made a gorgeous looking chocolate lavender cake. I have been wanting to make this cake for a year, and finally got the recipe to try it (thanks Judy). I think it was a favorite at a potluck, but it’s been so long the concept became more significant that the actual cake. Chocolate! Lavender! Two of my favorite things! But guess what? Not so great.

I think we must have overdone the lavender. We used a half cup of lavender syrup (sugar, water and lavender) to soak each of two layers of the cake – maybe if we’d half the amount it would have worked. As it turned out, the cake tasted like my grandmother’s bathroom, with the lavender soap permeating not just my nose, in a good way, but my mouth, in a not-so-good way. I really wanted to like this cake. It was just too much.

Because it looked awesome, with a dark chocolate frosting and a sweet little purple design on top, we let it sit on the stove for three days before I finally relented and tossed it out. Cooking is all about experimenting – so it’s no great loss, just a lesson. Lavender, unless very lightly applied, is best left in toiletries and growing up alongside the steps that lead to my front door.

Unexpected Persian Delights

How does a chance meeting over crabcakes in Baltimore lead to a world-class tour of Persian cuisine in Tyson’s Corner? As a Florida girl from little ol’ Vero Beach (aka Zero Beach) I would venture to say it has something to do with living in the wonderfully diverse Washington area.

Last week I blogged about Kam, a traveler down from Canada, touring the Baltimore-Washington area. After meeting at the fabulously funky Lexington Market, we met again when Kam suggested I join him for Persian food. For more international flavor (already we’re talking about a guy who grew up in Spain, lives in Canada and has traveled the world), we started at a Takoma Park art exhibit featuring two Venezuelan artists, and took in the brilliantly colored ceremonial masks and evocative mixed media prints of the charming David Camero and Luis Scotti. (see it at the TP Community Center through the end of October).

Then we went, GPS in hand, to Tyson’s Corner. Except the GPS was malfunctioning and my mapquest directions brought us to Tyson’s -- but not the restaurant. My role as locally knowledgeable tour-director, already compromised because I knew of no Persian restaurants in the area (Kam heard of this one through a friend), was totally shot. Finally the GPS politely announced, “you have reached your destination.” And there we were – in what looked to me to be a very dark, deserted office park.

The restaurant, Shamshiry, was hiding just around the corner, and we finally took a spot at a small table in the corner. Menus in hand, Kam then noted that his mother used to make such-and-such a dish.

Thus began an entirely unexpected tour of Persian culture. Turns out Kam, who I first thought might be Native American (tall, broad, dark pony tail) is Persian, and didn’t get to Spain until age 9. So much for my international/ethnic radar.

Not only did I have a personal tour guide through a traditional Persian menu (I could say there were lots of kabobs but that brings to mind places like Moby Dick's. This was no Moby Dick's). Kam also shared his story – in a way that said everything about how important his Persian heritage is to him. I now have a picture in my head of his great grandmother, who tended the coals under the samovar and poured scalding hot tea for family and friends – including a four-year-old Kam, who might have preferred orange soda but knew better than to stand against tradition and refuse Tea from Great Grandmother.

I learned about places in Iran where you bring you own cooking pot to have it filled with rice (aromatic basmati, fluffed because it’s been rinsed just before it’s finished cooking, ridding it of its starch). I learned about popping a raw egg into steaming hot rice. I tried tah-dig, the crunchy crust that forms at the bottom of the rice pot, and ghorme sabzi, heavy (and delicious) with parsley, fenugreek and Persian lime – it was not even on the menu, but that’s what you get when you let someone else order for you. I learned that fava beans can be creamy little gems hidden in dill-infused rice dish called baghali polo. We ate enormous piles of rice and chelo kabob and drank two pots of Persian tea and could have lingered for hours – and in fact managed to sit through at least three families coming and going at the table behind me.

The best treat was the paludeh, or faloodeh, unlike anything I’ve ever had. It looks like shredded coconut mounded in a bowl, but it is a frozen dessert of potato starch flavored with rosewater and garnished with, in our case, tart lemon or cherry syrup (I liked lemon best). Kam remembers having it with pomegranate syrup, in a place where pomegranates were so plentiful they cost a couple of dollars a case, instead of the $4-a-fruit price I saw recently at Safeway.

Thank you to Kam, who surprised me not only when he revealed that he is Persian (the musical Persian (aka Farsi) he spoke with the waiter was more than enough proof of this), but who also totally turned the tables on me: Meeting an out-of-towner, I expected to dispense advice on attractions in and around our nation’s capitol, but instead I became a tourist myself, and enjoyed a surprise trip through Persia via Tyson’s Corner. I am humbled by what I did not know, and delighted to learn it.

faloodeh photo by chiffonade
photo of Ginny at art exhibit by Kam

Dancing in the Streets

There is nothing like Takoma Park’s annual street festival for bringing out the “ghosts,” as one friend put it. Every year, I see old friends at this gathering of community folks and regular visitors, wannabe-Takoma-Parkers and other fun-loving characters. Characters, in many cases, being the operative word. There was the guy in mime-like face paint, for instance, who approached me in all his chalk-white glory to comment on my t-shirt (not very mime-like, but I loved the accent). Turns out he’s from Amazonia (the t-shirt he admired refers to the Yanomami tribe, though in this case it was an ultimate Frisbee team from Venezuela). Mime man’s story: he is artist David Camera, and will be showing his work – masks – at the Takoma Park Community Center gallery. The reception is this Friday, 6-9, and I hope to make it.

Countless stories like these are up for grabs at the festival. Another example: here was Jay Summerour, who clued me in to the history of local blues last year, when I wrote about him for Bethesda Magazine. I missed his show this year (under the Gazebo, gotta catch it next time around!!), but I know from hearing him in the past, Jay can wail on the harmonica, is an amazing whistler (yes!) and carries the tradition of the blues forward from people like his grandfather Eddie “Smack” Martin (so hard to resist writing a name like that). Did you know there was a Du Drop Inn in Rockville, and a music hall in Johnson’s Park in Emory Grove? Jay remembers playing ball there while the parents danced inside. He’s also an inspiration to me because he not only nails the blues – he proves it’s just regular folks who make the best music. His day job is driving a Montgomery County School bus.

Some stories are brief: I saw a grey-haired hippy dancing in the street, who jolted my mind back 25 years ago and a crazy Valentine’s Day party at his house – I have a vague memory of a lot of wild red and pink costumes and a zip line through the trees.

And about that dancing: you gotta love a place where strangers dance with one another in the streets, and a man in a wheelchair pumping his arms in the air fits right in with couples swinging and swirling like pros. There was a pair of dance instructors I recognized from our local dance palace, Glen Echo Park, where I last saw them showing us zydeco moves; there were older couples who looked as though they’d been dancing together for decades; there were dancers still finding their rhythm and dancers sitting on the sidelines just rocking to the beat. Thanks to the Nighthawks and Tom Principato for the fabulous music, to David Eisner for organizing the music portion of the event, Roz Grigsby of Main Street Takoma for directing the festival, and to various familiar faces for being there so I could get out there and cut a rug among friends.

Look in the Takoma Park Newsletter for photos, November issue, out the last week of October.

Crab Cakes and Coons in Baltimore

On my way home from the BSO open rehearsal (see previous post), I decided to risk getting hopelessly tangled in Baltimore’s one-way streets and hang a left off Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard to see if I could find Lexington Market. Turns out, it’s not so hard, as there are signs directing out-of-towners like me, and I even found street parking in front of the Ronald McDonald House.

Which is kind of indicative of this neighborhood. It’s a rough mix of funky stores and a hospital and office workers and people who look as though they’re about to ask you for money. I walked three blocks to the market, with its huge sign, “Lexington Market: World Famous Since 1782,” ready for sensory overload.

This market is a warehouse on steroids, full of food stalls hawking everything from sushi to éclairs, and specializing in a few Maryland traditions like soul food, fried chicken and crab cakes. I wandered around a bit, passing over the steam trays of Chinese food, burgers and hotdogs that I could probably find in your average shopping mall, and wound up at Faidely’s Seafood, which felt pretty damn authentic (it was founded in 1886 and is still run by the Faidely family). There was a guy standing at the raw bar slurping oysters and gabbing with his server, and behind them was the hot line, offering three kinds of crabcakes (regular, which meant small; backfin; and clawmeat), fried fish, and a host of sides. I ordered a clawmeat crabcake, pickled beets (yum!) and potato salad (questionable). Then I grabbed a spot standing at a counter, slathered the crabcake with a bit of hot sauce, available in giant squeeze bottles, and chowed down.

This is one good crabcake – and I’ve been eating crabcakes since I was 8. Even better is the friendly atmosphere at this place. Among the locals and out-of-towners mixing easily all around me was Kam, a friendly world traveler from New Brunswick, Canada. He had his camera out, and we agreed the place is a feast of great images, not the least of which are the seasoned faces of the people serving up the food. Character is an understatement.

Faidley’s also sells fresh seafood to take home, and with rockfish at under $10 a pound and bluefish at something like $3.99, I am planning on a return trip. Next to Faidley’s was a place that sold muskrat and raccoon – and yes, I am tempted to try them, too, when they’re in season. There are also fresh chicken and pork stands, produce vendors, and other grocers here.

The last time I visited this market, years ago, I got a paper cup full of fried chicken livers – where else could you possibly buy that? Not sure if they’re still available, but I did see plenty of hog maws and pigs feet, Polish sausage (Polock Johnny’s wins the best name contest here) and enough bakeries to give you a permanent sugar high. The éclair I sampled was disappointing, but I’d give the bakeries another try after asking what’s really fresh and house-made.

While I explored the upper tier of the market, where there are tables and a balcony overlooking the crowds, I also got to hear a great blues band – the market regularly schedules local bands, many of them offering up blues, jazz and R&B. And, today happened to be part of the chocolate festival, so I watched a pretty silly chocolate eating contest involving two women with their hands tied behind their backs, dipping their faces into chocolate cake, pie, and other desserts, trying to eat the most. I do understand the compulsion to eat a lot at Lexington Market, though – I’ll definitely be back.

Happy Interlude

Tearing myself away from the desk (and its related deadlines) I made good on my plans, made weeks ago, to attend an open rehearsal of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra at the Meyerhoff in Baltimore today.
I am so glad I did this.
First of all, walking into this hall gives you that feeling you get when you enter a cathedral, as though the top of your head has opened up to the heavens and the world has just become a bigger and more beautiful place, full of profound possibility. The hall is enormous, with soaringly high ceilings studded with spotlights that illuminate an interior of golden wood and cream-colored balconies that look like adobe outcroppings on high cliffs. This morning it was busy with 90-plus musicians tuning up and practicing their most difficult (or perhaps favorite) passages of Bartok and Tchaikovsky.

Add to that the feeling of privilege, to be let in on the inner workings of a well-respected orchestra and a maestra, Marin Alsop who has made history as the first woman to head a major American orchestra. I like her even better for her commitment to making classical music more accessible to those of us who are not (yet) steeped in its traditions. Perhaps her appeal is why, among the retirees in attendance, there were also plenty of young faces. The event was free, too – major bonus.

Alsop began the rehearsal punctually at 10 a.m., explaining the concert briefly (two pieces – Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra and Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto – would, at the actual concert, be preceded by the Hungarian and Romanian folk music that influenced Bartok). Then she turned to the orchestra and got to work. It was all very informal, musicians in blue jeans and untucked shirts, but also very professional, everyone focused and sharp. They seemed to enjoy the work, and the mood seemed upbeat, though of course from the audience, even during an open rehearsal, it’s hard to tell.

I am always fascinated by the way a good conductor just takes the entire orchestra in hand, as if its entire sound inhabits her body, while at the same time she shapes it and releases it into the concert hall for everyone to experience with her. And the sound of so many musicians coming together to create one sound is absolute magic to me.

As this was rehearsal, there was a bit of stopping and starting, but for me it served to make the experience more real – and showed Alsop to be a considerate leader, requesting, rather than demanding, alterations in dynamics and sprinkling her comments with “thank you” and “that was beautiful.” She even sounded kind when she remarked lightly, “I respect all of your tempi but I think it’ll be easier if we just go with mine.”

You can hear the BSO at the magnificent Meyerhoff, or, closer to (my) home, at The Music Center at Strathmore, right in Rockville, Maryland. It, too, is a beautiful facility and musicians particularly favor its acoustics. The Strathmore bonus is the great little snack bar/dining area outside the concert hall. (Full disclosure: I write about the arts for Bethesda Magazine, and Strathmore frequently appears in my work. I also write for Strathmore's magazine, Applause.)

Real Clothes

Yes, it is a privilege to wear my pajamas while I work from my home office (best commute on the block, up the stairs and straight ahead). But there’s something about dressing for work that makes me feel more in charge, more inspired and motivated to act like a Real Working Person Out In The World. (other work-at-homers, you know what I mean.) This week, with a handful of appointments on my schedule, I got to strut around the streets of Bethesda in black, heeled boots, wide-legged grey pants and a great black sweater passed up to me by my daughter – I figure, if a 16-year-old deigned to wear it at some point, it’s gotta be stylish enough for Mama (especially since this particular 16-year-old is in the Fashion Club at school). The boost to my usually schlumpy demeanor elevated my mood (see Things My Teens Have Taught Me, #4) and made me want to scour the closet for more awesome outfits, or maybe even endure a day of shopping (stimulus overload!!!) to buy something new. At the very least, I am planning a trip to Value Village, our local thrift shop extraordinaire.

Yes, I have also been influenced by the documentary I just saw about Vogue Magazine – September Issue. What a great little glimpse into not only the world of fashion, but the world of ruthless editors who, dammit, are right despite their Frigidaire approach to slashing great ideas. This particular magazine is a world unto itself – I especially liked one short scene showing Editor Anna Wintour getting into her car (driven by someone else, of course) on a NY City street, where you can see real life all around her – paper cups and other trash blowing around in the gutter, dingy sidewalks and narrow lanes for vintage taxis bumping along beside her limo. The gritty scene underscores the contrast to the pristine world of fashion she’s created in the highrise offices of Vogue.

And even though I would never want to work for her, I do love her sunglasses. Maybe big is better.

Biker Boys in the West

Just got word from the “Biker Boys,” as they have become known in the emails flying around among parents and a few farflung relatives hosting them. They’ve developed a sort of virtual pit crew out here in cyberspace, supplementing the ground crew of various lovely people hosting them on couches, extra beds and the occasional floor. Thank you to all hosts!!! Parents on home base send things to places we know the boys will land – in one case, a dorm room at Harvard – so they’ll have warm clothes, plenty of energy bars, and the sense that we will always be here for them.

So far, the trip has taken them, on the bikes, from Elm Avenue in Takoma Park, up to Baltimore, through Philly (and a few nights with friends at Temple University), to New York City, where they stayed in Aunt Rebecca and Uncle Craig’s ballet studio (bikes at the barre. see photo for a scene on Broadway!). Then it was on to two different Ivy Leagues – Yale, and Harvard – where they stayed with college student friends and sampled the collegiate night life. After that, a three-day train ride took them from Boston to Seattle, and a bus trip for Eliot and Tyler went to Anacortes, about 70 miles north, where they got to eat grilled salmon with Aunt Sarah and cousin Conor (sorry they missed you, Richard!); Tom got to have a visit with friend Ana at Lewis and Clark College, in Portland. Then T & E bussed to Portland to join Tom again and they all mounted their bikes and pedaled south.

Current location: just south of Florence, Oregon, on the Coastal Highway, Highway 101, which is apparently a bike route as well as a roadway, Tyler says with plenty of shoulder – and I know this is important as those cars shoosh by at 50 mph. It is beautiful, all along the Oregon coastline, with cliffs dropping down to ocean. They recently rode through the Siuslaw National Forest. There are plenty of campgrounds for $4 a night per hiker or biker, and sometimes free (I didn’t ask).

People on the road have been incredibly generous – at one point, somewhere on the east coast (was that between NYC and Boston, or Philly and NYC?) the boys were asking strangers if they could camp on their lawns. The result: not only accommodations on a lawn, but one night in someone’s home (the college-age son was away so there was an available bedroom), and feast-like meals that included homegrown corn and big salad and burgers, and biker-sized breakfasts and even snacks for the road. This sort of generosity restores my faith in America, and inspires me to similar acts of kindness should I ever be asked to host a transient posse of pedalers passing through my own town. I think people are so excited about their trip that they’re happy to pitch in to help make it happen.

The boys are by all accounts hungry all the time. No kidding. They’re biking, at this point, 50 to 70 miles a day. They’ve discovered Dollar Tree, Tyler says, “where everything is actually a dollar.” Today the guys got a skillet to add to the pot they hunted down in NYC, so they have two cooking vessels. Tonight’s dinner: steak from the campstove. Yep. My vegetarian boy has put aside his veggie ways for practical reasons. Fuel.

Thank goodness for cell phones – even though Tyler eschewed bringing his own, he’s borrowed his friends’ to reach us a few times. It’s always great to hear his voice. And I’m grateful that Eliot’s little trick of burying his rained-on phone in a bag of rice seems to have dried it out sufficiently to work again. Gotta love these creative solutions. I’m sure they’re learning loads.

The Picture of Dorian Gray

Shocking. Moving. Thought-provoking. I know, it sounds like an ad for the play I saw last night, but really, it was all of those things and more. Like, full of artistry, from the writing to the acting, sets to lighting and even marketing (great flier, and yes, the lead really is a hunk).

The play, The Picture of Dorian Gray, at Round House Theatre, started out at an advantage, as I already loved the book (huge impact when I read it many years ago). The premise: a young man is so taken with his portrait that he wants to freeze his image, to stop time so that he’ll never age. Somehow he gets his wish, and is able to behave badly with no consequences (the usual wrinkles and old age illnesses and guilt-ridden eyes of the rest of us). Except his behavior is off the charts. It’s like Lord of the Flies, with 20-somethings. Kind of. And a fascinating consideration of what happens when we indulge our wildest impulses. What liberation! What a train wreck! Also loved the consideration of the arts: do music/painting/writing/stagecraft lead us to act or be a certain way? Or do they simply bring out what already lies within?

The bonus for me was that this was opening night, and a post-performance reception was packed with people – it felt like a party where I would enjoy getting to know just about anyone there. Among those I did get to chat with: James Kronzer, who designed the uber-cool set (and whose sets can be seen in many theaters around town, his creative approach and his steady work ethic inspire me); Sarah Pressler, who handles press for Round House and is always knowledgeable about upcoming productions; and Andy Torres, a dancer I met through, well, I’m not sure – Liz Lerman, Jane Franklin, Carla Perlo, Nancy Havilik, or possibly all three.

Plus, I got to have Clara on my arm, and she enjoyed the show as much as I did – despite the fact that it kept her up on a school night. She’s ready to recommend it to her entire drama class at Blair. Note for those with kids: A) tix are $10-$15 for people age 30 and under and B) there is a lot of risky business, including nudity.

Fall garden resurrection

Feeling guilty over the morass of weeds that had taken over the back part of my vegetable garden, last weekend I got to work with a shovel and dug myself out of what was beginning to look like The Secret Garden – pre-resurrection (see before and after pics). Now I walk by the garden with a smug look of satisfaction, as it’s been re-ordered into neat rows of what I hope will be a fall crop of various greens and peas.

Fall gardens are tricky for me – I usually plant them too late, and wind up with token midgets in scraggly rows. The good news is, they winter over and surprise me in spring with what my neighbors assume is my really early, especially ambitious spring crop – actually an uber-delayed fall harvest. I keep trying for an actual fall success, figuring the worst that can happen is I put $1.99 worth of seed packet in the ground and it doesn’t come up.

This year feels more promising. I persevered through the slim pickings in three different stores (um, borage? calendula? who grows these things? I’m all for variety but what happened to kale and collards?). Then I discovered that Johnson’s has a full complement of more familiar fall seed options, and I got to work.

As I watered in the seeds, I gave them a little pep talk, “Come on, collards, do your thing!” There’s also kale, spinach, lettuce, scallions, beets, chard, and cilantro (not sure about this one but we’ll see), plus sugar snaps that I planted next to the rescued wire “trellis” they climbed in the spring (I probably should have planted in a different spot, something about nitrogen in the soil, but I didn’t have time to relocate). There's also one tomatillo plant I discovered in the tangle of weeds, a volunteer from two years ago that's now produced enough for one bonus batch of salsa.

Clara – who patiently indulges me when I enthusiastically point out yet another pepper or eggplant that’s made it from our garden to our dinner plates -- says we won’t have to buy any groceries this fall, if it all comes up. We’ll see.

Caving in to Cooking Light

Enough with the leftovers.

Running short on the culinary energy that might save me from A) ordering out or B) scrambled eggs, again, I finally caved to the call of Cooking Light and bought $4.99 worth of inspiration in the form of food porn photos and accompanying recipes. It’s totally paid off.

First I indulged myself and went through the entire magazine, marking every recipe that looked appealing. It was an exercise in compulsive imaginings. The stilton burger? I wasn’t even in a red meat mood until I saw those juicy onions dripping off a cap of lusciously stinky cheese under the bun. So I put it on my list of recipes to try. Along with chocolate hazelnut bark – a chip of sheer, dark indulgence with a recipe that sounded ultra simple, plus it’s conveniently listed under “healthy snacks.” The list of recipes turned into a menu for the week: no longer will I root around in the frig, hungry and irritable because I didn't plan ahead. Well, at least for this week.

Last night I went for the halibut with basil butter, but substituted bluefish, the cheapest fish in the case at Whole Foods (someone give me an alternative to this high-priced fish monger, the product is great, but $8.99 a pound for bluefish?!?).

The dish was fabulous. And simple. The butter is what made this meal: it’s combined with (in my case) homemade pesto leftover from a batch I made the other night, and spiked with lemon rind and shallot, all mushed together and placed on top of the cooked-to-flakiness fish, where it melts into all the little crevices. I paired this with the full-page-photo-illustrated recipe for green beans and potatoes – another awesome dish, simple to make but complex in flavor, just this side of a spicy curry with mustard seeds and cumin and coriander and something called a New Mexican chili for which I substituted chili powder.

Can’t wait for the leftovers for lunch today.

We rocked the chocolate mousse

Following up on our movie night at Julie and Julia, Clara and I borrowed the book that started it all – Mastering the Art of French Cooking – and rustled up a fantastic meal that I still am not entirely comfortable pronouncing, my French being way limited. It was Boeuf a la Parisienne (sauteed beef with mushrooms and cream sauce), and we chose the recipe because it looked relatively easy and not-so-time-consuming for a first try. True to her reputation, Julia calls for beaucoup butter and cream, and we used it all – the only thing we changed was the cut of beef, sirloin instead of filet. For obvious reasons. And the dish came out fine. We served it with sautéed potatoes – Julia recommends doing them whole (in more butter) which is what we did, but they were a little undercooked. Patience has never been my strongest virtue. And we had green beans of our own making -- Clara's, actually, also involving lots of butter in the saute pan.

The crowing achievement of the meal was the chocolate mousse. Yep, we used raw eggwhites – and the egg yolks were none too cooked either, as we did them in a makeshift double boiler. But we all survived every delicious bite of it, and I do believe I’d do it again. Really, it set a new standard for the kind of chocolate I crave – it was not that light and airy mousse you sometimes get in restaurants, sort of a muddy-water color, but a nice, rich, dark chocolate color with taste to match. Yum.

Thanks to our lovely guests for coming to enjoy the meal. I think my favorite thing about cooking fabulous food is sharing it with friends. But I'm not sure -- because dancing around with my daughter in our small kitchen, as we madly stirred the chocolate so it wouldn't burn and tested the syrup we made for sugar-encrusted orange rind to garnish the mousse (do we have a candy thermometer? Could it be any further back in that overcrowded drawer of old wine corks and soup ladles and crab mallets? what does it mean to drop the syrup in water until it forms a string?) -- and peeling potatoes and figuring out how to do all the beef without crowding the pan (use two pans) ALL AT ONCE -- and still having fun -- was more than lovely.

BTW, I haven't decided yet if I'm going to buy my own copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking. It feels a little retro -- not necessarily a bad thing, but I'm more drawn to veggies than meat, and all that butter, well. I do like the explanations of the basics, though, lots of detail that answers the kitchen-y questions you don't know who else to ask.

Lunchtime Gardening

Because I work at home, I have the luxury of . . . rarely taking a real lunch hour. Usually I’m up at my desk with a bowl of salad, or at the dining room table with a sandwich and a manuscript to edit, or a must-read publication to peruse. I do stroll down the street with Nala, the dog, so she can have her daily romp with her dog-buddy, Jack, in his yard, but I generally leave her there so I can return home for more work.

Today I mixed it up a bit (feeling guilty that Nala is always the guest, rarely the host) and had Jack come to our yard. I brought my lunch outdoors, into the gloriously cool but still sunny summer day. I ate my salad (a satisfying bowl of lightly dressed lettuce and lots of sinkers, including earthy carrots I dug up yesterday) and watched the dogs romp. Then, while they lolled about in the shade, alternately biting one another’s ears and rolling in the grass, I weeded out the patch of garden where the parsley is pretty much spent.

The result: two little rows ready for planting lettuce and spinach. The seeds went in just as Jack was looking out the gate, wondering when his owner might pick him up. I sprinkled the seeds with water, walked Jack home, and now I’m back at work.

I still feel as though I have three weeks’ worth of weeding and digging and planting and reorganizing to do – but now I understand better that I can do it one lunch hour patch at a time.

A most satisfying lunch.

Front yard veggies

Yesterday I saw yet another front yard veggie garden – I love this trend! Is it a trend? In Takoma Park it seems these gems are popping up all over, in my neighborhood especially. There’s one next door, across the street, katty-corner, two down the avenue and, of course, my own.

I dug my garden out of the zoysia grass when I moved in five years ago, cutting up the lawn and replacing it with bags of organic soil I hauled up the 27 steps to my yard. The result has been moderately successful – I’ve grown all sorts of greens (lettuce, arugula, spinach, chard, collards), green beans, sugar snaps, peppers, tomatoes, zucchini, parsley, cilantro, eggplant, carrots, beets. I am currently overrun by weeds, but that has nothing to do with poor soil and everything to do with neglect.

My best crops this year are eggplant, jalapeños, and bell peppers, which are turning red just as I’d hoped. Talk about a great sandwich ingredient – roasted red bell peppers and roasted eggplant on a nice, artisanal bread spread with pesto from the garden basil, and maybe a bit of mozzarella or goat cheese – like a bite of late summer.

How to roast a pepper
Wash the pepper but keep it whole. Set the toaster oven on broil (or the oven, if you don’t have a toaster oven, or use the grill if you’ve got stuff going already). Set the pepper under (or on) the heat, turning as each side blisters and/or turns black. To blister the entire pepper will take 10-15 minutes. When it’s ready, remove it with tongs, place it in a paper bag and fold over the top. Leave it for 5 minutes or so, then remove and peel away the skin. The flesh will be nice and soft and sweet, great for slicing up in a sandwich, as a pizza topping, or as a “sinker” in a salad. (To roast the eggplant, slice and spread with olive oil, then place on the grill, or set under the broiler until slightly tender).

Shameless plug: I learned about other, quite beautiful and inspiring garden options when I wrote an article about people who ditch their lawns and instead choose ornamentals and natives. This choice is often all about aesthetics, but many people turn away from grass because more plantings provides food and shelter for wildlife, and minimize runoff that can pollute our waterways. The article, which features five examples of lovely lawnless homes, is in the current issue of Bethesda Magazine. (Sorry, no link to this particular article, but you can get it on newsstands)

God is in the [sandwich] details

A good sandwich is all about the condiments and additions. I have learned this from sandwich shop menus – among my favorites, the Sea Star on Chincoteague Island, Va. During a week-long vacation there, we treat ourselves to things like The Big Cheese and Super Sprout the first day, then make our own inspired creations the rest of the week. I’ve also cribbed from Whole Foods and Starbuck’s – they may be corporate but they’ve got some good ideas (send me local sandwich shop ideas, please!). Who says you can only get a cool sarnie (as Jamie Oliver calls it) from a shop? DIY.

First, forget about the main ingredient. You don’t need the roast beef, or turkey-n-swiss, or even egg salad. And even if you do choose these, focus on the accoutrements. If it were a salad, my nephew would call these “sinkers” – all the stuff that sinks to the bottom of the lettuce bowl. Cucumber chunks. Pitted olives. Roasted pine nuts. Raisins. Gather enough of these goodies and, as in so many other things (orchestras, for example), the sum of the whole becomes far greater than its parts. It becomes a Great Sandwich. Or, at least, Lunch.

This week’s triumph resulted from rooting around to find an “everything” bagel left from the bikers’ breakfast, which I smeared with humus made by the lovely Yahron, owner of Olive Tree foods.(Yahron runs a great falafel stand in Takoma Park, and sells his humus and other goodies at the co-op across the street).

Humus could be considered the Main Ingredient, but if you think about it, it’s just a spread. I jacked it up with some extra tahini I saw in the frig last time I went searching behind the milk carton. Olives spiked the flavor some more. Fresh tomatoes and thinly sliced cucumbers from the market upped the daily veggie quotient. And to top it all, I added my favorite sandwich enhancer, lifting the meal to sandwich-shop level: alfalfa sprouts. I must start growing these babies again, it really is so easy and their health factor is off the charts.

There you have it. I should have taken a picture. Still getting the hang of the whole blogging thing – maybe by the next food post I’ll remember the camera.

Biker Boys

So they’re off.

This afternoon, three 18-year-old boys loaded up three bicycles and pedaled off to Baltimore for the first leg of a 4-month journey that will take them up to Boston, over to Seattle (by train), then down the west coast and across the United States. One of them was my son, Tyler (that’s him on the left).

They were pretty patient with all the picture taking and questions from parents and friends asking about first aid kits, giving advice over routes, and expressing dismay over how small a kitty litter box seems when it’s converted into panniers (that would be Tyler’s alt-flavored choice for saddle bags, they’re known among some cross country trekkers to be watertight and cheap). Maybe the boys were tolerant because we plied them with bagels and fresh fruit before they left. Or maybe they’re smart enough to know big love when they see it.

Things my teens have taught me

1) It’s okay to start making cookies at 10 p.m. on a work night (the picture
shows Clara practicing in the daytime with a pie, three years ago!)
2) [Some] lyrics to rap are revolutionary. In a good way.
3) Cayenne on fried eggs tastes great.
4) It matters how you look.
5) It doesn’t matter how you look.
6) It’s okay to be late.
7) Question convention. More.
8) Run in the rain.
9) Friends are important.
10) So is family.

Friends who dance

Over the weekend I saw a show at the Dance Place, indisputably the center of dance in D.C. I could go on and on about how much I love this community of people, how warm and welcoming they are in class and at performances, how generous the community programs that take in neighborhood kids for a free summer camp and after school programs.
And the shows are fun, too.

I found out about this one, Choreographers Collaboration Project, from Alicia Luchowski, who takes Carla’s Monday night class with me. She choreographed two pieces in the show: By Twos and Threes moved upstage and down, playing with shadows in, you guessed it, groups of two and three dancers; and Where Do You Come From?, which (among other things) placed repeated motifs in dramatically contrasting music -- Simple Gifts with Yo-Yo Ma and Allison Krause, and the more earthy, Latin beat of Rodrigo y Gabriela. It seemed to be about origins. I’m totally making that up, there was no explanatory note in the program – but that’s one of the things I love about modern dance, you can take from it what you will.

There were three other choreographers in the program, and I was happy to discover one of them was Danielle Greene, who I got to dance with when I was in Carla and Company, one of the resident companies at Dance Place. Danielle’s piece, Weathering the Storm, buffeted dancers around the stage but I also saw a round, flowing element to the movement, like wind and water.

It’s always fun to see the work of someone I’ve watched move up close, in class or rehearsal – I imagine I recognize their bodies superimposed on other dancers, an odd displacement when the movement echoes through totally different body types.

How I feel about gardening

The Writer's Almanac captures a little of the magic of growing a garden in a Barbara Crooker's poem, Vegetable Love. I love the secret caves of peppers and the plump pulp of tomatoes.
Picking sugar snaps not long ago, I wondered how we got from treasuring juicy, ripe, round, swelling, abundant peas and peppers and eggplants and tomatoes and melons, peaches and apples and berries -- all nice and fat -- to admiring thin, even emaciated women we call "slender." In the natural world, the only slender I want is maybe a willowy stalk of asparagus or a bunch of haricot vert.
That's my green pepper in the photo, still growing plump.

Proof that I love to cook

Last night I pulled together a pantry meal -- you know, one of those surprisingly fabulous dinners you pull out your... cabinets ... when you just can't face the weekend crowd at the grocery store. It's called "Peasant Tortilla" in Julee Rosso's book, Great Good Food, but I've know it as Spanish Tortilla at places like Jaleo. It's way easy, beautiful on a plate, and makes me feel sophisticated because I imagine the other people joining me in savoring this very dish: They are sitting at a neighborhood bar in Spain, ordering tortillas to accompany lovely glasses of wine and chatting away, en Espanol.
Here is a my recipe, based very loosely on Rosso's. Once I get the hang of blogging, I'll start posting photos, too.

Ginny's version of Spanish Tortilla
1 potato, thinly sliced (the "thin" part is very important here)
4 whole eggs, 2 egg whites (please use free range, trust me on this)
1/2 an onion, again with the thin slices
1/2 cup chopped tomatoes (I used cherry tomatoes from Monica's garden, thanks!)
1 clove garlic, chopped (smashing it changes the flavor, but you could go either way depending on how much time you have for chopping)
3/4 cup frozen peas
a handful of Greek olives, pitted and chopped
olive oil for the pan
salt and pepper to taste

Heat the oil at medium-high in a cast iron skillet that you can put in the oven (actually, use whatever you like, but I love the cast iron -- sister Jean, are you listening? I'm still using what you gave me 20-plus years ago!). Add the potatoes, arranging in overlapping circles from the outside in. While you let 'em brown on the bottom (use a spatula to peek), preheat the oven to 500 degrees.
Once the potatoes have browned, scatter all remaining ingredients except the eggs over the top (no, you haven't flipped them, just leave them in the pan the way you first arranged them). Whisk the eggs and eggwhites all together, then pour over the potatoes etc. Place the skillet in the oven until set, maybe 5 minutes.
When you plate this (don't you love that verb, "to plate"?), you can flip it so you see the lovely layers of browned potatoes,or you can leave it upright and see bright green peas and summer-red tomatoes rising up out of the eggs.
This makes enough for my dinner, the next morning's breakfast, and someone else's generous snack later in the day -- 3 to 4 servings.

I Love to Cook. Really.

I love the idea of cooking. Flipping pages of cookbooks and old issues of Cooking Light, talking over recipes with friends, planning dinner parties. I get so lost in this that time passes and I get hungry and I can’t wait to get ingredients and cook and THEN eat, so I don’t actually cook. I go buy something ready-made.

Today I went to the farmer’s market in Silver Spring and bought a miniature quiche from Praline (yum) and vowed that eventually I will make one myself. Later. I’ve even chosen the recipe, thanks to my lovely neighbor, Claire, who has loaned me the original Julia Child cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Claire has had it since her college days. It is food-splattered and wobbly on its spine, so she is especially generous to loan it out. I picked it up after I saw the movie Julie and Julia -- the libraries and book stores are clean out of copies. I’m giving it a sort of trial run – if I like it, I might splurge and order a copy of my own. Actually, I’d be sharing it with Clara, who was so inspired after the movie she was ready to go to the store for ingredients at 8 p.m. I took her to Mon Ami Gabi instead. We’ll cook with Julia next week.

BTW, the Silver Spring market has gorgeous produce, and today it had tomato tastings hosted by Washington Gardener magazine. But it’s more expensive than our Takoma Park market, which is hands down the best one in the area.

A beginning

Why blog?

I have a lot to say.

Like how I love my kids (don’t believe teenagers are awful, who started that rumour anyway?) And how music can move me to tears (Don, are you listening?). How joyful dance can feel. How lovely it is to walk to the farmer’s market and chat with five people I know on the way, in a community where I know shopkeepers by name and can walk to just about everything I need.

And bad stuff, too: let’s talk about the toilet that requires four flushes to do the job, and the girl who got to hand her dad the tools but never learned how to fix things herself (that would be me). Then there are the yawningly empty nights when it’s just me and the dog and – well, and now a blog.

But this will not be a me-fest.

Or at least not entirely. Mostly I hope you will see some little piece of yourself here, that something will resonate and make you say, yes, what she said.

That is what I would like to do best.