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.