Priceless

There are some things money just can’t buy.

Love. Happiness.

And a big black trash bag full of fresh mustard greens.

Love, we all know about.

Greens, not so much.

Of course, you can buy greens, but as I was blanching the towering pile of greens on my counter to freeze today, I realized I could never have bought these particular greens.

True: you can buy greens in the produce section of the grocery store. Lettuce, definitely. Kale, maybe. Collards, even. But probably not mustard greens.

You might be able to get them at natural food store, Whole Foods maybe, on a good day, or the local natural foods store. And if you’re lucky enough to have a fabulous farmer’s market like mine, you’ll be able to get them there as well. Or, you could grow them yourself But if you want a whole big black trash bag full of them, you’d have to have a lot of space in the garden.

Like Frances.

Last week, I was at the Callaway Community Cannery, a place that’s been open since 1945 for local folks in Franklin County, Va. to can their greens – along with their tomatoes, applesauce, venison, beef, you name it. I’d already been told that people there share their bounty with one another, and they share the work of preserving it. If you finish cutting up your potatoes and you’re waiting for your soup to be finished before you pack it into jars and place it in the ginormous pressure canner, you go over and help the 90-year-old gentleman who is smashing up his apples in the strainer and packing it into his jars. You swap recipes with your neighbor, and share advice about tin cans vs mason jars. You let your friend know when you’re slaughtering the pigs, and offer her a ham. I overheard all these transactions the day I visited the cannery.

Frances and her friend, Shirley, were there canning greens, and when she heard I loved greens she said, “Come with me.” Then she took me out to her car, where I saw more greens in one place than I think I’ve ever seen. There was the big black trash bag, along with those black speckled pots – enormous ones -- full of cooked greens ready to can. Frances cans a lot, and besides the greens, she’d brought chickens to can the day I saw her. She gives more than half of her canned goods away to neighbors who don’t have easy access to fresh food. She is one giving person.

In fact, when she found out I wouldn’t be able to come by and see her garden and get some fresh greens straight from the source (I’d told her I was envious of a garden that could grow that many greens) she gave some of those greens from the back of her car, stuffing a quart jar full of the cooked ones, and cramming fresh ones into a re-usable shopping bag I had in my car.

These are the sweetest, tenderest greens I’ve ever eaten. Thank you Frances.

Money can’t buy that kinda greens. And it can’t buy this kind of community.

Everything but the squeal

The first time I tried scrapple, I was sitting on a stool at the Exmore Diner on the Eastern Shore of Virginia, and I had to ask the local fellow sitting next to me what it was, exactly.

He put his coffee down, turned to me, and shook his head.

“You don’t want to know.”

But, of course, I did. So I pressed. A little.

To make a long description short, scrapple is a kind of sausage – and we know how making sausage is compared to all messy processes, including the political variety (“Laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made," said the oft-quoted Otto von Bismarck.) As long as you like the outcome, you don’t want to know what goes into it.

I ordered the scrapple anyway.

It was delicious. Creamy and savory on the inside, crunchy and crispy on the outside, a bit salty. You have to fry it long enough, the cook advised, or it really is awful, mushy and unappealing and too close to what it is: the discarded scraps of the pig slaughtering process, the who-knows-what bits like ears and snouts and, I don’t know, maybe eyelids. The cook did not, of course, describe such things across the breakfast counter.

I’m not sure why there’s all this aversion to eating every part of the animal. If you can get past eating animals at all – their legs, their bellies, their butts – why would it matter if you also eat their livers and hearts and gizzards, whatever those are? I think eating “everything but the squeal” is smart. Admirable, even. Waste not, want not.

Though I do draw the line at beef tongue. Its texture is waaaaaay too close to that of my own tongue. And it’s not even dressed up with a nice name to help me forget what it is – like “tripe” for intestine, or “sweetbreads” for glands.

But mostly, I think it’s a great idea to use every part of the pig. In her book, Little House in the Big Woods, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Pa slaughtered a pig, took the bladder, cleaned it, blew it up like a balloon, and gave it to his girls to play with, like a ball. Laura and her sister, Mary, also put the pig tail on a stick and roasted it over the fire; they were so excited to eat it, they burned their mouths on it every time, never waiting for it to cool.

The same concept can be brought to the vegetable garden. At one point, our food co-op had an arrangement where if you hauled away a portion of the produce department discards as compost once a week, you got a 10 percent discount on your groceries. It was the best deal ever: I got great compost for my garden, I got the discount, and I got to pick through what they were tossing to find all sorts of edible food – whole red bell peppers with just a bit that had gone soft, apples with nicks and bruises that were perfect for applesauce, potatoes with blemishes. Granted, I had to root through soggy lettuce and smelly, yellowed broccoli and slimy carrots, but it was worth it.

This week, I salvaged vegetables from the garden before the weather turned seriously cold. I picked all the green tomatoes, stripped the pepper plants, and grabbed the basil for one more batch of pesto. And since I don’t love fried green tomatoes, I found a recipe for green tomato pie. Delicious.

Well, I thought so. Here’s another opinion:

Me: So, what do you think?

My honey: I think it would be better with apples.

Me: It does taste a bit like apple pie, doesn’t it?

My honey: Yeah. They both have crusts.

Two nights later, it had somehow gotten better, and we shared it with our wonderful friends whose table we always enjoy: they often serve us beef raised in their back yard, and veggies from their garden. Tonight, it was pork roast from a local farm, mustard greens we brought from another friend’s garden, and a wonderful baked combination of apples, figs, mushrooms and egg white. They also gave us some home-cured pepperoni and sausages to take home with us – complete with a description of how they were made.

You don’t want to know.

Humble pie

Being a person who works with words all day, every day, I tend to have some opinions about correct use of the English language. And, when someone makes a mistake, there’s at least a tiny part of me that raises an eyebrow and begins to feel superior. Even though I try not to. Everyone has their strengths, right? Someone may write “they’re” when they mean “their,” but they might be brilliant at crunching numbers, or manipulating all those pipes under the sink until the plumbing works again, or getting the balance of fruit and cornstarch just right so the cherry pie doesn’t run all over the place (if anyone knows this trick please call me).

Still, it’s hard to quiet the voice in my head that mentally edits a person when he or she says, “I couldn’t care less” when they really mean they could care less. And so on.

Except now, I really have to hold the judgment, even the unspoken kind. Because now I am making the same sorts of mistakes myself. 

For some reason, my fingers have been slipping on my keyboard. I type “hear” instead of “here.” This is not just spell-check gone awry. It is some subconscious mechanism that keeps making mistakes I thought I would never make, not since fifth grade. Today, my keyboarding fingers made up an entirely new word: disatisfication. It reminds me of “comfterful,” a word my cousin Susan made up. Comfterful, comfortful, comfortable. Or “draweau,” my little-girl word for bureau. It has drawers, so why wouldn’t it be “draweau?” Also Clara’s adorable “Pizza Hot” for Pizza Hut.

I actually like disatisfication. It sort of draws out the idea of being really dissatisfied – and then I don’t have to use that evil word that some teacher somewhere declared unnecessary and which I subsequently consider amateur:  “very.”

But I digress. Another pet peeve. 

This humility extends beyond language. Some imbecile driving in front of me neglects to get in the left turn lane on time, but I cannot fume, because I did the same thing just yesterday, looking sheepishly from the right lane as I tried to cut in front of the line of left-turning cars. Or, I feel disdainful of the women who pass the check around after lunch in a restaurant, reluctant to calculate the tip themselves (“math class is tough,” whines Teen Talk Barbie) – until one day (despite the fact that I really do know how to do this!) I somehow manage to tip the waiter 50 percent instead of 15 percent.

Good thing the check was a small one. Even so: That’s some expensive humble pie. 

To build a fire

Okay, I am not so desperate as the guy in the Jack London story, fighting sub-zero temperatures on a remote trail while trying to coax flame from a few sticks in the snow. But I do get anxious about making a fire, and this weekend it was more important than building a picture-perfect blaze in the fireplace.

It was cold. There was no central heat. I needed that fire.

We are talking out in the country. And, here’s the thing: I am no master fire builder. Every time I put my match to newspaper, tucked carefully under sticks of kindling and neatly placed pieces of wood, I worry that the ratio of big to small branches is workable, that the newspaper is neither too tightly crumpled nor too loose, and I hope that the fire gods will smile on me and give me heat. Sometimes, they do. Most times, even. But it still comes as a surprise.

Perhaps that’s because I did not grow up making fires. I gathered kindling in the “woods” behind our Long Island home – a vacant lot in a suburban development in Setauket. I approached this very important assignment with the earnest vigor of the good little 7-year-old I was, gathering the driest, best-sized sticks, then twisting pages of newspaper just so to set beneath them and delivering it all to my father, who put it all together and made the actual fire himself.

As a teenager in Florida, I made a small fire in another vacant lot, which I somehow knew was not allowed – just as I knew the cigarettes my friend snuck from her mother’s purse for us to try, lighting them at our tiny stick fire, were forbidden. Later, in North Carolina, my college boyfriend showed me how to light a fire in his woodstove, which I did while he was away and I stayed at his house, taking care of his cats. I felt like a pioneer woman, choosing quick- and hot-burning pine to burn in the wood cookstove, congratulating myself when the water for my tea finally boiled.

I shared my own house in college with two fire building housemates, who dealt with the woodstove themselves. We rented the house, on a mountain road outside Boone, N.C., for $150 a month, total, and it was as drafty as a barn, with gaps in the walls where moonlight and the cold seeped in.  The stove was in the one interior room, and that is where we spent all our time, with the doors to the kitchen, living room and bedrooms closed tight against the weather. At bedtime, we would turn on electric blankets in the bedrooms, wait for them to heat up, then dive under the covers until morning.

We needed fire in that house. Last weekend, same: drafty house, up in the mountains of SW Virginia. Cold grate. No fire.

I know I can do this – I’ve done it before. But I am a junior firebuilder. A junior firebuilder, walking into a cold house at the end of a dark road a mile from any neighbor. Well, less than a mile, but far enough so that it was pitch dark walking between the car and the front door and the only sounds were deer sneaking around in the woods. This was no vacant lot in Florida. It was the first time I’d been on my own there, and I arrived at 8:30, in the dark of one of our first cold autumn nights, with temperatures below 30 degrees outside—and probably inside as well. I kept my hat and coat on.

To start a fire: I checked the flu in the fireplace. I gathered up the very dry kindling and wood I’d brought along, crumpled newspaper just as Daddy taught me, arranged my sticks on top and placed a couple of small logs just so. I struck a match. I used the new trick my honey (and master firebuilder) showed me, and directed the first wisps of smoke up the flu with a lit bit of newspaper held where the fireplace gives way to chimney.

Voila! A face-warming fire in the grate.

Amazing.

I know the woodstove in the next room would have been more efficient. It would eventually warm the whole house, unlike the fire, which burned one side of my legs but left the other side of me, and the rest of the room, cold. Like a camp fire. But I kept my hat on and, for the couple hours before bed, the fireplace was perfect.

I sat contentedly, luxuriating in the fire’s glow, occasionally feeding it another log that I’d warmed on the stone hearth first.

At bedtime, I placed the screen over the fireplace and opened the door to the bedroom.

Where I’d switched on the space heater.

There are lots of ways to build a fire.

Raisins and salt

My dream is to work out in the garden, pushing the edge of dusk, happy to be rearranging the earth and its bounty until it’s too dark to see, while inside my house someone is making dinner. Isn’t that the way it’s supposed to be? Division of labor. You can have both: late hours in the garden, AND homemade dinner.

That’s not the way it works when you are single. Any late gardening means dinner will be late, too – and it will probably be scrambled eggs or grilled cheese or something equally quick and easy. Which is fine – but wow, wouldn’t it be amazing to come in, wash the mud from my hands, and sit down to a real meal that someone else has made? Or how about this: come home from work at the end of a long weekday and have dinner ready? I’m not talking about being met at the door with a martini and my house slippers – just being met at the door by cooking smells and knowing that dinner is already underway.

This happens now.

It is one of the many perks of being (newly) married.

And there are more.

Just today I called my husband (don’t you love the sound of that?!?!) and asked him to pick up raisins and salt. And he will. I don’t have to make a special trip to the co-op, or put it on my list for later, or go without raisins in my oatmeal tomorrow morning, because there is another person who is my partner here, and we work together to be sure the pantry is stocked.

Also. He sends me copies of the bills he’s paid. He is paying the bills. We share costs, but the act of sending the money in, on time, every month, is no longer my sole responsibility.

Liberation can mean a lot of things: besides being free to do as you please, it frequently means doing everything yourself. But it can also mean giving some of that responsibility up to someone else. It can mean raisins and salt that you didn’t have to run out and buy yourself.
Thank you, my honey.

Patchwork living

I’m always struck when I visit Floyd County to see how people make a living in what is still a hard-scrabble place. Hard scrabble in a different way now than it once was – yes, literally the soil is rocky, but since most folks don’t make a living from the land anymore, they are scrabbling in different ways.

Driving down Highway 221 I see a hand-painted yard sign for small engine repair, “from ATVs to lawn mowers.” I imagine this evolved from a neighbor doing favors for family and friends, then deciding to make it a business. Ditto the hand-lettered “deer processing” sign – all those hunters, heading back to the city after a weekend, don’t have time to dress their deer. A business is born.

There’s also the woman who cuts hair at the back of the general store, and another who make barbeque sauce and apple butter to sell at the farm stand. 

It happens in other small towns, too. Every time I visit Chincoteague, Va., I consider spending an entire summer there, growing tomatoes to sell from a table set out in my front yard. If I had a front yard, there. There was one farmer who drove his pickup truck to the island every weekend and sold watermelons from the back. And I love the tables set out with seashells for sale. Fifty cents each.

When my income dips – and, in my business, it can be like a roller coaster – I often comfort myself by the thought of all the things I could do if I needed to make money just to get by. I always think first of baking pie. I could sell it to busy friends and neighbors too busy to bake at Thanksgiving! One summer between college semesters, I baked three kinds of bread and sold it at the local health food store. I don’t remember now how much money I made, but I do remember being crestfallen when my father pointed out that I was getting the electricity to bake with for free, at my parents' house. And I thought I was such a clever young business woman.

Today, I’m thinking of the big bag of chestnuts I gathered this morning from under the trees near our favorite country hideaway. If I were living near Floyd full time, I could package them in brown paper bags and sell them at the farmer’s market. I could gather wild nettles, a sort of gourmet foraging novelty, and sell those as well (they’re actually delicious, which I know thanks to a Floyd County potluck). Or hunt mushrooms for sale, or pick dandelions and package them neatly, the way French farmers do for the Paris market.

Instead of lattice-top pies, I could make hand pies, maybe team up with a mountain woman who could share her recipes, and we could pool our profits. We could sell to the tourists who come up the mountain for the fall leaves, we could use lard to appeal to the traditionalists, and vegetable shortening for the crunchy-granola vegetarians. I could write a book about baking with Esther, or whoever I find willing to tolerate my enthusiasm for tradition that isn’t even my own, long enough to bake with me.

Or, I could go back to the city and write more local news, more local travel, more education policy, patchworking a living together the way I’ve done for the past 20 years. Patchworks come in all different textures and patterns. I guess mine will remain, in some form, the written word.

Though if you really want a Thanksgiving pie, you know who to call.

Held up by community

All the most private moments – birth and death, tragedy, accomplishment – seem so intimate. Not only does it feel as if they’ve never happened to anyone but you, in precisely the way you are experiencing them, but also it feels as though they are moments you must live through utterly on your own.

Why is that? Because the truth is these life-changing moments nearly always involve community: celebrating, sympathizing, supporting, crying, laughing or cheering us on.

And so, our community held us up last month as we celebrated our new marriage.

Let me tell you how community – and locally sourced -- this wedding was. It started out with invitations hand-crafted by artist/design friends. Other friends volunteered to gather flowers. Another contributed photography. Our guests fed us themselves – they brought potluck to add to the food and drink we provided. Food is one of the greatest ways people connect, and I loved seeing the many dishes our friends contributed. A trifle with berries and peaches picked by my sister and niece! A favorite chicken dish with homemade pasta! And TWO wedding cakes: one that I know ate up hours of weekend and late night planning and testing turned out to be a masterpiece of crunchy meringue layered with tangy apricot, a sweet almond cake that was dense and light at the same time, topped with  rich buttercream and organic – yes organic – white roses. The other was equally meaningful, with a history involving seven generations of Myers women on my side of the family – well, eight, if you count Clara Dodd, the daughter who baked it!

Our children and friends did a yeoman’s job of helping with last-minute details, making signs for trash cans, making sure the stereo system was working, picking up food and wine, toting potluck paper plates and cutlery, and cleaning it all up when we were finished. And contributions continue, as guests share their photos with us in the best ways, on line and in beautifully crafted collections.

Then there was family who came hundreds of miles to join us, surrounding us by a sense of rootedness that only family can provide, siblings and their children and their grandchildren, reminding us of where we come from and where we are going.

Even the larger community contributed: the folding chairs for the ceremony were borrowed from the local church. The flowers were from the Takoma Park Farmer’s Market a few blocks away. The sound system was set up by the local music guru, whose friendly face is familiar to anyone who’s attended a Takoma Park Street Festival or an IMT concert at the Community Center, or shopped at the House of Musical Traditions. Organization help came from JudyTiger, a friend who once ran the community gardens in D.C. and who took time out of her organizing business to pitch in. Some of the food came from Middle Eastern Market, and we held the event at the Cady Lee House, a landmark Victorian home restored by one of the leaders of Historic Takoma and now used as office space for a community youth support organization.

But most of all, we had friends and family all around us, so that whenever I turned there was someone to help out, or just share the moment, and share the joy. Heartfelt thanks must go out to everyone who launched us into our very happy marriage.

To be surrounded by such a loving community was the best way to share this most intimate moment. 

Grandmother's wedding cake

There are periods in our lives when everything happens at once. I see this often among the young families in my neighborhood: they move into a new home, get a new job, have a new baby – all within the space of three or four months.

At age 51, it’s my turn.

I am moving, marrying, renovating a new home and juggling new work. I could be – and sometimes do – feel uprooted with all this change. But my roots, it turns out, run deep.

About three months ago I was surrounded by boxes in the attic, moving out. Time was precious, so I was determined not to give in to nostalgia. For the most part I resisted leafing through old yearbooks and mementos, but on top of one box was a photo album that looked new. Should I set it aside? Or put it with the other photos?

I opened it up. Just to see what was in it.

Out slipped a note from my oldest sister, written nearly 10 years ago on Christmas stationery. Just one page of the album was finished – the note suggested the possibility of filling in the rest over the years.

That one page was enough.

In the center was what appeared to be a wedding invitation: formal, printed script on creamy white stock. But instead of requesting “the honor of your presence…” it described the wedding cake made by my grandmother, Clara Dodd (Myers). Surrounding this was a vintage photograph of her, along with photos of her mother, and her mother’s mother. The script explained that each of them had baked this cake for their weddings, part of a tradition that went back through six generations of women. Under the photos and story were two food-stained index cards recording, in spidery handwriting, the actual recipe. A pint of molasses. A pound of flour.

Apparently, it was my turn.

The cake is a fruitcake, which was traditional for weddings in the 19^th century –this may have been because there was no baking soda then, and with no refrigeration the whisky-soaked cake kept well on a shelf.  Clara Dodd’s mother, Anne Sniffen (Dodd) was born in 1868, and her great great grandmother, who is the first listed as having made the cake, would have lived four generations before, which must have been in the 1700s.

This is a different breed of cake from the brick-hard, brick-heavy holiday punchline. It is rich and moist,  sunny with raisins and sweet with warm, earthy flavor. How do I know?

My daughter, my own Clara Dodd, named for her great grandmother, made it for my wedding.

Clara Dodd Myers, raised five sons and lost one daughter, who was three when she succumbed to one of those diseases now easily cured (was it pneumonia? Whooping cough?). Her husband was a stern patriarch who insisted his boys wear neckties to the dinner table. She must have been the softer of the two parents – her boys, and eventually, their children, called her “Mothe,” short for “Mother” (and pronounced like the first part of that word).

In fact, Mothe did not like her given name, Clara Blanche. She was a tomboy, I’m told, and was called “Bill.” Despite  that fact (and after confirming with my father that my late grandmother would not object), I named my only daughter for her. He nicknamed her “Billy Dodd.”

Mothe was just 5 feet tall, but from the stories I’ve heard, she was a pistol. When her children were still  small, she took a bus across the country, by herself, to visit her brother in the San Juan Islands, writing postcards about her travels and sending her love back to her family in Sea Cliff, on the north shore of Long Island. One story recounts her girlish delight when (and I picture her here as a young bride), she’d purchased a dress and twirled around in it for her husband. He sternly told her to return it to the store, as they couldn’t afford this extravagance. During World War II, she dug up a victory garden in the hard-packed dirt of her back yard; she lived with her mother, her husband and five sons in an old Victorian house with a coal-burning stove in the basement, leaving the bedroom windows open in winter for the fresh air. In summer she trooped the boys down to the beach at Hempstead Harbor, where her youngest would splash within the safety of a playpen, set at the water’s edge with its bottom removed.

My own memories of Mothe are limited: She had a little white dog named Skid Row,  a front porch swing that bumped into the wall of the living room behind it, a gravel driveway that always signaled the end of our family’s long drive to her house. She used a gourd to darn socks, always had a knitting basket nearby, and drank gin and ginger ale with ice cubes that tinkled in her glass.

I was just 5 years old when we sat around the dining room table and my father told us Mothe had died. He gave each of his four daughters a piece of her jewelry. I wore the little clasp bracelet on my wedding day.

And, I also ate her wedding cake. Thank you, sister Jean, for sharing this family history. Thank you my own sweet Clara Dodd, for baking the cake, and carrying it into the seventh generation – I will make it eight at your wedding some day! And thank you, Mothe, for joining us in the celebration, and reminding me: even in the midst of change, I am rooted in tradition. 

Transformation

I have changed professions.

This week, I am a contractor. And a mover.
All this because yes, I am moving – just across the street, but it is a big deal just the same. The accumulation of years, etc. etc.
So, I am filling boxes with all sorts of things – CDs, books, photo albums, pillows, clothes. And I am moving those boxes, muscling them down two flights of stairs, shoving them around the back of the van or maneuvering them onto a hand truck and then unloading them elsewhere. During the hottest week of the year.

I am also tidying up the house I am leaving, for the next resident – which is where the contractor part comes in. I am painting a soothing “Swiss Coffee” color over the purple and lime green in my son’s room (bittersweet, but transformational). I am recaulking the tub where it had gotten grody. I am replacing drip pans under stove burners, and cleaning out the contacts so the one burner that wouldn’t light will work again. I am trimming hedges, untangling vines from the azalea, mowing the lawn, hauling brush to the curb.

I am sweaty. I wear paint-splattered shorts and dirty t-shirts, and when I am clearing thorn-studded brush I am wearing my father’s old pants, also paint-splattered, and recently mended where they split at the crotch.
This work is liberating. I feel as though I’ve dropped all pretense – and I didn’t think I had much to begin with. But I do like to think of myself as pulled together when I go out in public.
Not this week.
I go to the hardware store in the clothes I am wearing – which are typically the clothes I wore the day before. My shirt is inside out, to protect it from paint. And it is damp with the heat. I am dirty, smear of soil on my knee where I went out to pick tomatoes at lunch time, hair covered by a hat, or pulled back with a strip of fabric I tore from an old t-shirt that was waiting to be used as a rag. I run into people I know, and they don’t even notice – or at least they are too polite to say anything. It’s still me. Maybe that pulled together look isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
My eating habits have changed, too. I am hungry all the time but I don’t have time to stop and eat. Also, the house is bare bones, so I heat up whatever is not freezer-burned if I get hungry. Edamame. Raisin bread that’s been frozen for a year. Between that and the heat, I’ve lost seven pounds.
And I feel strong. Wiry. I look in the mirror, and I see my dad, a guy who was always outside trimming fruit trees or mowing the hay field or fertilizing the lawn, sweating and skinny in the Florida heat. I think of him when I pick up his old screwdriver to fasten a light switch plate, or when I’m cutting in painting trim, trying to make it look right – Dad was a perfectionist and, it turns out, I’ve inherited a bit of that myself. The “holidays” where wall paint makes an unintended spot appearance on the ceiling, must be fixed. The gutters must be replaced all around, not just in the spot where the oak limb fell last year.
The place is going to look great. It is being transformed.
And so am I.

Church of the Blessed Farmers Market

  Every farmer’s market has its day.
  In Takoma Park, Sunday market is a landmark, if a weekly event can be a landmark. It’s where everyone goes to run into one another, catch up on the news of the week, and incidentally buy apples and peaches and strawberries, depending on the season – sort of like church, but vegetables and fruit replace the prayers.
  Certainly the food is worthy of reverence. This market has the best selection of greens I’ve ever seen: collards, mustard, spinach, kale, bok choi, chard. There’s an entire town block dedicated to locally grown, mostly organic vegetables and herbs, sustainably raised bison, artisanal goat cheese, my favorite scones, big, fat empanadas, and eggs that go for $5 a dozen. Yes, some of it’s on the pricey side, but we are paying the farmers directly, talking to them about how this year’s crop of spinach has been and when we should all plant broccoli. It’s the sort of place where the farmers write memoirs (this Sunday, Forrest Pritchard from Smith Meadows Farm, will be signing his). And it’s where you’ll see your neighbors not only purchasing produce, but also pitching in behind the “counter,” working part-time as clerks for the farmers. I faithfully buy apples and peaches from Twin Springs FruitFarm, where my then-teenage son worked for several summers in a row, and the regulars there often ask for updates on his travels.
  Plus, there’s live music: the teenage fiddle player (I remember her from my daughter’s gymnastics classes) and the Banjo Man, with his crowds of young children chiming in on Oh Susanna.
  On Wednesdays – when many churches schedule evening mass – I can replenish the produce drawer at the Crossroads Market, where there is an entirely different congregation. For one thing, many of the patrons and vendors speak Spanish, so I get to trot out my rudimentary español: “dos pepinos, por favor, y un cantalupo pequeño.” In fact, with the smell of fresh pupusas sizzling on the griddle and the produce labels written in both Spanish and English, I can imagine that I am visiting some bustling town in Central America. The market has also gained a pioneering reputation for the first Fresh Checks program in the country: It allows families participating in federal food assistance programs like WIC and SNAP to use their benefits to purchase locally grown produce at discount prices.
   I also love the African griot/musician, who shows up from time to time to play his ngoni, a sort of skinny guitar  from Mali. Plus, there are Sno-Kones!
  But no rhubarb. For that, there is a Saturday farm stand that just opened this year on Maple Avenue. Called MarVa Harvest, it’s located right in the middle of a corridor of high-rise apartment buildings, just a couple of white tents erected in a parking lot to shade tables of produce grown primarily on one local farm. This market has a mission, which its prices reflect: to provide lower cost, sustainably grown food to everyone, regardless of income.
  The first time I visited, I saw the rhubarb I’d been looking for – it has such a short season, and I hadn’t seen it available anywhere else. The folks who run this market are polite enough to keep their thoughts to themselves, but I’m sure they were puzzled by my over-reaction when, halfway across the parking lot, I was already exclaiming, "Wow, rhubarb!" I was so excited to see it, I bought extra so I could freeze some for later. And I made one of the best strawberry rhubarb pies ever – my favorite, next to cherry. And mixed berry. And that lemon slice pie I want to try next.  
  Like farmers markets, pie has endless varieties. I love them all. Any day of the week.

Art for fun

Art Hop:
Excuse for artists and friends to roam around town for two days and look at each other’s work.
Opportunity to participate in no-pressure pop-ins, to see art you don’t have to buy (but can), then move on.
Showcase for Takoma Park’s artsy fartsy-ness, saturating everything from the hardware store to the toy shop.
All of the above.

And, this year, there’s an infusion of new talent. I’ll  not only get to rub elbows with the uber hipsters (and friends) who have anchored this town’s art scene for decades, I get to hang with some younger talent as well. Like Martin Swift.

He is seriously talented.

Full disclosure: he calls me Mom (as in, he visits my own kids enough to feel like a part of the family), so yeah, I would say he’s talented. But also, it’s true. This is not your average, just-out-of-college kid dipping his toes in the water and showing his “art” at non-juried, come-one-come-all shows. This is serious stuff, and this is a bold guy, unafraid of putting his (very distinctive) work out there on its own merit – not because it fits a particular genre or market, but because it’s who he is and what he has to say. Plus, it’s selling.

You’ll just have to see it for yourself, at Trohv, during Art Hop.

Which, even without Martin, is one awesome event. I mean really, what other city of 17,000 has the collection of talent we have? Sure, some of it is whimsical and crafty, but I would dare to say (since I’m not an art critic, but cleave to the old trope, “I know what I like”) much of it is high-end whimsical. You will not find plastic beads strung on earring wires. But there will be handmade beads, glass-fired beads, and an enthusiastic explanation of how they were made from an artist standing yes, right there, hoping you might dish out $30 for a pair of earrings. And even if you can’t really afford to, you probably will. Plus, there are other artists who have not quit their day jobs; their price tags are lower. And. You don’t have to buy anything. You can just come and enjoy the art, right where it is, and feel enriched because you live in this place where artists thrive.

The vibe here is open and unpretentious, the artists mostly have fun visiting with friends and each other, and if there are art patrons, you wouldn’t be able to tell them from the rest of the crowd. It’s basically a party, that happens to have art as a running theme.

The official Art Hop spiel goes like this: more than 60 emerging and established artists, variety of media (painting, textiles, photography, collage, hand-crafted jewelry), in shops, galleries and restaurants all around town. So, you’ll see collage at the hair studio and sculpture at the florist.  Saturday and Sunday, April 13 and 14 from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Plus, there’s a kick-off tonight, Friday the 12^th from 6 to 8 at Trohv. Martin will be there.

And so will I.

The photo: Artist Bobbi Kittner, who helped found Art Hop, Bulent Ceylon who runs the shop, Covered Market, and John McQuillan, who runs Salon Jam hair studio. Photo by Sam Kittner

Warmth of community

Yesterday, one of the first warm days of spring, there were signs of the season everywhere in Sligo Creek Park. Brilliant yellow flowers carpeting the banks of the creek. Mallards paired up in the water. And my favorite, a pair of socks had been left behind, spread out on a rock where a boy must have liberated his toes and switched to barefoot for the summer.

On these gloriously warm days, people come out again. It is as if we are sparkling water, bottled up all winter long, until we unscrew our caps and the effervescence of our lives explodes.  There are more runners. More bikers. More gardeners and dog walkers and grillers.

And we talk more. We want to catch up with our neighbors.

I’ve found the perfect spot for this: at the new gelato store, kitty korner from the town clock. At about 5:00, the commuters begin walking home from Metro, and the young mamas are still out with their strollers. The merchants are around, too. Everyone is out, eating gelato, or drinking coffee, or popping into the hardware store, greeting one another, lightened by the warm weather and each other.

Yesterday I caught up with Dave, who I haven’t seen in six years. And Jane, who lives just down the street but with whom I haven’t shared a conversation in months. We sat in the sun and greeted people going by and chatted about our kids and our work and the new businesses in town.

Even strangers greet one another. Back in the park, one of the dog-walking regulars – an older guy with white stubble and two labs, one black and one white – leaned over the fence at the playground and called out, “How’s the new slide?” The young mama answered over her baby’s wailing, “We’re about to find out!” and looked up to find her toddler negotiating the top of the slide.

I have an old card posted on my refrigerator: “How to Build Community.” It’s a vintage sentiment but it still rings true. It is the unwritten code of Takoma Park.

Leave your house. Know your neighbors. Greet people. Sit on your stoop. Plant flowers. Share what you have. Help a lost dog. Take children to the park. Have potlucks.

 I am going to a potluck now. At my neighbor’s house. I will probably visit with another neighbor on the way.

And it’s not just because it’s spring – but that helps.

 

The photo is Marcello Minna, the very friendly Italian who runs our new gelato shop, Dolci Gelati. Building community.

Agricultural revolution

On a recent morning, as I walked my dog around the block, she lunged at something just out of my sight, on the other side of a neighbor’s car. Probably a cat, I thought.

No. A chicken.

Two chickens, in fact.

And I live in Takoma Park, a Washington, D.C. suburb within walking distance of a subway stop into the city.

The chickens did their high-stepping waddle around the back of the car, scolding the dog in their gentle clucking voices as they went. The dog, utterly confused, and, thank goodness, on a leash, alternately lunged and backed off. 

I know these chickens. They belong to a friend who lives across the street from where they were pecking at the neighbor’s lawn. They are out during the day, but mostly stay close to the coop and are gathered in at night. I thought of knocking on the door to let my friends know “the girls” had wandered across the street, but then they started to cross on their own. In front of a car.

Oh, no! I put out a mittened hand to alert the driver, who stopped to let the birds cross.

At this point I was laughing at these busybody hens bustling themselves home after their morning adventure, oblivious to automobile traffic and focused only on the patch of ground in front of them. The driver, unbelievably, was not amused, and acted as though she was waiting for a child to cross the street, nothing unusual about two chickens in her path. She continued her conversation on the cell phone and never made eye contact with me, or the chickens. 

I chuckled all the way home.

Then I toasted some cornbread for breakfast and slathered it with honey from the hives of another neighbor, across the street.

Who says you have to live on a farm to have the best of everything? 

 

A whelk to remember

New York Times, food section article: Elaborate photos of a little seashell-encased delicacy served beside a ramekin of unnaturally bright green parsley and garlic butter, with a glass of white wine in the soft-focus background. International overtones: the Italians call them scungilli, the English have popularized them as whelks – along with talk of executive chefs and lists of high-end-sounding restaurants that serve them mixed with “crispy duck tongues,” or dressed with “fenugreek-cashew pesto.”
Really?
These are the same little seashells I picked up on the beach when I was a kid, excited to be gathering up something we’d be eating for dinner that night, far from the linen-covered tables of Manhattan.
As I remember it, the whelk is a humble little critter, in the way a dragonfly is humble: common, in its habitat, but stunningly and intricately beautiful when you take time to really look at it. The whelks I encountered all those years ago were a study in black and white, like a houndstooth tweed whorled around a spiral snail house.

I don’t remember exactly how we ate the whelks – probably steamed until we could ease them out of their shells, and dipped in butter, if we had it. We were living aboard the Glad Tidings, a 40-foot sailboat that was home for a family of five (sorry, Jean, you’d disembarked by this time), and on this particular occasion we were in Virgin Gorda, in the British Virgin Islands. One expanse of coastline, called the Baths, is all rock, great for 9-year-old girls like me: I climbed and scrambled and explored, discovering the dips and recesses in the rock where centuries of crashing waves had worn the granite into smooth recesses, now filled with seawater warming in the sun. These still pools were full of tiny fish and shellfish, the sort that are perfect for filling small pockets. And they were full of whelks.

Our guide, Cap’n Tony, a boisterous, dark-bearded sailor and ex-pat we’d met at the dock a few islands back, told us the whelks were edible. Full of 9-year-old purpose, I began to collect them.
I kept one of the shells for years, proud to know the provenance of such a thing – but aside from that keepsake, I’ve never encountered whelks since. Until the New York Times.
In typical fashion – it’s what I love about this publication – the Times is thorough: I read that whelks are closely related to conch, the other Caribbean shellfish we learned to eat on the boat (we would follow their trails in the sand, visible through gin-clear water, then dive down for them). Whelks are usually sold as scungilli, often for Italian pasta sauces, and they are a by-catch (like the rock shrimp and stone crab my dad used to get in his shrimp nets, years later in Florida).
All good information. But the most important thing to remember about whelks, for me: that magical day I spent gathering them from the rocks, under a Caribbean sun.

Winter jam

This town knows how to do winter.
We do not slouch around in our pajamas all day, mourning the light and warmer weather of other seasons. No. We make an effort.
One recent weekend, I met with friends to celebrate three birthdays at Takoma Park’s OliveLounge. We had so much fun we decided to make it a weekly gathering. And we went again this past Friday. I saw two other friends there and the outing turned into dinner. What a great place to hang out! I always see neighbors, the wait staff is good-looking and attentive, and they let us hold a table until all in our birthday party had arrived. But mostly, it’s the gathering of friends that makes this place work.
Some of the folks who gathered this past Friday went on to hear some music two blocks away, at the Carroll Cafe. Another group went to Restaurant Week in Washington, one of the perks of living so close to the city’s border: during slow months (like February) some of the more expensive restaurants give a deal for a week, fixed price for three courses at lunch or dinner. I’d done the same thing for lunch earlier in the week. Yum.
On another weekend, I missed a writer’s meeting in order to get some housework done –but I could also have met my new neighbors, who had an open house to get to know the folks who live around them. The Takoma Park Jazz Fest sponsored its annual Jazz Brawl, for musicians to compete for a spot at the June festival. And on a Thursday night, a blues band was playing at El Golfo, a Mexican restaurant just over the Takoma Park line in Silver Spring. Midwinter Play Day was also that Thursday, with board games, yoga, dress-up, live music and more for kids and adults at the Takoma Park Community Center.
I did get to my hairdressers, Salon Jam, for a Valentine’s Day Art open house, where I saw my friend (and artist) Bobbi Kittner and met a couple artists I didn’t know before. The housewares store, Trohv, had a pop-up coffee shop the same day, with luxurious-sounding coffees described as if they were fine wines – and while "almond and sage aromatics, full body and cherry acidity" isn't everyone's cuppa, I loved sipping along with my friend.
The list goes on: yoga classes at the fabulous Willow Street Yoga; dance performances and classes at the Dance Exchange, and in nearby Brookland at the Dance Place; local bands at the VFW-HellsBottom, where anyone can pull up a stool for $1.75 beer; house concerts a block from my home; community center concerts with international musicians as well as local (in a Community Center that feels less municipal than professional, with new sound and lights for the stage); art shows and openings, also at the community center; everybody-sings events through Carpe Diem, a local ad hoc chorus; weekly open drum circles at the Electric Maid.
The problem with winter is not so much the hibernation that draws us all in – the problem is all this effort to overcome the urge to withdraw is packing our calendars so that the occasional evening cuddled by the fire becomes the exception. Which is not really a problem, after all.
Photo is from the house concerts I mentioned -- and it's by Sam Kittner, yes, Bobbi Kittner's husband. Thanks!

 

Fashion after 50

Skinny jeans are everywhere, in bright colors, like fistfuls of pick-up-sticks with legs in them. Cheery. Fun. Great with boots and bulky sweaters.

I want some.

But my mother’s voice sounds a warning: “teenage grandmother,” she’d say, rolling her eyes when we’d pass a woman (and there were lots of these in Florida) dressed in clothes my mother thought would be far more appropriate on a girl one quarter the woman’s age.

I am not my mother.

So I take a look at my favorite shop (the one with “thrift” in the name), and find two pairs of skinny jeans in what I think are my size. One pair is blue denim, the other black – disappointing, as what I really want are the crayon-colored legs I see in the magazines, but I don’t want to go on a full-out shopping spree, so I settle.

These are pretty ridiculous pants. I have to point my toes to get into them, then pull them up as if they are tights. You could tear a fingernail doing this—even a short one, like mine. Then I have to inch them up my legs. This reminds me of the girls in high school (not me) who would lie down on the dressing room floor to zip up pants they had no business wearing. I was so disdainful of that sort of thing. Fashion. Puh.

I begin to wonder if these skinny jeans are worth the trouble, and whether they’ll look like “they’re painted on,” another of mom’s favorite put-downs, once I have them on over my, well, healthy thighs. Yes, me and Beyonce. I have to tug to get them over my rear end. And then there’s a little adjusting of curves before I’m entirely comfortable.

But once they’re on: they look good. They feel fine. I like them. My boots go over them without looking like I’m trying too hard, with jeans tucked into my boots, as if to say, “look at my boots!” I check for muffin tops: sigh of relief. It is a little dicey if I squat down to pick something up – these particular skinny jeans could be higher-waisted and that would be good – but other than that, they’re great.

The second pair doesn’t fare as well. They’re also skin-tight, in a good way, but only up to the knees. Then there’s a lot of extra fabric and a funny gap at the top in the back. Plus, the fabric feels chintzy. They remind me of the jeans your mother wants you to buy – usually Wrangler, as I recall – that are just not cool at all, but you can’t explain how they are uncool. Something about the stitching, or the cut, something invisible, only to be felt.

Still, I have one pair of skinny jeans. I feel like I’m 20 again.

Mom, that’s not a teenager. Plus, I actually own a pair or Wranglers. And I like those, too.

 

Grandma Jean's coleslaw

I came home tonight with no particular plan for dinner, other than what I could dream up in the car on the way back from dance class. I decided on my old stand-by, grilled cheese and tomato. But since I was out of salad greens, I had to be creative if I wanted something besides carrot sticks on the side. I had to make due.

Turns out I am good at this, probably the result of frequently avoiding the grocery store: if I can make something work from what I already have in the pantry, I will.

Tonight’s side veggie came from an old piece of red cabbage and a carrot. That’s really about it. I was going to shred the vegetables and then improvise a dressing, maybe throw some mayonnaise and lemon together and call it coleslaw, but then I thought of the Southern cookbook Ann gave me a few years ago – I’d just baked cornbread from it, and I figured it would have a good coleslaw recipe as well.

The book, The Gift of Southern Cooking, is by Edna Lewis and Scott Peacock, and though they contribute to it at least equally, mining their southern childhoods and subsequent journeys into all things culinary, it’s the only cookbook I have by Edna Lewis, and I think of it as hers.

According to the New York Times, Miss Lewis (as she was known) was the first to elevate southern cooking  beyond its “knee-slapping, cornpone image.” She was born in Freetown, Virginia, the granddaughter of a freed slave, and wound up bringing her kitchen traditions to New York society through restaurants and cookbooks. She became the doyenne of southern cooking, widely respected and admired by top chefs and glitterati. She died at age 89, in 2006.

I love this book. It really is a team effort; Peacock, it turns out, was so close to Lewis that he lived with and cared for her in her final years, and they were widely known (again, according to the Times) as “the odd couple of southern cooking” – she, an elderly, African American widow and he, a young, white, gay chef. The coleslaw recipe is his, developed when he was chef for the governor of Georgia in the 1980s, cooking for countless political barbeques. I know this because the story is included in the book: The bits before the recipes are at least as good as the recipes themselves. In addition to the provenance of the coleslaw, the explanations and stories turned me from disdain over lard, to wondering where I can buy some; and convinced me that I should make the homemade baking powder, to avoid that occasional metallic taste in my muffins and biscuits when I use the store-bought variety.

The recipes here are solid. I can vouch especially for the lemon chess pie and the biscuits, I am charmed by recipes like “cat’s tongues” cookies, red-eye gravy and chow chow, and I want to bake my way through nearly an entire chapter on cakes.

Tonight I found another reason to love this book: coleslaw. This one involves a cooked dressing, just like my Grandma Jean’s. Hers was finely shredded, and so is Peacock’s (though I have to admit, mine strayed far from the actual recipe, and I just shredded it coarsely since I was hungry and didn’t want to spend a lot of time on it). The dressing is heavy on the vinegar, too, a trait that puts me right back in the kitchen at Bixley Heath, the street in Lynbrook, New York, where my grandmother served my family Sunday dinners when I was small.

The recipe is simple, really: equal parts vinegar and sugar, boiled together for 3 minutes with a little salt; to this you add some Dijon mustard and half the amount of oil as vinegar, then the dressing gets added to the vegetables – Peacock calls for cucumbers with the cabbage, but I used carrot to stretch what little cabbage I had (and I had no cucumbers). There’s also a little cream and sour cream to finish the dish.

I think of Grandma Jean’s coleslaw with “cold cuts,” a favorite short cut for lunch or a casual dinner at her house. It also makes me think of her potato salad, which we called “German potato salad,” though I’m not sure why. She was actually Scottish and Irish.

As such, she would probably find it pretty funny that I now think of this pair of southern cooks as her compadres in the kitchen.  I love how cooking unites all kinds of people. Maybe she and Miss Lewis have found one another in some sort of culinary afterlife.

Thanks, Ann, for this book. As you can see, it’s a winner in more ways than one.

 

Photo is by John T. Hill, and ran on the cover of Lewis' book, The Taste of Country Cooking.

 

The return of the crockpot

 Since the prospect of someone (like this fine gal to the left) greeting me at my own front door with a martini and the smell of dinner cooking is slim to none, at least in the foreseeable future, I’ve discovered the next best thing: the old crock pot.

Really.

I unearthed this from my basement yesterday when I had to run off to yoga class, but the beef stew wasn’t finished cooking. I couldn’t leave the burner on to finish the stew while I was away, but I knew it needed more time to simmer. So I (literally) dusted off the crockpot that’s been sitting in the basement for eight years, slopped the unfinished stew into it, turned the dial to “high,” threw a lid on it and left.

 

I wasn’t sure the pot actually worked – so I did wait around for long enough to be sure it didn’t explode and cause a fire, and that it did heat up and not sit there, broken, on the counter, with beef stew cooling inside it.

But all systems seemed to be in working order. And when I came home from yoga class, I opened the door and voila! The sumptuous smell of dinner cooking greeted me (albeit without the martini). The stew was bubbling away, and it turned out to be delicious: tender beef chunks, sweet carrots, tender potatoes, all flavored with garden herbs and tomatoes and onions cooked so they melt in your mouth.

Now I’m going to google around and try to find other ways to use this wondrous tool I’ve resurrected. I’m hoping it will work for black bean chili, or maybe a lentil-based Indian stew. Are there revised crockpot cookery books out there that update an old trend, the way books about canning and knitting made home-making hip and cool again? I’ll find out. Or maybe write one myself.

Yoga class beef stew

Yes, it’s probably not very yoga to eat animals, but this was free-range, antibiotic-free, hopefully well-treated beef. And I’m grateful I could buy it for that undeniable red-meat craving I cannot seem to shake.

Approx one pound stew beef (it’s the cheapest cut in the case!)

Olive oil for the pot
1 large onion
3 or 4 carrots, chopped
6 or 7 small potatoes, peeled and chopped
A handful of fresh rosemary (I actually used a 7-inch sprig that had been drying on the countertop), chopped
A handful of fresh sage (again, this was sort of drying out on the countertop), chopped
1 can chopped tomatoes
Water
Salt and pepper to taste

Rinse and pat dry the beef. Heat olive oil in a soup pot. Add beef, brown on all sides, turning each piece with tongs, as needed. Add onion, cook until onion begins to soften, stirring occasionally. Add the rest of the veggies and herbs, give it a stir and let cook up to five minutes. Add the tomatoes and enough water to almost cover. Bring to a boil.

    At this point you could either
1) skip yoga class and keep cooking the stew for a couple of hours -- either on top of the stove or in the oven, with a lid, at about 300 -- or
2) cook it for as long as you can, then change into yoga clothes, dump the stew into the crockpot, and leave it for about two hours more.  
3) Third option is to go ahead and bring it to a boil, then transfer it to the crock pot and follow the instructions that come with the pot -- or look it up on a website that is more thorough in the crockpot category than mine. I like this one, as it has veggie options as well as meat.

For the martini, you're on your own.

Give yourself a break

I made a kick-ass minestrone soup the other night, and instead of beating myself up for not making homemade bread, or biscuits, or cornbread to go with it (why do I think this is necessary when I’ve already made the soup?!?) I bought already-baked cornbread at Whole Foods. This was not cornbread mix in a box, to make at home. It was pre-made, wrapped in plastic, good to go, ready for the table. It even had little jalapenos in it.

It was great.

Why do I so often think I have to do everything by hand in order to make the meal perfect, truly homemade, really authentic? It’s not like my mom didn’t pour pre-made dressing on canned pears and iceberg and call it a salad – a salad that I really liked. And there are plenty of great people who use cream of mushroom soup for casseroles and box cake mixes for desserts on a regular basis. How about those parents who buy packaged cookies and disguise them as freshly baked for the school bake sale? You do what you gotta do.

Except I don’t. Instead, I’m the person who wants to make homemade versions of “store-bought” treats like Hostess Cupcakes and Ho-Hos. I have to make my pie crusts from scratch, as a matter of principle. I feel like a hero if I can turn out something from my kitchen that I’ve kneaded, stirred, rolled, whipped or roasted myself.

Usually I love this. Except when I don’t.

There are times when I look up and it’s way later than it should be for the start of some cooking project or other. Times when I run short of energy or incentive or inspiration. Times when I need to give myself a break.

For those times, I’m learning that in addition to loving the satisfaction of having made it myself, I can also love the shortcuts that make life just a little easier. That cornbread, for instance. It was delicious. 

 

p.s.: This photo is not "homemade," either, I took it from a web site that's even more committed to doing everything yourself than I am. Check it out, these kids are shucking and grinding the corn with a hand crank before they make the bread! Farm to Table.

(Homemade) Minestrone Soup

2 teaspoons olive oil

1 medium-sized onion, chopped
1 tablespoon or more dried oregano (thanks, Simeone, I used some I dried from your mega-harvest!)
4 garlic cloves, minced
3 cups yellow squash, chopped
3 cups zucchini, chopped
1 cup corn kernels (I use frozen, great to have on hand)
3 cans chopped tomato (or 4 cups fresh)
5 to 6 cups veg broth (yes, I make my own! Whenever you’re cutting up veggies, just throw the trimmings (like onion ends, chard and collard stems, celery leaves, carrot stubs) in a Ziploc and keep it in the freezer, adding to it until there is enough to cook up. Then put them in a pot with plenty of water, a cut up onion and maybe a stalk of celery or a carrot, simmer for a while (an hour?), then drain all the veg out, pour into carryout containers in one-cup increments, and freeze. I like to pop out the frozen cup-size chunks and store them in Ziplocs for whenever I need ‘em. If you’re really thinking, you’ll defrost them early in the day – if not, just zap in the microwave. Of course premade is also TOTALLY FINE)
½ to 1 cup dried pasta – I like penne
1-2 cups cooked white beans (yep, I do ‘em from dried. Sometimes. Or just use 1 15.5-oz. can of pre-cooked)
1 bunch fresh chard, chopped (you can use spinach if you prefer, I happened to have chard on hand)
Salt and pepper to taste
Parmesan or Asiago cheese, shredded, for on top

    Heat oil in a soup pot (love my Dutch oven) and add onion. Sauté until soft. Add oregano and garlic, sauté a minute more. Stir in the rest of the veggies, except for tomato, until tender.

    Place 3 cups tomato and 1 cup broth in the blender, process ‘til smooth. Add tomato mix to pot, stir in remaining tomato and broth, and bring to a boil. Reduce heat, and simmer 20 minutes.
    Add pasta and beans, cook another 10 minutes or until pasta is done. Stir in chard, salt and pepper.
    Ladle into bowls and garnish with cheese. Serves 8.