Be joyful though you have considered all the facts
Ive added the sixth article in the series “Drawing as it develops“.
In it you can read about Amie’s experiments with play dough at 23 and 24 months. The idea was to see how she perceives our bodies and the bodies of animals. I’d say we got some fascinating results, some of which seem to support some of the Theory.
Here’s the little girl in question, wearing her “Doctor’s glasses”:
And here’s a little preview of one of the “Dough Guys” she came up with:
We also made a Dough Dog.
We’ve been away on several trips, one after the other, and have had numerous Local Summer meals en route and when staying with friends. None of which I was able to photograph (well enough), and few of which I remember in detail (as in ingredients, let alone mileage!).
I do have a picture of today’s mostly local meal, though (cooked, finally, at home):
There’s nothing like being back home and cooking in one’s own kitchen (however much of a mess it is)!
So many “exotic” recipes – like the ones I am trying from the wonderful travel adventure, food history and cook book by Najmieh Batmanglij, Silk Road Cooking – can be made locally. The ingredients are often readily available (around here, at least), only the spices can pose a problem (see above). Still, those spices can be the something precious, luxurious and special that makes us dream of far away places and that puts our “local” meal, and place, into perspective…
Enough ruminating: dessert!
Local peaches and blueberries
DH is away to give a talk and I’m alone with Amie, who caught a stomach bug on Thursday and is still not recovered – the hot and humid weather isn’t helping much. When she’s not sleeping she is glued to me, so I haven’t managed and probably won’t manage to prepare a OLS meal this week.
Amie’s stubborn bug and my hard work on The Potboiler have thrown off my blogging. I have so many drafts of entries lined up, but I can’t seem to finish them.
I spent too many, many hours putting together A Story of our Friendship photo album for our best friend and maid-of-honor and godmother to Amie, in Shutterfly (a very clumsy program, to say the least – no undo button! – and I am curious to see the printed end result).
I’m also reading too many books at the same time: all the reserach for The Potboiler plus Home Ground (Barry Lopez, editor) and Lucila Perillo’ s I’ve Heard the Vultures Singing, among others, for reviewing for Suite101. I received my first Mother Earth issue in the mail, which gave me a wonderful feeling of connection with a community. Lovely. Soon the new Orion will arrive in the mail as well, and it will have to be devoured instantly, each and every letter of it! And of course I am still working on Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle – though I shouldn’t call what I am doing with it “working” without immediately explaining that “work” for me means fun and enrichment. What a book! More on all that later…
Later, later…
Let’s first recover from the stomach bug and the heat and humidity and because of that a yucky, smelly basement (i.e., our house). I might cave and buy a dehumidifier. Ugh.
There were potatoes at the Farmer’s Market this week, at just one of the dozen Farm stands but I got to them before they sold out. M-mm!
So we had, all grilled (on charcoal grill) by DH:
The Farmer’s Market also featured two buckets of peaches. Two! I didn’t show up half an hour before “the bell” for nothing!
I never buy the organic blueberries – they’re too pricey – but Kimball’s Fruit Farm is a Low Pesticide Spray farm.
So dessert was:
I don’t think I’ve ever eaten better in my life. “Better” in the sense of healthier and tastier, but also in the sense of “with more taste,” on my part, that is. I mean, I eat with more attention and appreciation. The potatoes and the peaches were so special because I have been doing without for so long.
Thanks, Liz, for this initiative! Without One Local Summer I never would have appreciated the exceptional quality of local food in season!
“Happy” has been a favorite icon of Amie’s since she was very young. At 16 months, she was always drawing “happy” – the feeling, we presumed. Later “Happy” became a happy face: a simple circle including points for eyes, short lines for eyebrows and nose, and a curve for a smiling mouth.
As I reported in Drawing As It Develops, Amie had a short phase of naming her drawings and making an effort to represent something by them (airplanes!), but then she lost interest, mainly because she turned to color and, most recently, coloring (Maisy, only Maisy).
So I was surprised this morning, when on her way out she quickly sat down at her drawing table, grabbed a crayon, and very deliberately drew a circle. her nose was nearly touching the paper as she very carefully traced it and put down a nose, an eye and a mouth!
– “I drew Happy!” she announced. “I made a circle and Happy!”
When I looked, there it was, in the upper left corner, above Maisy’s ear:Â Happy!
I can’t wait to see what will happen next!
Yesterday it was just Amie and I – DH was out, playing a softball game. So dinner had to be cooked fast and easy. What I came up with was tasty and creamy, healthy and local, and ready in 15 minutes. So I thought you might want me to share the recipe.
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I just published a review of Najmieh Batmanglij’s wonderful cookbook, Silk Road Cooking. A Vegetarian Journey on Suite101.com. You can read it here.
It did occur to me that the Silk Road and many of the other ancient trade routes that Batmanglij travels in this book are about as non-local as you can get! How does this fit with One Local Summer, for instance?
Well, I’ve found that most of the ingredients used in the recipes are grown locally: eggs, spinach, cauliflower, squash, honey, apples… Even many of the spices are or can be grown here (saffron might be a problem). The only major trouble is the rice.
So – surprise! – you don’t need to live in Turkey, Iran, India or China to enjoy these recipes locally! This is a relief to me, because I adore this book, for all the reasons elaborated in the review.
I had a discussion today with my upstairs neighbor this morning. She leaves her airconditioners on, all of them, all day and night, even while she’s at work. One of them is very noisy and makes the doorknobs in our bedroom vibrate. I met her in the hallway and addressed the problem (again). She was very defensive, which is not new, but in a (for her) novel way. She said:
– “I can run my airconditioners whenever I want!”
I said she could, it’s her electricity bill, and was going to reiterate my real complaint (about the noise), when suddenly I realized that, no, this time I won’t shut up! So I added:
– “Still, don’t you feel bad about wasting fossil fuels and polluting the environment? What about your grandson? I am always thinking of Amie’s future. I am sure you think of his future too. I know you’re very fond of him.”
This rambling and pacifying tone is typical me: I can’t bear confrontation, and my neighbor can be very rude and aggressive (verbally), so I was extra careful.
– “Those will be their problems, not mine,” she stated, stomped off, and slammed her door.Â
Then followed the brilliant insight, the stroke of argumentative and rhetorical genius, the absolutely withering reparte:
-Â “How about this:Â in 50 years time, when water and food and fuel are rationed, your grand and great-grandchildren are allocated less than others, because their grandmother was so wasteful.”
She answers:
– “It would be totally unfair to punish my grandchildren because of my behavior!”
Me:
– “Oh really?!”
(Again she stomps off, but after her slamming her door, she thinks about this, and within 10 minutes I can hear she has turned off her airconditioners. Then she calls me up to suggest the condo step up the recycling and install a compost bin…)
These are my dad’s parents, taken in 1999 at a typical family meal in summer. For me, the picture crystallizes “family”: the shared food, cooked by my grandmother (who was a great cook), the shared wine (note the three bottles!), selected by my grandfather, the unseen but imagined presence of many family members around the table, the slanting sun, the old cherry tree…Â
I wasn’t present at that gathering, I was already living in Boston and we coulnd’t afford to fly over very often. Most of my family lives in Belgium (Ghent and Antwerp, two cities that are half an hour’s drive away from one another). Two of my uncles emigrated decades ago and live in Toronto and in Taiwan, and one of my nephews lives in Barcelona, Spain.
My grandmother passed away two weeks ago. Everyone flew in to Ghent for the funeral and to support my grandfather. It was too difficult and expensive for us. That Friday of the funeral was a very strange day for me. Knowing that everyone was gathered there, except for us, and my grandmother, gave me a bizarre feeling of solidarity with my grandmother: we were both absent in person, though, I hope, present in spirit.
I wrote a while ago about the importance of family, especially of grandparents, for raising children and ourselves, and the appeal of a family more extended than our present, very nuclear family. That week after my grandmother’s passing, that message was made crystal clear to me.
In the meantime, however, we’ve realized that we cannot afford to buy a bigger house, even one in the country. The dream of an extended family will have to be put on hold for a while longer…
Ah, my apologies for being late! Due to unforeseen but lovely circumstances, we went out to dinner with friends the last couple of days, so I had to postpone our One Local Summer dinner until today. It was worth the wait, though (for us at least).
Very simple:
The steak this time was again excellent and excellently cooked too, by DH. We get small pieces, this one was a little under a quarter of a pound, for the two of us. It’s all we need, really, or rather: a luxury even in such a “small” portion (“small” by American standards). We appreciate it all the more because it doesn’t seem to go on endlessly, like it does in many restaurants. It’s also darn expensive.
This was simple again but lovely and very refreshing on this hoy and humid summer’s day.
Another simple and quickly prepared dish.Â
I guess you can see a pattern now, with the desserts: they are always just one or two ingredients. The fruits in summer are just so fresh and sweet, I don’t think they need any elaboration with sugars or flours. Also, as you may have guessed, I am not much of a baker. I’m going to do something about that soon. But for now:
Good, great! We’re not starving, quite the contrary. But I can’t wait for the potato harvest! I try to stick to the local eating more of the week, and potatoes – my staple, my favorite, the only thing I can cook in so many different and all of them delicious ways – is one of the crops I’ve avoided buying non-locally. I guess because they are so heavy and take up so much space on the trucks/trains/planes that would have to cart them over to my local store.
I popped by the Blue Heron Organic Farm in Lincoln (right around the corner from Drumlin) and they promised potatoes next week! At all the farmstands at the Farmer’s Market, however, the farmers laughed at my impatience and said I’ll have to wait another month, if not longer. That’s interesting. I’ll be sure to go by Blue Heron and check out their harvest!
