You could open a restaurant.

In this post, I’ll return a bit to a subject I meant to write about more in this blog; it’s turned out to be a bit more memory-searching than food-oriented, but hopefully this one will return a bit back to my original intentions.

It’s January now, with a bit of snow finally blanketing the city and frigid single-digit temps holding everyone captive.  I’ve been sick for months, fighting some combination of allergies and sinus infections and the common cold.  It came to a head a couple weeks ago, when I could barely leave the couch to drag myself to the doctor’s office.  A couple days later, after some antibiotics, I was finally able to sit upright and concentrate for more than an hour.  Being sick for so long, I found myself falling back on simple food like steamed broccoli and simple boiled pasta or rice; anything more required too much energy and besides, my stomach just wouldn’t handle it.

So when I finally felt my motivation and sense of smell returning, I jumped on it.  I started with a simple roasted chicken – easy on a still-somewhat-nauseous stomach.  This summer I found some free-range, organic chickens for a great price if I bought ten over the course of the summer, so I jumped on it.  My freezer finally had a purpose.  So out came one from the freezer, thawed, and roasted in an incredibly simple, delicious way.  I rinsed it in cold water, patted it dry with a paper towel, and drizzled it with olive oil, making sure it got all over the bird.  A little pepper, lots of kosher salt and bits of garlic tucked under the skin finished it off.  I started it off with 10-15 minutes at 450 to brown up the skin, then I turned down the heat to 350 and let it finish until the meat thermometer read whatever is right for poultry.  It was absolutely perfect – juicy, tender, and piping hot.

I can’t usually eat an entire full-size roasted chicken, even over several days, so eventually whatever is left gets put into something else.  This time curry seemed to strike my fancy, so I googled “chicken curry soup” and found a couple recipes to mix together and make my own.

The first step: making some broth.  This is simple.  Just put the chicken carcass, whole, into a big stockpot and cover it with water.  Add a couple carrots, a couple stalks of celery, and a sliced onion to the water and let it boil for a few hours until the meat falls off the bones.  I take the chicken out of the pot and let it cool in a pan.  Then, pick the meat off.  This time I had more broth than I needed, so I took 4 cups off the top and put them in containers to freeze and use later.  The remainder, along with the vegetables that had been boiled down with the chicken, I used in my soup.

So, now, this amazing soup.

First, I sauteed an onion, red pepper, chopped, and a sliced carrot or two in a little bit of olive oil.  Then I added a hot pepper of some sort I had dried from the summer and the chicken pieces.  I covered it in the broth and veggies and let it come to a boil.  I added a bunch of curry powder – I never measure when I cook like this, so my estimate is 3 Tbsp, but I just kept adding a little at a time until it tasted like I wanted.  I added a few tablespoons of brown sugar as well, again, my guess is 3 Tbsp.  Finally, I dumped in a can of coconut milk and a few shakes of fish sauce and stirred it all together.  I let it simmer for a while longer to get the flavors all thoroughly mixed together and it was ready.

Both of the recipes called for eating it with white rice, but I thought rice noodles would fit a bit better, so I cooked up a few and ladled the soup over the top.  But then, the all-important finishing touches – top the bowl with freshly sliced green onion and cilantro.  And swoon over the deliciousness.

And since I am indeed a bit of a locavore, I’ll let you know that I did indeed use quite a few local ingredients.  The chicken, of course, came from a farm in West Glover.  The pepper I dried myself from Berry Creek Farm’s bounty over the summer.  And our health food store is still getting onions and carrots from Berry Creek, so I of course used those.  I’m pretty happy with that, considering it’s January in northern Vermont.

And there you have it, you could open a restaurant.  Seriously, it’s that good.   Enjoy!

And, of course, let me know how you like it.

Christmas candles

I’ve been blogging off and on since 2005, first on LiveJournal, then MySpace, and now WordPress.  Last night a friend and I were chatting and it sent me back to my original LiveJournal posts, and this is what I found – a post about the last Christmas I spent with mom, as our family.  This is why Christmas carries with it an eternal ache, an emptiness that no amount of lights and carols and gifts can fill.  While most of my days don’t carry the grief that they once did, something about Christmas brings it back sharper than ever.  Here you go:

24 December 2005, 12:30 pm

Let me paint a picture for you: Me, in my beautiful little Subie, the entire back seat filled with laundry, my skis, boots, and poles, and a pile of nice clothes to have for Christmas. Presents for my parents behind the seat. My passenger seat filled with CD’s, m&m’s, orange juice, and a fresh cheeseburger. My tank is full of gas, my new french press (amazing! Thank you SO much, James!) full of incredible fresh coffee (it lasted 90 miles!), No Doubt turned up loud, a beautiful Montana night…and away I go from Deer Lodge. And 4 1/2 hours later I pull up to mom & dad’s house, a Christmas candle in every window, the porch light on, waiting for me… Mama Kitty, our outside cat, rubbing up against me as soon as I open the door. I grab my overnight stuff and stumble inside, Woody, our English Shepherd, meeting me at the door, and upstairs to my bedroom, all clean and waiting for me. There’s a turkey thawing on the kitchen counter for dinner tomorrow, and the coffee’s all ready for the morning. And while this is no longer “home” for me, it is still special…. I sleep. I awake sometime early this morning to the sound of a downpour on the tin roof, about 3 feet above my head. Not used to that sound…it’s been a while. But it makes me smile, and I stretch and turn over and go back to sleep, to wake again a few hours later when dad brings me in a cup of coffee. And today? A relaxing day, finishing the Christmas tree, wrapping presents, visiting friends in town… There are many things like this in life for me right now: As much as I don’t like the rain and the disappearing snow, I have peace. More snow will come, and the disappearing snow makes for a much better drive back home on Monday. So I simply rest, trusting that there is Someone so much bigger than me out there, writing my story, and He is so good, I can simply sigh, sit back, sip my coffee, and watch the quiet scene out the window, chat with my parents, and let life slowly go by. Someday, more excitement will come, but not today.

Family Belongings

I sneezed.  A chorus of “Bless You”s echoed around the Thanksgiving table, encircled by my family.

The day before, I drove down to the northeastern corner of Connecticut to spend Thanksgiving weekend with my maternal grandmother and extended family.  My mom had one brother and one sister, both of whom settled within an hour of my grandparent’s house.  Mom was the oddball, first traveling 600 miles (gasp!) to Marietta, Ohio, to get a math degree, unheard of in her day.  Then, after marrying my sister’s dad, who was in the Navy, they moved to northern California, then to rural northwestern Montana with my father.  I grew up there, on 20 acres in the middle of nowhere that Mom and Dad settled.  I was a well-traveled kid, with a thousand miles under my belt before I was a month old, traveling through Mt. St. Helen’s ash to northern California.  Then there was a cross-country trip when I was three, that I don’t remember, and another when I was seven, that I do.

The trip when I was seven was a meandering, slow trip in a camper, stopping at all the historical markers along the way.  I remember the Badlands in South Dakota and Mt. Rushmore, and thinking Kentucky “bluegrass” was incredibly odd; grass is green, not blue.  Grandma and Grandpa still had horses then, and I remember traipsing along after Grandpa to feed them and move them around to various pastures, and checking the bluebird houses.  My Uncle Chuck had a dairy, and for the longest time I had a T-shirt that smelled like dairy after helping with chores, becoming ever after my “Uncle Chuck” shirt.

Mom and I made another trip East two years later when my great aunt, Ah-Ah, died, to bring back inherited furniture.  But between then and my junior year of high school, I didn’t see my Eastern family.   Many letters and cards passed between East and West those years, and many a phone call, but no traveling.

Then, I spent two weeks with Grandma and the family when I was sixteen, on my way to a year in Europe as an exchange student, and my college years were spent in western New York, with most of my breaks and holidays at Grandma’s.

Slowly, through those years, I began to get to know my family.  What was missing as a child because of the distance was made up in those two or three trips a year as a young adult.  Thanksgiving, Easter, and various other breaks taught me of the value of the quiet, rest, and conversation that Grandma’s huge 300-year-old house and quiet life afforded.  I began to notice that mom had the same habits as Grandpa, and oh!  Uncle Chuck and Aunt Meb sure looked like her!  We all enjoyed similar things, a love of cooking and plants and gardening binding us together even when we were yet strangers.

This year, I dug out some old pictures from my great aunt.  I found pictures of my great-grandparents wedding, and lots of picnics and vacations at a beach in Rhode Island and in the mountains in New Hampshire.  There’s one of my great-grandmother Viola posed with a shotgun pointed into the distance, and Grandma and Ah-Ah hiking a rocky mountaintop in awkward breeches and heavy boots.  No wonder I love the outdoors; it’s in my blood.

Every time I visit my family, I learn just how strong genetics can be.  How much is genetics and how much is upbringing? It’s hard to know exactly; but for me, it’s a bit uncanny how much I’m finding my own quirky traits in my aunt, uncle, grandmother, and cousins.

After the “bless you’s” that echoed around the table, I blamed the pepper I had just shaken over my lovely Thanksgiving plate.  I love pepper, but it invariably makes me sneeze a few times, a small price to pay for a love of cooking and good food.  But even this small thing is family related; everyone around the table reacts the same to pepper, as did mom and Grandpa.  I don’t really look like my mom’s side of the family, but it doesn’t take much digging below the surface to find just how much I belong.

Arguing with a memory

I see her there, as real as day.  She’s been gone almost 5 years, but her voice, her legacy are as strong in my mind as if she was right there in the flesh. 

No, Mom, I need to throw these away.  What am I going to do with them?  They’ve gone bad.  It’s too much for me and I don’t dare give them away.  But the jars…yes, the jars, I know.  This is wasteful.  What if I need them later? 

Isn’t that the question that framed so much of her life - what if?  What if I need them?  I’ve been without before; I don’t want to be without again. 

So she kept.  And collected. And hoarded.  And my task in these 5 years has been to try to sift and sort and try to figure out what has actual significance and what is important simply because her memory is telling me so. 

It’s incredibly painful, this process.  Trying to separate my love for her from my respect for her from sheer ridiculousness.  I really listened to her, growing up.  I learned so much…from cooking and sewing to building fences and shoveling snow.  But in the process I became steeped in her issues, in her inability to trust. 

I’ve been single for all of my life minus three short, difficult months.  I’ve traveled internationally on my own, I’ve torn apart my faith only to build it again, I’ve moved short distances and long, I’ve given and loved deeply without hope of return…and in every moment, I have been cared for.  I have never been unloved and I have never gone hungry.

It isn’t things that make up my life, that bring me life…it’s people. 

It’s time for me to build my life around my present, my present filled with amazing, imperfect, beautiful people.  Mom will always be with me; I grow more like her every day. 

But I am me.

Change.

My world has suddenly become very small.  It takes about a minute to walk to my office, the new community garden, and the amenities of Main Street– the library, the health food store, the post office, a hardware store – from my new apartment.  In past lives, my front view has looked beyond a small clearing over a river valley and onto faraway mountains, past hundreds of acres of wilderness.  More often than not deer browsed across the clearing, now and then a bear, once a wolf and even a mountain lion.  Now, I look past some trees over the “bad” part of town and the back side of a large hardware store.  And something in the dumpster hasn’t stopped beeping for days – blip blip blip.  Blip blip blip.  Blip blip blip.

Friends might argue that this isn’t really a city I’m living in, and, depending on your definition, it might not be.  But for this tried and true mountain girl, it’s a city. 

I escaped tonight.  It’s the end of ramp season.  They’re a new discovery to me, part of this journey of choosing to deepen my roots into this place.  A new friend, one I value more every day, let me in on a childhood haunt along a river, and tonight I took myself there. 

Learning the trick of foraging ramps came easy to me; I’m well-versed in the poetry of the forest.  My eyes have learned to observe small details even when everything is new, and picking out the slender, graceful leaves in bunches along the riverbank was an easy lesson.  Birds chirping, the river rushing by, the smell of spring on the riverbank bring instant and easy peace to my soul.  The feel and smell of the soil as I tease the ramps out comfort my mind.  This is the world I know. 

After filling my bag with enough ramps to keep me supplied for almost a week, I found a dry spot on the bank and sat for a moment to breathe in the woods and river and ponder. 

My heart is full; I’m overwhelmed by my life of late.  The magnitude of new friendships in the making, of doors opened and walked through, of choices made, old dreams realized and new dreams birthed hits me so hard I am speechless. 

What have I done?  What was I thinking, moving to the city?  Can I really handle this? 

My answer is immediate -yes, this is right.  The moment you begin to be comfortable, the moment you cease to be challenged…that is the moment to wary of.  Comfort and ease don’t produce good fruit.  I’m overwhelmed by the confirmation that yes, I am exactly where I need to be, where I’m meant to be. 

I seem to live to cross boundaries, to challenge pre-conceived notions.  This process always begins with me, with life presenting an option to me that goes against my own built-in judgements.  But instead of running, I face it.  I walk it out.  The process is often messy, not so pretty, not so graceful; I only let a trusted few see it.  

But my hope, my prayer, is that beauty springs forth and spills over.

Spring from fall.

i set my right foot on the pedal, take a deep breath, look around, and push off.  the wind floods my ears and my eyes squint instinctively from the rush of the cold air.  i stand up, pump my feet a little harder, and road rushes beneath me.  the sun glares off the hard, glittering crust of snow on the fields around me, the river sliding silently but forcefully through its meandering channel.  my lungs begin to burn first, then my thighs, stiff after the long, cold months of not-quite-enough exercise.  the memory of the last time the brown fields and bare trees stilled my soul rushes back – late october, i think. 

then. 

then i was escaping my grief, my sadness of a relationship ended, the crisp fall air bringing peace, solace.  such a contrast, then and now. 

today. 

today i am celebrating.  every day lately brings change, growth, promise, real and symbolic.  change flies at me like a whirlwind, and i hang on.  anticipation, joy, peace, promise, happiness…my life is full of good things.

the contrast, illuminated perfectly by the seasons.  putting to rest a love, allowing the grief to come and go, the winter snow to cover, protect, and force my heart to rest.  and the spring…the promise, the anticipation of life as yet a mere glimmer, the sheer joy of living and loving.

Sun dogs, peppers, and a puppy.

The days run one into another, one long meeting after another, the language of grant writing and the Department of Health invading even my dreams.  Terms such as “capacity-building,” “evidence-based,” and endless lines of acronyms dance across my vision.  This, my mysteriously sleepless state, and an intensely difficult friendship situation leave me weary, my eyes rimmed with red from hours of crying.  Saturday dawns bright and chilly, my over-tired body insisting on awaking at 5:30 like usual, my overworked brain disallowing me to succumb again to desperately needed sleep.  A couple hours later I finally drag myself out of bed; at least the sun is shining.  After coffee, a shower, and lunch with Dad, I head to town.  Work beckons; I answer for a short while, then try my luck at the small-town clothing store for some jeans.  I feel bad for the clerks – at least ten pairs later, I left with a shirt for $5 and a scarf and a renewed rememberance of why I swore off that store for anything but shirts and scarves.  Home is next on the agenda, but what to do once I got there?  Heading into the nearby grocery store, I ponder the contents of my fridge and my appetite.  It’s time for a little self-pampering.  I leave the fish counter with some cod on sale; probably not any sort of sustainable, but I’m desperate.  A container of mushrooms finishes off the purchase , and my trip home is framed by late afternoon sunlight glinting off hardened snowbanks and music to soothe my tortured mind and body. 

Home.  Peace.  A cuddly, bubbly puppy to insist on my love and attention, a glimmering candle.  A quick batch of dishes. 

I find a cutting board, my faithful French cook knife and a cast iron frying pan that went through our house fire in ’98.  The onion comes first, my hands slicing deftly through the juicy white layers without hesitation.  The pieces slide into the waiting olive oil in one swift motion and begin to softly sizzle.  While they cook, I wash and slice the mushrooms, adding them when the onion begins to soften and turn vaguely translucent.  The fish waits on a piece of lightly oiled tin foil, salted and peppered.  The sauteed mushrooms and onions slide easily onto the fish, I sprinkle a little lemon juice over the pile, fold up the tin foil and pop the packet into the waiting oven.  Half hour to wait. 

Meanwhile, I’m still hungry.  Salad.  I pull out my bag of greens, sprouts, and various vegetables in various states of slicing out of the fridge.  Bella, my roommate’s adorable shih tzu, whines at me forlornly from the stairs across the kitchen; the only language she understands is that of cuddling and couch time, not an hour of food preparation.  She’s excited when I head toward the living room with my plateful of veggies; this means I’m sitting down and she can settle in beside me. 

I sit down with my pile of veggies and a deep sigh escapes, and I realize I feel a little better.  Nothing has changed; I’m still weary, I’m still drained, but somehow a little peace has grown.  I eat my salad in silence, relishing each bite.  By the time I finish, the fish is about done; the smell wafts through the house.  Steam piles through the tin foil as I check it with a fork; it flakes perfectly.  A little more salt and pepper and…absolute perfection.  Bliss.  Fresh pineapple for dessert and I settle in for some quiet Bella cuddling and a book. 

Healing.

It’s a simple, quiet process, really.  For me, it comes with quiet, with time to process life’s twists and turns and the heartbreak of loving another imperfect human.  The everyday activities of choosing and preparing what my physical sustenance will be somehow bring life to me, beyond the the simple chemical processes that begin with fish and salad and end with cellular protein and glucose.  Taking whole food - onions and mushrooms and cucumbers and peppers - holding them in my hands, washing them, slicing them, feeling the juice on my skin, smelling their potency, tasting them individually and together…something about the process from beginning to end quiets me.  There is comfort in taking something that grew from a tiny seed, preparing it with knowledge and appreciation, and slowly savoring it, receiving pleasure from not just the taste but the texture, the smell, the combinations with other food. 

Life is hard.  Heartbreak happens, no matter how desperately we try to avoid it.  Stress is part of this American life, no matter how much you enjoy your job.  Cars break down, people get sick.  But pleasure, peace and healing come in simple, unexpected packages.  Sun dogs around a winter sun, the brilliance of a red pepper, the pure, unadulterated joy of a dog when you come through the door. 

I may not have answers, but I have peace.