Alecto's Ophelia

Saint Simon, the socialist St. Bernard

In the interest of staying current, here's my dog. He's about five weeks old in this picture and can be expected to grow, um, significantly bigger.

On the subject of other posts, I've started about six in the last week and have had to trash every one of them due to massive frothing at the teeth and gums.

Take deep, deep breathes, Alecto, and read some more farming books.

(I have in my hands this week, Eliot Coleman's hoop house book, The Contrary Farmer, Root Cellars (or something like that), the latest Michael Pollan book and Joan Dye Gussow's This Organic Life - awesome train reading.)

I haz cookbook problems, let me show you them

I live in a 2200 square foot raised ranch, most of which is taken up by bedrooms because there are a bunch of us living here and we do subscribe to personal space, however small that might be. I used to live in 2700 square feet and before that 700 and before that 1200 so I'm used to expansion and contraction. This makes me a bit sensitive to accumulation. Add to that my inability to throw out anything I've ever been attached to, up to and including shoes I have worn into the ground and couldn't even give away (they leak and smell like, um, feet) and you have a recipe for disaster if you also happen to need to live in a clean space (that would be me, again). I'm perfectly all right with clutter, as RW will attest to given the state of my office, but if I can't clear everything off and scrub it within an inch of it's life, I've got issues. Therefore, I am very, very careful.

So here it is, my first of three (yep, three!) hallway closets:

From this somewhat blurry photograph (I'm still experimenting) you can see my entire life history with regard to food. If you start on the upper shelf you will notice that there are three, count 'em, three publications of The Joy of Cooking. I used an edition purchased by me in 1982 to teach myself to cook. I was simultaneously working at a four star restaurant in the kitchen as a dishwasher and then a prep girl. I did eventually get behind the line. I also should note that at the same time I worked at the four star place I was also a manager at the Westport Burger King (boy can I scrub a broiler and clean out grease traps) and looking at what I think of as the other side of food, as in, maybe we don't really want to put this in our mouths. The Joy of Cooking is still my bible if I don't understand some bit of kitchen chemistry or if I just happen to need a good recipe for possum or squirrel (that would be the older version).

From The Joy of Cooking I moved on to the Silver Palate cookbooks that came out in the 80s and 90s and redefined what the home cook did in tandem with Martha Stewart (never did own one of those books, I might be sorry someday). The Silver Palate is also a bible of some sort, where I return when I just want to get back to the root of savory and simple. I know, they didn't seem so simple at the time, but they do now. After that I moved onto Alice Waters and Wolfgang Puck and a bunch of specialty books that peppered the shelves in the last two decades. My second husband is a graphic designer and his first love is books, typesetting specifically. He worked for Book of the Month Club which became Bookspan for years and got to know a lot of the authors and books. He still gives me cookbooks. I love that about him.

Sometime between the 80s and now I began collecting Moosewood cookbooks. The Moosewood cookbooks are vegetarian which is somewhat limiting in my meat eating household but was an absolute life saver during the years I supported weekend group retreats that required mostly vegetarian cooking for large groups of people. What I can do with a mushroom and a little soy...

Peppered about the four primary groups are books that range from cookies, to cheesecakes, to frugal gourmet and probably a couple diet books that I gave up on after a week or two (just eat less and work more, OK?) and then you come to the last category, reference. I have reference for Jewish holidays, soups, breads, stews, canning and grilling. Many of these books exist solely for inspiration or direction (I eat what, specifically, at Passover?) but all of them are necessary. Necessary and completely dispensable. I could let them all go tomorrow and continue to cook the way I do. But I don't want to. They are old and trusted friends. Hell, some of them are brand new friends. But think about this. In twenty years of serious cooking if I've only filled half a closet, then maybe I'm doing all right. (I don't really want to discuss the 2,000 other books in the family room right now but I will at least acknowledge their existence).

Now on to pizza:

Here is pizza ready to go to the oven. These are simple pizzas. The dough recipe comes from Aroma Cucina, the sauce is my marinara (it's got a bit of a kick, I think I might have accidentally dropped a bunch of habaneros in there), fresh mozzarella and some peppers I roasted and marinated last weekend.

   And here they are ready to come out. They might have wanted another three to five minutes but we were mighty hungry.

Here Cletus captures the pizza grin because I've just had my face in a 500 degree oven and I think this is more fun than just about anything.

Here is tonight's very simple tomato soup from the latest Alice Water's cookbook. This has already been through the Cuisinart (which is 23 years old now and I fear for it's very soul and mine if I ever have to replace it because I think they're built to break now) and the strainer to remove the seeds. This is simply, a sliced onion, six sliced garlic cloves simmered in butter and olive oil, added six large (just over four pounds) tomatoes cut in eighths cooked until they fell apart with some salt, thyme and bay leaves and two tablespoons of rice, two cups of water and two tablespoons of butter added at the end (yes, at the end) and then cuisinarted and strained and reheated. It took just over an hour and we ate it with the DO NOT WASTE CHEESE concoction from Food on the Food and fresh bread.

Lastly, here is the mess of me at the end of the weekend because NoMans thought it was hysterical. Covered in food (yes, I do own two aprons and usually wear at least one of them) and damned happy too.  Happy Sunday, and happy eating to all.

None of this is going to make any sense at all

NaNo stats - 42,010 and I pretty much want Kate dead but can't see a way to kill her off without being accused of gratuitous violence. Does writer rage count? Kate will have to live through at least 8,000 more words and then maybe I'll lock her in a closet and forget for awhile.

I think a lot of the pain was in writing about events that occurred while trying to tell another kind of story all together. My brother accused me of writing a posthumous journal, as it were, but that's about as far from the truth as I could get, a journal would have been simple reporting and I could have given you 50,000 reporting words in two weeks or less.

I'm telling a story about a young woman in her early thirties who walks out the door one day, pretty much worry free short of working out how to pay her rent and turns into something else entirely by way of life simply happening. I used a good chunk of my life to build the context but wrote a story I wasn't particularly familiar with. And it hurt, a lot, because I had to do some pretty serious soul searching in the interest of honest introspection. Maybe that's journalism but it sure didn't feel like it.

I don't know where I'm going with this, I've run out of coherent brain cells, can you tell?

So, new subject. I was reading the Style section of the New York Times in bed this morning and was struck upside the head. I refer to the Style section as the women's sport section because it contains the wedding announcements. NoMans likes these a lot, he likes to analyze who is in and why. The Style section is also an advertisement for conspicuous consumption. I don't even register it anymore but I know it's there. Well, this week the front page article was on the Green Grinch, or something like that. The overall theme was that we give up giving all together. No presents, no Christmas cards, no nothing but traded services. All this for a page and a half surrounded by advertisements for ten carat diamond rings and $600 sandals and fur, fur, fur (I got Nothin' against fur but I'm not sure a new couple of coats a year make a lot of sense however you slice it off the rodent).

It got me thinking. I don't ever ask for or receive a pair of Jimmy Choo Shoes for Christmas. I'd like to just to see the look on NoMan's face if I actually did but I don't because the wanting doesn't occur to me. What I really want is a twelve quart stock pot so that I can make bigger soups and I want a better camera because the old one is getting close to death and technology's come a long way in a couple of years. So do I tell NoMans not to buy the stock pot and I'll do without? Or do I buy the stock pot the next time it's on sale? Have we gone too far? Is this what it looks like when the pendulum finally swings the other way? I am scratching my head but that's OK too.

Ode to Erma

I'm gearing up for NaNoWriMo.  Really.  I am.  If you go over to Sudie's place you can find out about NaBloWriMo, which, by the way, I cannot say with a straight face. NaBloWriMo sounds damn reasonable too (unless you have a look in my head and then it's just plain dirty).  In any event, I told two people about this today.  Telling people is like when you quit smoking.  The more people you tell the more pressure. This can be good or bad.  In my case it's motivation.  It makes it more real for me.

I told my boss and my brother. Similar responses.

J - (that's my boss) after he stopped laughing he reminded me that the only way I stay on topic at work is because I have deadlines (check) and him (not so check unless he's going to read each draft every night otherwise I'm going to get off topic and stay that way).

Jack - (that's my brother) after he stopped laughing reminded me that linearity is a frame of mind and I'm more than capable. That's not the POINT Jack!  I like being non-linear. Or do we call that ADD?  Whatever.

Neither of these lovely gentlemen were laughing about me doing this, by the way, they were both all over it.  They were laughing about the fact that so far I'm going in without a plan other then to sit down, start typing and beg the muse to stay on some kind of topic.

J - wants me to give up my dreams about writing about women in the workplace (and how we're catty, mean and untrustworthy - hey, it's my experience, let it be) and write about nannies and parenting instead.  He likes to hear the nanny stories. His jaw sits on his desk over what little I disclose about my home life (he's genuinely interested, it's hard to remain isolated). He's pretty sure we're all going to implode one of these days but that's just not true. Explode maybe. We might be serving as birth control, or a horrible lesson.  Who knows.  He even likes to hear the canning stories about pressure cooking the chicken soup to the point of near death such that my entire home smelled like a Purdue processing plant.

The problem is that everything I write is anecdotal and that's not fiction, now is it? What if I made up a story about the perfect nanny?  Well how boring would that be?  I mean, come on, do you want to read about Mary Poppins (AGAIN) or do you want something infinitely more entertaining?  I want the entertaining. Life is entertaining; deeply, entirely and completely entertaining.  You cannot make this shit up.

I think I may have turned into Erma Bombeck.  There are worse fates, I really liked Erma. She had one hell of an impact.