December 13, 2012

what feels like enough

Danny’s gone right now, down in Arizona with his folks. They’ve been ailing, needing a little help. When I talked to him a few moments ago, Danny was in their kitchen, making a big enough vat of tomato sauce to last them through the winter. I don’t begrudge him being gone for the week. We just miss him.

Whenever Danny does go away, I find that I revert back to an older self.

I spend hours writing in a quiet, cold room, without talking to anyone. I bake the salmon for dinner instead of searing it, because I can shove it in the oven and not think about it for a few moments. Without him here to talk the thoughts out of my head, they tumble and bounce against each other loudly.

And when Danny leaves, and I go to the store, I realize again: I’m really a hippie.

People, I bought sprouted mung beans yesterday.

See, the thing is, I naturally gravitate towards all these natural foods. Lemon-tahini dressing on brown rice. Quinoa fritters with bits of red pepper and zucchini. Green smoothies with a bit of chia seeds mixed in. There’s a reason I’ve chosen Vashon as my home, twice now. The groceries in my basket are pretty typical for Thriftway here.

And yet, for years here, you haven’t seen this food. Not always. Not regularly.

It’s a funny thing that happened. I started writing here because I wanted to write. I craved this space to discover. I wrote about amaranth greens and teff porridge. I realized that my life had become what I had hoped, an evocation of the community in Laurel’s Kitchen, which I read as a teenager. I felt unfettered and alive, to quote Joni Mitchell. I was the kind of woman who quoted Joni Mitchell.

But then, people started noticing. I wrote a book, fulfilling a lifelong dream. I dreamed of writing more. People started clamoring for recipes without gluten to suit their needs. I started listening.

That doesn’t mean that I haven’t loved every dish we’ve given you on this site. I have. Because it’s not all flaxseed crackers and hemp milk around here. (I don’t really like hemp milk.) I had to give away the last of the sugar cookies I made for my appearance on the local NPR station on Monday, because I kept nibbling at the rich buttery crispness with frosting and sprinkles. Danny and I bought a pork shank from a pig raised on Vashon the other day, and we’re excited to figure out what we’re going to cook with it.

But in the past few years, I have felt myself pulled toward pleasing. Querulous crowds demanded soft white sandwich bread so we made it again, again and again, until we were happy with it. And now that I’ve figured out the secret? I never make it here. Instead, I’m working on a dark, whole-grain bread that’s a little lumpy because it’s filled with seeds and chia. It doesn’t look airy and fantastic. It’s European bread, dense and nutritious. I don’t eat bread that often anymore but when I do, I like this little dark nub of a bread.

It won’t look good on Pinterest. Can I confess something? I don’t really like Pinterest. I like the chance to see spontaneous moments, photos filled with light that make me feel more alive. I have boards there. It’s a good stress reliever when I have too many emails to answer. But I really don’t like the way Pinterest seems to make so many women feel inadequate.

I don’t think real kitchens look as gleaming as they do on Pinterest. Do they? Maybe some. I remember an episode of Sex and the City where Charlotte winced because her self-confident, brash husband left a used tea bag on her perfect white kitchen counter. I don’t want to be that woman. It seems to me that’s what it takes to have that kind of kitchen. (That and the perfect kitchens seem to be devoid of cooking.)

So the demands of Pinterest and hit counts and driving traffic to the site and the very real desires of so many people across America writing to us, wanting us to re-create the food of their childhoods without gluten, have taken their toll on us.

I’m takin the hippie skirt out of the closet, folks. There are lentils to sprout, squash jam to make, and tofu to marinate. There are also buttered popcorn cookies and gluten-free stollen to bake. “Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself. I am large; I contain multitudes.” (I’m still the kind of woman who quotes Walt Whitman.) From now, we’re just cooking whatever we feel like that day and sharing when it feels right.

Today, there was a quiet house with a kiddo at preschool and this lunch. I threw some tofu into a hot wok with coconut oil and peanut oil. I had some leftover roasted sweet potato and broccoli in the refrigerator. I dashed in fish sauce and tamari, a little red chile flakes. I didn’t bother to wipe the plate before I took the photo. It looked beautiful to me. All that light.

It was enough.

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December 11, 2012

a satisfying job

“It’s important to remember that when you’re feeding someone, including yourself, it’s an honor. It’s about pleasure and nurture and respect. We all come to the table with different kinds of baggage –hungers that can’t be satisfied, or fear, or perhaps an illness that makes food problematic, or even good appetite and high expectations – you name it. Cooking for any or all of these qualities is a big job, but a satisfying one.” — Deborah Madison

Saturday, just after the farmers’ market. A wide smile sliver of a French heirloom pumpkin sat on the dining room table, along with two delicata squashes that grew conjoined, a bunch of gleaming green collard greens, and a squat orange squash.

I’d like to tell you they made a beautiful tableau, with high pale northern light falling on the mostly empty wooden table, the squashes artfully arranged to look as though they had landed that way. But the dining room table was filled with stacks of cookbooks that threatened to topple. There were at least a dozen clean jam jars with the remnants of tea lights melted on the bottom of them. I’m pretty sure our water glasses from the night before were still there too.

Danny had been cleaning out the refrigerator, so there were jars of salt-cured tomatoes, pickled turnips, and duck fat on the counters. Lucy rearranged the magnetic letters on the refrigerator to make a long, loping ABCs, curving in on itself, not in the right order. At least four had fallen to the floor. And there were dishes in the sink, waiting to be washed.

But we’re cooking. I took one look at the splayed-out choices of leftovers from the refrigerator and started making lunch. I put a pot of hot water on, then watched the water roll slowly across the surface, the boiling beginning. A bowl of braised greens called to me. Oh, these weeks in December, with the potlucks and teacher gifts and sugar-cookie baking. I’m trying hard to not eat much sugar, but it’s hard. Greens seemed so wonderfully appealing to me. Lucy and I had plucked a bunch of fresh kale leaves from our garden when we came home from the market, so I rolled those up like a cigar and sliced them. By this time, she was more interested in what I was doing than in the refrigerator magnets or hiding in the refrigerator.

“Mama, can I help?” she asked me. It’s one of her most frequent questions right now. Of course, the answer is yes.

She stirs food in pots now, carefully, with our close observation. I let her stir the greens and kale as I grabbed a handful of caramelized onions left over from the night before and threw those in too. “Mama, can I have a napkin?” she asked. I knew she meant a kitchen towel, so I grabbed one. When I turned back around, I saw that she had carefully wrapped it around the handle of the cast-iron skillet. She could feel the heat rising and wanted to take care of herself. Sort of teary, I whispered to Danny to come look. We stood there for a moment, feeling lucky.

Then I threw in some sliced-up olives and asked her to stir some more.

I swirled the spider around in the pasta, feeling its bite with the edges, and then the edges of my teeth. Done. Lucy helped me move all the greens and browns, the smells of brine and caramelization into our wide red bowl. And then I moved the pasta on top of it, along with some of the water.

We danced to the Nutrcracker for a few moments while we waited. We were headed there in less than half an hour.

Ding. Lucy stirred the pasta, with my hand on hers, to find a creamy sauce. That technique — hot vegetables and sauce, a splash of pasta water, pasta on top, and waiting — works every time. Time to come to the table.

Danny ran back to the kitchen and pulled out the truffles. He had insisted on buying these Washington state truffles that morning, three tiny nuggets for $22. I blanched at first, then thought, “This is what we do. Let’s celebrate.” Besides, they last for such a long time. Soon, there will be trufffle salt and truffle oil in our kitchen. But that day, he shaved tiny slivers over our pasta.

“You taste like truffles,” Danny told me the first time I kissed him. I didn’t know how that could be, since I had never eaten them. But when he said that, giddy and right there, how could we have known that we would be sitting in our dining room on Vashon, at a table covered with cookbooks, that pale northern light still flooding out the mess, eating pasta with truffles with our daughter. Pasta she had helped us to cook.

The dishes got done later. That meal could not wait.

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