Who loves a little boiled cruciferous vegetable for lunch? I do! Cauliflower, broccoli, cabbage, Brussels sprouts are all prime contenders for a wholesome bowl of midday sustenance.
Here, cauliflower from Volante Farm is topped with British cheddar, recently made herb butter (using aromatics from the garden), and threaded with kale that a friend grew and gave me earlier in the week. Plus salt. Of course, salt.
It is so simple — what my mother would’ve called “peasant fare” — and yet beyond satisfying.
It stinks up the house for a minute, but who cares? It is totally worth it.
In other news, our turkey family is missing its fifth member. Is it the mother? I can’t tell because the chicks are full grown now.
I’m busy convincing myself it’s the mother, so that I can tell myself that her absence is purposeful and natural. To imagine otherwise? Not today.
Boil a chicken carcass from a previous meal in a Dutch oven with plenty of water. Add: onion skins and ends from one medium onion, ends and peels from six or seven carrots, tips and ends of seven stalks of celery, ten cloves of garlic, rosemary, thyme, and bay leaf. S&P.
(The onions, carrots, and celery from above will go into the soup).
Make the soup:
Rough chop a medium onion and sauté with three cloves of garlic, as well as thyme, rosemary, oregano (except for the oregano, I used fresh herbs).
Add six or seven chopped carrots and three chopped celery stalks.
Ladle in enough stock to cover and then some.
Add two tablespoons of tomato paste and two teaspoons of fresh grated ginger.
Cook until carrots are soft and then using an immersion blender, make a puréed soup.
Serve with chopped dill and thyme, more salt, and a swirl of garlic-infused olive oil.
I probably would have added a tablespoon or two of heavy cream or marscapone if I’d had any in the fridge, but this recipe was delicious without them!
Here’s my high-tech method of squeezing some of the liquid out of tofu. 1) Wrap in clean dish towel. 2) Place a full tea kettle on top.
I keep sesame seeds in the freezer and sesame oil in the fridge, so this dinner is an easy (but delicious) choice when groceries and energy are low.
The marinade is just: soy sauce, white vinegar (because I was out of rice vinegar), a triple splash of sesame oil, and a 1/2 teaspoon truvia (more like 2 teaspoons if using honey or sugar).
Fresh scallions, if you have them.
Rice is in the rice cooker and I’ve trimmed some green beans.
Dinner in 15!
(Serving it up just now I remembered I also put about 1/3 cup of a recently made spicy hot soy sauce mixture).
One of the happy consequences of diarrhea lettuce is that I’m shopping my town’s Farmers’ Markets. Salad above features radish sprouts, a spicy addition to already tasty salad. I tossed in some pumpkin seeds for extra crunch.
We also had melt-in-your-mouth corn on the cob. Local. It was so tender Ken said that I could’ve risked it, referring to the fact that ever since my front crown fell out of my mouth twice, I shave my cobs.
Sounds like a guilty admission: I shave my cobs.
TODAY? I plan to finish piecing this with a simple edict: when solving a dimension issue, GO SMALLER NOT BIGGER.
Jeez.
Legs knit w/yarn I dyed with indigo. This was in hospital waiting for Dan’s arm surgery to be done. He was 14. It was the second break.
I ordered some indigo powder from Dharma Trading Company yesterday. I don’t have the bandwidth for leaf processing and who knows, I may not have what it takes to make up a batch with powder either. I’d like to though. It’s been a minute. In cleaning out the basement, I found piles of white t-shirts, rubber bands, resist plates of glass, a thermometer. All kinds of dye supplies, in other words.
In October I will be spending a day with an African dye master, Gasali Adeyemo. More about this another time. A writing friend is hosting him in New Mexico.
What do you do when time behaves like a rascal, defiant and disobedient? What day is it? What month? How long has Danny been dead?
Time always slips around some, but in acute grief it stretches and compresses like an unruly adversary — another aspect of loss.
Today is the four-month anniversary of Danny’s death. Ken and I find ourselves flummoxed. We seesaw from wondering how it can be only four months to wondering how it’s already been a quarter of a year.
I didn’t think this was a significant anniversary, but the amount of weeping I’ve done today tells a different story.
Last night, I tossed and turned and dreamt about Mick Jagger. Nonsense, really. I was in the kitchen and something frustrated me and I pushed some objects violently aside. Mick Jagger said, “You’ll never be president.”
Why would I want to be president and why is Mick Jagger in my kitchen, judging me?
We saw him in the stands of the England/Argentina game, of course.
I don’t know enough about soccer to have an opinion, but boy are people mad on Threads. Many think that Argentina was afforded every advantage in ways both obvious and unfair. I don’t know. I just know that when the games end, there will be a space that needs filling.
Hand-wringing returned. Yesterday I kept imagining calling 911 that final night. I hear myself whispering that they shouldn’t use their siren and that they should approach the apartment quietly. And then I imagine announcing to a furious Danny that I couldn’t let him throw his life away.
You don’t have to chime in about culpability or whether such an intervention would’ve worked, even for the short term.
I know. I know. I think I know?
Last week, I met with a friend whose child has made more than five attempts on their life. This mother, my friend, shared that both times they institutionalized her daughter, it made things worse.
There’s so much suffering in the world.
The rabbits eat at a furious clip this summer. It’s hard to watch my ferns drying up in the heat and the hosta being devoured by those cute little fuckers. More death.
Our corrupt dipshit of a president plans to address the nation tonight. I’ll admit to being on edge, even though sane commentators say, Calm down. The federal government doesn’t control elections. He can say whatever he wants and it doesn’t mean he has the power to do what he says.
There are many things that I wish I believed.
Meanwhile, the upside of this diarrhea lettuce outbreak is that we have twice recently shopped for local produce.
I got some gorgeous onions that the bagger said you could bite right into they’re so sweet. And look at these beauties below!
For dinner, we’re gonna have an onion, goat cheese, burrata, ham, and asparagus tart.
