Some Thoughts I Have About Raymond

Raymond and I have conducted our relationship in secret for almost fifteen years. We weren’t hiding it, we weren’t up to anything-in fact there was a very marked lack of any sexual attraction between us though he has given me many compliments on my rack over the years. Thanks, Ray, by the way. We just had very different lives, different social circles, different schedules.

So when I found out he had died it was about 24 hours later and only because someone posted something about it on Facebook. FACEBOOK! I was in my office and I got up, walking past all these computer monitors and silent typists wearing headphones and stumbled out onto the street. My body shook. I didn’t know who to call. Our lives are like a venn diagram and no one else seemed to be in that overlapping area, that little place where our friendship existed. Just like that all traces of it were gone. I barely have even any photos of us together.

I wanted to call him and ask if it was true.

When people die everyone says the same things. Unlike our friendship my grief isn’t private-it’s shared by everyone who knew him, loved him. It’s shared by everyone in the world really, because time keeps marching on and keeps dragging us from each other and we try to forget during the in between times. We probably have to or every moment would be this agony of feeling, just constantly screaming at the top of our lungs, “I love you, I love you, I love you.” Because in this moment, knowing that he is gone, I wonder why I ever said anything else.

My last word to Raymond was on Gchat. We have been IMing each other pretty much every single day since it was invented. Maybe that’s why it was always so easy to tell things to Raymond that I could never tell anyone else- about my chronic depression, about my family, about my low self-esteem. Most people don’t want to hear about those things because they think it makes you tainted in some way, like a sick animal that should just slink off somewhere shady to die. Raymond never made me feel like any of my thoughts or feelings were unsafe to share. He never made me feel like the things I hoped for were stupid. He was, no matter how much we butted heads, always kind which is not something many people (definitely not me) manage to be. And my last word to him on Gchat was, “whatever.” I was annoyed with some disagreement we were having. I wasn’t angry or anything just being dismissive. On Sunday I called him to see if he wanted to go get a drink and he didn’t answer. I can never take back that last irritated conversation. So instead I want to remember the last time we were together which was at his house a few weeks ago.

It was rainy as shit. I went to his house and we drank beer, ate pizza and watched stand up. We smoked a cigar on the stoop and made a pact that we would do a stand up show together by November. We looked out at the rain and said we should write a song but by the time we got upstairs we were too lazy and drunk. We sat around his room while he played music and talked about people we love, think we might love, think we might get laid by. We said good bye and I hugged him and said let’s do this more. He agreed. Memory is strange because now, wanting it so desperately to be true, I think as I left I said I love you. Did I? Had I ever? It was true and he must have known it but even though I can picture myself saying it and I can picture him bashfully mumbling, “Love you too, Aimee, now get out,” or something like that...I don’t know if it really happened.

I doubt very much that I was anywhere in the top best friends of Raymond’s life-he had so many. But I believe our friendship was one of the most special in my life, one of the most unique and long lasting. A huge part of my life has been extinguished and besides I Love You I’d like to tell Raymond that. We don’t always know the ways we touch people, what compartment inside their psyche or heart we fill. I can walk into so many rooms in my mind but now one of the biggest ones is empty. If there are people in your life who shape you, understand you, indulge you, argue with you, make up afterwards with you, get crazy on the dance floor with you why keep it a secret? I wish it hadn’t been. I didn’t even know it was until I knew he was dead.

On my iTunes there is a bunch of music Ray picked out and a few that he wrote, a couple we wrote together. The ones I was involved with weren’t as good, but he always helped me anyway. One in particular popped up a few months ago and I hadn’t listened to it in awhile and it made me so happy to hear it. It reminded me I had this friend who wrote me this silly song just because I asked him to and a tear came to my eye even then. It was for a video I made about an evil villainess called the Pie Socialite who pies her enemies and Raymond wrote it from the perspective of her boyfriend before she goes evil, when she’s just plain old Holly his girl. He probably wrote it in like two minutes but it’s so catchy and funny and sweet. I’m listening to it now as I write this and trying to remember all the moments we’re supposed to remember in times like this- when I flashed him on stage during his first show with Ohnomoon, watching him walk out my door forgetting he was still wearing a pair of bunny ears over his hat, him running down the hall away from me in our high school after teasing me, tasting honey together at a harvest festival, smoking pink cigarettes on my stoop, dragging his drunk ass into a bed while he clutched a slice of pizza, him chastising a driver who almost doored me in Williamsburg as he biked cavalierly by, roasting together on Brighton beach, the sound of him calling me Red which is a nickname no one else living remembers...

There is nothing in this life worth as much as the capacity to be loved and to love others. I love Raymond Blanco. I believe the world and my life is a lesser place for not having him in it. There is no solace.

The Philosophy of Fasting

This morning I was sitting around the kitchen table with my roommates, debating the merits of exercise. I was pro-exercise and others were con or somewhere in the middle. And one of them made the point that Elle MacPherson doesn't look like she does because she hits the gym every day. That exercise doesn't ever really make the life altering change to our looks that we hope it will. And I told her that in the last year I've lost roughly 20 pounds and definitely look different. She asked if this was just from exercise and I said yes...but it's not quite true.

Just after Thanksgiving last year I embarked on a five day fast. For five days I drank salt water, lemon juice and tea. During those five days I lost maybe eight pounds, most of it water weight. Which means I should have instantly put it back on in the days following the fast, but I didn't. I kept getting thinner. I ate less generally. I started exercising. So now a year later those five days of not eating have left their mark on me and I wonder if it was kind of a cheat.

This summer I was in a used bookstore and I found a slim yellow volume entitled "The Philosophy of Fasting" by Edward E. Purinton. Published in 1906 it advocates what is essentially the Master Cleanse, what I did a year ago (a very truncated version). I flipped through it, intrigued.

When you're not eating there's not much else to do but think. All the time you usually spend planning a meal, buying ingredients, preparing your food (or in lieu of that, the time you spend arguing about where to get take-out) is now just dead air. Since I was avoiding the thought of eating I thought about lots of other stuff that I had been avoiding by eating all the time. My way of dealing with difficult emotions or thoughts has always been through food, eating as a kind of sedation. Part of the reason I went on the fast was because that compulsion had begun to take over my life in a scary way.

This is a weird thing to write about because this blog is about things I think are cool or funny or interesting or poignant or would recommend other people try. But fasting is none of those things. It's personal, as is everyone's relationship to food and their bodies. As much as we do it in groups, fetishize it, torment each other over it, teach and write and talk about it, eating is like a relationship. No one knows what goes on between you and your food except the two of you. Edward E. Purinton's book touched a lot on the spiritual side of fasting, how starving yourself leads to all kinds of revelatory experiences but he sounds pretty crazy and self-obsessed, much like this post is starting to sound...but I still get it.

Because I fasted, which led to thinking which led to philosophizing. My reasons for eating more than I needed to and then more than I even wanted to became clearer to me and I found that those reasons held less power when I was aware of them. Am I cured of these compulsions? No. They manifest in a hundred other ways and I'll never abstain from all bad behavior, god willing. Do I have control over myself? What an ugly word control is especially when related to the physical self. But now I know what's possible. Change is possible. I've changed. I don't think fasting is the only way to make that happen for myself or anyone but I'm still really glad it did happen. I wont ever look like Elle MacPherson, obvs, and while I look different, kinda, maybe its not as different as I'd hoped when I started loosing weight.

Could I fast again? Well, I have one or two days at a time. It's not the same because the first time you don't eat for many days in a row you're not sure what to expect and it's kind of exciting. Now when I do it I'm like, oh yeah...that bullshit. But with it having been a year and all I'm beginning to feel some of that desire, to just set aside time for myself. Time to think, to have a headache, to reflect, to pee a hundred times a day, time to work out my philosophy. Whatever it is.

Secret Garden Tour Part 2: Waterpod

Well, well, well. Look what we have here. It's one in the morning and winter was in the air as I walked home tonight. To warm myself I looked back on summer days of yore and it hit me-I haven't written a blog post in over a month! What the what!

Also to get through the night shift I've had about 50 ounces of yerba mate in a twenty minute period. I'm so pumped I've already jogged around the block a couples times, painted my room and rearranged all my books according to the Dewey Decimal system. I even smoked a cigarette to pass some time. It was either write this post or count all the hairs on my head until dawn. GET PSYCHED EVERYONE!!!

A lot has happened since the summer. I've finally settled into a new house and unpacked about 45% of my boxes. I got a hair cut.

So, the Waterpod. I visited twice this summer, once when they were docked in the Bronx, once in the Queen's marina. The first time it was just the tour. We saw the chickens, the greywater system, the wood burning stove the tiny lofted bedrooms and the Three Sisters garden. The second time I went and built a boat. But what is the Waterpod? Part art project, part experiment in sustainable living, the Waterpod is a giant barge that was dragged from borough to borough this summer teaching the local populace about food and agriculture from their very own working farm! The people living aboard fed and watered themselves from what they grew and the rain water they collected. It was kind of like a dream come true. Who among us hasn't been sitting around with friends late a night and said something along the lines of "Guys...guys. We should live on a houseboat. Seriously. Like, let's get one and live on it. We'll be free, man!" Well, that was like this except better.

The second time I visited it was the last weekend for the Waterpod and they were cramming the events in. There was a foraging tea and dance parties and music but my favorite thing was a boat building session led my Douglas Paulson and Christopher Robbins, artists who are interested in community building and also floating objects made from garbage. My friend Robin and I elbowed our way into their project and helped lash a couple of doors together along with giant chunks of styrofoam found floating along the shoreline. When time came to launch the very shady looking raft only the four of us volunteered to go for a spin. I'm not gonna lie...the paddles made from pine branches and two by fours were not the most wieldy. But again I felt like I was living the dream! Is there anything better than taking the detritus of human existence and with some comradery and power tools turning it into an adventure on the open water? I'm here to tell you...no, there is not. Of course, we were slowly sucked out towards the sea and had to be hauled to shore by a kayak, but near drowning is part of the fun. And when we got back there was rose hip tea and a sleepy cat in a captain's bed.

Lotus Garden: Secret Garden Tour Pt. 1

I snuck home last weekend for the Secret Garden Tour and visited two amazing places. So I decided they each deserved their own post (And then I'd feel less nuts about all the writing I'm doing. Or more nuts?)

The Lotus Garden is on the Upper West Side which is like a foreign country. I'm a downtown girl, if you know what I mean. The townhouses and condominiums of Central Park West through to Riverside Drive are completely alien to me. They're full of rich people, you guys! What's interesting about The Lotus Garden is it's completely ornamental and this was a stipulation of its existence. The garden had originally been a ground floor community garden and when it was ripped up for Columbia to develop another building they had enough sway to demand reconstruction. Now the garden is elevated over the new building's parking garage, but growing vegetables was banned as it was considered 'low rent'. Why would you need to grow food when you can buy it?

I don't mean this as a criticism of the garden. Frankly, it's totally beautiful and well maintained and verdant etc. I just find it pretty fascinating how people's attitudes about home gardening have been reflected in the landscape. Upstate now I've noticed that depending on the neighborhood you're driving through many people have started to have vegetable gardens (or continued to if they never had any snobbery about it). Will there come a time when Lotus Garden needs to grow vegetables? Since I'm not usually that interested in ornamental gardens, especially the shaded hosta filled variety I spent a lot of time thinking about that as we toured around.


Members of the garden have a key to let themselves in and not many open hours. That plus the fact it's up a locked staircase on top of a private parking garage means it's a secret garden indeed. The Lotus Garden is also run solely by volunteers and to register as a non-profit they'd need to be open at least 20 hours a week which would be pretty challenging. I wasn't clear from listening if they need more members or money or what...but I guess being a non-profit they could then apply for grants and then get more members and then more money.... wahhh! How confusing the access to park and growing space is in New York! I heart community gardens but they need to become less rarefied and more inclusive if they want to survive. Probably not the Lotus Garden though. Their roots run deep.

They have trees standing twenty feet high and a koi pond whose ancestors probably pre-date my birth. The people who met us there, with cider and crisp apples from the farmer's market as a gift, were gracious and incredibly committed. Carolyn Summers showed off her miniature garden, tiny Hen and Chicks planted in the gravel, baby hostas and ferns stunted by the pots shortening their roots and hidden carefully under ground. It's kind of fascinating how people take pride in what they grow and what they choose to grow and why. With space limitations she made her plot a museum of the small. I could never grow a garden like that...but wouldn't it be incredible if everyone had a little space to see what they'd sow?

You can visit The Lotus Garden from 1-4 every Sunday April-November on W. 97th between Bdwy and West End. Thanks to Huong for photos!

Small Potatoes

Well, it's September 11th. I don't think about September 11th very much. I didn't think about it today until I checked Facebook and saw everyone's statuses reminding me and telling me that they were thinking about it and also pretty sad about it.

I woke up this morning planning to write a post about some potatoes I grew in a window box. They're Magic Mollies, purple potatoes that I hoarded for almost a year to plant in my garden. When we had to move out and couldn't take the garden with us I got the shovel and uprooted one of the potato plants. It was a wonderful color, dark green with purple coming up the stem and spreading into the leaves growing in every direction. I put it in a long narrow plastic container with some silty dirt and hoped for the best. Over the summer it continued to grow, taller and taller but there were never any flowers on it. Eventually the whole thing collapsed on itself and I made the executive decision to rip the thing up rather than cart around twenty pounds of dirt to yet another of my many homes.

All that came of it were a handful of tiny potatoes. They looked like something a woodland animal leaves behind. Appetizing, but I didn't get around to eating them, then forgot them in a friend's refrigerator. It was a disappointing yield but still the Mollies are magical to me. Anytime you have a hand in creating something, even something so small and turd-like, it's kind of a thrill.

The scale of the worthwhile and the meaningless is such a difficult one to balance. On the one hand I'm thinking about a day eight years ago when thousands of people died a short subway ride away from me. I have memories of the day and the days that followed. My mother got sick that same week and was in the hospital for ages, it seemed. I remember visiting her and walking through the ER hallways lined floor to ceiling with pictures of missing people. On the other hand I'm thinking about potatoes.

When today passes I'll be thinking about the potato side of life far more prominently. Or there will be another unspeakable tragedy and I'll think about that. Or another crop, something even more sustaining and delicious and I'll think about that. I guess on the anniversary of important events, both good and bad, we're not just thinking of one day but all the days in between, all the events that have changed and shaped us, who we were and what we've evolved into. And we hope this time next year things will be better.

The Secret Garden Tour/ I Love Plants Like Whoa

Someone recently said, "Your posts are so long!" without adding "And really interesting..." so here's a pretty short and sweet and matter of fact one for ya. Ya knows who ya is.

This summer I met two lovely people, Colin and Huong. They're artists and though I'm not sure about what kind of objects they make (if only objects qualify) they certainly know how to throw a party. Frankly, there is an artistry to that I greatly admire. Many fun times were had but this fun time in particular took place on their Secret Garden Tour. Colin has assured me it's not really a secret so I am at liberty to divulge. They've been developing the tours all summer and this particular one brought us to two very diverse examples of community growing.

Damn. I typed a whole bunch and then my computer shut itself down and it was all lost. There's a lesson in here somewhere but for who?

Let me regroup. THE FIRST PLACE WAS...Red Shed Community Garden on Kingsland Ave. and Skillman. They have a willow and fig tree, a shed, and a grill that they started to fire up at the smallest hint we'd be staying a while. Didn't bring anything to bbq though unfortunately. This garden is very reminiscent of a community garden I grew up next to in the East Village run by Open Road. I had a plot there which still remains. I planted a tree in it so they can't dismantle it. Cherries!

Anyway, at Red Shed there are the locals who've been living in the neighborhood and nearby projects for ever and there are the gentrifying intruders. As a visitor I can only say that things seem friendly. They have community plots and personal ones with lots of fruits and vegetables growing. Eggplants were flourishing when we were there and mosquitos. The keep extra bug spray in the shed.

Our second stop on the tour was Rooftop Farms on Eagle St. in Greenpoint. Rooftop is run by Annie Novak and Ben Flanner and they've been getting a lot of attention this year because they've taken the idea of a green roof and turned it into a working farm. The roof's owner wanted to install a green roof and Annie was called in to figure out how to make it all work. We talked for awhile before the tour started and it seems like that's what she does circling the world, stopping at farms and meeting challenges in growing. As she said several times in different ways, "I love plants like, whoa."

Rooftop sells their produce and welcomes volunteers. They're hoping to make the farm work as a viable option for other buildings around the city. The installation is quite expensive but since then she says they've been farming as cheaply as possible. With time the produce will begin to pay for itself and make up the original cost.

We walked down the rows of tomatoes, carrots, squash, beans, fresh herbs, melons and Annie told us about the different plants and their composting system. They also have two bee hives (!) and are growing hops up the side of one of their walls.


Now, I'm not a farmer. But I do love plants like...well, like something. What was especially exciting about the tour was the feeling that hey, you want to grow things, grow them! You want to start a community garden, start one! You want a farm, build it on the roof!

So how about it? Anyone want to start a community garden with me?

The next Secret Garden Tour is this coming Saturday Sept 12th starting at 2 PM at The Lotus Garden then going on to the Waterpod at Concrete Plant Park. If you can't come then find another time to visit either place (the Waterpod in particular looks cool as shit) or hell, just go to your nearest community garden and sit back on a bench. Enjoy the last warm days of September as the harvest comes rolling in. Think what you'll plant next year. Imagine it grow.

Fly Away Home

Since moving from Sunset Park this spring I've lived in four other locations, not counting a few regressive nights on my mother's couch, which would bring the total to five. Certain aspects of moving have become very streamlined for me. Every time I start packing to go to a new place I go through my things and ask myself, When was the last time you touched this object? Wore this shirt? Opened this book? Things have been paring down. Coming to my current roost I had one bag of clothes and a backpack. Of course the weather has completely changed since then and I've been wearing the same long sleeve shirt over and over. I don't know if this means I should have packed more or if I could have gotten away with packing even less. One shirt. Done. Who needs pants? The Man.

Earlier this summer I went camping with some friends in Harriman State Park on the edge of a lake. We took a train to Tuxedo then walked through town and off the road into the woods. I have been looking back on that trip as some of the worst packing of my entire life. I walked into the woods prepared for little more than dying cold and wet in a ditch covered head to toe in ticks. Yet somehow my backpack was so fucking heavy it felt like my collarbone was being gradually pulled apart by the straps across my shoulders. It was a two hour hike to the camp site and this wasn't considering the walk through Brooklyn to the subway then wandering all over Penn Station for the train.

Luckily, my friend Zach lead the way and he loves to camp! It's just camp camp camp day and night with this guy. He has a camp stove, a bear bag (this is where you keep your food not your bears...unless you eat delicious, delicious bear), various tarps, and an extra tent for myself and my pal Robin who would have been sleeping on the dirt with me otherwise. He also had lots of great advice, like "Don't wash your face with the water we cooked pasta in," and "Don't bring berry scented lotion to the woods full of bears".

Some of you (I mean the two people who read this blog) may know how terrified I am of sleeping out of doors. Like most unreasonable fears this one has waned through practice or the 'facing' of fear. I've slept in a tent a few times now without prescription drugs OR a panic attack and though I went to bed that first night startlingly sober (though he packed everything else Zach forgot the bourbon) I believed in the possibility of sleep and not that I would be murdered by an itinerant woodsman.

Fear is not the same thing as discomfort and within the hour both Robin and I were shivering in our sleeping bags. At least that's what she claims. Every time I looked over at her she was calmly breathing out frozen white puffs. According to her she tossed and turned and declared me an 'excellent sleeper'. We'd borrowed our bags from a couple who told us they'd slept on the snow with them. We realized they must have zipped the bags together and cuddled but Robin rejected my offer to spoon. You can lead a horse to water but you can't make it spoon with you.

The next night I thought, if I could just be warm I would sleep like the dead. But the body wants what it wants. It was warmer but there was no peace. You see, I hadn't packed a mat and through the thin texture of my sleeping bag I felt every rock and clump of grass and rabbit dropping held together by the hard hard cold cold ground. My eyes closed occasionally but that was as close to sleep as I got.

Since this trip I've thought a lot about what's the least amount someone would need to live in the woods and though there are many people who actually have the experience to answer this question let me dwell on my suppositions a moment. Fire. Food that wont quickly perish, until you learn to throttle squirrels for soup. Good walking shoes, until you walk them off your feet and develop a thick sole of skin. A tarp. A place to sleep. Well, I seem to be wavering here...because what is necessary to living in the woods depends a lot on how much you want it to be like living in your home. One could slowly shake off what is vital to a civilized life and keep only what is vital to survival. I don't think of that as a romantic idea. Being uncomfortable is hard. And if you're going to live in the woods, well, why not build a cabin? As camping goes we were in a pretty good place, not a cabin but there was a nylon roof keeping the rain and some of the bugs out.



I still don't have a permanent home but when it happens how will I face the flood of...stuff? All the lamps, the mattress, the bags and bags of clothes I never wear, boxes of books to the ceiling, letters, photos, drawings, twenty-five years worth of knick knacks pouring in on me from storage to be sorted through and categorized and valued again. They wont take it well if I say, "Sorry. You're not vital to my survival." Then I imagine myself in a bare room, in a poorly insulated sleeping bag tossing and turning on the floor. But hey, at least I don't have BAGGAGE! There must be a happy medium somewhere.

Wait, before I finish I just want to mention the bugs again. There are a lot of bugs out there. Ticks especially. Zach had a handy little plastic tweezer to pull them out. Robin was covered in them every time we came back from a hike. I never found any on myself but did enjoy mooning her under the pretense of a tick search. The thing about bugs is in the city we think of them as scurrying around the floor, hiding in the dark until we go to bed. It's a war and we think by keeping our homes clean, lining the cracks with poison we'll win every skirmish. But as soon as you go out where there are more trees than people you can see the fallacy in this thinking. Bugs in the woods are not shy, they're not gonna hide and you're in THEIR house. A tent is basically a little air bubble where you can breath without inhaling gnats.

I'm in the woods again, in a cabin actually, and the line where my house ends and the bugs' begin is blurry. There's no heat and the screen doors droop on their hinges. I have to evict squatting spiders and hypnotized moths pretty regularly, ants swim in my honey and this morning I killed a mosquito helping itself to the buffet of blood in my eyelid. Later I was walking along the road and saw a black raspberry bush, the last of the season's fruit glistening on its stems. Falling on it like a gremlin, I ate what was there leaving nothing for the birds or neighborhood children. When I stood up I checked my legs, for ticks of course, but found instead a little red stowaway, a ladybug clinging desperately after what surely must have been a traumatic trip through space.

I recited the old rhyme. Ladybug, Ladybug fly away home...and just like that she spread her hard candy wings and fluttered off. It was kind of like magic and I appreciated that she didn't let me get to the grim conclusion...Your house is on fire and your children are gone. Now trying to imagine my future home I keep thinking of the ladybug's scorching tinderbox. The tiny firetruck manned by grasshoppers. Her (many?) eyes reflecting the dying flames and charred remains. She'll have to rebuild.

On our third day of camping we woke up to pouring rain. We shook out our temporary homes, rolled them up and packed them away. When we got off the train we went en mass to a friend's house for showers, a hot meal, Pictionary and a big bottle of bourbon. Damp cold and sobriety has its place...but not at MY place. That much about my future residence I do know.

April is the Cruelest Month...and May Through August

Statistically speaking I dropped off this whole blogging thing at about the right time. Half a year and I checked out. I can go on about the reasons why I did but what's more interesting are the reasons why I'm writing again, which will hopefully not be just another whim. But hey, who knows? Life is long and full of impediments.

Let us take a journey back to April then, that far flung month of Fools and sudden flurries. It was wet, it was cold but Spring had reached out to tap our shoulders and say, "Hey, wait up I'm coming! Don't go without me!" I looked out at the sagging broken bits of my garden and thought, Let's do this thing. Earth was turned, leaves composted, cement swept and the great Craigslist search began. First to build a garden box you need wood and free wood is the best kind.

My roommate Claire and I met up on a desolate street a hair's breadth from Red Hook then followed a strange woman into her warehouse, using a flash light to pick through her debris and find chunks of wood of an approximate size to one another. They were all different finishes, some actual lumber, some just the hacked up drawers of an old bureau, some were lined mysteriously with cloth that no force on earth (barring industrial solvents) could remove. We bungeed what we could to the back of Claire's bike and the rest on a tiny black hand cart and walked the forty or so blocks to our house, with the weight of the wood tipping their conveyances over every ten feet or so. Tenacious C, as I like to call her, urged me on as my shoulders separated and we finally made it, April wind whipping our faces and the clouds rolling over.

Aw, look at this photo. I'm so glad my Nalgene is pictured here. I lost it a few weeks ago at a yoga studio. Never forget!!


When we finally got to hammering all this garbage together we noticed our boxes were perfectly coffin sized, if you were being buried 150 years ago in the Old West.


There was one for me as well but I like the power to the workers tone of Claire's pose here with the hammer and all.

Hmm, now we have boxes. Where to find dirt? Until you need large amounts of it at once you assume dirt is the most readily available commodity out there. I mean everywhere I look I see dirt, right? But no. Craigslist again! This time it lead us to a bar on Fifth Ave. where the proprietor had been digging out his basement, hoping to make the ceiling a habitable distance from the floor. One day it will be a music venue but that particular day it looked like where we were going to be murdered. It didn't help that in the corner sat two hundred partially filled black garbage bags under a caged bare bulb. These turned out to be full of dirt, not body parts, and we started hauling them up the perilously steep basement staircase. Another surprise about dirt-it's pretty fucking heavy! It took the both of us to manage certain bags and when we peaked in one we saw why. This wasn't loamy compost full of rich organic matter. This was red silt, the clay earth of old Brooklyn sitting under the pressure of a building for a hundred years. Not entirely sure anything would even grow in it we loaded down a friend's car until it sagged and drove the bags home to go through another back breaking session of moving them down the long alleyway to our apartment.

Now the fun part! Slashing the bags with a razor blade filled me with glee. Because I'm deranged. Claire upended our compost bin over the red clay, ignoring un-composted bits like corn husks and what we'd just eaten for lunch, assuming it would all work itself out in the end. We mixed the two together hoping to create a hospitable environment for our seeds.

And such seeds. I had it all worked out. I was gonna grow a whole season's worth of food and have enough to can and jar, freeze and dry, and subsist on all winter. I dreamed big, baby. Tomatoes, snap peas, kale, carrots, green onions, potatoes (Including the purple Magic Mollies I'd hoarded in a paper bag all year. When I reached my hand in to get them I shrieked. Their eyes had sprouted and the stems caressed me like antennae), strawberries, five kinds of basil, rosemary, thyme, beets. All of these I planted in peat lined trays and covered carefully with clear plastic. I worried over them like a mother. A negligent, inconsistent mother but somehow they sprouted. I built a trellis over the boxes out of old silkscreen frames for the climbing peas and sat back waiting to reap what I'd sown.

Then the blow! My landlord wanted my house, Tenacious C was moving out and I had to find a new place to live all of which is a saga for another day. I suffered in a few ways, throwing out most of my personal belongings, losing money etc. But the hardest thing was saying goodbye to my garden that I had planted and tended in good faith and which now was reduced to a charge from my landlord. Removal. He trashed it all. All our work in a dumpster just like that.

That's assuming he didn't just charge me and keep the beds in his new yard anyway, which I'd really be glad to hear.

So here I am, in upstate New York again, a part of the world that first inspired me to begin writing about food and the outdoors and growing things. And I said this was going to be a post about why I've started writing again not why I stopped but it seems they're the same story, really. I stopped because my garden was taken away before it could be anything and I'm starting again because writing about food and life and plants brings it back to life, allows it to stretch its tendrils out and climb that trellis where it can unfurl and bear fruit.

Metaphorically, I mean. Because it's actually in a landfill now.

They Know What We Want

Hey, by now this is kind of old news, but Michelle Obama is starting a vegetable garden at the white house.

I'm not a particularly informed or political person and part of the reason for that is I feel like a lot about politics is just a big show to keep disinterested parties like myself complacent enough to not take any kind of action. And what was scary about the Bush administration (aside of course for EVERYTHING) is that they didn't even bother putting on a show for people like me, who care about food or the environment or social programs or anything good in the world. Is Obama a savior? Is he really that different from what we had in the past? Is it possible for a powerful political leader to be that different?

Well, this is obviously not the forum to answer any of my bullshit questions...but hey, good show, Michelle. Thank you for patronizing me! I feel good about it.

Bird Watching

This is partly an effort to meet my personal four blog posts a month quota and partly because what I am about to relate blew my mind grapes and I need to share it with my two readers.

Today I was walking in Greenwood Cemetery and saw a giant bird of prey pecking the flesh from the leg of a squirrel in a tree branch just a few feet above my eye level. I watched in terrified fascination for awhile, hoping it had gotten that squirrel bastard who kept eating through the stems of my sunflowers last summer when it looked up and stared me down. It was like in The Last Unicorn when the unicorn is trying to get away from the harpy...well, I'm a nerd. But I turned and walked away slowly so as not to attract its attention in much the same manner.

Nature!!!

And where the Devil stepped onion grew from one foot print and the other, garlic...

I've failed. I made a New Year's resolution and kept it private so no one would know my shame but the truth must come out. My resolution was to write four blog entries a month. Crazy, right?

Luckily my birthday is in February, so I always get a chance to renew resolutions and start over for a new year, a personal new year. And I hereby renew. Right now I'm sitting on the couch watching BCAT and finishing off the better part of a bottle of red wine. Just signed a petition to legalize beekeeping in NY.

What's the hot news on BCAT? Mostly about saving Coney Island. My roommate Claire is working on a website, saveconeyisland.net, which just put up its own petition. Sign both!

So...back to me.

I wanted to write about garlic because a few weeks ago I was sitting on my couch deliriously ill and over the phone my friend Robin suggested two possible home remedies for the common cold:

1. Drink hot water over crushed ginger

2. Eat raw garlic mixed with warm water and honey

Now I heard number 2 as "Eat raw garlic with hot water OR honey," and thought, of course honey is the better choice here! It'll disguise the intensity of the flavor...duh. Only an idiot would do anything else.

If you've ever eaten a mouthful of raw garlic minced by a fever-addled madwoman (by which I mean in large irregular chunks) you may not know how painful it is. I gagged and fell to the floor clutching approximately where my esophogus turns into my stomach. Or is it the intestine? Well, anyway. It hurt. It hurt again the next morning when I gave it another try. Eventually I checked in with Robin and figured out the warm water kind of helps the whole mess slide down a lot better.

I have a much admired tank top that says GILROY GARLIC FESTIVAL, but I've never been. It's one of my great dreams because horrible throat burning aside garlic is one of my favorite things. I put loads of it in every meal and that's why I smell and no one will ever love me. BUT on the flip side garlic is supposed to help prevent heart disease and cancer so it'll be a long life alone. Garlic thins your blood which is probably what's keeping the vampires away. They want the arteries choked with saturated fats...I'll never have a pale night-walking lover!

Around mid-summer we get bunches of beautiful green garlic scapes with our CSA. The first time they arrived I had never seen scapes before and was mystified by them. A garlic scape is basically a head of garlic bolting, or sending its flower up into the world. Garlic can cleverly grow from seed or by increasing its cloves under the ground. Since we like to eat the cloves it behooves garlic growers to snap off the scapes to keep them from flowering. That'll get the plant to concentrate its growing power on a full delicious bottom.

But you can eat them! Apparently. My cooking of scapes hasn't reached transcendental levels quite yet. It took Claire and I awhile to even figure out what the hell they were.

On both farms I stayed garlic was a part of the experience. At Frosty Morning Farms the garlic wasn't ready to harvest on my first visit and the second time they'd all already been yanked out of the ground and laid out to dry on stack after stack of plastic crates.

In between I was at Cross Island Farms where Dani was growing garlic for the first time. She'd planted a bunch of different varieties to see what would grow best in their wet clay earth. Now I don't want to sound like I know a damn thing, but Dani left the garlic in the ground way to long. I didn't know this until I spoke to Allison at Frosty as we went through the drying trays later. You need to pick garlic while the stalks are still green. Dani left her garlic in the ground until their tops molded and broke off as we attempted to ease them out of the ground. They were still tasty but they weren't pretty and probably wouldn't hold up as well to drying and preserving. Many of the heads were split open in unsightly ways or lost forever in the dirt.

That's ugly garlic. Pretty garlic is what I made with Allison!


She taught me to braid garlic in a simple rope. You soak the dry stems in water to soften them then over, under, through the loop...well, I can't really describe it (or replicate it on my own). The one pictured above I held up to photograph, telling Allison, "I'm pretty proud of this guy." She nodded in a non-commital way.

All these boring non-anecdotes have only garlic in common. But garlic has so many appealing qualities-medical, mystical, decorative...a fourth thing. It's the base for all my soups and under the skin of my roasted chickens. What else runs through so many aspects of our lives in such a positive way?

I don't really have an answer but if I'm going to keep my re-resolution I better publish this post. Feel free to leave any ideas in the comments

OH god!! WHY??

So congrats all you assholes who voted for 'Dr. Watson'. Your sick whims have been indulged. It's my own fault...I donated no money at all. I'm sorry, Vince...FOR YOUR FACE!

Some positive news though. Babyface came in number 3. There are some aesthetically sensible people in the world!

Oh yeah, and Vince raised $1376 for Just Food. Yay!

A Hirsute Heart

That's Vince. Vince is raising money for Just Food a very amazing local organization that is trying to build a sustainable food system in our fair state by connecting with farmers and NYC communities. They're also working to legalize bee keeping in the city. Throw your hands up!

So how is he doing this? The most convoluted way possible. Every dollar you donate is a 'vote' for your favorite beard, choices shown above. On February 28th the votes are counted and Vince will be shaving your favorite look onto his face. Why? Because it's Bearduary, apparently.

Now you may not (probably don't) know Vince so your interest in how much or little hair is growing on his face is probably pretty nil. Yeah, it's a great and worthy cause, but that's not why I'm imploring you, a stranger, to give a crap. It's because BEARDS MUST BE STOPPED.

Beards are the worst. They are lazy and repulsive, particularly on a young man who has beauty and symmetry of face. What a cruel waste! In my book only ship captains and guys who bare a vague resemblance to Santa Claus should ever put down the razor. But even then, what if they're a hot young ship captain? Or Sexy Claus? You see the murky moral territory we're in with even those concessions. Bearduary and all beard related celebrations should be SHAVED FROM THE FACE OF THE EARTH.

So vote NO on proposition Vince Has A Beard. Put your dollar(s) towards Babyface and you're putting a dollar towards civility and smooching without stubble-burn. Here's how:

1) Check out the pick above to decide which is your favorite beard (NO BEARD- AM I RIGHT??)
2) Go to: http://www.nycharities.org/donate/c_donate.asp?CharityCode=2262
3) Enter your donation amount. Anything helps. Really.
4) Towards the bottom of the donation page, dedicate your donation "in honor of" the beard of your choice (NO BEARD-AM I RIGHT??) -- i.e. insert the name of the beard.
5) Then put this email address in the "notify someone" blank so Vince can receive a record of your vote. ( tvtrotter@hotmail.com ). You have till February 28th-don't delay.

Of course, if you disagree with my well formed and articulated opinion, bring it! Vote for the mutton chops or the gay one or whatever. Because what is right will triumph here...what is right must triumph.

there was not a sweeter kitty meow meow meow in the country or the city meow meow meow

I've had a very cat-filled week (this isn't going to be about food insomuch that I haven't eaten any cats). First my dear boy Lloyd got a urinary tract infection and had to be rushed into surgery before his bladder exploded all over his other organs and it cost me EIGHT HUNDRED DOLLARS. I got this cat from Kitty Kind, a no kill organization full of crazy people, as all people willing to devote so much time and resources to rescuing garbage animals probably are crazy but also thank god they exist or a cat like Lloyd would have been thrown in the drowning bucket. When we got him he had an eye infection and a hernia and now he's got a defective wee wee. He'll have to eat prescription food for the rest of his life which will hopefully be a long one cuz I love him like crazy cakes.


Then like an idiot I volunteered to baby-sit a kitten all weekend. I say I'm an idiot because I had to go pick her up after the longest day of work and disappointment carrying ten tons of shit already and when I got home and wanted to black out for a proper ten hours I had a six week old ball of fluff needing my head and purring all night. TOTALLY WORTH IT.

I've got a lot to say about cats because I am a crazy cat lady. No, there are no (permanent) cats in my apartment right now and there probably wont be for many years. I can't afford them and don't have the time to spend with them. My roommate just told me about an article she read as she petted little Daffodil (the kitten who I assume was named by a child...I hope) that said a pet on average costs over a thousand dollars a year to keep. Perhaps this was a 'how to cope with the recession' piece, encouraging everyone to euthanize their animals to save a buck, I don't know. Whatever, I have no pets now...but when I can there will cats all over the damn place. Still, I am already a crazy cat lady. If I walk into a room and there's a cat in it, it's like everyone else just fades away and there are only the two of us. Music swells. Cats purr.

In itself this isn't such an embarrassing quality. I've definitely had more humiliating objects of affection. But since my family knows of my obsession I get lots of cat related gifts-socks, shirts, pendants, cat shaped boxes, books of cat quotations. So yeah, a cat lady isn't a crazy cat lady until her family finds out and dresses her appropriately.

Anyone who loves animals knows they're setting themselves up for heartbreak. Cats die. It's their worst quality, I think. Not wanting to go through it again this week I maxed out my credit card for Lloyd. Seeing him all sick and scared and drugged up brought back memories of all the other cats I've known, late nights of anxiety and early mornings full of dread as the phone rings with the news. No, they didn't make it. At the end we think back on the quality of that life and try to assess. Was it worth it? Did I do them right? Obviously, these are much easier questions to approach with a cat than a person. Both love and death are far less complicated with animals which I guess is part of the pleasure of their company.

Do animals living in an apartment really have quality of life? My mom's are pretty spoiled. She's like their personal chef/masseuse/cleaning lady. She begs scraps of fish for them at the market and mixes oyster juice into their water. Still, they often seem bored, restless and, let's face it, fat.

Farm cats don't necessarily live an idyllic life either. The drowning bucket was invented out on the farm. There's lots of competition and often little veterinary care, so I hear. I was on two farms this summer. Frosty Morning Farms had two cats, Jezebel and Don Gato. Jezebel was as fickle as her name suggests, but both cats seemed happy, fed, sun kissed etc.


In stark comparison was the cat at Cross Island Farms who I didn't even know existed until I'd been there two days.

Dani, who has four dogs running around like they own the place, mentioned that David had a cat. What cat, I inquired. I see no cat. Oh, it lives up in his office she replied. The office was down the hall from my bedroom and before turning in I peeked in on it. It was a black matted thing kept up in the attic like the mad first wife in a Brontë novel and it creaked the saddest, craziest meow as the light went on. I visited it every day but god that broke my heart. I asked Dani why the cat had been banished and sniffing she said, "Well, it peed in my potted plant and I just don't care for the smell." Good...god...there is no picture of this as it was too depressing.

So there's a wide range in quality of life in the country and the city for cats and people. I've learned through trial and terrible error how a pet should be treated, just how everyone painfully learns how other people should be treated, and themselves. Hopefully well. No locking anyone in attics unless it gets sexy V.C. Andrews style. It never does.

Meow meow meow.

Five Roses

2009 will never see Five Roses Pizza. My first job was there, I was 13 and they paid me five dollars in cash per hour, plus tips. From what the final owner, Cristina, told me recently, not much involving pay roll has changed. This may explain why she was always the only one behind the counter the last few years with the occasional circulating delivery boy.

If you've never worked in a pizzeria let me tell you the pro and con: You can make a pie however it is you best like it, more sauce/more cheese, and eat a slice fresh. You go home with the greasy smell of pizza clogging every pour. Which is the pro and which is the con??

Even though my time there was relatively brief in comparison to other jobs I remember it very vividly. The aprons, the texture of the dough, electrocuting myself on the stove, learning not to drink milk with pizza, a fifth thing...like when Josephine pointed out I shouldn't touch my eyes and hair in front of customers before serving them food. Thanks, now I'm totally self-conscious.

Aside from extorting child labor Five Roses was a meeting place for neighborhoodites. You always bumped into everyone you knew there, family and friends. I remember blushingly trying to cut a pie before the inquisitive eyes of my first serious crush. All their food was from authentic Sicilian recipes, made in the kitchen in the back by an authentic Sicilian. They didn't buy stuff frozen or belong to chain. It was a truly local establishment.

The East Village from ten years ago is so completely changed that when I walk there now it's almost unrecognizable and it'll be different in another ten years. It's weird how shocked and saddened I was to turn the corner and see it had changed in a way I'd never prepared for- Five Roses is closed. The gates are shuttered, the space is for rent, there are poster boards of photos and farewell wishes in the windows. If only I'd known and savored that last slice. Had one last surprise party (I've had like three surprise parties thrown there for me and was surprised every time because I'm an idiot) or at least said goodbye to Cristina...my childhood...something.

But that's kind of how it is. You don't always get to say goodbye.

Five Roses, I love you.

"I bet you don't even bother to compost your own feces!"

Last week someone made a joke about how I should write a blog post about going to the bathroom in a stranger's apartment and it reminded me of another joke someone made to me about how I should write a blog about urinating in public, with photos of all the places I've made my mark. Layers upon layers. So many jokes about composting feces in Robin's sleeping bag! So many!

There was a time when the outdoor relief list would have been very short, non-existent really. A female growing up in the city has few opportunities to pop a squat that don't leave her frighteningly vulnerable. Then a couple years ago I was in Utah with my roommate Claire tailgating at a rodeo and could not fucking take a piss behind the pick up truck. Not kidding when I say it was totally embarrassing. What's so hard about peeing?

Anyway, when I was at Frosty Morning Farms they had an outhouse or 'composting toilet'. It was a little wooden shack up a flight of stairs full of dust, spiders and peat moss to throw down the hole after your bizness. Now, I drink a lot of water and am often self-conscious about the number of times I run to the restroom during the day. But out in the hot sun, weeding or god knows, drinking water and going to pee was the best way to get out of the heat and break the monotony (partially true for working in an office as well) so I did it freely, lighting the way with a candle by the peat moss bucket. After a couple days, Allison took me aside...

She let me know that urine really isn't so good for a compost toilet because it gets too acidic and she usually went, oh, behind the tool shed or by the paddock or behind any convenient tree. A few days later a visitor to the farm was in the outhouse and I could hear the stream like a gushing white water rapid-poor Allison had been listening to me ruin her compost!!

So yeah, peeing outdoors. Once the floodgates were opened...I kind of dug it. Especially at night, in the pitch black, coyotes howling madly in the distance, chickens scattering, night bugs hopping around and down my throat in one noteable instance...it has a kind of magic.

(The view into the farmhouse as I peed on the doorstep)

If you haven't developed the muscles to do it, ladies, get on it. Okay, I almost gave Allison and Karl's teenage sons a free show one afternoon but it's worth the risk.

All jokes about urinating aside, composting toilets are awesome and though I am currently bound by my landlord's stifling restrictions, if I ever build my own house I'd have a composting toilet put in. You wont be contaminating rivers and streams or disrupting soil systems by installing pipes. You can build them anywhere that plumbing is inconvenient. And if you're very bold you can use that compost to fertilize your garden...just don't pee on your garden. That's what behind the tool shed is for.

Incidentally, I didn't get over my outside/bathroom fear on the farm (though they did bring my comfort to an unprecendented level). I got over it just a few days after the tailgating party. I was at the top of Timpanogos, a mountain in Utah, leaning against the summit shack, in front of god and everyone. Which shows if you set a goal for yourself there's nothing you can't accomplish.

Black Bean Soup

Hot off the presses! Hot of the stove actually. I just made the most amazing black bean soup!! It was so good I wanted immediately to tell the internets about it. Hopefully, some poor protein deprived soul will come across this and fill the bean shaped void inside. I was told about this recipe just last night by my pal Robin, so props to her for spreading the word via her mouth.

Black beans and black bean soup always remind me of National Cafe, a tiny Cuban restaurant that used to be on first avenue, where I spent large parts of my allowance in my youth. Or it would be a reward after going to the dentist or something and I'd eat from the side of my mouth that had feeling while food dribbled out the other. They made incredible beans, rice, stewed chicken and banana milkshakes. The day it closed a little part of myself was shuttered and hung with a 'for sale' sign, ya know?

But still I feel National Cafe's influence. Rice and beans, cooked in a variety of styles, is my comfort food. So Robin told me about this recipe and I was like well I don't have rice and I don't have beans, but I have all the other bits so I ran around the corner to my local friendly deli guy and bought a 99 cent can of Goya black beans and got down to business. Delicious comfort.

Recipe for vegetarian black bean soup:

Can o' beans
veggie stock or bouillon cube (you could make it non-vegetarian and add chicken stock or pork which is I'm sure what was going down at National Cafe, though I was blissfully uncaring)
a few scallions
couple cloves of garlic
lemon
healthy teaspoon of red cider vinegar (any kind would do except maybe balsamic)
tiny pinch of cayenne pepper
dash of black pepper
olive oil
optional, yet highly recommended: slices of avocado

Chop up your scallions and set some aside. Put the rest in a pot with a bit of olive oil and minced garlic. Cook them on low heat till they're soft. Open your can o' beans and rinse them then throw them in the pot when the garlic/scallions are ready. Add enough water (or stock) to cover the beans and set it to boil. When it's boiling add the bouillon unless you used stock. Add the cayenne and black pepper and stir. Turn the heat down to a simmer. At this point if you want to thicken it you can puree some of the beans and liquid then add it back in. I have a hand puree thing which is awesome. Add the vinegar and stir. Pour some in a bowl and squeeze in lemon juice. You don't need that much, use sound lemon judgement. Sprinkle the rest of the scallions on top and avocado slices and you have a bowl of heaven.

I don't have a picture of the soup because I ate it so fast, sorry. Make your own and you'll see how it looks.

UPDATE:

I was thinking about this post the last couple days, because I'm a dork and I realized everything I espouse about eating locally and seasonally is kind of thrown out the window here. I mean-lemons? avocado? In New York? In December? That's fucked up. I guess beans could be worse, they are canned not refrigerated. No icy trucks to get them around but still, trucks. New York being the cultural capital that it is has many different cooking histories from every part of the globe and they all import their sensibilities and ingredients. Cuban cooking (though its pretty presumptuous to align my soup with Cuban cuisine) has infiltrated my personal tastes and I haven't yet gotten to the point where I can cast aside black beans because they don't grow in my back yard. What do you love that's out of season or from far away? What do you love that's only east coast?

Seeds

This summer I neglected my garden. I was away in other people's gardens and had no time for things like weeding or watering. The sun was there doing its thing. Sometimes the clouds would part. That's it.

Of course upon my return the place looked like ass. Nothing had been transplanted on time and all the herbs were sadly strangled in their pots, by their own roots no less. And yet...things grew.
Nature-what a crazy bitch she is.

So here was the total:

Six tomatoes, a handful of beets, and enough beans to replant them next spring. There were also enough basil leaves to flavor a mixed drink. Speaking of which there's a lot of mint growing randomly around, so mojitos for everyone! I have grand plans for next year. There's going to be a pea place (where I grow peas) and troughs of Magic Mollies. There will be strawberries (we have a few in a big yellow tub now but my mouth didn't harvest any) galore and chickens. Chickens.


There is a chance it will all fall to ruin again. That's the chance everyone takes any time they attempt something positive because unlike things that are bad for you doing something good for you is hard work. Diets, exercise, educating yourself, being nice to people... All practically impossible!! At least this is what we're conditioned to believe. Eating organic is too expensive, shopping from local growers is too complicated, eating healthy is too boring, recycling is a waste of time, no one can remember to take canvas bags to the grocery store don't bother, nothing you plant will ever grow.

My garden marched on without me much as the planet will march on without humanity once we've wiped ourselves off it. But if I'd done a little more with it, some weeding for instance, we could have supported each other! No one would have to be wiped off anyone's face. I'm trying to say that you can work with nature or you can ignore it-guess which action turns out better? It's not a perfect analogy since my garden's decline isn't causing climate change but you get it.

Personally I'm not very active on the doing things for the planet front but I've noticed my awareness and interest has increased with every seed I plant. Every seed. We have a compost bin so now I don't throw organic waste into the garbage (for anyone holding their breath to find out what happened with my almost full compost bin, one day Claire just picked it up and dumped the whole thing over a garden bed. It had actually turned to dirt! Didn't need that help line after all) and I reuse bags and recycle and buy organic and am trying to just buy local (if only Europe didn't make such awesome cheese) and these are all pitiful small things, seeds if you will, that hopefully will grow into something more, with time. But only if I put in a cultivating hand. Mmm, mixed metaphors are delicious. Like Mojitos.

I guess what I'm saying (and reminding myself of) is even though a seed looks small and insignificant, plant it because it's amazing what it can produce.

Raymond Sings!

Hey here's that song about pie making Raymond wrote. I hope he appreciates me putting his picture all up on the internet. Kisses, Ray!

"Liveblogging" Thanksgiving

Wednesday November 26th, 7:52 PM

So I wanted to record my cooking experiences this year since it is my first Thanksgiving where I've taken a really active part in any kind of preparation (As I type cranberries are popping merrily on the stove. Wait, are they supposed to do that?) But I can't really keep up with today's modern technologies of whatever the hell live blogging is...partly because I'm not particularly tech savvy and partly because I've imbibed a good deal of the cooking wine and bourbon for the Kentucky Derby Pie. I should be so lucky to escape this ordeal without any third degree burns.

Isn't it interesting that on Thanksgiving everyone is eating more or less the same dishes all across America? I haven't decided if that's creepy or cool but as I compiled my grocery list for this undertaking I noticed that the traditional dishes are composed of ingredients ACTUALLY IN SEASON. Refreshing.

I just plan to write what I'm doing when it gets interesting (...to me) and post it all on Thanksgiving night with pictures. You're welcome!

8:07 PM

Hmm, cranberry sauce smells a lot like mulled wine. Or is that me? Oh well, everything is better mulled...with wine. Moving on to stuffing. Jeez, that's a lot of bread. Stuffing is fascinating-like many soggy bread dishes it was obviously once a solution to the eternal question, "What the fuck to do with all this stale bread?"


8:38 PM

MC Hammer just came on the iTunes. Thank god.

8:46 PM

Okay, the cranberry sauce is a little too sweet but you can't unsweet what has been sweetened. Life lesson, people. Cut up my potatoes for the first bake of the twice-baked potato recipe and have them precariously balanced in the oven with the stuffing. What to do, what to do? So much of cooking is deliberate planning and timing. The pecans have been stewing in bourbon time to make a crust. And dip into the bourbon supply.

9:01 PM

Let's Get It On was playing as I kneaded my pie crust. I'm anticipating some sexy pie...which considering who it's going to feed is fairly disturbing.


9:20 PM

As I formed my pie crust into a pretty border my friend Raymond's song about pie came on iTunes, he wrote it for my little movie about a pie making villain. The recording is excellent and made me smile. I'm gonna find a way to post it here so you can all listen as you make your next pie and imagine you are Holly, the Pie Socialite.

9:37 PM

I used caraway seed sour dough bread for the stuffing, it's tasty but doesn't quite have the right texture. It's supposed to be like glue right? More vegetable stock and back in the oven...is this the beginning of disaster? I KNEW it was going too smoothly!

9:44 PM

I'm waiting for the potatoes to cool and drinking Jack Daniels on the floor. Ahh, the holidays.

9:50 PM

Found a cranberry on the floor. Ate it.

10:34 PM

Okay, cut up sweet potatoes and put them to boil. Now I'm digging the potato insides out of their skins, leaving the shell intact. In the battle of me vs. skins, skins is kicking ass. I probably should have baked them longer! Pie and stuffing have come out of the oven and look good though the stuffing has baked down a bit. No one likes stuffing anyway, right?

10:51 PM

The last skin is empty!!!!!


11:35 PM

Skins refilled! I am horribly sober and should probably have a glass of water.

Thursday November 27th, Thanksgiving, 12:03 AM

Oh God, what's the point?

12:04 AM

Rallying, I made the first part of my sweet potato souffle to be baked tomorrow morning because I don't know how it'll survive being heated up. Next year I need to find recipes that don't rely so heavily on sugar or at least stock up on more honey earlier (One day I'll have my own hive!) so I can do some substitution. I did a bit in my S. P. mix and we'll see how it tastes.


12:23 AM

Okay, twice baked potatoes have been baked twice and I seem to have consumed an entire meal through osmosis. Now some clean up so my roommate doesn't strangle me in my sleep.


12:45 AM

While struggling to make room for all this prepared food in the fridge I came across containers full of materials that can not be identified. After hours of delicious cooking smells I'm being sent to bed with the gagtastic leftovers of meals past...I ran out to the garbage to get rid of the horrorshow as quickly as possible and almost ran into a guy walking a three legged pitbull. Sad...Time for sleep.

Black Friday November 28th, 12:07 AM

I wrote a bunch of stuff between last night and now and it was all deleted. Let us say sweet potatoes were sweetened, showers were taken and I eventually made it out the door. And what happened? Mostly eating. Also a fair amount of waiting since the turkey wasn't cooked as soon as we'd all hoped. And what of the turkey, indeed?


Well, I wasn't responsible for cooking it. I did ask that we buy a free range organic turkey this year and was graciously indulged. Mr. and Mrs. Ed accompanied me to the Co-op and bought that fancy turkey just for me and it was awesome once it was finally roasted through. So dinner was mostly all my side dishes until about six 'o clock.

There are a few stages of learning re: Thanksgiving. First you learn about the desperate Pilgrims aided by friendly Indians who helped them through a terrifying American winter and the delightful feast they had to celebrate their new friendship. Then you learn about the Trail of Tears. After that, the scope of America's gluttonous consumerism obscures all positive aspects of the holiday. But, finally, I've settled on the idea that whatever we dress it up as, Thanksgiving is really a celebration of the harvest, a good old-fashioned animal sacrifice(yay, Buffy!). Winter is ahead. For the Pilgrims and everyone that meant long nights, cold days and the very real possibility that they might not make it through. On my cozy couch, stuffed with pie, that possibility seems so remote it's almost offensive to consider it. But there are dark times always where we think spring will never come and on Thanksgiving we're setting aside one day to appreciate that it WILL come and with it the bounty and life before us will be renewed. It's a cycle humanity has trusted and relied on for a long time and part of the reason I think and write about food so much is because of how important and rare it is to really be connected to that cycle.

Sharing some food with some folks renews that connection in some small way, I think. I am thankful I did it today. And for the half a Derby pie in my fridge right now.

Recipes:

Cranberry Sauce
-a 12-ounce bag of cranberries.
-1/2 cup cabernet wine
-2 tablespoons of orange zest.
-1/2 cup orange juice
-1 cinnamon stick
-some salt, a pinch, and also a pinch of cayenne pepper.

Add 3/4 cup of sugar to a sauce pan. Pour in the juice and the wine; add the zest, the cinnamon stick and those spices. Bring that up to a simmer on medium heat. When it's simmering, add the cranberries. They are going to start to pop, it's going to take about 10 minutes. The sauce will also start to thicken. Throw in a 1/4 cup of cold water and turn off the heat. Take out the cinnamon stick.

Herb Stuffing
-12 cups slightly dry bread
-1/3 cup snipped parsley
-1/3 cup finely chopped onion
-1 1/2 tsp. salt
-1 tsp. ground sage
-1 tsp. dried thyme, crushed
-1 tsp. dried rosemary, crushed
-2 cups of vegetable broth
-6 tablespoons of butter, melted

Combine bread, parsley, onion, salt, sage,thyme, and rosemary. Add broth and butter; toss lightly to mix. Use to stuff a 12-pound turkey or bake covered, in a 2-quart casserole at 325º until heated through, about one hour.

Sweet Potato Souffle
-3 c. mashed sweet potatoes
-1 c. sugar (or one cup honey so your teeth don't fall out)
-2 tsp. salt
-2 eggs
-1 tsp. vanilla
-1/3 stick butter, melted
-1/2 c. milk
Mix all ingredients and pour into greased baking dish. Cover with topping.
TOPPING:
-1 c. brown sugar
-1/3 c. flour -1 c. chopped nuts -1/3 stick butter, melted
Mix thoroughly and sprinkle over top. Bake at 350 for 25 minutes.

Twice Baked Potatoes
I had a recipe but didn't follow it...cut your potatoes in half, bake them till they're soft enough to scoop out the insides then mash those insides up with everything fattening and delicious-milk, chedder, butter, sour cream, salt, pepper, green onions. Put the filling back in the skins and baked 'em till they're brown on top.

Derby Pie
Again didn't follow a particular recipe...made a crust from butter and flour soaked my pecans in bourbon, mixed them in a butter/sugar/egg/flour/vanilla mix, laid the bottom with chocolate chips, pecans on top, baked till goldeny on the edge. I should write a freaking cook book.