Author Archives: Tata

And Your Blood Will Sing

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Topaz and Drusy approve our yarn purchase. We have enough for at least a month's blankets.

The weather finally turned today and I bicycled to work again. It’s been nearly two weeks of wild rainstorms, showers, dry lightning and mud everywhere. The garden is practically singing. In related news, I found a supplier of locally grown rhubarb and tomorrow I’m going to dehydrate a bunch. This might not seem all that exciting, but I feel inspired, damn it! I don’t know about your evening plans but I’ve got grapes tonight that I hope will be raisins tomorrow. Cha cha cha! School’s in and I’m at the head of my class.

Every Mistake We Must Surely Be

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Win some, lose some, make pesto of some.

After more than a week of rain every day the garden looks lush and every plant grew tremendously. Even so: some seeds did not sprout at all; some beets have finally germinated. As I was weeding, I discovered two entire carrots had in fact sprouted so I spent the afternoon attempting to get over a grudge against them. The peas have become giant busybodies that can’t keep their fronds off their neighbors and the parsley’s showboating inspired a very delicious and refreshing salad. I cannot tell a lie: I trimmed that leaf lettuce to its stem for the second time and hope it doesn’t come back. It sounds crass to say the spinach and I have a date for six weeks after the lettuce bites the dust.

Radish jungle at the dining room window, a favorite of resident lovely cats.

Today, I planted two window boxes with two varieties of carrots in soil liberally laced with compost and vermiculite. Vermiculite is supposed to prevent soil compaction, so I’m optimistic the carrots will do better in a dedicated container. It’s working for these wise guys, right? Ever seen such smug radishes?

You Go For So Long

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Pink food makes me feel squinty.

It’s rained every day for over a week and though the temperature’s rising, so’s the mud. Yes, it’s Mud Season in Central New Jersey. Don your hip waders, Poor Impulsives! I’d hate for you to ruin your blue suede shoes.

That’s strawberry-rhubarb pie filling. Working up your own recipes for jarring is supposed to be very bad juju, fraught with perilous peril, unless you’ve been jarring since before you could tie your own apron strings. Thing is: sometimes you can go from book to book to book and find recipes filled with crap you’re not interested in eating; such was the case with rhubarb pie filling. I was not at all interested in including thickeners other than sugars, since I couldn’t find anyone making a case that the additional ingredients affected the pH and I would prefer my jarred pie fillings not congeal in the jar. Dude: it’s hard to get gelatin out of a quart jar and I develop needless hostility for delicious fruit. No, I want to open a jar of fruit like peaches, toss that into a pie crust, open a jar of pie filling and pour that on top without a fight or unnerving SLOOSHing sounds. Then I want to roll out a top crust, crimp that bad boy and bake it until it sings to me because, dagnabbit, in January, pink pie might save your life. Back to my point: I found recipes for rhubarb preserves and strawberry preserves, both of which included only fruit and sugar, that’s it. So I macerated the strawberries, macerated the rhubarb, cooked them a little, put a tablespoon of lemon juice in each jar, and poured in gently simmered fruit. The jars processed for half an hour, which seemed sensible. The flip side of working up a recipe is that I have to be prepared to accept it if I’ve fucked up. So okay: if I open a jar and the pink pie filling’s turned a startling fuzzy blue I have no one to blame but myself. If it’s tasty, though, I shall be impossible to live with.

Belong To Me And Ease My Mind

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What's in your Gustav Klimt yarn bag? Mine is nearly empty.

Kind of weird, but I’m nearly out of yarn. I’d say I have about one more blanket’s worth of yarn after the blanket I’m working on. It’s an exciting turning point in the project. Pete’s all atwitter because I’ll finally have a chance to sort out and move out the last of my friend’s friend’s late mother’s odd possessions, which have been gathering dust in a clean corner of the basement. Further: I’m really looking forward to cleaning and reorganizing the pantry shelves. Last weekend, I emptied some messy cabinets in the kitchen and threw out everything I couldn’t re-use. I’m preparing to work every weekend on jarring and canning and to learn as much as I can. There’s room for fun in all this churning and driving: Pete’s going to put up sorbets every weekend. On a sweltering afternoon, a scoop of crisp, homemade fruit sorbet in a glass of seltzer can be positively dreamy.

Who Just Crumbles And Burns

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Topaz is curled up in my lap. She and Drusy came to live with me a little over four years ago now. It’s been about sixteen months since prickly Topaz threw caution to the wind and climbed into my lap to cuddle. After awhile, it’s time to get over what was, what we did, who we might have been. If Topaz can, I can, too. Today, I looked up the video for Fake Plastic Trees, which I’ve never seen.

For fifteen years, the memory of this and and depression were enough to turn me inside, but not today. I waited for a feeling of familiar devastation that didn’t come. Waited. Waited. Nothing! Then I felt stupid for expecting to feel small and broken.

Well, whaddya know: I might be over it. Whaddoo I do now? If I am free, this is a new life.

A Forest Than A Street

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Drusy is so adorable your heart could stop.

About a week ago, our kitchen fridge started making a heeeeee haaaa heeeeee noise, not unlike Felix Ungar’s hinky sinuses. Pete whacked it a few times and unplugged it. We moved everything into the now-packed spare fridge in the basement, so it wasn’t a crisis, but running down and up the stairs was hard for me. Pete’s dad owns the house, but he was visiting relatives on the other side of the country and not fridge-shopping. Even though we had stuff to do, lives to lead and influence to peddle, we put those nefarious deeds mostly on hold and spent our evenings hunting for a deal. A treasure hunt through appliance stores can be exciting if you’re into it, but staring at ice machines makes for shitty blogging. Last Friday, Pete and his dad bought a fridge. It was delivered today and is cooling off now. In a bit, I’ll start moving things from the basement to the kitchen. As problems go, this one was small and annoying, but time-consuming and attention-hogging. Putting it behind us will be a pleasure.

The cats freaked with people in the house. Their fur stood on end and they went Full Kitty Invisible for a couple of hours. I later found Sweetpea in a spot behind the couch where I’d looked for cats and did not find them, but Topaz and Drusy’s hiding spots remain mysterious. As I write, Topaz crouches on the dining room table, blinking slowly at me. The noise and the hubbub were too much for them, which makes them cuddly and suspicious now. Sweetpea snores softly on the couch and Drusy crunch-crunch-crunches kibble in the new quiet of the kitchen.

To Step Out Into the Dark

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Mama, don't take pictures of me where the only measure of perspective is your own rack.

I could quit my job and still not have enough time to read everything I’d like to about food. Facebook offers a pile of nostalgia crap – no, I do not really need to see the same pictures from high school Class of 1456 ten thousand more times – but it can also let me find people who survey the food blogs and point to interesting projects. I’m about to toss out used jar rings with rust spots, clean and reorganize my storage shelves and put my supplies where I can use them. This is not an interesting project, so I’ll leave you out of that, but I will document tidy results because cleanliness is next to impossibleness and when a miracle occurs, someone should be standing nearby with a freaking camera.

It’s been a long time since my brain fired on several cylinders. It’s fantastic, being brainy. Spin this 45, baby:

Tata: Smart is a great feeling.
Dad: What does feeling smart feel like?
Tata: Smart feels like you can see in every direction.
Dad: You can see in every direction. I have to think about that.
Tata: Yep. Think of traveling with the light of the lghthouse on a foggy night.
Dad: Not being the lighthouse?
Tata: Nah, they just stand around lookin’ purty.

At the moment, I can’t see the screen without reading glasses, but I’m optimistic. I think I can learn more about simple techniques this weekend. I feel like light.

Don’t Say That You Love

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A little while ago, Topaz did this strange thing where she started chirping oddly. Topaz talks a lot and pretty clearly for a person disguised as a 6lb. black cat, so I asked her what was going on.

Tata: Hey, Topaz, what’s going on?

Topaz chirped, bounded in a circle and went to the bottom of the stairs. Pete caught on.

Pete: Open the doors upstairs. Drusy’s locked inside somewhere.

When I opened the third door, Drusy gave me a look like my necklace was in her cosmo and sailed downstairs to the living room. That’s how long it took her to forgive me, but it was a painfully long fifteen seconds. It’s your turn to forgive me. I’ve got a project to prepare. You’ll see it soon. For the moment, know that I still find you captivating.