Food: Foraging in Spring

So right now (as alluded to in my previous post), I’m focused on things of a domestic nature in order to cope with the chaos raging outside my door. Call it escapism, or something else vaguely insulting — I don’t care. Whatever it takes (short of psychotropic drugs) to get by these days.

This week in food: my son and I collected Japanese Knotweed shoots and made a delicious jam — or compote, really. There is nothing like a tasty invasive species compote.

Japanese Knotweed (Fallopia japonica) was originally brought to the U.S. as an ornamental, but has taken over as the bane of many gardeners. Knotweed is quite pretty, with shoots that look like bamboo that quickly transform into a gargantuan plant which flowers in late summer/early fall. It spreads via its rhizomes, which means it is a nightmare to control.

Interestingly, knotweed is used in alternative medicine to treat Lyme disease. An herbalist I know says that plants will often spring up unbidden in response to a need. If so, it makes sense that knotweed is so pervasive here (beyond its biological imperative), as Lyme disease is equally pervasive in the Northeast. For more official information on knotweed, check out what the eggheads at Penn State have to say through this link.

I was skeptical of the pro-edible knotweed entries I read in my foraging books, but thought I would give it a try. My skepticism was ill-founded because wow, is it ever tasty! If you like rhubarb, then eating knotweed is for you. The only downside is that the jam/compote is a terrible color: like asparagus baby food puree. This is off-putting, unless you are a baby who doesn’t know any better. As an adult, the polite thing to do is ignore the hue of the food and focus on the taste. You will be rewarded with deliciousness. Try it over yogurt or ice cream or anywhere you would slather jam.

I used a recipe from this smart veggie-obsessed blog, though I added two cups of sugar, not three, and contributed a touch of cinnamon to the final product. Which gave it a bit more depth, if I do say so myself.

Japanese Knotwood: ugly-cute

Next week’s post will feature life in the garden. And by life, I mean finding life in the garden. What a place! In the meantime, hang in there and, if you can, make this Life Changing Udon from this month’s Food & Wine. While it might not change your life, it will most definitely fill your belly with wholesome goodness, remind you that eggs, when cooked properly, are a beautiful thing, and be one more culinary hedge against outer darkness.

Bouncing Back

The world is burning down, but in the middle of the chaos, it is important to get outside. Vitamin D, endorphins, dopamine? I dunno the physiology of it, but COVID cowers when confronted by bare-faced nature.

As a prescriptive move, we went to New Hampshire over Easter, and hiked to the top of a little stunted mountain. The hike was listed as “moderate” in trail guide, but this is true only if you are moderately in shape. The husband, kids, and dog scrambled nimbly to the top. I walked behind them, which is a diplomatic way of saying they remained out of sight for much of the hike. Then I saw this rock that some soft-hearted poor speller had left in the crook of a tree, as thought it had been left just for me.”u r lovd” the rock said, and I knew everything would be alright. This was just before the bear attack. (Ha, just kidding. Though an asthma attack was eminently possible.)

Easter services were held in a tiny chapel on the side of the road. In attendance were the same four people I’ve been staring at for the 13 months of COVID isolation. The service was short as a result.

The weekend — miserable hike and all — marks the beginning of bouncing back. The world will open up again (if we don’t burn it down first), and in the meantime I’m planting new little baby seeds and harvesting the spring greens from the greenhouse. In your face, entropy.

Christmas

In case you have lost track of the date, Christmas is next week. I have decorated to the extent that I feel able, and am enjoying the cheery visuals provided by the little lights against the greenery and the orange pomanders. The magic of the season is greatly aided by the fact that I’m actively working on ignoring the constant rumble of my children disagreeing with one another. It is hard, but necessary, to ignore the shrieking in order for me to survive right now.

Speaking of survival, the theme song for this holiday season is the Judy Garland version of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas”, which will nearly kill you if you listen too closely to the lyrics while simultaneously experiencing Judy’s voice.

Have yourself a merry little Christmas
Let your heart be light
From now on
Our troubles will be out of sight

Have yourself a merry little Christmas
Make the Yule-tide gay
From now on
Our troubles will be miles away

Once again as in olden days
Happy golden days of yore
Faithful friends who are dear to us
Will be near to us once more

Someday soon we all will be together
If the fates allow
Until then we’ll have to muddle through somehow.
And have yourself a merry little Christmas now

My daughter made a snowman pomander.

The beloved Christmas village: the site of much mayhem and chaos as the kids fight over how it should be arranged.

The biggest tree we’ve ever had, a hedge against 2020.

On Bees & Bread

I thought maybe the isolation offered by universal quarantine would bring blogging back as a cultural trend. But after two months of 24/7 life at home, I realized this is not happening. Reading blocks of text (even when interspersed with pictures) is very early 2000s and our attention spans are roughly the length of a TikTok video. And then there is the fact that we are all too busy in isolation. Freaking out and fighting over available virus information/disinformation, trying to do our jobs and manage online schooling, and baking sourdough bread all take a lot of time. So the anticipated cultural revitalization of blogs hasn’t happened. That said, I would like to start posting again.

Happening Now

Lots of farming-related activity is going on. Bread-making, growing food, and new this year: bee-keeping. As Benjamin Franklin cautioned, I have a beehive…if I can keep it. That’s not precisely the quote but it is in the general spirit of the enterprise.

I am excited about the bees. A little too excited, my kids might say, as my moods swing in accordance with whether or not the hive seems to be thriving. But I have good reason to be nervous: apparently, keeping the hive alive and in good health is on par with keeping our Constitutional Republic alive. Basically, I have the same job as Congress. Even so, I was feeling pretty good about everything related to the bees before I heard about the murder hornet. This two-inch long protein-eating nightmare has descended upon Washington State and is munching its way across the continent, one beehive at a time.

Sourdough Bread

In a gut-level anticipation of a pandemic, I became wound up a few years ago about making my own wild yeast and taking charge of my own destiny through bread. It took me a while (a long while) to really get cranking, but now I’m as weird as the rest of the internet about sourdough bread. I’ve had some massive failures along the way, and I still don’t score fancy patterns into the top of my bread in the way that is Instagram-worthy, but I make the bread and we eat the bread and I smell the tangy, weird smell of my starter once a day and feel a rush of emotion. I don’t understand it but there you are.

Homestead Viewing

Like millions of other people, I watch videos about tiny houses by the trailer-load. I also watch a few over-the-top farm ladies on a regular basis. Why I like the suggested resources: because each of these people make it okay to care about farming and aesthetics, or minimalism and aesthetics. Having a simplified, countrified, even isolated lifestyle doesn’t mean you are surrounded by junk. In fact, it means the opposite. A few of my favorites:

 

 

 

My Favorite Things

No, this is not one of the Oprah-esque lists where I tell you about A Few Things I Love, which turn out to be $400 slippers and a box of 22k gold toothpicks. Like this.

The My Favorite Things of the title is in reference to a book written by the late Dorothy Rodgers, wife of the late Richard Rodgers (of Rodgers and Hammerstein fame). I picked up this book at our town transfer station (which we call The Dump), where locals drop off trash and recycling, including unwanted books. These books go into a pleasant little shed called the Book Barn.

The Book Barn at the dump is the source of many, many great finds. The advantage of picking up books at the dump (besides the fact that they are free) is that so many are out of print. I would otherwise never come across a book like Dorothy Rodgers’ My Favorite Things. Published in 1964, it is so of its moment that it could never be recreated now. The book’s very appeal—its era-specific trendiness (a selling point at the time of publication) means that it seemingly stopped being relevant long ago. But this book is more than the sum of its Mad Men-era parts. It’s clear from reading it that Dorothy Rodgers was one of those sorts of women who, in any civilization, is a class act. The tips and tools she utilized for decorating and entertaining may belong to an time long since past (thanks for breaking America, hippies!), but they are really never out of style.

Part I is called “The Things That Go Into a House” and Part II is called “Entertaining at Home”.  Literally everything you need to know about leading a civilized domestic life is contained in Parts I & II.

 

 

Another recent dump find was the Meals with a Foreign Flair cookbook, published by Better Homes & Gardens in 1963. I probably will send it back to the dump from whence it came. The food styling and photography is fascinatingly grotesque, the title faintly offensive in a PC sort of way. Also, it stinks.  I’m actually wheezing as I type this, due to the mold spores emanating from the book. I am very likely the first person to crack open its pages in approximately six decades and am paying the price.

 

Still, it was worth a look, so I picked it up from the Book Barn, taking a swift tour around the world through the culinary lens of mid-century home cooks, who were interested in moving beyond hot dogs and towards foreign foods such as cappuccino. An admirable impulse.

After a few Meals with a Foreign Flair I ended up back in Dorothy Rodgers’ well-appointed living room. Mrs. Rodger’s home is a place to which I will return again and again, perusing My Favorite Things while enjoying Menus with a Sense of Balance.

 

 

 

Winter Bones

It’s the week of the Polar Vortex. I don’t know what that means but it sounds like a lot of people will be dying of exposure. Conversely, the polar bears are dying in because it’s too warm in the Arctic. In short: it’s crazy out there.

If you follow me on Instagram, you’ll know that we saw an owl in the trees in the woods across the street. That’s one of only 12 things that have happened in the last year or so, according to my Insta-account-gram anyway.

Here’s the owl:

photo credit: Phineas B. Kelly

2019 is promising to be a year ripe with Instagram-worthy opportunities (aren’t they all), if I can ever get over the embarrassment of the performative aspects of social media. I plan to offer up plenty of insta-awesome snapshots…my head thrown back, laughing, while I ride in a convertible with my grrls, my blond hair flowing, kombucha in hand. Seriously though, I do have a lot of plans. Tuesday is the day I’ll post amusing anecdotes and such—dispatches from the Creative Life™— because I have preemptively declared blogging to be back in vogue.

So, enjoy the owl for now, with the promise of more owls—literal and metaphorical—to come.