Eggplant Soup from this Month's Food and Wine Magazine
In the winter, my routine narrows significantly. My scope is survivalist. There's no more agenda-free wandering of neighborhoods and hiking trails for hours. There's point A and point B that need to be navigated. Usually, it needs to be navigated through a rainstorm, so expediency is key. Being relieved of the task is key. So I can get home and turn up the heat. Take a warm bath. And do one of the following things: read, write, watch West Wing on Netflix (shameless) - or cook. But even my cooking becomes survivalist. It needs to be steamy-warm, nutritious and quick. It needs to be soup.
Soup, itself, is never routine though. The possibilities are endless. My Winter 2013 tally of soups that will help deliver me to spring and something new and fresh, hopefully:
Pumpkin and Rice Soup - 101 Cookbooks After my mom gifted me a 20# pumpkin, I made lots of things with pumpkin in early November - this soup being one of them. Pumpkin soup for a week, pumpkin soup for the freezer, pumpkin soup 4EVR. Unfortunately, the recipe felt incredibly bland to me - like weak baby food. I don't think I'd make this again, or if I did, I would cube not puree the pumpkin, and add other vegetables (maybe some mushrooms and greens).
Winter and I don’t often agree. Portland's winters are relatively mild, misty and monotone. Vivaldi’s
Winter concerto section of The Four Seasons, done Portland-style, would just be
the first few bars, played on repeat, until you hit spring or go insane,
whichever comes first. All those shades of grey leave me feeling similarly dull
and muted, which I vow to conquer this winter with a few simple resolutions. (Thanks
to this blog post for the inspiration)
1. Say goodbye to my TV. I’ve always had a love-hate
relationship with my TV. I don’t get cable, and the 5 channels I get tend to
tune in and fade out with the weather, or when the upstairs neighbor stands in
his apartment. And it’s a giant beast. The space I’ll reclaim won't just be physical, either. Quiet with room to think, read, write or listen to music.
2. Greet the morning. Winter mornings are the worst, but
they needn’t be. I’m going to rise early and embrace the cold, the dark,
and the quiet. I’ll make a hot pot of tea each morning and write.
3. Get outside, often. Again, in Portland this isn’t so much
a resolution as it is a requirement. If you wait for it to stop raining, you
will NEVER go outside. But we’ve each figured out, in our own way, that rain
doesn’t kill you and it’s never as cold as it seems once you’re in it. And
there’s winter farmer’s markets, cozy neighborhood pubs, and moss-laced
waterfalls in the Gorge just waiting to be explored.
4. Make it smell like heaven. The apartment, that is. A
respectable stock of candles, a heady soup or batch of scones in the oven each
weekend. Is there anything better?
5. When in doubt, look to the cat for inspiration. Because Bee knows how to live, man.
My morning commute is with the sunrise, and evening with the sunset. There's two ways to picture winter: a pain-in-the-ass season of slogging
through the rain on my bike, wet and cold - a blur of short, gray days
and cold nights. Or, I can feel the acute cold on my fingertips, the icy rain
stinging my face, and the grateful clarity of the rare day without rain -
hot pinks sunrises and sunsets. Everything is intensified. This
external experience brings a new freshness to my writing, too. With the
short days the outside world shrinks, and the space for quiet reflection
and creating stories swells. And that's pretty lovely.
Today was the first-ever winter farmer's market here in Portland. So instead of that dreadful time from Thanksgiving to April, when we could only dream of getting a jewelry box of multicolored eggs and having cheerful conversations with the mushroom man (I should really learn his name) we have all sorts of (surprisingly colorful) treats at our fingers: cabbages, kale, turnips and a crazy-looking black beer radish. It's nice to know that even when produce goes underground in winter, the damp and depressed citizens of Portlandia don't have to.
If you're curious...here's a few soups that have kept it cozy the last few weeks:
This year, I'll be cooking Thanksgiving Dinner for the first time. I've lured my parents over the windy 4-hour drive along the Columbia from Walla Walla to Portland, and I will be serving (perhaps a bit to the initial disappointment of my traditional, meat-loving dad) an entirely vegetarian meal. I was surprisingly nervous pulling together the menu - this is a notable right-of-passage in American lore, no? I'm thankful to be given the chance to show my family how much I appreciate them, and good food is usually the way.
A simple pumpkin pie and vanilla ice cream for dessert
(although if I were a richer lady, I would spring for a half dozen whiskey apple hand pies from Portland's Pacific Pie Co.)
Like too many things in my life, I’ve told myself that one day
I should write down my memories of 9/11 and never did. And here we are, an
impossible ten years later, a day to the anniversary. I tell myself I can still
make it, I can still remember.
The impossibility of that day was amplified by my life at that time. I was a little more than a month away
from my 22nd birthday. I had arrived in Washington, DC only six days
earlier – 9/11 was one of my first days as an intern at a legislative affairs
consulting agency. The prestige of the job was in sharp contrast to the mess I
had left behind in the other Washington, my home of Washington State. I would
not be going back to school for my senior year – I was on indefinite break from
college, after my best friend’s death and the dicey year of being depressed that followed. By the time I came home from college for summer break,
I had beat the heavy shroud that paralyzed me, but my parents, rightfully concerned, demanded I stay home and heal. But home was laced with memories and the
past. I knew that to move on emotionally, I had to escape physically. And so, I
ran.
At 21-years-old, I was far to old to be considered a
runaway, but my escape to DC had that feel about it. I announced to my parents
on Friday that I would be leaving on Monday – they forbade it, I went anyway.
One friend drove me to Portland, OR to catch the train (a plane ticket being
way to expensive) and another lent me $600 – the only money I would have for
the indefinite future.
So I got on the train, with a friend hastily arranged
for me to stay with some college alumnae upon my arrival. The train ride took 3
days. I don’t remember a lot of it. I do remember waking up to dawn and
crossing the continental divide, seeing buffalo and getting off to buy a coke
in a small town in North Dakota, imagining not getting back on and what my new life
would be like. I remember seeing Chicago and Philadelphia for the first time,
rolling in and rolling out without exploring. To this day, stepping on that
train against all common sense was the bravest thing I’ve ever done.
And suddenly I was a resident of Washington, DC. I rented an stuffy attic room in a group house ran by a Chinese woman in Georgetown. The
house always smelled like Chinese food and I was the only non-foreign,
non-graduate student there. Rather than get lost on public transportation, I
would walk several miles across Georgetown to my new job in Dupont Circle. Sometimes in the
early morning, I would see deer wandering out of Rock Creek Park into the
streets. On one of my first days in town, I looked at the building in front of
me, hot and frustrated that I was lost again. “Where am I?” I thought. A minute
later I realized I was staring at the White House, and laughed at my own
stupidity.
In DC, every lobbyist has a small TV in their office, to
keep on top of media reports and what’s happening on the hill. My fellow intern
and I sat in a corner area with two desks and the copy machine, outside one
lobbyists’ office. We had only been at work for about 20 minutes when she
started talking about something that was happening in New York. A plane had
flown into one of the twin towers, but we didn’t know anything more. We watched
the TV in her small office for a few minutes, then went back to our desks and tried
to work. The lobbyist grew quiet and gradually more information was released.
She had said goodbye to her husband just that morning – he was on a flight
headed for LA.
I didn’t comprehend the extent of what was happening for
probably too long. The initial images of the plane hitting the twin towers were
disturbing, of course, but the building was so large, dwarfing the size of the
plane on the television screen. I imagined a small personal two-seater Cessna,
and an office area with some blown out windows and lots of glass. I do think it
was the unbelievably beautiful fall day making it impossible to imagine
anything serious was happening in those first few hours.
I tried calling my parents to let them know I was ok, but my
mother was scheduled for a major hysterectomy operation, so they had been at
the hospital all morning getting her ready for surgery. When I finally reached
my dad at the hospital, he seemed confused about why I
was calling, and talked only about my mom’s condition.
The next 90 minutes increased the confusion. There were
reports that the White House, only three blocks from our office, had been hit.
We were advised to go to the roof and see if we could see anything, and then
they thought we should leave the building, and then stay put. Finally, it was
decided that I would go home with my fellow intern, who lived much closer to
work than I did. I protested that I could just walk home, still somewhat
enamored with what a nice day it was and the opportunity to leave work early,
but was shook to reality when someone said, “No, you can’t. The city’s under
martial law now – you shouldn’t be out by yourself.”
The other intern’s apartment was at The Cairo in Dupont Circle – the tallest residential building in the
District, although still only 12 stories high. It had been infamously covered
in the news that summer for being where the intern Chandra Levy lived when she
went missing in May.
In one of the most surreal moments of the day, we sat
quietly in her apartment on the 9th floor, in front of the TV that was
positioned in front of the tall living room windows. The windows looked out
across the neighborhood, and at the edge of the skyline, we could see the
Pentagon burning. At one point, we watched the national news, with Peter
Jennings reporting from his news desk, a small window in the corner of the TV screen with an image
of the Pentagon burning, while the real-life scenario hovered immediately behind
the television through the window.
The days and months after, as everyone knows, were equally
confusing, unbelievable and hard to reconcile...can we ever, when terrible
things happen? I learned to love DC and feel safe there – despite Chandra Levy
disappearing into Rock Creek Park earlier that summer, despite the unspecific terror threat that settled
over the federal buildings and monuments after that day. But when I finally moved
back to the west coast, after finishing my internship, college, and my first
post-college job in DC, I did it without regret.
I've been given lots of gifts from the garden lately. Basketball-sized sweet onions pulled from the field just for me, eight perfect stems of chard and a ruffled ball of butter lettuce. Strawberries from the foothills of the Blue Mountains that I roast with ground pepper and balsamic vinegar, a lentil chili made meaty with barley and a giant, prideful zucchini. Such simple, thrilling gifts.
The great thing about having a blog nobody reads is that you have a platform for talking about things nobody would otherwise listen to. For Easter Brunch I made lox from scratch. I used this recipe from April's Food and Wine magazine. I was especially taken that it was a recipe from the chef of Sitka and Spruce, a restaurant in Seattle I always mean to visit but never do. Meanwhile, favorite pubs are hit repeatedly. Resolve!
So, here is my photo-journal of Eden's attempt at lox. I was pretty happy with the result (and really, really happy that nobody reported food poisoning).
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 20th, 10 PM: Brine that mother!
I gathered fresh mint, parsley, cilantro and dill from the Portland Farmer's Market and spread the sprigs across the amazing marbled wild salmon I got for an arm and a leg from Whole Foods. Resolve!
One makes a salty mess with shallots, dill, anise and coriander seeds, and garlic, and drowns the salmon (well...).
You drape the mess in paper towels (or if you're a hippie like me, you don't have paper towels on hand so you use a very stained flour towel that you had planned on throwing away long ago).
You wrap the entire thing in plastic wrap. I refer to this step as the Salmon Mummification Project, but Food and Wine calls it something much less interesting. Pop it in the fridge and wait for 36 hours.
SATURDAY, APRIL 23rd, 9 AM: Peel that mother! Unwrap from the plastic, burn the flour towel and recover the dressed fish with (recycled, unbleached) paper towels that you sprung for, embarrassed that you ever thought using a flour towel was appropriate. Mentally apologize to Food and Wine (and, your guests for brunch tomorrow). Rewrap in plastic, place back in fridge.
SUNDAY, APRIL 24th, 9 AM: Hehasrisenhehasrisenindeed. Peel that mother! Again! Scrap the dressings off of your lovely fish and place it on a bakers rack in the fridge to chill out for two hours. The goal of this step, disturbingly enough, is a fish that's "slightly tacky". 'Where is that flour towel?' you think.
SUNDAY, APRIL 24th, 12:00 PM: The reveal! Of course, I failed to take pictures at this critical point. A picture of Andrea, protesting that she can't eat another bite and then stacking a bagel with more lox, is the best I could do -- and good proof, I think, of the project's success.
(THE REST OF THE MENU: besides the lox, on Kettleman's bagels with whipped cream cheese, red onions and capers, Easter brunch included a spinach and goat cheese quiche, a rhubarb jam with red chile and lemon, a sweet cream cheese with honey and hazelnuts, a fabulous dressed salad with crunchy greens, and plenty of mimosas with raspberries.)
Recently my sister complained that I hadn't updated my blog in sometime. I'm thinking that this writing platform might've run its course. The good news is not that I've stopped writing altogether, but I am busily writing more substantial things - articles, short stories and of late, even a (short) film treatment. Exciting. So, just to keep the masses happy (and by masses I mean my only reader, my sister, who refuses to comment on my blog except as her dog) this photo. Merry Christmas, all.
This will go down in history as the summer that never was (my East coast friends had the opposite problem, it was the summer that was Too Damn Hot.) That said, I did have some nice moments, even if I was wearing long sleeves when I had them. I'm listening to the rain fall outside in the pitch black (even though it's only 8pm) and I know I need to face the facts. Summer's out, Fall's in. And, against all common sense, I'm a little excited.
So, here's scenes from my too-quick, too-cold summer in redux. Onward!
(top to bottom, more on my flickr page) A week in Maine with my favorite people; Newport, Oregon with my mom; a documentary on the cemetery shown in the cemetery; Hitchcock's Blackmail shown on the rooftop of the Hotel Delux, looking over downtown Portland; A lovely spur-of-the-moment day trip to Seattle with my sister, and a hike to Falcon Cape (near Cannon Beach, Oregon) with Canela the Explorer.
I have a very distinct memory of sitting on the Mouse House porch-couch a few summers ago, clutching an "Eyewitness Vietnam" guide and explaining how most of the fun of travel - for me - is the relaxing armchair travel. The imagining was the thing.
I meant it, but I also realized that it sounded sad. Obviously, all the books on the history of the Eiffel Tower cannot measure ten minutes of standing in the crowds and summer heat, with its arches like a steel halo over your head. I can't deny this. But I also know that in travel, something always surprises you. One of my strongest memories of Paris in July is the stench of dog poop. Caught off guard (that wasn't in the guidebooks) I wasn't prepared to shrug it off. It was also an earned memory, not borrowed from a book. My love of arm chair travel means I have several piles of travel writing and guidebook editions to places I've never been. Fifteen dollars, in my mind, is a cheap placebo when you can't finance a summer in Sweden.
In two weeks I'll be in Maine for the first time. My only literary GPS markers for Maine are Bill Bryson and Stephen King, which is unsettling. I've lived in New England and know that the trees grow thick and right up to the edge of the lake. I know Anne of Green Gables lived a few hundred miles northeast. I'm pleased with the holistic route that comes from traveling from Portland to Portland, on opposite coasts. I'll continue to dig into the books and blogs and I am excited about what I'll find.
But I'm sure nothing will match that moment when I see a lobster struggling in a cage in the water, or hear that elusive Maine accent for the first time, or, or, or...that's the part that I have to discover for myself by going, by getting off my proverbial porch-couch, that my books can't experience for me. And if I run into Stephen King when I'm out berry picking, well, I'll be prepared for that too.
Maybe it was the 3,000 straight days of rain and cold and gray. Even though the weather has edged toward and hinted at summer, this fifth day of July, and weathermen are promising it'll completely flip the switch over to 90 tomorrow (from 65 today)...still. Something broke, or at least became undeniable to me. Everything is too tight. Job, little apartment, neighborhood haunts, the city -- and probably if I could afford to escape it, the state and the region. Mama needs a change of pace before it's fall and the gray sets in again, for real.
How to fix this? I'm not sure.
I ironed a giant pile of shirts, for distraction.
I mopped the kitchen floor, for clarification.
I joined my sister on a hike on the coast, for a new perspective (but it was gray there, too).
When mass exodus from your life isn't an option, Oprah-types suggest you hug your tired life in a new way, try to see new details in the old. So. At the beach I examined shells, coves and tidal pools. At home, I rearranged and purged. Still, I feel stuck. I'm thinking maybe I should start doing things backward, for a new perspective. That's how stuck I am. I'll report back, hopefully from a more sunny place.
I haven't been so complimentary about Portland lately. And it might seem a bit late in the season for a "things to do this summer list" but in my defense, we're still holding our breath for any sign of it here. It's been cold and obscenely, unrelentingly rainy. But the weatherman promises that's all changing this weekend, when we'll hit 80 for the first time this year, mid-June. So, here it is; My summer wish list, to make sure I appreciate every non-work gorgeous summer minute I'm offered, if the season does manage to present itself.
PLACES TO GO: Portland, Maine / Newport, OR / Chicago, IL / Vancouver, BC / Seattle, WA
In the last few days, Portlanders have turned against the rain. Normally rainy weather's biggest champion (Portlanders gush about it and wax nostalgic about evenings forced to stay inside the way others recall perfect summer days of sunshine and heat) we've reached the limit. My boss stands at the office window and makes sarcastic comments about the beautiful day. Another friend -- generally agreeable and laid back -- threatened to fly back to his home town in Illinois and rip the arms off the next person who commented on how much rain they've been having. What do you know of rain!? he cried. I personally think of it as a semiofficial agreement between us and the sky. After all, we bear eight months of chill, dampness, and gray for four perfect months of Portland summer and fall. The deadline has come and gone, sky. The charm of falling asleep to the sound of rain on the rooftop has long past. Sun: reveal yourself!
Today I might be staring down yet another grant application inside and a wild wall of weather outside, but I'm secretly drawing on the inspiration of film makers and food writers. Bright spots in an otherwise gray little day.
.JPG)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
