Are we there yet?

I'm coming to the end of my rope. I'm out of jars, for one. The lack of jars seriously puts a damper on my canning enthusiasm. As a kind concession to Patrick's sanity, I've promised I will buy no more jars. And so, this crazy season of my life draws to a close. I am down to exactly five wide-mouth quart jars, four pints, and sixteen jelly jars. Sigh. All too soon those will be filled (like, tomorrow) and shelved, and then what? Then I'll have 2008 to look back on as The Year I Learned to Can, (maybe also, The Year I Got Married?), and in five or ten years it will seem so absurd that I ever had to teach myself to can. It'll become something I've just always known how to do, something instinctual, fundamental to my Domestic Goddess-ness.

So now how am I going to fill my days? Well. Yesterday I received the much-awaited, thoroughly exciting news that I am going to be hosting my family's Thanksgiving this year! Maybe not everyone would be so thrilled, but for someone who loves to cook, and loves to entertain even more, it's heaven-sent. For someone who spends hours curled up in an armchair with a stack of her favorite cookbooks, and subscribes to half a dozen foodie blogs, the gift of hosting Thanksgiving is divine and lovely.

And an honor. Oh. Now I am taking my place in the long line of accomplished women who've hosted holidays in my family: my aunt, who is passing Thanksgiving directly on to me. My mother, who used to do Thanksgiving and Christmas both, back in the day, whipping up brioches, rolling croissants with a wine bottle, serving braised pearl onions and sauteed breaded leeks. My grandmas and great-grandmas, great cooks and hostesses all. Now it's my turn.

I'm already conjuring a menu, though the day is nearly two months away. I might be thrilled, but poor Patrick is losing his wife to a stack of cookbooks for the coming weeks.

There's a special place in heaven for patient spouses.

The last of the garden

Yesterday afternoon, Jen and Corrine and I headed to the garden to harvest the last of the beets, carrots, peppers, and green tomatoes. Pulling in that last harvest of the season is always impossibly bittersweet for me. I'd come to expect and depend on those handfuls of little tomatoes, knobby carrots and fistfuls of fresh herbs, just as a parent anticipates her child's sweet crayon drawings decorating the fridge. Joyful and imperfect, proof of your contributions to the world. Living without those gifts, for four long months?

I'm buoyed by knowing that next year's garden will be better. There will be brighter colors, finer flavors, and not so many darn cucumbers. Next year's garden will always be better. Gardeners are planners, schemers, dreamers. And they're optimistic enough to do it all again, year after year.

We picked our nasturtiums, too. I put mine in a jar like this, with a line from an Anne Michaels poem running through my head:

Across the room a jar of flowers

made its small fire.

And now, moving on to something purely silly.

While idling in the kitchen this morning, I made this with some of our knobby vegetables. The carrot was my inspiration: a perfect pair of legs! The eyes are cloves, the eyebrows and mouth are dried rosemary. It's Angry Beet Dude, patron saint of knobby vegetables.

I really need to get out more.

Here's some pictures from yesterday's hike at Chenango Valley State Park. Fall sunshine makes for good pictures.

Saturday done right

It wasn't the gloriously sunny day we wanted, but we made the best of it. Cooperstown, NY, is just an hour and a half away. It's best known as the home of the Baseball Hall of Fame-- there's Doubleday Field, a baseball greats wax museum, and a plethora of little shops on Main Street otherwise devoted to the Great American Pastime. We politely ignore all that. We know Cooperstown mainly as a town of spectacular old stone buildings, brew pubs, and beautiful lakefront. Our afternoon started off with a hike at Glimmerglass State Park.

Maidenhair ferns, a favorite.

Witch hazel.
We spotted lots of deer on the hike. These guys (or rather, girls) were posing like Upstate New York poster deer.


This is one of those aforementioned spectacular old stone buildings. I love how the orange mums set off the gray sky and the gray stones. One thing about this town: they have strict zoning laws. Sometimes I think they even regulate what color flowers you can plant in your pots. Plant the wrong shade of mums, they make you move away.


After our hike, we went to visit our other favorite place in Cooperstown: The Farmers Museum. I hands down love this place. It started out as just some old farmland with a pretty impressive stone barn (built by one James Fenimore Cooper), and has expanded steadily, building by building, into an entire recreated early American village. In places where historic buildings were threatened, the Farmers Museum would set about raising the money to have them lifted, moved to Cooperstown, settled on the property, and then restored. When the restoration is finished, the house is open to the public, often complete with knowledgable interpreters in period dress.


This house used to be in Norwich. It was lifted up and trucked here in 2006. Imagine driving down the highway and seeing an 1840 farmhouse go by!

There's a real diversity of buildings: a forge, a schoolhouse, a church (available for private weddings), a pharmacist, a lawyer's office, tavern, and a number of farmsteads. Inside the Moore house, a woman was cooking bubble and squeak over an open hearth, while another sat by the window mending a sock. After a minute (I was chatting with them about food preservation) a young man brought in a bucket from the heirloom cattle who'd just been milked, out in the barn. Outside, their woodshed is full, their bins are full of potatoes. Chickens peck in the dooryard. Walk down the lane, there's turkeys and a horse, pigs and sheep. Say hello!

The place is like a time capsule. It's also a tribute to those things I love best-- handwork, resourcefulness, ingenuity, independence.

We met up with my parents in Oneonta for an early dinner, (mom gave me another infusion of canning jars and recipes), and rounded out the day sitting with some friends out in Endicott. And that, folks, is my kind of Saturday.

Pantoum for Autumn Evenings

The wind articulates: offers tree sounds
to our ears, leaves to the ground,
tosses handfuls along the sidewalk.
Pinwheeling colors twirl down

to our ears, leaves to the ground.
Man in a flannel shirt gathers leaves,
pinwheeling colors twirl down.
We know a turn is coming.

Man in a flannel shirt gathers leaves,
rakes a bushy pile, kids flop in bunches.
We know a turn is coming,
we yield to a new season. Our neighbor

rakes a bushy pile, kids flop in bunches,
shouting. Geese hurtle south overhead.
Yielding to a new season, our neighbor
brings us apples in a paper sack.

Shouting, geese hurtle southward.
Purple fox grapes make us pucker. Each year, fall
brings us apples in a paper sack,
tawny and russet, that blush a kiss of frost.

Purple fox grapes make us pucker. Each year, fall
comes colder, darker and we hurry inside,
tawny and russet, that blush a kiss of frost.
The rusty gate swings open, leaves flutter, and fall

comes colder, darker. We hurry inside.
The wind articulates, offers tree sounds.
The rusty gate swings open, leaves flutter, and fall
tosses handfuls along the sidewalk.

Here's to a long day spent roasting peppers, shutting storm windows, and canning the last of the season's tomatillos before they freeze. It's time to get out of denial. Fall is here to stay.

Woman trapped in house; subsisted on squash for ninety days

Don't they look like treasure? This is a one-day haul from Frog Pond Farms, in Bainbridge, NY. It's a half-hour scoot from Binghamton, but thoroughly worth it for the prices and the general feel of the place. There's no cash register. Every day there's the owner standing at the head of the line, tallying peoples' purchases out loud: "Three dollars on butternut, three dollars on delicata, eight dollars onions, four dollars red potatoes, and a dollar on parsley is nineteen dollars!" And you hand him your money and the next person steps up: "Five dollars tomatoes, a dollar on zucchini, three dollars on basil, three-fifty on cider, that's twelve fifty!" On it goes, all day long. Does his voice wear out? He seems weathered and durable, like he might have good stout chestnut fencerails under his clothes.

The thing I love most is the huge quantities of things for sale. Bushels of potatoes. Cases of tomatoes. Fifty pound bags of carrots. Frog Pond is a place for people who can, which makes me proud to be among the patronage.

For the record, I refrained from the fifty pound bag of carrots. I did come home with a trunk full of squash and potatoes, though.

Drying tomatoes

Last week I discovered drying tomatoes. It's one of those things I knew was possible-- that the intrepid Domestic Goddess could, by her own hand, create some of those delicious, gourmet morsels they sell in grocery stores for approximately $5 an ounce-- sundried tomatoes.

Just the name is enough to throw you off. Hear sundried tomatoes, and what do you think? I conjure an Italian courtyard of ancient terracotta buildings, maybe a fig or an orange tree in the center, and around the perimeter, trained on wooden supports, a lush, languid tomato vine, fruits ripening perfectly in the Mediterranean sun.

Maybe to make Tuscan sundried tomatoes, or Milanese sundried tomatoes, you need a courtyard like that. But to make Binghamtonian sundried tomatoes, all you need is an oven.

Oh, and tomatoes. Some of those, too.

I've been using the plum kind, which are a little smaller and not as juicy as regular old beefsteak tomatoes. I slice them in half. I lay the halves out on a cooling rack (you know, for cooling cookies). I sprinkle them all with salt, and with dried thyme (optional, but worth it for the potpourri effects). I put my oven on its lowest setting (170 degrees). I stick the tomatoes in there, and I wait. It's been taking about twelve hours to dry a batch-- I check after about eight hours and pull any that are satisfactorily leathery and wrinkled, and let the rest go for longer.

Here's a picture of the action:

I can't get over how easy it all is. Once they're done, you just stuff them in a baggie (or a clean jar, or a tupperware) and store them away until you need them. I have a feeling we are going to be eating well this winter.

So, who wants pesto?

Canning with friends

A harmonious kitchen-mate is a hard thing to find. Yesterday, my neighbor Jen and I spent the day canning as if we'd spent every Saturday canning, our whole lives. I knew when to back off, she knew when to jump in with the tongs. We ate muffins with the bits of jam that were left in the bottoms of my jam pots last week. We played board games while we waited for the water to heat, the steam to start, the processing to run. She beat me at Othello, and I'll try not to hold it against her. When Corrine could spare a minute, she joined us too, and we'd sit at my table drinking tea and sharing easy conversation.

Altogether, it was a thoroughly fun, soul-filling afternoon.

And now I know how to pressure-can. (Insert evil laugh here.) Watch out world, I've got a whole month before the Farmers Market closes!

Homemade roasted red peppers.
Vegetable stock. Isn't that a beautiful color?


Pete, sleeping in my fabric. This is a typical level of cuteness for so-called Mr. Magical.