Now what?

Many of you already know this about me: I'm a hoarder. I think a lot of crafty people are. We can't see something without seeing its great potential, its higher purpose. A bottlecap is not just a bottlecap, it's raw material. It's a tessera, or a pendant, or a picture frame waiting to happen. It's not its fault it was born a lowly bottlecap. It can be so much more than that. Something more noble.

But, now what? Now that I've got this pile (just three months' worth!) what do I do? I dump 'em out onto my table, swoosh them around (they have the same smooth shiny appeal of buttons), take a picture, and think think think.

Think think. Any ideas?

The 100-mile meal

That disturbingly pink stuff in the middle is cole slaw, made with a couple teeny little garden beets, and a couple teeny little garden carrots. There's corn from Baldwinsville, NY. Tomato-cucumber salad with garden herbs and some Farmers Market red onion. The pickles are from garden cukes. And the tofu, lo and behold, is made in Rochester. Now that's what I call spiffy.

This slaw literally flies together if you have a food processor.

Fluorescent Cole Slaw

8 cups shredded cabbage (that's a whole petite little cabbage, or half a real hunker)
1/2 good-sized red onion
1 small carrot, peeled
1 small beet, peeled
1 tbsp salt
2-3 tbsp Dijon mustard
1 1/2 tsp mustard seed
1/4 cup white wine vinegar
2 tbsp olive oil
1 tbsp honey
black pepper to taste

Put the shredded cabbage in a bowl. Run the remaining veggies through the slicer attachment on your food processor, and then process for half a second with the regular blade, in order to get that pink color. Or, just mince those veggies with a regular old knife. Throw everything else into the bowl, give it a stir and taste to adjust the flavorings. I let mine sit overnight in the fridge, which really let the flavors marry nicely.

This is nothing if not a colorful dish.

Berrying

... and I picked one more just like it. And three quarts of raspberries. And twelve pounds of apples. By the time I headed homeward, I'd also picked up four zucchinis, two pints of cherry tomatoes, two quarts of pears, and the most enormous head of cabbage ever, at the Farmers Market. My car was packed, and it smelled like summer.

Going picking was something I wanted to initiate myself into. It's poetic. It's one of those things you do if you're possessed of a rural sensibility, a way to connect with the land. There's many beautiful posts about berry picking out in blogland: here, here, here, and here. It's also a good way to make out like a bandit, because my backseat haul probably would've cost $100 at the grocery store.

So, having never properly gone picking before, and having stepped out of the car at Apple Hills Farm, and into a view like this:

I wanted to make the most of my experience there. That wasn't difficult:
You couldn't reach into a blueberry bush without grabbing a whole handful of ripe ones. And they were absolutely the tastiest blueberries I've ever eaten. I've heard there are some crops that benefit from a light drought, since it concentrates the sugars in the fruit. I think blueberries must be among them.

The endnote to this day of reaping the bounty of central New York, is this:

This is my freezer. I ritually pull everything out and cram it back in at least once a day, desperately trying to make room for more stuff. Yesterday I added the blueberries and raspberries, a gallon of shredded cabbage, a gallon of shredded zucchini, and nearly a gallon of eggplant. I still have tomatoes to deal with, and cucumbers, and I'd really like to stock up on peaches, apples, and winter squash.

The only solution, it seems, is to start canning. And that would be where I run up against my firmly rooted anxieties, my (so far) lifelong aversion to canning. I mean, I've done the low-impact stuff: water-bath pickles, jam, and a batch of marmalade that was almost lethally bitter. But what I yearn for, in my heart of hearts, is emerald jars of green beans, golden peaches in juice, apple pie filling, preserves that taste like fruit instead of sugar.

I have a dusty, antediluvian pressure canner in my basement. Someone gave it to my mom decades ago, and she was always too chickenshit to use it, too. A few years ago she passed it on to me, where it's been lurking, always reminding me of my shortcomings. You can't call yourself a domestic goddess if you don't know how to can, silly. Come on, what are you, scared?

No one in my family has ever done this before. If I succeed, I'll be the first Plath woman to have proud pantry shelves lined with particolored mason jars. The mark of an accomplished woman, a real provider and provisioner. A true domestic goddess.

Into the woods

I'm not sure what we'd do without Chenango Valley State Park. It's a big old place, with lots of trails, cabins and campsites, and big old fieldstone picnic pavilions and lodges. Our favorite spots are always deserted, even on Labor Day. And it's only about 20 minutes away. When Patrick or I need to get to the woods, it's often where we go.

Our favorite trail is called the Tween Lakes trail, which, as you might guess, winds around between two lakes. The lakes are petite, with lots of cattails, lily pads, and waterfowl. They are "kettle lakes," meaning they formed around colassal glacial ice cubes about 1500 years ago. When the ice cubes melted, the lakes formed. Neat.

Being so close to the waters' edge most of the time means there's always potential to see exciting things: turtles sunning themselves on floating logs, fish shadowing away into deeper water, herons fishing the shallows. We've seen Pileated Woodpeckers there, too, and loons. Today we saw approximately two hundred chipmunks. They were in logs, on logs, on branches, in trees, in holes, on rocks, and chattering at us for jeopardizing their nut-hoarding industry. This would be a good time of year to be a chipmunk.

There were also these gorgeous floppy orange mushrooms:

And this pretty Indian Cucumber Root, turning a little pink for fall.
After a picnic lunch and our hike, we were able to end the day with homemade ice cream in the late-afternoon sun.

(Sinful Chocolate and Mint Chip.)

West Fest

After a long day at West Fest, I walked home through the sleepy west-Binghamton streets and stopped for this shot. This is the gazebo at Recreation Park, sort of magicial at night, don't you think? The park is close by, maybe five blocks from our house, and passing through it always rustles up a lot of nostalgia. I'm not sure why. It's just a big empty plot of land in the middle of the mostly quiet residential West side, with a swimming pool, playground, tennis courts, and lots of gorgeous old oak trees. Sometimes we walk our dog there-- he appreciates the squirrels who are lured by those oaks.

The trees are beautiful. I'll admit it. But my nostalgia has more to it than that. Rec Park brings me a sense of history, the knowledge of what Binghamton was like before most of its companies, and most of its people packed up and left town. For the first half of this century, this whole area was a wildly prosperous place, in no small part because of the Endicott-Johnson shoe company which had its headquarters nearby. It employed thousands of people. It financed homes for its workers, and offered employee health insurance. Throughout the Greater Binghamton area, the company erected libraries, public swimming pools, parks, and carousels. There was a concert hall that had minstrel shows on Sunday evenings, free for workers and their families.

Walking through Rec Park alone, I think about what it would've been like to raise a family here sixty years ago. Minstrel shows. Ice cream cones and carousel rides at Rec Park. Swimming in the giant public pool (shaped like the sole of a boot) that held 2,000 bathers. I guess it's all too easy to romanticize, but to me it seems like EJ represented capitalism at its best, when even the biggest, most prosperous companies were run by people who looked out for their employees, and understood their role in the local economy.

Binghamton now is a testament to what happens when those jobs go overseas. The population has dropped, from 85,000 in the 1950s, to a little under 50,000 today. There's no more minstrel shows or boot-shaped swimming pools. But there's always plenty of room on the carousel.

Here's some pictures from West Fest 2008, hosted by the venerable Cyber Cafe West.



My husband (far left) and his band, The Second Class Citizens.

The owner and his dog, Lila.

Happy flowers

Sorry to have been scarce lately. I've been here, as usual, giving in to the mellow of a gray rainy day and embroidering. I was in my studio armchair, with Pete sleeping on the back like a furry neck pillow. My lamp glowed against the dim windows, occasionally there'd be the crack of a walnut onto the roof (from the tree in our backyard), and through it all was the constant, steady pop and hiss of my needle poking up and being drawn through.

Yes, I love embroidery. And it's funny, because I am not a patient person. Through the few years I've been at it, I feel like I've learned something about myself. Maybe, just gotten in touch with part of me I didn't know was there. It makes me feel steady, grounded, and purposeful. It's sort of like meditation. Meditation, with happy round flowers, blooming on turquoise linen.

Vegetable soup, and drive-by sconing

There's nothing like a cool breezy late-afternoon devoted to a sputtering pot of chopped vegetables. There's a recipe in the original Moosewood cookbook I've always been tempted by. It seems so simple, and unusual-- chopped summer vegetables (onions, corn, carrots, green beans, bell pepper, broccoli, zucchini) sauteed in oil until tender, mixed with two pureed potatoes, nutmeg, black pepper, thyme, and a quart of milk. It was definitely tasty, ladled over toasted sourdough bread cubes and spiked with a little Tabasco.

And, because last week Patrick brought me a quart of vanilla yogurt accidentally when I wanted a quart of plain yogurt, and I had a scone recipe that features yogurt, I made Lemon Yogurt Scones. Wow, they were good. Even better was bundling half of them into a tupperware, still warm, and shuffling over to assail our neighbors Jen and Corrine as they pulled into the driveway. A drive-by sconing. How do you like that.

The pansies I planted, the marigolds are volunteers from last year. Aren't they pretty?