Tapestry of Fortunes and Greens

When I worked for Williams-Sonoma, a thousand years ago, I'd walk from Ghirardelli along the water and over the hill to Fort Mason. I'd get in line at Greens To Go, consider the salads and the sandwiches while the line inched forward but always order the same thing: black bean chili in a heavy paper cup. I'd take it outside, sit by the water, and feel lucky to work in San Francisco even on those days that I hated my job.

This week my dear friend Sylvie is visiting San Francisco, where she, too, worked a thousand years ago. We went to Greens and there was no line at all. (This worried me: there should be a line.)

We bought Tassajara Rice Bowls (chili spooned over rice, why did it take Greens so long to come up with THIS?) and goat cheese-fig pizza (with flash-fried basil leaves), corn-tomato salad, and lots of peanut butter cookies and then we ate by the water, listening to the waves lap against the piers, and trying to ignore the droning helicopters hovering over the America's Cup boats. A lone, fluffy grey gull watched us with beseeching eyes.

Walking back to the car I spotted a pencil on the ground, a yellow Ticonderoga, new, unmarked, and sharpened to a perfect point. I bent down to get it and held it up. "There is nothing wrong with this pencil," I said. "Look at it!" Sylvie raised her eyebrows but I tucked it into my bag anyway.

We said our goodbyes and I stopped at a bookstore where the new Elizabeth Berg was waiting. Bought the book, headed home, and started the book right away. In the first few pages, the narrator, Cece, asks her mother's friend Cosmina to tell her fortune:

" ' Your task will be to learn in what direction to look for life's great riches, and not to deny the veracity of your own vision.'

I stared at her and whispered, 'What does veracity mean?'

She leaned forward and whispered back, 'Truth.' "

I never mark books but I couldn't help it. I had to get the yellow Ticonderoga and to lightly, lightly underline these words. Life's great riches. Sitting beside the water with the city at our backs, rice bowls warming our hands, sharing the easy conversation that comes with a thirty-year friendship. Life's great riches.

@copyright Ann Krueger Spivack, 2013

Wallace Stegner and "Women, Food, and God" Plus Shortcut Onion Soup

I'm not good at parties. If I could be zapped into the middle of a party -- teleported into a good conversation -- that would be fine. Instead, you have to WALK into a party, carrying a large bowl of fruit, absolutely positive that somewhere between curb and patio you're going to stumble and send fruit flying and probably it will land on Anne Tyler, your favorite writer in the world, who happens to be a friend of the host.

This party was an open house for a sculptor, Richard Starks, (Anne Tyler was not there, having remained in Baltimore since Richard and Jill don't actually know her) but even so we fell into a group of book lovers right away. Suddenly this was no longer a "party" but just a kind group of people chatting while eating grilled chicken, two kinds of quinoa salad, plus Tosh's heartbreakingly beautiful fruit tarts. We talked about left brain/right brain (Jill Bolte Taylor), Life of Pi, Ann Packer, Into the Beautiful North, and Wallace Stegner. Some of us love Stegner and some of us aren't so crazy about him, but either way you need to read Wallace Stegner On Teaching and Writing Fiction. There's a kind of compassion in this book that seems more about being human than about being a writer. Stegner quotes Joseph Conrad:

[Of the writer, I would ask] that he be capable of giving a tender recognition to the obscure virtues. That he not be impatient with [humankind's] small failings nor scornful of their errors. I would not have him expect too much gratitude from that humanity whose fate, as illustrated in individuals, is open to him to depict as ridiculous or terrible. I would wish him to look with a large forgiveness at men's ideas and prejudices, which are by no means the outcome of malevolence but depend on their education, their social status, even their profession. I would wish him to enlarge his sympathies by patient and loving observation while he grows in mental power.... Let him mature the strength of his imagination among the things on earth....."

I'm also reading Geneen Roth's Women, Food, and God. Now, you're probably thinking "what can Wallace Stegner and Geneen Roth possibly have in common?" Yeah, I thought that too, but here's the deal: Geneen Roth says that in order to stop eating ANYTHING and everything within reach, start observing. Put down the fork and let yourself see, hear, smell, touch. That when we eat voraciously and without hunger we are trying to drown out the voices -- our mother's voice or maybe Luva, that horrible ballet teacher we had when we were five who said that we landed like an elephant -- yes, we eat an entire chocolate cake and we drown out those voices but we also halt our ability to hear the wind blowing the oak tree behind the house, and to see the hummingbird hovering just above the rose bush with soft, ruffly flowers that are so vibrantly pink that they glow.

Seems like Stegner (or maybe Conrad) is saying the same things as Roth:

[Enlarge your sympathies]

Patient, loving observation

[Enlarge your sympathies]

Put down that leg of lamb and look at the sunset

[Mature the strength of your imagination]

Lots of folks can put together a sentence; only those with enough room in their hearts can connect words in such a way that the words connect human beings

[Mature the strength of your imagination]

Instead of focusing on what you cannot have (or on the voices of those who refuse to see your beauty), look at the beauty within reach

SHORTCUT ONION SOUP

Make this when you have lots of onions and you are working on maturing the strength of your imagination (which may or may not leave a lot of room for cooking).

1 large yellow onion

6 to 8 small white onions (OR any kind of onion at all)

2 to 3 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

1 26-ounce container Swanson's low-sodium beef stock

2 cups cold fresh water plus more if needed

2 tablespoons Cognac or Calvados (optional)

Peel the large onion and cut it in half. Dice half the onion and set aside. Cut the other half of the onion soup-style, which means cut thin slices from pole to pole so you have half-rings and then cut those long pieces in half.

Heat the olive oil in a large, heavy pot. When the oil is hot, toss in the diced onion (but not the long onion pieces just yet). Stir the diced onion and when well browned, pour in the stock and the 2 cups of water. Heat over medium heat while you cut the small onions.

Peel and cut the small onions soup-style (no dicing for these). Toss them into the pot as you slice them. Then, lower the heat so the soup simmers. Simmer for as long as you like -- 30 minutes works and 2 hours also works. If you simmer for more than 30 minutes, add another cup or two of cold water. Basically, the longer you simmer, the darker and more mellow the soup. Get up and taste it every 30 minutes or so, and take it off the heat when it's perfect for you. Then stir in the Cognac or Calvados if you like. It's also fine without any booze added.

When you're ready for soup, decide whether you want option A or option B:

Option A

Cut up some nice, fresh veggies -- anything from carrots and celery to parsley root and red peppers. Stir in the diced veggies, heat for just a few minutes and then serve a light, healthy supper.

Option B

Heat your oven to 350 degrees F. Cut a baguette into slices and toast them. (Or just cut any old bread into cubes and toast them.) Ladle soup into ovenproof bowls, add baguette slices (or croutons) and top with shredded gruyere cheese and a little Parmesan. Set the bowls (or one bowl if it's just you) on a baking sheet just to be safe. When the cheese is melted and golden brown on top, take it out and while you're waiting for your soup to cool, you can look at the web site of sculptor Richard Starks:

http://www.richardstarks.com/

See the photo of Lou Ferrigno on the wall behind Richard? Before he became a sculptor, Richard made exercise equipment for body builders including The Hulk. Don't you love meeting interesting new people at parties?

Family Album and a Good Turkey Sandwich

I've been thinking about famous artists as compared to some of my favorite authors. If Picasso is Anne Lamott and Hopper is Anne Tyler, then I think that Penelope Lively is Vermeer: small, quiet at first glance, incredible impact -- she creates these complete paintings of people who stay with you after the book is finished and shelved.

The story of a family with six children, each chapter in Family Album is like a snapshot of one family member or one incident, and something mentioned in a chapter leads to the next. It's carefully written but not stuffy. I'm sitting here with the book beside me wondering how she did it, how the author made each person in the book mysterious and whole, interesting and likeable or unlikeable, depending on your point of view.

This is a book about family, home-making (not in the sense of bed-making but in the sense of creating a home life) and how children can determine who a woman is. Does that mean that men won't want to read it? Maybe.

This book makes me consider the cost of being a mother, how for some women there is no hesitation, no question that caring for children is a life's work, a calling, satisfactory on its own. For the rest of us, it's constant push and pull. I know when I make a great meal, everyone in the family feels better. I also know that most of the time I would rather read and write than shop and cook. (Does everybody else think about Meg's mother in A Wrinkle in Time, cooking stew over a bunsen burner while she did her work in her laboratory? Nice idea but somehow it doesn't ring true.)

A turkey sandwich is the opposite of a good meal. It's not warm, it's not cooked. It's a cheat, a lunch, really, not dinner. So I dress it up. Pile up deli-sliced maple-roasted turkey on a plate. Set out fantastic sweet batard from Acme sliced thickly and a nice dark green bowl filled with homemade mayo (see below). I mound up whole romaine leaves on a nice dark blue platter to put on your sandwich or just to eat with your fingers. I add a small plate of sliced tomatoes and a funny old-fashioned divided casserole filled with sweet gherkins on one side and slices of dill pickle on the other. Bring out a few whole avocados with a knife and a small cutting board for anyone who wants to add avocado to their sandwich. That's it. That's dinner.

Danny and Rachel sit down and Danny actually says it out loud: "This is dinner?" My feathers are ruffled. "Yes," I snipe. "Tomorrow do you want to make dinner?" He shoots Rachel a look and then shakes his head. "No," he says. I settle my feathers into place and we each make our own sandwich, and eat quietly.

"It's good Mom," Danny says and Rachel nods, both eating their sandwiches. Not my best dinner but maybe not my worst.

Homemade Mayo

I have it on good authority that Julia Child actually kept a jar of Best Foods mayo in her fridge and when she didn't feel like making mayonnaise, she whipped out the jar. That works for me. If you have beautiful eggs from a farm nearby (as I did) and you want to make your own mayo, this is the method I used. (Make sure all your ingredients are at room temp; don't do this with chilly eggs.)

2 large egg yolks

1/4 teaspoon good Dijon mustard

2 to 3 tablespoons fresh-squeezed lemon juice or vinegar

1 cup oil (I used a nice olive oil)

Slide the egg yolks into a blender and whir for just about 20 seconds. Add the mustard and lemon juice or vinegar and whir until smooth. With the top off the blender add just a few drops of the the oil with the machine running on low. Add the oil, a few drips at a time until it forms an emulsion (it's thick and smooth). In a slow drizzle, add the rest of the oil. You could add a little more oil than 1 cup if you like, but I like it on the lighter side.

Dandelion Wine, Dandelion Greens, Dandelion Tonic

I'm trying to remember how old I was when I first read Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine. Ten maybe? It was the first time that I read something that I knew wasn't true and yet was more true than true. Now, four decades later, walking through my yard trying to decide if I should weed the dandelions or make a nice liqueur from them, I'm remembering Dandelion Wine in surprising detail.

Do you remember Douglas, looking through the store window at a pair of Cream-Sponge Para Litefoot Shoes?

"Somehow the people who made tennis shoes knew what boys needed and wanted. They put marshmallows and coiled springs in the soles and they wove the rest out of grasses bleached and fired in the wilderness. Somewhere deep in the soft loam of the shoes the thin hard sinews of the buck deer were hidden. The people that made the shoes must have watched a lot of winds blow the trees and a lot of rivers going down to the lakes. Whatever it was, it was in the shoes, and it was summer.

Douglas tried to get all this in words.

'Yes,' said Father, 'but what's wrong with last year's sneakers? Why can't you dig them out of the closet?' "

I'm now the parent wondering WHY my children can't dig last year's shoes out of the closet, but this brings back memories of how those first minutes of summer sound when school lets out, and the way your body feels when you wake up with absolutely nothing to do while cicadas are chickering in the long grasses, and the sky is impossibly, almost painfully blue.

I decide not to weed the dandelions but to eat and drink them. I walk outside with a glass jar and small scissors and walk through my yard snipping off the bright yellow flower heads and letting them fall into my jar. I bring the jar inside and go back out with a salad bowl, pulling off any tender, bright green leaves from the dandelions. (I don't use any pesticides -- if you do, maybe think twice before eating greens from your overgrown lawn.)

I have the flowers in a large glass measuring cup and I pour on a good amount of vodka. I add just a few teaspoons of sugar and two long strips of lemon peel, with the white pith scraped off. I pour all this into a large clean glass jar, screw on the lid and put it away in the back of my pantry. (I have no idea how this will taste -- stay tuned.)

Then I rinse and dry the dandelion leaves. I pour about 1 tablespoon of EVOO into a pan, add 2 minced garlic cloves, let it cook for about 30 seconds and then add the dandelion leaves -- about 1 1/2 cups of them. I add a little bit of lemon zest and a bunch of chopped fresh parsley leaves, and heat for another 10 or 20 seconds. I chop up a few roasted almonds and throw them on top. I taste it. It's good but there's something missing. I take my bowl of greens outside and carefully balance it on a tree limb while I climb up into the kids' treehouse. (This is harder than it sounds.) I sit down with my bowl so I can kick my legs while looking out over the fields, which are just turning from pale green to gold. The dandelions are about as good as greens can get (which is to say a lime popsicle would be more appropriate) but just for a minute I'm the same person I was when I was ten years old and summer stretched ahead so far forward that you couldn't imagine school starting up again.

Happy summer to you.

The Elephant Whisperer and Alfresco

Alfresco isn't a restaurant but a kiosk in downtown Santa Cruz. Walking by on my way to the Del Mar, I smelled something spicy: cinnamon and cloves, slow-cooked vegetables. I stopped walking. As I stood there, deep breathing, the guy waiting in front of the kiosk smiled at me. "Such a big smell from such a small place," he said. The woman inside the kiosk handed him a bowl (biodegradable, of course) filled with chunks of spicy soft eggplant, raisins, chickpeas, and tomatoes on a mound of couscous. I forgot all about my movie and asked for the same thing, the North African Bowl. Then we sat at Parisian cafe tables on the sidewalk taking bites of this earthy, aromatic, completely satisfying sun-drenched food.

This bowl fits in with the book I'm reading, The Elephant Whisperer. (Yes, bad title. I walked past it in the library and thought, "Cheesy.") Okay, maybe it does bear a little resemblance to Born Free but once Lawrence Anthony, the author and owner of the game reserve Thula Thula, begins telling about the elephants who arrived by a fluke at his property, I can't stop reading.

Elephants have had a tough time of it what with humans taking all the land and deciding that it's much more expedient to shoot elephants than to find them appropriate homes. Anthony, who's lived in South Africa for much of his life, is struck by the fact that elephants -- once plentiful here -- haven't lived on this land for over a century. Many of the native Zulu people surrounding Thula Thula have never even seen an elephant. He fights to save his little band of elephants, fights to build a lodge that will help eco-tourism replace poaching, fights to convince the ranch owners that the land could be more viable and lucrative as a reserve than as grazing grounds for cattle. He falls in love with the elephant herd, with the matriarch Nana, inquisitive and stately, the second-in-command female Frankie, who charges first and asks questions later (I feel a curious affinity for Frankie). He tells of the arrival of Mvula and Ilanga, the first elephant babies born on this land in 100 years and how the elephants will not let him near the babies but later, bring them to his house to show them off. Lawrence will take his first grandchild to the elephants (while his daughter-in-law nervously wrings her hands), and the elephants meet the human baby with the most gentle touches of their trunks.

I've been recommending this to people as a beach read but I think it's more: when a book can take you to African lands and let you stay with elephants, let you meet a particular group of elephants with their endearing and not-so-endearing traits, isn't that the reason we read in the first place?

Here's a link if you want to see the very appealing kiosk that is Alfresco.

http://www.alfrescosantacruz.com/

And you can hear (in lovely Brit accents) how Lawrence Anthony saved many of the animals in the Baghdad zoo:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/audio/2009/feb/20/conservation-wildlife-lawrence-anthony

And you can google Thula Thula too.

copyright 2010 Ann Krueger Spivack

Lit (part 2) and Alice's Dark Hot Chocolate

I've underestimated Mary Karr. In Lit, she calls her mother after checking into a mental institution when she's come too close to killing herself. Her mother refuses to come help with Mary's son, Dev, while Mary is hospitalized.

Her mother says, 'I just can't honey. You know I've had this trip to Mexico planned for a while.'

Mary says, "After she hangs up I cry because part of me still wants to drag her behind my car. But the other part still wants to crawl into her lap."

And then there's this conversation, held with Jack, a schizophrenic from Mary's AA group who works in a box factory when his meds keep him stable:

"But what if I don't believe in God?," Mary asks Jack.

"Get on your knees and find some quiet space inside yourself, a little sunshine right about here." Jack holds his hands in a ball shape about midchest, saying "Let go. Surrender Dorothy, the witch wrote in the sky. Surrender Dorothy."

Mary says, I want to surrender but have no idea what that means.

Jack goes on with a level gaze and a steady tone: "Yield up what scares you. Yield up what makes you want to scream and cry. Enter into that quiet. It's a cathedral. It's an empty football stadium with all the lights on. And pray to be an instrument of peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is conflict, pardon; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope...."

"What if there's no answer?" Mary asks.

"If God hasn't spoken, do nothing. Fulfill the contract you entered into at the box factory, amen. Make the containers you promised to tape and staple. Go quietly and shine. Wait. Those not impelled to act must remain in the cathedral. Don't be lonely. I get so lonely sometimes I could put a box on my head and mail myself to a stranger. But I have to go to the AA meeting and make the chairs circle perfect."

I read this page five or six times. Every time I read it, the knot in my chest loosens a little more. If someone battling schizophrenia can keep this kind of contract, then so can I.

I go downstairs to make toast and hot chocolate. Forget toast from a toaster -- it's soulless, hard and unforgiving. I put little marks of butter all over really good bread and then slide it into the oven under the broiler. I stand there watching because otherwise I know I will wander off and forget the toast entirely until it's smoldering and dark smoke is curling out of the oven door.

I make Alice Medrich's hot chocolate:

6 ounces of a really great dark chocolate, like Scharffen Berger
1 1/2 cups boiling water
1 1/2 cups milk

Chop up the chocolate, put it into a saucepan and pour half of the boiling water over it. Stir until smooth. Add the rest of the water and then the milk. I like to froth it up with a whisk. Then I dig around in the cabinets for my stainless steel coffee carafe that I love even though it's dented and old. I pour in the hot chocolate and set the carafe on the table with a good white china cup and my plate of perfect toast. Screw Weight Watchers. I bring Mary Karr to the table so I can finish reading.

copyright 2010 Ann Krueger Spivack

Lit and Roasted Cauliflower

Roasting cauliflower is easy. You hack the head into florettes, toss them into a big bowl, pour on a few tablespoons of olive oil, add some salt and pepper and then toss with your hands. Spread the oiled florettes on a baking sheet, and roast for 25 minutes at 375 degrees. It's forgiving, this recipe. Leave it in the oven a little bit longer and it's no big deal. I like them a little more browned anyway.

Made a whole white meal, just trying to use up what was in the fridge. Beige plates of Swedish meatballs, roasted cauliflower, and scallops and then we all sat at the table eating in a kind of bland-induced trance. I am stuck here, in white.

Mary Karr is the opposite of white. She is shiny black, obsidian dark, with a jagged tear of scarlet that stays in your brain after you've turned off the light. I go back and forth between loving Mary Karr and really resenting her.

I wonder why so many of us move forward in white, afraid to leave the path, doing everything we can to cover what shames us, while Mary Karr steps into the dark, writes about the dark, travels through it. "Nice" enters into it. ("Nice" is tangled up with "insidious" and "strangling.") Swedish meatballs on a beige platter -- how did I end up here?

Poetry makes me love Mary Karr. The fact that she is unsure about poetry's validity until she teaches poetry to a group of mentally challenged women. Somehow their ability to hone in on what is moving lifts Mary Karr above her uncertainty and lifts me above the whiteness. This is a poem by one of the mentally challenged women in Mary's class, Katie:

MONKEY FACE
Far away St. Paul
People like robots
Wash their tables
Scrub the floor
Bored things
Washrags on the window
Put it away now
Look at your leg
Tie your shoe. Look
At yourself. A monkey.

I read this and think that maybe poetry is not about intellect. Not about being adept with words or good in school or nice to your mother. I'm thinking about the purpose of poetry. Mary Karr writes about a teacher she had early on, Etheridge Knight. He told Mary to picture a woman climbing five flights of stairs in a Harlem apartment building in the summer heat, then having to go back down with armloads of garbage. "If you're standing on the corner of 116th Street, poeticizing," Etheridge told Mary, "what could you possibly say to help her climb back up."

So I'm thinking about what I could say to help her climb back up. Those words sure as hell wouldn't be found in a cookbook. They would come from leaving the path, from leaving behind "should," from sitting in the dark and letting the words come to you.

copyright 2010 Ann Krueger Spivack