Pink of Perfection

Granted, it flies in the face of my chatter yesterday about autumnal melancholia, but the thing is, it’s very hot here right now. Every morning I go into the living room and aim a fan straight at myself. Ice coffee is made. Brows sweat. And when a friend is coming over for lunch, the last thing I want to do is heat up the apartment. It’s time for a cold, assembled lunch.

I pretty much stole this menu from Lisa when she had me over on one of the most sickeningly steamy nights of the summer. Nothing could have seemed more appealing than the platter of deviled eggs and pile of cold radishes that waited for me on the coffee table. Except, perhaps, a beer float.

Anyway, it was all so perfect that I replicated the meal for a friend with a few riffs of my own: guacamole, deviled eggs, heirloom tomatoes drizzled with olive oil and sprinkled with chives, a plate of nectarines. It’s the perfect picking food when you’re hungry but it’s so dang hot that mostly you want to sit across from your pretty friend on the floor, the fan whirring directly at both of you, plotting big plans from the comfort of the living room.

I feel a little worried about fall this year. I’m having a last gasp of misbehaving summer days, wanting nothing but to sit outside in the sunshine with bare shoulders and drink beer. It’s so unlike me, but I’ve been in a panic about the changing seasons. “There’s something a little melancholy about September,” I said in the car ride up to the country with my book club last weekend. “Yeah,” said Jess, “that’s what I like about it.” Isn’t that what I love about it, too, like the way the light looked on the roadside rocks that Laureen pointed out? Isn’t that what I’ve written about before?

The temperatures, of course, are still summery. But I can already feel my inner Angela Chase rising up. This is the time of year when it feels delicious to lie on the floor in front of fan and listen to music. To play hookey and sit in a cold movie theater in the afternoon and wander by water with your headphones in. This mix was designed expressly for that purpose: autumn walking in your heavy boots, lying on your bed thinking about really sexy guys who will never like you as much as you like them, and general bouts of seasonally-appropriate teen angst. Doesn’t it feel awesome the second time around?

Remember that vintage fabric my friend sent me after finding it in a relative’s North Dakota attic? I didn’t know how to properly honor it, and a year later, here’s the answer I settled on.

I first saw embroidery hoops used as fabric frames at Purl Patchwork as a way to display their Liberty of London swatches. (I’ve always loved the black and blue feather print.) But when I kept seeing them in shelter mags and on design blogs, I thought it was a decorating device too “over” to do in my own house.

But you know what? Screw that. It might have taken me a few years to finally cop to my desire to get pretty fabrics on the wall any way I can, but now that I have, I find the results ridiculously cheering. Who cares if something is “everywhere” (Keep Calm and Carry On, anyone?). If you love it, make it yours, bring it into your house, and let it bring you a bit of joy every time you pass down the hall.

This project is just my kind of skill level: Iron your fabric. Then slip the fabric into the embroidery hoops, tighten the screw and pull the fabric taught. Cut off the excess fabric, and hang them on the wall on tiny nails. Done and done.

Again and again, I fall for the idea of summer vegetables baked together. And each time, when the softened hues emerge from the oven, I know instantly it was a bad idea. It’s like falling for the bow-legged cowboy each time you walk into the bar. You are twenty-one and so stupid, and he will break your heart.

That’s kind of how I feel about tians and ratatouille. The vegetables turn sumptuous and slouched, but I just keep thinking I’d rather have something sturdy and stand-up, like an unbaked tomato on a sandwich or maybe a raw ribboned zucchini salad. Neither of which would have required turning on the oven, my singular goal of these three summer months.

Also, I feel a bit flummoxed about what to serve with this. Polenta always fails me, pasta seems a little boring. I guess what I’m trying to say is that I don’t know how to make a meal out of fragrant baked vegeables. Maybe herb-spiked quinoa or bulgur would be nice. But just thinking about that meal makes me feel vaguely unsatisfied, like when the cowboy says goodnight for the final time without a kiss. I’m just hungry for a little more.

Those of you who see the tian light, tell me: what am I missing?

Continue reading “French Friday: Summer Vegetable Tian” »

The bad news is, I killed a plant. A couple weeks ago, I went on a plant buying spree. Green plastic pots filled with pink polka dotted leaves and viney tendrils were two for $5 at the farmer’s market. Then later, walking home from a cafe, a flower shop had a tray of long-armed, spiny aloe plants for sale, and a tall, proud looking green thing. Of course, I had to have them all.

Ever since I visited my friend in Los Angeles in the spring, I have realized that my dream life has a lot more green things in it than my actual life. Jenny had plants hanging from the rail of her balcony, and a terracotta pot filled with succulents and a bed of stones. At night, she might have snipped buds from white rosebushes and slipped then into the narrow neck of a tall bottle back in her apartment.

I came home wanting more green on my windowsills and fire escape. And it’s why, when I ran into a jade plant at Trader Joe’s, I swooned. There’s something about jade plants that so speaks to me––they don’t need much, and they hold what they need, in reserves, inside of them. Yet despite the lovely symbolism and my ability to instantly make reality an element of my dream life right there in the grocery store aisle, I had to stand, weighing the pecuniary ramifications of a $10 plant for several minutes. Then finally it hit me: I’ll spend $10 on a sushi lunch but I can’t drop the same amount to make my ideal life vision a reality? So I got my priorities straight and happily carried that jade plant home, where it greets me every morning from my bedroom windowsill. An important lesson: it’s always worth it to spring for the things that really bring you deep delight, especially when they cost less than $20.

I killed the pink polka dotted thing. I think, perhaps, it was more delicate than it looked. It might have been the rain or the wilting heat. But I still have the jade plant, the aloe plant next to it, and two unidentified green things in the living room: one low and long-armed, one tall and proud.

Here’s the good news: I’m pretty into these cookies. In fact, would it be wrong to say my favorite thing about these cookies was the raw dough? It was the best I’ve ever tasted. Some of their magic seemed a little lost in the baking, but they came out of the oven soft and have stayed that way for days. Plus, while I would not go so far as to call these cookies “healthy,” they do have a number of good-for-you items in them, like whole wheat and oat flours, canola oil, and agave nectar. This is not reason enough to eat them for breakfast, but all the same, I did. Let’s just call that my other piece of bad news.

Continue reading “Chocolate Chunk Cookies with Almonds” »

Last August Hours Before the Year 2000

by Naomi Shihab Nye

Spun silk of mercy,
long-limbed afternoon,
sun urging purple blossoms from baked stems.
What better blessing than to move without hurry
under trees?
Lugging a bucket to the rose that became a twining
house by now, roof and walls of vine—
you could live inside this rose.
Pouring a slow stream around the
ancient pineapple crowned with spiky fruit,
I thought we would feel old
by the year 2000.
Walt Disney thought cars would fly.

What a drama to keep thinking the last summer
the last birthday
before the calendar turns to zeroes.
My neighbor says anything we plant
in September takes hold.
She’s lining pots of little grasses by her walk.

I want to know the root goes deep
on all that came before,
you could lay a soaker hose across
your whole life and know
there was something
under layers of packed summer earth
and dry blown grass
to moisten.

A few weeks ago, I was craving comfort in a big way. I was getting over a lingering summer cold, and feeling neither interested nor able to deal with grown-up problems. I plucked Anne of Avonlea off the shelf, and for as long as I was flipping through those very old and faded rough-edged hardback pages, I did feel comforted. Anne’s is not a world in which she wonders about the meaning in her life. Meaning is as sure and tangible a thing as Marilla’s plum jam. The questions instead are how to extract oneself when you’ve fallen through the roof of a chicken coop and what to name a particularly enchanting place in the woods. There are scrapes, to be sure, but Anne snakes her way out of them.

I love ambiguity, questioning and grays, of course. But there is something deeply appealing to me about simpler worlds where families eat dinner together every night, self-worth and love are givens, and humans are replaced by bears and anteaters.

After turning the last page on Anne, I took myself to Books of Wonder and reacquainted myself with old friends like Mrs. Frisby and Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. I pulled aside several different teenage female clerks and asked for recommendations based on my love of spunky, fierce heroines like Anastasia and Laura. They introduced me to Mary Alice and Sheila the Great.

I shelved Joan Didion and Annie Dillard. Enough darkness, rumination, and underbelly. I parted the curtains to let in some light. And in these last very happy weeks of time spent at reading level age 10 and up, I’ve learned that when life feels a bit clouded and the way is unclear, these scrappy young heroines remind me of everything I need to know. Adventure is where you find it. Smart girls are cool. Being kind is more important than being beautiful. Work for good. Follow your passions. Love yourself and love with another will follow. But in the meantime, we’ve got bigger fish to fry, like learning to write novels, befriending old ladies in stone houses, and finding our home on the prairie, our dreams in the tall sea grasses.

So, friends: I’ve got Anne of the Island on its way from a used bookstore in Michigan. A Wrinkle in Time is in the queue, and when it gets chillier, I plan to read through all the Little House books. What are your favorites? What childhood books do you visit again and again? Which heroines taught you what kind of woman you want to be?

Did I feel like a blogger gone mad asking to take this picture of an account manager at the end of a meeting? Yeah, sort of. But is jauntily wrapping dad’s old tie around your waist a genius stand-in for a lost belt? You betcha. I love the J. Crew cool of this striped vintage number on a simple navy sheath and think it would make a particularly fetching masculine-feminine mash-up on a girly dress. Here’s to DIY in action! (Let this also serve as proof that I don’t dwell exclusively in the land of fresh flowers and daydreaming. I sit in windowless conference rooms, too!)