Blood, Bones, and Butter by Gabrielle Hamilton

I served sour tomato soup to my friends. I was trying to be hospitable, thoughtful to their long day of travel to see us by offering a comfort food. Unfortunately, upon first bite of soup, it became immediately clear that I had added too much, way too much citric acid to the tomatoes when I canned them last summer. It was sour, terribly sour. But technically edible, I suppose, if you closed your eyes and thought about lemonade. I am pretty sure it was their actual hunger that made the soup edible. Being hungry can really make a meal feel gracious, even a sour one!

Gabrielle Hamilton's book Blood, Bones and Butter is about hunger. The hunger of a poor, young traveler. The emotional hunger of a child abandoned by parents. The hunger to reconnect with perfect meals and moments from our past. Is there any other reason we really cook? To achieve a comfort we imagine and hunger for, to recreate a moment that sustained us when we were in need. To soothe a growling stomach is obviously why we cook, but what we choose to cook, how we meet that hunger, if we look closely at that, we will discern a long, emotional path, a labyrinth of physical memories and hopes.

I ate Gabrielle's cooking once. The angels were smiling upon Craig and I and we got a free spot in an event at the Italian Wine Merchant's secret back kitchen where Gabrielle was cooking. I fell in love with her when she held up the raw heart of a young cow (yes that is a nice way of saying Veal) and told the story of her butcher, who she said had a crush on her and always saved her the best hearts. She told the whole story with the heart in her hand, gesturing with it while the fancy ladies and gentlemen in the room stared, slack jawed and wide eyed. I thought she looked like a rock star shredding at her guitar, standing there with her swagger, her knowledge and her comfort with this ingredient: a heart.

She holds hearts in her hands, and with her writing and her cooking, she'll have yours in her hands too.

One of the other things she made that day was a perfect, truly perfect!, omelette, over which she put finely chopped young spring onions, parsley, olive oil, salt and pepper. Every spring Craig and I make batches of this when the long young onions are in season and we put it on absolutely everything. Eggs, bread with good crust, steak, soft cheeses.

Kenny Shopsin and Happiness

July 5

Kenny Shopsin, the strange and brilliant chef, not known for his social graces, gave me one of the most helpful ideas for parenting. He said that to find work that has meaning for you is the best example you can set, and that the best thing you can do for your kids is be happy yourself.

I held Colby, then a tiny newborn, in my lap and listened as he expounded, sitting across the table from us, exhausted from a day of cooking and yelling at his four kids, all at the time working to some degree in the restaurant. When Kenny does anything but rant and curse, you listen. He has an exceedingly rough personae, but under that is a compassion and an intelligence far stronger than his roaring expletives.

Contemplating his words now, from way inside the path of parenting and family life, they look different than when I first heard them. When I first heard, "Be happy yourself," it sounded obvious and easy, as easy as happiness ever is. Now, there is a larger family, work, and the thousand tiny shirts and shorts and socks that need folding. How to find happiness and do good work when you feel life is pulling you in a thousand directions, all of them important?

By making choices, and, the ever famous key to marital bliss, compromise. Make the beds but let the floors go. Write for an hour in the morning and accept the longing for a day. Make a dinner reservation.

What Kenny did not say was how in family life the happiness of the couple, individually and together becomes so linked.

Children are an astonishing amount of work. Their demands are tireless, their needs absolute. Meanwhile the rest of life clamors for attention. And, then there is each other. For us, that is the easiest one to lose track of. We operate for long periods under the illusion that we, the couple, can wait. That we come after kids, dishes, tractors, work.

We must take care of ourselves and our love the way we care for all the other aspects of a full life. To not let the inertia of distance between us become a habit, we need a moment together, to just gaze, and be.

We made plans for dinner out together and as I got ready I thought about all the small fissures between us, major and minor emotional infractions, moments of bad communication. I felt how that was not what I wanted dinner to be about, I did not want to talk, work, process. I wanted to be together, in the moment.

At dinner we laughed, we talked with our neighboring table, we caught up on the funny moments, profound work conversations, all the persistent beauty that occurred in the week. We invested in our happiness, the cornerstone of a loving, functional life, together. Thanks Kenny.

More Kenny wisdom, culinary and philosophical, can be found in his excellent cook book, pictured here. The essay on eggs is a revelation.

Tenderness, Strawberries

June 12

At the sink with a colander full of fresh picked strawberries, my chest goes soft between my ribs: they are so beautiful. Craig got them from Buried Treasures Organic Farm at the market. They are our favorite because they are the small strawberries, bigger than the tiny, wild strawberries I hunted as a child in Big Sur, but far smaller than the usual grocery store strawberry. They are deep red all the way through, floral, and so sweet they make your whole body pause at the flavor.

Noticing the feeling in my chest, and feeling the small berries between my fingers as I trimmed the green crown of leaves from their base, I contemplated tenderness. It has been a week of a lot of seizures. Craig and I felt ourselves slowly erode in the stress and sleep deprivation. After the first few days of seizures we get into a kind of survival mode that leads to very abrupt conversation and frustration with each other over trivial things. Normally it drives me crazy the way he leaves his clothes draped over the furniture. In a time of higher stress, I react with internal storms of molten lava, I feel really, disproportionately angry. I lose touch with my tenderness.

While I was holding these precious strawberries, old friends were visiting. T. has a way of asking questions that inspires an authentic, present response. She is absolutely listening, she asks because she wants not just to know, but to understand. She asked about Colby's need for care for her whole life, and later at dinner, about her cognition level. To face not the questions but the answers to the questions was to speak words that are largely a silent understanding between Craig, myself and our community. To say, yes she will need care her whole life, to imagine creating safe environments for her once I can no longer fit her on my lap or catch her when she falls having a seizure, is to connect, for a moment, with some of my greatest fears.

To feel that fear, rather than shield against it with an automatic answer, is to connect again with tenderness. As T. and I spoke I felt the tremendous work of life, of being present and honest, of truly sharing your heart and experience, and I felt my love for Craig. As crazy as clothes on the furniture make me feel, I am so, so glad and grateful to be on the road together. As abrupt and bratty as we can get, we also shoulder a burden and find beauty along the way. In conversation with T. I went from feeling so tired and sad to feeling lucky and rich and surrounded by love.

Our anger is understandable: our child suffers, despite medication and radical surgical measures. The work before us is acceptance, and remembering that when we are angry, we are not really angry at each other.

While preparing dinner, I opened champagne. Craig and I looked at each other in the eyes for perhaps the first time all week and toasted everything we could think of, including "to us." We leaned into each other at the fridge door, rather than away. Kissing as we passed in the hallway, holding hands at dinner, saying thank you to each other. A brittle, exhausted day ended with serving strawberries and vanilla ice cream to a house full of friends and kids. Our lips were red, and our hearts, once again, soft.

Perfectly Simple Parfait
Cut strawberries into mixing bowl. Add one teaspoon of brown sugar per quart of strawberries. Toss and chill until ready to serve. To serve: in a small water glass, one layer of strawberries, one layer of vanilla ice cream, another layer of strawberries. Ladle a little of the syrup at bottom of bowl into each glass.

Hard Times and Peach Preserves

May 8

Life lately has been such a duality of gorgeous moments and then episodes of intense grief, loss and stress. Some of the things that have gone on: deaths of significant figures in our lives, a roofing job gone wrong, both cars in the shop, a job loss, and seizures. At some point in the string of events, Craig and I started talking about karma.

At first we talked along the vein of, "What must I have done in another life?" Which feels like such a tidy, simple way to try and make sense of what my friend so aptly called "a real shit storm." Our conversation ended with meditating again on this idea: karma is not what happens to you, but how you respond to what happens. What happens is just a moment, how you respond, that is your life.

It is a significant balm in a time of sadness or even real depression to consider that while the events of life may be beyond our control, we have such a deep and wide choice about how to relate to those events. To feel our tiny fulcrums of freedom while enveloped in stress can shift our heart to a calm, soft and resilient place. Nothing is more impossible than feeling truly, absolutely stuck and victim to events.

Craig and I have been giving each other a wide berth through this last spate of events. Being supportive and gentle, or at least not overly reactive. When I get remote in my anxiety, Craig gives me space and put lots of honey in my tea, as if to sweeten me from the inside out. And when he got angry and reactive, he went out to mow on the tractor and go at the invasive Buckthorn with the weed whacker. Eventually, we found our equilibrium again, and set out to work and deal with things one step at at time.

With each other, Craig and I are finding our way through joy and adversity. We help each other get the time we need to be creative, to mope, to be alone, to be together. Colby's seizures have taught us to cull the moments of joy to a depth that is new for us both. The mental habits of staying open even when things are really hard has proved powerful and helpful.

A few days later, the roof job was back on track, the funerals were set, one of the cars was back from the mechanic, and I was going through the fruit Flannery and I had canned last spring and summer. I found a last jar of peach and basil preserve, a recipe from Honey From A Weed: Fasting and Feasting in Tuscany, Catalonia, The Cyclades and Apulia, by Patience Gray. I thought again about habits and happiness. Good habits are habits that work for you, for your health, for your financial reality, for your deep sense of happiness and resilience.

Setting the last jar of peach and basil preserve on the kitchen table, the deep golden orange of sugar and sunny fruit, a strand of basil curled at the bottom of the jar, I felt a moment of love for this habit too, this long tradition of canning. A tradition to preserve harvest and survive the winter, it brings beauty and sweetness to the stark reality of a barren, winter landscape. Surviving hard times through preserving beauty.

Marmellata Di Pesche - Preserve of Ripe Peaches
from: Honey From A Weed: Fasting and Feasting in Tuscany, Catalonia, The Cyclades and Apulia, by Patience Gray
(This recipe is best in June or July, depending on your climate)
Pour boiling water over large, ripe, blushing peaches. This makes them easy to peel. Cut in large chunks. Use 1 1/2 lb sugar per 2 1/2 lb peaches. Squeeze 2 or 3 lemons over the sugar and peach slices in a pan and cook on low heat while stirring. The sugar quickly melts and raising the heat you go on stirring, marvelling at the changing colour of the fruit reminding one of Modigliani's paintings. In 10 minutes or so, the jam is an intense gold, the fruit transparent. Put two sprigs of basil. Make sure that the syrup really is at setting point or the marmellata will not keep.