Roast Chicken, and a Bouquet to Baste

Roast chicken is my comfort food, more precisely, a home filled with the smell of roasting chicken is my comfort. Like a fire in the fireplace or a thick wool blanket on a cold night, roast chicken is deeply reassuring. When the girls and I all fell sick, the thought of finally being better, being hungry and roasting a chicken sustained me through the aches and pains of a dual bout of Strep throat and the flu.

We ate a lot of chicken in our house growing up. Chicken, pan roasted vegetables, salad and thick cut Sourdough bread was a weekly, or twice weekly meal. My parents were very popular with our friends for many reasons, among them, they let us eat our chicken with our fingers. To this day I rarely order chicken in a restaurant because I want to pick up the drumstick and eat it like a happy little savage.

In the world of farmers markets, there is a resurgence of very fine, well raised chickens of interesting breeds. Here in Ithaca, one of our favorites is the Poulet Rouge, raised by Kingbird Farm. As a parent I am glad to be able to feed the girls the crunchy, fatty skin of the bird and know that it is full of good fat from the bird's foraging based diet.

Roasting a chicken is barely a recipe, but there are two great ideas that Craig uses: one is trussing and the other is a Bouquet Garnis baster. Trussing sounds more fancy and complicated than it is. There are a lot of Youtube videos and long instructions, but I find if you cut yourself a long piece of kitchen string and just think about tucking the bird's legs up into a tight somersault, you can intuit your way. Trussing evens out the timing of your bird cooking, so the legs and larger breast all cook more evenly, resulting in moist meat throughout. No more dry legs and perfectly done breast!

The homemade Bouquet Garnis baster is so beautiful! Even after such frequent use, every time I use one I find them breathtakingly pretty. No more suction basters and their odd plastic-y smell. No more trying to pick off the tiny fibers from the paint brush style basters that always shed. The herbs soften in the heat of the pan juices as you baste and release a steady, delicate aroma.

Whether recovering from massive illness, or just need of a cozy, sustaining meal, find yourself a great chicken and give thanks for its diligent, foraging life. Golden fat and nourishing meat on another cold winter night.

Roast Chicken:

Pre-heat oven to 425.
Wash and pat bird dry. Rub with olive oil. Rub outside with salt and pepper. Inside cavity put a few smashed garlic cloves, a bay leaf, herbs, if you wish, and 1/2-1 onion (quartered). truss the legs (or not)and put in a roasting pan.
Sit the bird on a few strips of bacon.
Put in oven for about 15 minutes, then turn heat down to 350. A 5lb bird should be about an hour to an hour and a half. Juices will run clear and the skin will be brown.
Put any vegetables (carrots, potatoes, onions, brussel sprouts, celery, leeks, parsnips, rutabaga) in about 1/2-3/4 of an hour into the process. Or, you can slightly pre-cook them and throw in the pan near the end. Rub butter into the skin as it starts to brown and the baste the bird in pan juices every 15 minutes or so near the end.

Bouquet Garnis Baster:

In the spring and summer, use any and all fresh herbs: sage, rosemary, thyme, oregano, parsley. This time of year, we buy fresh parsley and wrap that around dried oregano, thyme, and rosemary.
For the stick, get a set of the very large chopsticks that are a basic Asian cooking utensil.
Tie your herbs securely at their base to the stick with kitchen string.

And for extra decadence, Pan Fried Bread:

Cut French or Sourdough bread in thick slices. Dredge through the pan juices. Fry in hot cast iron skillet. Serve immediately.

To Love

The tiredness that overtakes us continues to surprise us, we comment on it every time. Every time she has a phase like the one right now. My shoulders go into spasm, a deep pain with sharp edges. I can feel now the map of stress, our small, familial post traumatic stress disorder.

We, Craig and I, have this war, these maps, these fears, together. A tiny war for two. The words we use to describe the battle of Colby and her brain: beat up, battered, destroyed, wasted, worn out, zoned, gone. This is our little girl. The list of words, looking at them, not just saying them, our sadness and tiredness makes sense. We use the words in an attempt to acknowledge the severity, not to define her but to define the events, the repercussions: her state, not her being.

I start with a general sadness, quickly riffling through the day’s plans to see what will need changing, modifying. Then, without fail, I turn to smiling, happiness, positive meditations and visualizations. I feel like it might help her, to see the radiant love that I feel for her when she comes through the seizure. Then if they continue, as they have lately, I feel a greater sadness, it arrives slowly. The sadness is like watching a set of headlights appear over the horizon on a straight, flat desert road. They are tiny at first, but they steadily approach, and then suddenly they are upon you, blinding you, filling your vision completely. That is how the sadness is. And it might swerve off and disappear as quickly as it arrived. But while it is here, it is all I can see.

I think because Colby becomes so very remote - we wonder aloud: where does she go? - I let myself also go down, descend or ascend into emotions, reactions, far beyond the initial reaction of expressing and giving love. I don’t think the love goes anywhere, but I do not demand of myself that I stay in the calm, smiling phase. I let the rockier thoughts have a voice.

Today I held her in the bath and I wondered who else in her life might hold her on a day like today. Having a child who will always be defenseless is to always have a child. We will never put her through college and say we did the best we could. She, her body, her seizures, her precious life, will always be our responsibility. I do not try and conceive of a literal plan, in the bath, her passed out against me, long hair curling in the water like a mermaid.

I try and conceive of an emotional path. I send out prayers, urgent notes, tied to arrows that I shoot from my heart and into the heavens, “Let the love of our hearts find a community of care that will always surround and protect Colby Rose.” As I lay there breathing, I shoot these arrows, over and over, enough for every star in the sky. Urgent, vigilant, magical thinking. For our girl is a mystery, so I reason and I hope that there must be magic to help us find our way. Help us find our way from the deep wells of worry, from the evil things people do. Let her life be safety and joy, let it be what every child deserves, forever.

Citrus Salad Sun

Easing into the snowy, slushy parking lot at Wegmans, the temperature at mid day is 10 degrees. The kids in the their snow suits squeeze into a double wide grocery cart. The store doors slide open at our approach. A blast of forced air hits our cold, pink noses. Rounding the corner, as I take off my gloves and hat, I gasp and involuntarily smile: before me, crate upon crate of every imaginable citrus gleaming, spilling, tumbling, beckoning.

"Orneeeees!" Coral announces. I have yet to correct her pronunciation on that, I love the way she says, or sings, "Oranges!"

In an instant I have a full sensory memory of a salad I had this time last year at Fanny's in Brooklyn, a citrus salad. I had ordered it twice and taken a picture, memorizing it with the goal of recreating it this year, and every year after. In that goal was a hope, hidden in the folds, that we would be home this year, cooking for ourselves. Last year we were eating out almost every night in Brooklyn or Manhattan as we navigated Colby's brain surgery.

From the savored memory of the Fanny's salad I chose two kinds of grapefruit, honey tangerines, mandarins and blood oranges. Also, parsley, red onions, green and black olives, and capers.

I knew from the Fanny's salad that it would be a lot of work removing all the skins and pith from each and every section while keeping the sections somewhat intact. The glorious pile of fruit towered in a bowl on the dining room table for two days while I mentally practiced how I would make and compose the salad. The scent of their skins perfumed the air and elicited fantasies of warmer climates.

I made a small version of the salad to test the recipe. The explosion of water, sugar and the brightness of the colors was a pleasant shock to my senses. Nothing growing here now has that concentration of sun. As I ate, I decided who I would invite to lunch and adjusted the dressing.

One of the fun things about salad is that you can tell almost everything about the balance of flavor and texture by looking at it. It is a visually satisfying way to cook, or compose. On the table, this salad inspires in me, in this climate in January, an absolute sense that Spring is rounding the corner. The earth is warming, from the inside first, slowly reaching the surface as meanwhile the angle of the sun lengthens. But before the golden light of spring fully returns, you can bring it inside your home with a platter of late winter citrus.

Citrus Salad
Ingredients:
Grapefruit, honey tangerines, mandarins and blood oranges. Variety is key, you want a range of color, sweetness and acidity.
Parsley, red onions, green and black olives (I used Cerignola because I like their meaty texture, nice against the citrus,) and salt packed capers.
For dressing:
Red wine vinegar, olive oil, salt and pepper

Chop red onion and cover with red wine vinegar to soften.
Rinse salt packed capers and let stand in cold water for a few minutes.
Peel and section citrus.
Pit and cut olives into chunks.
Pinch of parsley leaves, cut only a little, the leaves look pretty on this salad.
And compose!
Dress this salad lightly, and add salt to taste, the capers and olives add most of the salty taste you need. Pepper at last minute so you can really smell the pepper with the citrus.

Winter Farmers Market

Winter Market: red cabbage, watermelon radish, celeriac, carrots, cold storage pears, honey.

The Ithaca Farmers Market is a dedicated structure on the shore of Cayuga Lake. The last day of market is in December. It is so cold that the meat sits out on the counter and the vegetables are in coolers to keep them from freezing. After the holidays, in the first week of January, the indoor winter market starts up.

It is a small, dedicated group of farmers who do the winter market. They continue to harvest and drive in the icy dark to market in the deep cold. Arriving to market the tales are shared of frozen batteries, impassable driveways and still everyone has arrived.

Eating my dinner, I notice that the red cabbage is significantly sweeter than even the one bought from the same farm in November and December. This plant has been through a lot even in that short time. I think that sensory knowledge of place is central to my gratitude for our farmers.

Even though I live in the country now and walk on the actual dirt every day, I still have a deep and wide gap in my understanding of what it takes to get my food on the table. For me, the food chain begins at the market. I know more now than I did in the city. There too I shook the working hands of the farmers who grew the food I ate. Here I know the farms and I know the people a little more. I might even know the breed of hen whose eggs I scramble up in the morning.

But I have never known this arc of taste of region and climate, the arc of texture and sweetness of a cabbage from fall to deep winter. This knowledge, while a personal epiphany and great pleasure, also feels old, and normal. Normal knowledge of place, and the food that sustains us.

Thank you farmers.

The Fight and The Table

We had not had our fight for quite a long time. And it arrived suddenly, and completely. Dinner was on the table and despite Colby having had ten seizures, the mood was light as I set out the napkins. Then we heard Colby have another seizure: it was time for Diastat.

The manifestation of our fight is about Colby: when she seizes a lot, status epileptus, we try and take care of it at home rather than taking her to the hospital. Her emergency medications, Valium in two forms, are imperfect and hard to administer. There is a lot of gray area in figuring out how much she has gotten in her body, and how much she needs. And this is where the fight comes from.

We, husband and wife, do not agree on how aggressive to be with the drugs and getting her out of the seizure cluster. I am more panicked about the seizures and willing to take on the burden of the side effects of the drugs. In my heart I feel like getting the seizures to stop is the most pressing fact. And Craig is more able to ride the moment, able to wait and see what happens next, in a way, he is able to be more present and accepting of the seizures and what their affect is on Colby.

Feeling this fight return filled me with adrenaline and fear. It had been so long, I felt like we had come so far in our ability to talk things through and eventually, however eventually, find our way, together. As soon as I felt how right I felt and how wrong I thought he was, I was plunged back through an icy cistern of difficult memories. The early days with Colby when we were going through these seizure clusters together for the first time. They were nearly constant back then, five years ago. The days and weeks and months of seizures and hospital stays bled together. And we fought. Not agreeing about how to care for a child in a chronic medical condition, I saw no way through. I did not expect us to make it.

Five years later, on the bed with Colby, emergency Valium, Diastat, in hand, dinner waiting for us on the table, the fight heaves around us and I feel as sure as I was back then about one thing: this is impossible.

And it is impossible. So, then what? How can you accept that? Coral was quiet. She had never seen this fight before, our real fight. I stood in the hallway. My petulant side wanted to slam a door and sulk. But that is not a true choice here, I thought to myself. Craig is not wrong to think what he does, and it would be strangely childish for me to behave as if there were something to apologize about and act like I wanted to be coaxed out of the bedroom like a pouting teenager.

Dinner is on the table. As I stood there in the hallway, Craig storming, me sulking, I realized it had been a year since this essay series started. And this was it, the choice, again: do I show up at the table, find my kindness and gratitude, and face the person, the people, across the circle from me? Do I show up?

I took a deep breath and walked to the table.

You Can't Always Get What You Want Winter Salad

...But If You Try Sometime, You Just Might Find, You Get What You Need

The Rolling Stones have been in heavy rotation on the kitchen stereo. The girls absolutely love "Wild Horses," Coral requests it endlessly (literally) and Colby concurs with a beatific smile when it comes on. My favorite lately is "You Can't Always Get What You Want." I think it is a very Buddhist reminder of the way life goes. I was humming it to myself when Craig brought home a new stove.

Craig's dream stove, the one he visits at the local appliance store and rhapsodizes on all the things it would make possible in our modest kitchen, is a six burner, 36" gas cooktop, by Viking. That being far down on our list of priorities with things like insulation ahead of it, he focused on not what he wanted but what he needed. He scoured the resale spots and found a perfect little four burner gas stove, exactly like the standard issue in NYC apartments, to stand side by side with our 1970s electric stove. Eight burners! Gas and electric! Each stove was bought used, each for about $100.- dollars. He was in heaven. Thanksgiving for fifteen guests was what pushed him to action, and it has been a fun and helpful addition to our tiny kitchen-scape.

Every time I look at these modestly handsome siblings, side by side in the kitchen, I start to sing, "You can't always get what you want, but if you try sometime, you just might find, you get what you need." There are so many, many places in life this is true, this very moment in fact, trying to write with both girls hanging over me, demanding attention, is not the writing moment I would want, but I need the time, so this will do.`

Not quite having what you want, but what you need, happens all the time in cooking. We had friends over recently and Craig set out to make a celery root salad. Realizing mid way that he did not have enough celery root, he looked around the kitchen for what to add to extend the salad. He decided to try a couple of Gold Rush apples. The sweet, tart and slightly chalky apples were a pleasing counter balance to the earthy nuttiness of the celery root. We had what we needed, and it was great.

A Winter Salad

Celery root
Tart apples (such as Gold Rush) 
White (chardonnay or champagne) wine vinegar
Olive oil
Sea salt, powdered cumin & black pepper to taste

Wash and peel celery root and apples. Grate celery root and apples on the largest hole of a box grater. Amounts are about 2/3 celery root to 1/3 apples. Add salt, a small dash of cumin and pepper to taste.  Mix well with hands. Splash in a glug or two of vinegar and about the same of olive oil. Mix well. Let rest about half hour, the grated vegetable and fruit absorb the dressing nicely. And serve!

Season of "Yes"

Coral sat before her gingerbread house. The brown, hard cookies plain and ready. I watched as her chubby finger extended into the cup of frosting, past her knuckle and back out, and straight into her mouth. And so the sugar began. When we arrived I had physically tensed at the huge bowls of every kind of candy, spread like an industrial rainbow on the kitchen counter top. There was enough to recreate any scene from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. It was a child's dreamscape, so bright and colorful, shiny and promising. I, meanwhile, worried about teeth and sugar crashing, about the rest of the day, about Coral's sugar innocence.

Colby has no interest in candy, in anything sweet except yogurt, so this moment with Coral was my first in navigating the addictive, fascinating sugar relationship, parent and child. How much do I let her eat? What if the other mom, my smart, generous friend, and I are on different pages with the volume it is O.K. to eat? Mainly though, I realized, I was thinking of my own self preservation: I was tired, Craig had been gone for nearly two weeks, I knew my patience was already very thin and I worried about how I would deal with a kid bedraggled and bratty from sugar. On a good day Coral and Colby can drive me crazy, what would happen now, after this bonanza, this wild up, and wild down?

And then I looked. I looked at the kids, bewitched by this sumptuous, out of the ordinary spread. I looked around at this home, filled with holiday cheer, Amaryllis bulbs, pine garlands, bright Christmas tree sparkling in the corner, and I decided to just say, "Yes." I did not want to be the aggravated, uptight parent, always full of rules. This was a truly special moment, one that Coral at nearly three years old may very well remember. This was a time for general guidance, how to lay Necco wafers into the frosting to make shingles for instance, but daily rules could relax at the seams a bit.

And my friend and I were on the same page about volume, and both relaxed about it. It was fun for all of us to let go a little. For the kids to have these new tastes and textures: Twizzlers, marshmallows, non pariels, ribbon candy, gum drops. All by 11 a.m. We sat back and gave gentle reminders that the candy was meant to mostly decorate the gingerbread houses. We talked, just a little, about how some sugar is so good and so fun, but if you eat too much it can make you feel pretty yucky and not be fun at all anymore. It is that way with rules too, having rules is good, makes life feel like it makes some kind of sense, but too many can just make you feel, well, yucky, and make you miss out on all the fun of life.

Happy Holidays, may your season of "Yes" be merry and bright.