lemon-thyme potato salad

Many of Dora's little friends are turning two right now. We've been going to a lot of birthday parties lately, and I can't think of a better way to bid summer farewell than celebrating all of these fabulous two-year-olds that we're fortunate enough to know. Potluck birthday parties are great and a lot of the birthday parties we've attended recently have been potluck-style, Dora's included. I just don't have the time or energy to put together a meal for a huge group of people these days, and fortunately everyone seems to understand.


I love going to potlucks because I get to focus on one dish and make sure it's really delicious. We have an abundance of potatoes right now from our CSA, so for this weekend's birthday party I made a lemon-thyme potato salad. It was very easy and quick, and tasted like a grown up version of the picnic standby.


lemon-thyme potato salad

1 pound small new potatoes, scrubbed, rinsed, and halved lengthwise (quarter if large)
3 - 4 cloves garlic, minced
1/4 cup olive oil
1 - 2 Tbs fresh thyme leaves
1 Tbs fresh rosemary leaves
1 Tbs fresh basil leaves, thinly sliced
1 teaspoon lemon zest
Salt and freshly ground black pepper


Set the potatoes in a steamer basket over boiling water, cover, and steam for about 10 minutes, until the potatoes are just tender. While the potatoes cook, combine the garlic and olive oil in a large bowl. When the potatoes are tender. drain and immediately transfer to the bowl with the garlic and olive oil. Toss the hot potatoes gently with the garlic and olive oil until coated. Let stand about 5 - 10 minutes. Add the fresh herbs and lemon zest, season with salt and pepper, and stir again. Tastes great at room temperature or chilled.

this is a story about love

What is it about Garrison Keillor's voice that just makes me feel so nostalgic? Every time I hear Prairie Home Companion on the radio, a part of me wants to turn it off. It's almost too hard for me to listen to that show now - partly because his monologues are always tinged with sadness, making you laugh one minute and cry the next. But it's also because hearing his voice takes me right back to my childhood - to Saturday evenings in my parent's kitchen, crickets chirping outside the screen door, sitting around the table after dinner. Public radio was a huge part of my childhood, so certain things about it take me right back there - the theme song to All Things Considered, the voice of Noah Adams, the monologues of Garrison Keillor.

I have been thinking about my childhood a lot the past few days. I had occasion this week to visit two different bookstores - searching for the perfect gift for a friend. I was looking for a birthday present for my friend Kendra, hoping to find a nice book about crafts, creativity, making a business from your artistic hobby, or something along those lines. I had in mind what I wanted, but I looked and looked just to be sure I was picking out the right thing. I went to two bookstores, flipped through numerous different books, and ended up buying at the second bookstore the first book I had picked up at the first bookstore I visited. Perhaps there is a lesson I should be learning from that.

I was struck by the large number of really nice, hip, beautiful, interesting books about crafting. When I first got into knitting, I invested a good chunk of money in a small collection of knitting books, buying all of the exquisitely beautiful books I could find that had fun or beautiful (or both) patterns in them. That was several years ago, and it seems like the number of books of that nature has increased exponentially during that time. There were books on sewing, knitting, crafting recycled materials, creative family projects, "green" sewing, knitting for babies, knitting for pets, sock creatures - and on, and on, and on. As I flipped through the books, many of them written by thirty-something women, I felt at once energized and a little discouraged. How can there be a place for my creative voice in this sea of women who've said, "I'm sick of this job. I think I'll publish a book on how to knit baby hats" and gone on to be successful? Are there any original ideas any more? But, I also thought, "if she can do it, can't I do it, too?"

I ended up buying two books - one for myself and one for my friend. For my friend, I purchased The Handmade Home by Amanda Blake Soule. For myself, I purchased Weekend Sewing by Heather Ross, even though I know the projects are too advanced for me. I love the ideas and aesthetic in the book by Soule, and found myself visiting her blog with the same sort of cringing adoration I felt flipping through all of the beautiful craft books at Barnes and Noble. Her blog, her ideas, her photos - very beautiful. It made me feel like my little blog, read, as far as I know, only by my friends, is pretty small-time. I can't imagine how one gets the kind of following she has - nor can I imagine how one goes from writing a blog to publishing two very beautiful books, or how it is that she is able to have the lifestyle she has that allows her to pursue her every creative whim. It makes me just a wee bit jealous, honestly. In Weekend Sewing, Ross provides a little background information on herself - she grew up in Vermont, in a one room schoolhouse where she and her family spent their days all cozied up and creative. Ugh, I thought - if I ever did get to the point of writing a book, what kind of a quaint little bio could I have! One room schoolhouse, my foot! If I'd had that kind of upbringing, I'd be a successfully published author, too!

But then, I thought about it some more, and it dawned on me - I did have that kind of upbringing. I mean, it wasn't a one room schoolhouse, and we didn't have the kind of winter you get in Vermont, but I really had such a wonderful childhood, with a house full of books and music and art and creativity - it's no wonder all those crafty books pique my interest the way they do. It's no wonder Garrison Keillor makes me get weepy.

I grew up in rural Southeastern Ohio, on 20 acres of land in the foothills of the Appalachians. My parents were a 1980's version of "back-to-the-landers", a decade or two later than most and not completely off the grid. My parents were married in 1959, my brother was born 10 years later, and I 6 years after that - so they were able to have some adventures on their own before settling down with us. I have a lot of memories of being outdoors - playing with pets, "helping" my mom in the garden, exploring the woods. We grew a lot of our own vegetables, many flowers, fished in the pond out back, raised chickens, ducks, rabbits, and donkeys. We made dandelion jelly. My mother was an artist - woodcuts, paintings, stained glass, random-weave baskets made from honeysuckle and grape vines gathered on our property. My father still prints hand-set notecards and broadsides on antique letterpresses he inherited from his father. For years my parents gathered all of these products to sell in various ways - at the Farmer's Market (way before Local Food was a movement), on consignment in art shops and galleries, at art shows, and at an annual holiday art sale organized with other artist friends. My mother was a prolific letter-writer - I have vivid memories of her writing letters at our kitchen table after dinner, a cigarette, unfortunately, balanced in her left hand as she wrote. She always said she was really left-handed, having been forced to become right-handed in the days when left-handedness was discouraged. I like to think that Dora's leftyness comes from my mom.

If I could change one thing about my childhood, it would be that my mother not be a smoker, because if that were the case, she would still be here with me - to answer my questions, to help me believe in myself as an artist and mother, to see the amazing perfection that is my daughter. Other than that, I honestly wouldn't change one thing about the way I grew up. It was a wonderful experience - something I surely did not realize at the time and something that, even as an adult, I don't always appreciate as much as I should.

We moved to Asheville 8 months after my mom died. It was so hard to leave, and so hard to stay. Athens had become a place with so many memories and ghosts, I had to get away, at least for a while, to focus on my marriage and try something new, to see what was out there for us. I love that we live in Asheville - it's home to me now and the friends I've made here mean the world to me - but I miss Athens, too. I miss it and I want to go back, and then when I'm there it doesn't feel right, either. It's like the urge to change the station when I hear Garrison Keillor's voice - there is a part of me that doesn't want to go home and face what is no longer there. I spent 28 years getting used to seeing my mom in my childhood home, seeing her in the pews in the church I grew up and was married in, in the garden where I dug around in the dirt as a child, at the kitchen table writing letters after dinner, marking my height with a pencil on the wall in the kitchen. In the 8 months I lived in Athens following her death, and in the 4 years since we moved here, I have not gotten used to her not being in those places. It is going to take a lot more than 4 years and 8 months to get used to her not being there. In fact, I don't think I'll ever get used to it. I think I'm afraid that if I get used to her not being there, I might forget all those wonderful memories I have. It's like I have to keep those images alive in my mind to try to keep her close to me. It's easier to do from a distance - I can sort of pretend she's still there, sitting at the table after dinner listening to Garrison Keillor. But when I'm home, it's not so easy to keep the images vivid - the house is different, everything is different. And I know in my heart, even when I can picture her there, that she isn't sitting at the kitchen table listening to Prairie Home Companion any more - and she never will be again. That is why, really, that I want to change the station when I hear PHC come on - because I know there's one less devoted listener on the other end of the transmission.

I'm starting to learn that the process of writing is not something you can control. You can start out in one place, with the intention of saying one thing, but by the end of it you're somewhere entirely different. Sometimes the thread of what you've written is easy to pick out, and other times it's more difficult to find the line that connects the beginning to the end. I guess it's like life, in a way, where memory and reality get all tangled up, and we try to find the common thread that ties it all together. You end up somewhere you had no idea you were heading, and it's nowhere near as simple, beautiful, or crisply defined as it is in all the craft books at Barnes and Noble or Malaprops. What is the common thread? Is it art, music, beauty, nature, God? It is all those things, I guess, but most of all, it's love. It's imperfect, honest, doing-the-best-we-can love. It's loving our kids, our spouses, our parents, our families, our friends, our earth, our pets. It's loving ourselves. It's remembering that it's just as important to love the living as it is the dead, and that we don't need to apologize for any of that. It's loving our past and our present and our future, and remembering that all of those are just as beautiful as anyone else's experience, whether or not the book about my experience is on the shelf of a great bookstore or residing in my mind. It's remembering that my experience matters, whether I have 9 followers on my blog or 9,000, and that writing it down is half the battle no matter how many people read it.

So there, self-doubt. I love myself, so you can just stop what you're saying right now.

And mama, I love you, too, so so much, and I always, always will.

ratio

Without really planning to, I fell into this pattern of posting a recipe, then a narrative, then a recipe, and so forth. I had sort of a back-log of recipes to enter for a while, because I was shooting pictures of every meal I made for a while. In the past few weeks, though, I've been more rushed in the kitchen, or the recipes I've photographed have looked beautiful but not really tasted good enough to share.

First, I tried adapting a Martha Stewart Food cookie recipe, substituting shredded yellow squash for zucchini. They tasted ok - but not good enough to go around telling other people to make them.

Then, I purchased a book called Ratio by Michael Ruhlman. I am really excited about this cookbook. It is not really recipes, but ratios for all kinds of things - crepes, pancakes, muffins, cakes, cookies, breads. It gives the basic proportions, from which one can improvise in limitless ways. It's really pretty cool. I'm the most excited about improvising baked goods, because I love baking - more than cooking, really - and because usually even the tiniest variations in baked goods have a big impact, or don't work well, etc.


So, I tried making oatmeal raisin pecan cookies using the Ratio cookbook. They came out pretty good - but, again, not perfect enough to share with anyone. One great thing about them, though, is that I toasted the pecans before using them. That really makes ALL the difference!


I'm going to keep trying with these cookies - but tonight, I must be honest. I have no recipe to share with you - just photographs of my funny cookies. I promise to keep trying, and when I get something good enough to share - you will find it here.

happy accidents

I had to sign an incident report when I picked Dora up from school today. This sounds like a big deal, but it was just because Dora fell on the sidewalk at school, scraping up both of her knees enough that they were bleeding. Because they had to provide "medical" care to her, I had to sign a form acknowledging the incident. I'm sure it's stressful for the teachers to have to tell parents this kind of thing, but I just smiled - Dora had two band aids on her knees. I'm sure she was THRILLED about that, more than anything else. The teacher said she didn't even cry - just pouted, and was indeed very happy when she got her two band aids.


After we came home, we had dinner, walked the dogs, and waited for someone to come by our house to purchase Brian's old bike that I have advertised on Craig's List. Brian bought the bike not long after we met, when we wanted to start biking together. I don't remember doing much biking other than on vacation until we moved here. When we moved here, I didn't work for the first few days we lived here so that I would have some time to settle in. I can barely remember what things were like then - no baby, fewer pets. Brian didn't have a job yet - we were totally broke. We lived in a different house, drove different cars. We spent a lot of time wondering if we'd made a huge mistake. We asked our cable installer, a young, hippyish dude with lots of hair, where to try out mountain biking. He suggested we try Bent Creek - and our interest in mountain biking was born.

We are not gear-heads at all - just regular folks who like biking in the woods. We struggled through trails together, slowly advancing to harder and harder trails as we got more comfortable and confident. I was always a slow rider, but Brian was happy to wait for me. All summer long, we'd throw the bikes in the back of Brian's truck after work and on the weekends, drive out to Bent Creek, and blow off some steam. It was great - a beginning to our simple, relaxed Asheville life.

Brian eventually got a job - a couple of them, in fact, including one in which he met a young French woman named Aurélie, whose American husband was a singer in a band looking for a new keyboardist. Brian's steady gig - playing music with professionals and making real money, not a cut of the door - began thanks to Aurélie. Through the band we met other friends - some who became my closest friends in Asheville, a group of other moms with whom I spend a lot of time, and whose children are wonderful friends of Dora's now. It was a happy accident that they found each other working together, and I will always be thankful to Aurélie for helping us in that way.

GIven all that's happened since we moved here and started mountain biking - friendships made, houses purchased, new family members (both human and animal) - it's not surprising to me, at least, that Brian's old bike represented some significant memories for me. I suddenly felt a twinge of sadness tonight, waiting for some stranger to arrive and take the bike away. I felt some sadness, too, at the thought that I hadn't asked enough for the bike. I was amazed at how many people responded to my post - the bike is terribly damaged from a run-in with a parking garage roof - yet many, many people wanted to buy it.

I went with the first person who responded, out of fairness, although I started getting annoyed with him because he asked SO many questions about the bike. He arrived on time, walking up on the porch and introducing himself, revealing to me the French pronunciation of his name which I had read in his emails as the American name Oliver. I showed him the bike, he gave me the proper amount of cash, and we chatted briefly. I asked where he was from - France. I asked if he lived in Asheville, wanting to introduce he and Aurélie so they would both know another French person in Asheville. He and his wife live in Greenville, though - he had driven over an hour to buy the bike. I showed him a little tin of French cookies Aurélie had given me recently, we talked a bit about the area she is from.


Chatting with this stranger from a place I have never visited, who speaks a language I unfortunately do not understand, I found that my sadness about selling the bike had dissipated. Instead, I had found myself in a happy accident - selling the bike, probably for less than I should have - to someone who could really use it. He's making it into a bike for his little brother - so I guess the bike is going to France. How exciting for it! It just felt right - somehow paying forward the kindness my husband received from a stranger from a place we've never visited when we first came to Asheville.


One of the great things about being a parent is rediscovering the world with them, through their eyes. Being with Dora reminds me to notice the sky, the last day lily of the season, the kitty in the yard, the sunflowers down the street. Being her mom helps me remember to be on the lookout for these tiny moments of beauty. Being Dora's mom helps me remember to appreciate accidents that yield surprisingly happy results, that remind us of our connections, and how kindness can be returned not just in a direct reciprocation, but by passing it forward as well.

roasted chicken with carrots, onions, and thyme

This week's CSA box includes a beautiful bunch of carrots. I have always loved carrots (except when I was pregnant, when cooked carrots absolutely turned my stomach), but the carrots that come from our CSA are above and beyond the carrots you get at the grocery store. If you can grow carrots yourself or purchase them from a farmer's market, you really should, because the difference is amazing. I don't peel my carrots - just scrub them well under cold running water, leaving an earthy flavor and texture intact.


My friends know that I have been a vegetarian in the past but am currently eating some meat if I can find locally, humanely raised products (which is easy to do around here). I feel the need to preface any recipe including meat with that statement, because I still have a lot of internal conflict going on about eating meat. That being said, this recipe, adapted from a Martha Stewart Food recipe, is delicious. I purchased bone-in, skin-on split chicken breasts from Alison's Family Farms, and they are humanely raised in North Carolina and free of antibiotics and hormones.

This easy dish made leftovers for our small family - we had two meals out of it, plus I'll be making chicken salad and stock from the leftovers. Great for fall!

roasted chicken with carrots, onions, and thyme

two bone-in, skin-on chicken breast halves
5 or 6 fresh carrots, scrubbed, trimmed, and halved lengthwise (halve again if large)
1 medium red onion, peeled and cut into eighths
6 cloves garlic, peeled and halved if large
2 - 3 Tablespoons unsalted butter, softened
salt
pepper
several sprigs fresh thyme



Preheat oven to 450. Spread the onions, carrots, and garlic in the bottom of a glass baking dish. Place chicken breasts, skin side up, on top of vegetables. Rub skin with a tablespoon or two of butter. Season with salt and pepper and top with fresh thyme sprigs. Bake for about 40 - 50 minutes, until chicken is cooked through and instant-read thermometer measures 165.

mission: possible

I'm feeling a little on-edge tonight. I have been looking forward to this evening for a couple of days now - Brian is working, Dora went to bed early, and I can now focus on a couple of projects I've been wanting to get to all weekend. Writing, organizing a website-redesign project for a friend, making a gift for another friend's birthday. Perhaps its just that I have such high hopes for tonight, and so many objectives, that I know I can't do it all.

I don't want this blog to become another stressor for me. I don't think it is - yet. But it has been on my mind a lot in the past few days. My goal is to write every day. For one thing, I want to start "marketing" this blog in some way - even if it's just casting a wider net with my friends and family. I don't want to ask people to look at a post that's two weeks old. I'm also taking the advice of one of my favorite authors, Anne Lamott, who advises aspiring writers to write, and read, as much as possible. As a full-time working mother, wife, pet-owner, friend, etc., that can feel like a tall order indeed. But, to be honest, most days I feel like I have something I'd like to write here - even if it's just a short recipe or exclamation about my day with Dora - I just don't always have the time. I have all of these snippets of posts floating around in my head, waiting to be written. Jotting the ideas down sometimes works, but usually if I don't have the chance to write about the topic when the idea comes to me, it later feels a little bit untruthful, a little bit contrived.


I've been meaning to write for several days about something that happened on Thursday - a little incident, somewhat humorous, somewhat disturbing, that makes excellent fodder for a blog. I wanted to write about safety - the illusion of safety, the desire for us to keep ourselves and our families safe, and how this affects our behavior - and how sometimes, ironically, we can be confronted with feelings of danger even when we try to line everything up in our favor.

I couldn't get to it that night, though, but I tried to keep the idea alive in my mind - like fanning a tiny flame to try to get the fire started. The odd thing is that I ended up experiencing several other things over the weekend that could be used for the post about safety. It was almost as if my desire to keep the blog concept alive in my mind led me to these situations in which I experienced a feeling of insecurity, loss of safety, even danger. Perhaps I was just more aware - I don't know. Regardless, over the course of several days we encountered people acting strangely (not that unusual for Asheville actually), were nearly hit by a car while out walking, removed a giant splinter from Dora's hand, narrowly avoided Dora being severely bitten by a dog, and lost a large amount of blood. Okay - the last one is a bit of a stretch. I donated blood on Friday - an experience that can definitely be frightening, but was decidedly voluntary.

Still, all of this - even the voluntary blood donation - comes down to the constant struggle to be in control. I want to be in control of my time, in control of my environment enough to keep my child safe, in control of my home enough to keep my pets healthy, in control of my marriage enough to keep us happily in love. I haven't flown for years and I know exactly why. It's not the act of flying itself that scares me - in fact, I love it. It's fast, convenient, relatively inexpensive. It's the potential for a bad ending that keeps my tightly connected to the ground. It's the knowledge that, no matter what I do, once I set foot on a plane, it's out of my control.

I'm not sure why exactly this is such an issue for me, but I have a few ideas. My mother was really into worrying about things, and trying to control her environment. She was averse to many things - heights, small spaces, snakes, flying, doctors. In the end, her fear of doctors, and her addiction to tobacco, took her life. My mother was many things to me - my best friend, my guide, my champion, my book club president, my advisor, my mentor. She was also a great model for anxiety, and losing her only confirmed for me that terrible things do, in fact, happen.


I know this kind of fear, this intense desire to control, doesn't work. I've watched it not work and I know it's not keeping me any safer to stay on the ground. For example, I don't think a guy, in this age of intense security on airplanes, could have gotten away with flashing me his hot pink bra if we were on a flight together. But, this did happened to Dora and I a few nights ago in our safe, cozy, middle class neighborhood. I don't want my girl to grow up afraid of as many things as I am. If her behavior thus far is any indication, I think she's going to be fine. She seems to be kind of a daredevil.


But, even so, I've worked and worked, and continue to work, on my anxiety levels and the way I convey those fears to her. And I really, really want to go back to Europe, and being on a boat in the middle of the ocean for a week isn't my cup of tea either, so I've got to get back on the horse (or plane, as the case may be) - and I know that.

This is going to be one of those things that I struggle with for my entire life. I don't say that to be overly negative or to create some self-fulfilling prophesy. I say it because, although I don't know what I want to do with my life, and I don't know how to prioritize all of my tasks, and I don't know how to crochet, I do know that trying to be in control, trying to stay safe, is a part of who I am. It's as much a part of me as nearsightedness and long, skinny toes. If I were to remove this part of me completely, well, I might finally like rollercoasters, but I would lose some essence of myself, too.


The key, I guess, is to strike some balance between the two. I have to try to be the nervous flyer who prays, or drinks, or holds tightly to the seats, instead of the nervous flyer who just never buys a plane ticket again. I have to be the creative writer who takes notes, writes as frequently as possible, and gives myself a break when I miss it for a day or two. After all, I have a child to take care of, a husband to love, pets to snuggle, and a penchant for anxiety that I'll continue to respect and work through, no matter how impossible it sometimes feels or how long it takes. I'll aspire to be less paralyzed by my fears, and more like my dog - aware enough of her surroundings to sense an unfamiliar voice on the street or a storm cloud gathering on the horizon, but secure enough to sleep vulnerably in the sunshine.

egg special

When I was a kid, my mother would often make what she called "egg special" for dinner. Usually this was either scrambled or sunny-side-up eggs (my favorite) with thin, white squares of Pepperidge Farm bread, toasted and buttered. It seems like we had egg special at least once a week - at least enough that I remember it very well. I kind of thought "egg special" seemed like a big deal with a name like that, but now I know it was just a quick, easy, inexpensive dinner for which my mother always had ingredients on hand.

I've followed this approach myself, and I make egg special on a pretty regular basis now, too. Usually I make it on nights when Brian is working late, or if I'm not feeling that great. I guess because I grew up eating it, it's become comfort food for me. I try to dress up my version of egg special with good cheese, fresh herbs, cherry tomatoes, leftover chicken sausages, etc. Or, sometimes I just go for the old stand-by, sunny side up, with a piece of buttered toast or english muffin.

Recently I discovered a tasty and easy recipe for fingerling potatoes in Jack Bishop's "A Year in a Vegetarian Kitchen". He suggests a few variations, and I've tried the recipe twice now in two different ways and I LOVE it. It's one of the few potato recipes I can honestly say I really love. Because we now have many, many fingerling and other potatoes from our CSA, egg special with a variation on fingerling potatoes seems like a great easy meal.


egg special with thyme fingerling potatoes

a handful of fingerling potatoes per person
olive oil
one clove minced garlic per person
several bunches fresh thyme
salt
pepper
1 - 2 eggs per person

Scrub and rinse the fingerlings well. Slice in half lengthwise. Heat the olive oil in a skillet over medium until shimmering. Add the garlic and cook until fragrant, about 1 minute. Add the potatoes and stir to coat with oil and garlic. Season with salt and add enough water to cover the bottom of the pan by about a 1/2 inch, bring to a low boil, cover, and simmer until tender, about 15 - 20 minutes. When potatoes are tender, remove lid, raise heat to high, and cook the potatoes until all remaining liquid has evaporated and potatoes begin to brown. Stir in thyme leaves when liquid has evaporated.


Remove potatoes from pan and set aside. Return pan to medium heat and add another bit of oil. Add 1 - 2 eggs per person, season with salt and pepper, cover, and fry over medium until done to your liking. Serve eggs over potatoes, eat once a week, and watch that cholesterol!