To My Mom

 Dear Mom,


Happy Mother's Day!

I am very grateful to be your daughter for many reasons including inheriting your courageous spunk and musical aptitude. Thanks for feeding me encouragement, your sense of practicality and food.

The way I remember  growing up is by thinking of what we ate. 

I want tuna casserole and french bread pizza. I want nachos, but I want them specifically at 11 pm on Christmas Eve.

I want your spaghetti. That spaghetti tasted like the Pacific Northwest to me. That's why I moved there, because it's where you lived. I wanted to know how you became you.

I want spritz cookies. Sugar cookie dough stuffed in a tube and pressed down through different shapes onto the cookie sheet. You were so excited to find a cookie press! You made spritz cookies with your mom in Seattle, (right?) and we made them again when I am a teenager in Salt Lake City, Utah.

I want a mimosa, but only on Christmas morning and only with you, Dad and Chris at our dining room table, sitting on the chairs with the sweethearts carved into the backs.

I want milk toast. Is it just bread soaked in milk? I remember you bringing it to me when I was sick and me turning up my nose at it. I'm sorry. That was so sweet of you.

I want an egg fried by you. I've almost got the "Marilyn method" down: crack an egg in a skillet over medium heat, watch until it's almost done with just a bit of runny yolk left on top and then splash a little water on top of it. Just about a tablespoon. Then cover it and let it steam and sizzle for 30 seconds to 1 minute. In my grown-up life I love fried eggs on almost anything. In my growing up life, I don't think I ate many eggs at all.

I want salmon baked with lemon. I remember your dad, my Grandpa Al making this is Seattle, the moist, citrus-flavored fish pairing with the damp Pacific air and mysterious gray sky. I remember you and Dad making it on the barbeque on our redwood stained deck in our backyard. We ate in the cooled off evening air of the hot high-desert summer as we look up at the Wasatch mountains which rise a jagged 12,000 feet into the atmosphere. Those majesties look like a giant theatre backdrop. Almost flat from where I sat on our deck. I wanted to run my hand along the front of them, feeling all the crags and hollows between the peaks.

I want to make cookies and let them cool on paper bags cut open and laid out across the Formica countertop. Paper bags are fine cooling racks. In my adult life, a wire rack would be nice, but until it's a reality I have many brown paper bags waiting for their turn to be the cookie settee. I am so glad I learned this trick from you. You can drain bacon this way too.

Thinking of this repertoire makes me ache for a home. At least though when I make this food or cut open a paper bag for cookies, I make home wherever I am. Except that I will be missing you. But, then, you are present because you made it all first. It's because of you that I remember any of it at all.
Remembering what we ate helps me remember you.

Thank you for nourishing my brother and I as we grew in your belly and even after we became screaming children.

 Love,

Mindy

Pretty Magical

No recipe today, just a quick note to say:
Last weekend, Laura introduced me to canning. She arrived balancing her giant canner, ten pints of strawberries, and many tiers of shiny jamming jars in her arms. We got to work hulling berries and sterilizing jars in boiling water.

We made strawberry jam. I felt fierce. It's pretty darn magical to take some red berries and add sugar and heat and turn them into sweet ruby jam, with bits of whole fruit intact. Pretty magical and pretty delicious smoothed with butter on crusty rye bread. After I've made it again, I'll post the recipe here.

Magic is built into making jam, just like it's built into making bread, yogurt or sauerkraut. You take a raw material and teach it to sing a bright and sustained note. You take a raw material and make it easier to share and save. My remaining three jars of strawberry jam are good until next year. (Though we've already eaten up two of the five jars in my house, so I doubt they'll last that long. I'll make more soon.)

When Laura took the jars out of the canner, we hovered over them, chicken mamas watching for their chicks to pop out. We waited with anticipation. Then we heard the first suction pop!  That's the lid sealing to the top of the jar. We exchanged gleeful looks and mischievous nods with each small pop! that followed. "That was a good one" she said. It was so helpful to have an experienced canner guide me through the process. I am not daunted by this any longer. Thanks to Laura I know what a good pop and a weak pop sound like. My only other experience with canning was assisting my mom when I was around three years old. We canned apricots from the giant tree in our backyard in the Sugarhouse neighborhood of Salt Lake City, Utah. I stood on a stepladder so I could reach the counter. Now I can start canning all kinds of things myself, adding new chapters to the story. I'd like to make some apricot jam.
 
Maybe soon I'll try something like this. Grown-up jam. I also can't wait to try peppers, tomatoes and pickling!

Until then, there are still three more jars...

This Week in Forking

Some things have changed around here. Look at rule number 2. I have rewritten it.

This week I took great delight in slashing a large loaf of rising bread before it went in the oven. That loaf turned out wonderfully! We ate half of it before 9 am the next morning. I'll have to post that recipe later. We pulled it out of 450° oven right before we dashed across the quad to a prom dance in Eric's seminary's dining hall. True story. I wore a little black dress, Eric's fedora and black stockings with  seams up the back of the legs. I never would have worn anything like that at age seventeen.

Later on in the week I made cornbread out of the dregs of my dry goods supply. I did this to avoid working on writing songs or writing anything (like this blog). It was too salty, but no one would have known it unless I'd told them. Which I did. This week I was again frustrated as I usually ended up with some completed baking project at about 10:30 or 11 pm, which means bad light. If anyone has good tips for taking photos of food in low light, let me know.

Then at dinner here I thought about taking pictures of the food I eat with an inconspicuous fork in the picture for obvious reasons. I don't know if this is a practice I'll continue for obvious reasons. The sweet potato fries there are forking amazing.

This week I marveled in got annoyed at this phenomenon: It's great to have a friend in the kitchen, but it skews the process a bit. My partner and I have a dance, a routine that we could probably do sleepwalking as long as were alone. But add another body in the kitchen and suddenly the garlic is almost burning, the kale is too wet and there is like a whole bush of it there on the cutting board, and the eggs...well, I don't even want to talk about them. Bryna, it's not your fault! I loved having you over for dinner. Please come again, and we'll work on overcoming this phenomenon and making better eggs. Eggs can create tension and controversy. We should have just let everyone fry their own.

This week Eric and I hiked up and down the steps that are supposedly equivalent to climbing a 30-story building to the Pt. Reyes lighthouse on the Pacific ocean. The wind activated my cowlick ferociously. But it was warm in the sun and it feels good to hug in the wind. After that we drove through the rolling green-gold hills singing Kate Wolf's "Here in California" over and over working out a harmony part while we ate sunflower seeds and fig bars. We stopped in Pt. Reyes Station at the Cowgirl Creamery and tasted an aged gouda that was a lot like salted caramel. We enjoyed a sesame crusted levain from Brickmaiden Bakery very much as well. Eric kept handing me hunks of bread to gnaw as we drove back to Berkeley through the calming green canopy of Samuel P. Taylor state park.

Here in California
Fruit hangs heavy on the vine
And there's no gold, I thought I'd warn ya
And the hills turn brown in the summertime

This week I reflected on the kitchen as a place to challenge by deepest doubts, to overcome my fears and to process my emotions. Slashing bread is a safe way to demolish my insecurities symbolically.

The kitchen is a laboratory where I
can control my anxiety. In the end even if Bryna is over, they are just eggs. Next time they can be better. The kitchen makes me feel safe. It's an extension of my workspace and that's why my desk is within sight of it and why I place some of my most precious items on the ledge above the kitchen sink. I found that little tiger on the street in the Sellwood neighborhood in Portland.




This week I've felt like this tree I saw at the Pt. Reyes Seashore. Windblown and wild, but attached. I'm glad I'm still attached, I think.

I'