racoon ramble

Saturday already. Time's flying; nearly the solstice!

I'll try to do some catching up. Fun to get news from storm central last week. It's good that you got rain with minimal damage. As Mom's been saying in her blog, we are desperate for rain here. We've been teased over and over with clouds, warnings, wind, but still no rain. Yesterday we had a ten-minute cloudburst which did not even register on our rain gauge. More promises today, but now when (and if) it rains, it's sure to be violent. I just want a steady, wet inch or two. Anyway, we're spending a lot of time watering. Most of it is done with soaker hoses, a slow process, but very effective. We water some things (tomatoes, cabbages, beans, broccoli) by hand, because they are not in tidy rows.

(this will be kind of rambling, since I'm flashing back and forth between it and previous blogs)

Like you, Suzy, I cringe to read old letters. But it's good to have them down, painful as it is. And how lovely to have the first reference to Bill: "someone." I love it.

I did make the chicken/olive dish towards the end of the week. Used some huge dryish green ones I got at Kowalski's. Something exotic but not too heavily brined. It was really awfully good. Nice recipe. We finished up the relish (I made half) easily in the next couple of days. But then I've been "derouted," as they would say in French, by Molto Mario, our favorite chef. Our first MM cookbook. Charlie picked out a couple of recipes, which I made on Thursday: Mock Tripe (who would want such a thing?) and Neapolitan Crostini. The latter was thin omelets sliced into thin strips in a wonderful, simple tomato sauce. It was pretty good, not great (except for the sauce). I'll send along the tomato sauce recipe, if anyone wants it. The crostini were made with ricotta, a lot of black pepper, and anchovies. Quite good. We finished up the crostini yesterday and today for lunch, bathed in the tomato sauce. Last night we had steak, and out of Mario I made roasted potatoes with garlic cloves. He blanches one-inch chunks of potatoes (unpeeled red ones, in this case) for two minutes before roasting them for 30 minutes at 425 degrees with chopped rosemary, olive oil, and unpeeled garlic cloves. It was excellent, but next time I'll put the garlic in ten minutes into the roasting time; it got overcooked, which makes it kind of disappear. Anyway, it's fun to have such an interesting new cookbook. I finally remembered to buy (actually Mom spotted it at Kowalski's and reminded me to buy) FC #79 for Marty. It's really a wonderful issue.

I have disciplined myself to order Fun Home from the library. Our network has one copy, so I'm on a short waiting list for it. I had to do it, since I just bought a new book on the French Rev (I think I told you this) as well as the DVD of "The Passenger," one of the great movies of all time, and just now out on DVD. It's very wonderful, and Charlie and I both recommend it. Terrific commentary by Jack Nicholson.

I wish you a great week of proto-retirement, Suzy. It's nice that you have such a fun and interesting project, too. Yeah, it would be fantastic to get Chris Ware to the conference!! Let me know when he has a new book out. There are several projects hanging fire (Rusty Brown surely will be continued, and the building stuff from the New York Times Book Review will surely be published . . . ).

What makes Chris's GT's so special? Please let me know. We've been drinking them for the last few days, since David Olson (henceforth known as DO) is home and Charlie is working on his kitchen. At about quarter to five each day, I've gone over there and the two sweaty men and I, cool and fresh from the A/C at home, sit down for a couple of GTs. This means I miss my normal see-through (I just have one, since I have wine with dinner), though. Looking forward to it tonight, as it's not a work day. At least not there. We worked over at Florence's this afternoon, as she is sure to tell you, until she got so overheated I was afraid we'd killed her. Just doing little stuff, but she did a lot of running around in the heat. I was glad I noticed how red she'd gotten and made her sit down!

I have loved the Rancho stuff, too. Also about baby consumers; it's where we learned to shop. And of course when I began cooking, I'd do the weekly shopping at the market. Dad would be at work in the record store, and he'd give me a twenty-dollar bill. For this I shopped for five (well, four, really, since Mom didn't often eat with us) people for a week! And if I ran over, I faced the humiliation (in the market) and the opprobrium (from Dad) of running over to the record store for more money. I was very careful! And of course I remember the coffee shop (though had also forgotten the name), and the flavored cokes. We were playing at being teenagers, of course, though our ideas were formed by the soda shop/drug store of the forties, I believe. Sammy Kahn's was kind of a prototype of that, though unlike in the movies (and our fantasies) there was no juke box jitterbugging in either place.

Well, that's scattered and sketchy answers to recent blogging. Glad you're getting the Black Box back together. Glad we don't have such a thing; it'd be me struggling with it.

So today's garden news and photos! Last Wednesday, when Mom and I were shopping, Charlie and DO got busy: When I got home there were 48 bales of hay in a corner of the garden! DO has a barn at his place with tons of hay in it. It's ancient, and most of the bales are broken. Getting it out of there is a nightmare, so we always take the bare minimum, usually just enough to mulch the garlic for the winter. But they went in through a little side door and found the mother lode of unbroken bales; there's a little raccoon pee and shit on some of it, but I consider it beautiful.


Here is a photo this morning of the happy farmer! The red thing on the ground is my weeding mat. It's a poncho that says "Ozark Trail" on it, a souvenir of one of Mom & Dad's trips. I love it because I imagine him buying it so he can hike some, even though it's raining.

Things are growing nicely in this heat.


Here are our beanie babies, with peas to the left of them. Some of the peas will be ready by next weekend; that's early, since they normally start to bear on the fourth of July. To the left of the peas are the potatoes, and in the corner is Charlie, tilling. Some can be done with the riding tiller, but most of it involves wrestling the Troy-Bilt Horse around.

I weeded for two and a half hours this morning while Charlie tilled and distributed some of the hay here and there. By nine-thirty it was way too hot to do any more; seven is too late to start. Tomorrow I'm determined to be down there by six! Of course then we worked in the heat at Ma's, but that's somehow less grueling than to be toiling in one place under the hot sun.

Enough already!!