Ten.Eight Hundred & Fifty-Five

1. The coolness of morning. I had forgotten how hard it is to get out of bed in winter.

2. I warm the leftover broccoli cheddar soup and am tempted to eat it for my breakfast.

3. Henry Lohmeyer’s course Wide Open.

4. Play.

5. Fog or smoke haze, I can’t tell but I like it just the same.

6. The way the light falls across the empty fields. The tractors making dust. The crow on the phone line.

7. Indispensable.

8. New things.

9. I wonder if any one other than me notices the diversity of the faces panning the screen and that the current administration is trying to eliminate these very faces. The irony.

10. Being tepid ruins everything.

Crust + Too Many Sorry's

The boy’s are in baseball camp this week and I’ve been preoccupied with other life things and so the poor middle child, my daughter, has been bored. Not really bored so much as left alone. So this morning, after smelling the bowl of plums, I decided we ought to bake something. Why, when the forecast projected a high of 94 degrees I’d think that turning on the ovens would be a good idea is besides me. I just knew that I needed to bake and she needed to bake because we both needed whatever kind of preoccupied calmness (medidtation?) it would offer.

I had her prepare all of the ingredients and set them out on the counter before we dove into making the crust for the galette. It’s a pretty simple recipe—flour, cold water, cold butter—mixed together by hand in a bowl. So we put in the flour. A little spilled onto the counter. “I’m sorry,” she said. Not a problem. “There’s no need to apologize.”

I asked her to retrieve the measuring cup she used for the water. “I’m sorry,” she said as she walked back to the kitchen sink. I say nothing in response.

I show her how to cut the cold butter into tiny squares and then hand her the second stick to do on her own. The knife slides through but at an angle, creating a sliver instead of a straight cut through. “I’m sorry.”

I put the knife down and looked at her. Told her that she hadn’t done anything wrong. That she shouldn’t feel the need to apologize for little things like this. This is not a big deal. This does not require an apology.

I jumped into memories, trying to see if I could hear myself uttering unnecessary apologies. How much of this is nature? Did she learn this from me? Absorb my perfectionism and people-pleasing through osmosis while in the womb? Because once she was born I set myself on a mission to unlearn this behavior knowing that I didn’t want to raise her to be a passive woman. I wanted her to be able to stand in her truth and in her voice, advocate for her own needs and desires with confidence and without fear.

The ability to recognize mistakes and then account for them through apology and changed behavior is a very real and necessary capability. But how do we learn (or unlearn) what constitutes the need for a genuine apology? How egregious does the error need to be? Are there different levels of apologies? Some sort of internal matrix we learn to use in order to gauge response? If so, how do we learn it? How do I teach her—and my sons—how to use this system for determining when an apology is necessary? Does it just come with age and wisdom?

I have no answers, only more questions. Maybe we’ll figure it out when we make the next crust.

---

 

Tart & Pie Dough

Recipe via The Art of Simple Food by Alice Waters

Ingredients

• 1/2 cup ice-cold water

• 2 cups all-purpose unbleached flour

• 1/2 tsp salt (omit if using salted butter)

• 12 tablespoons (1 1/2 sticks) cold butter, cut into small (1/4-inch) cube

To Make:

Cut or work the butter into the flour with a pastry blender or your fingertips, leaving some of the butter in fairly large, irregular pieces. This will take 1 or 2 minutes. Pour in three quarters of the water, stirring all the while with a fork until the dough begins to form clumps. Keep adding water if needed. Divide the dough in two, bring each part together into a ball, and wrap each ball in plastic. Compress each ball, and then flatten them into disks. Let rest, refrigerated for 1 hour or longer.

Chocolatey Chewy Granola Bites

It’s my own doing that the children prefer my homemade foodstuffs over the store-bought goods. I suppose I should be grateful but at times it can feel like a lot of pressure when you have three sets of hungry eyes looking at you and then those three mouths are asking you for a snack. But not just any snack. They want a snack that you’ve made yourself. I don’t know. I guess it’s true that food sometimes feels like love. So what is one to do but stick one’s head in the pantry and see what can be cobbled together? And there is a lot of cobbling these days because grocery shopping is my least favorite chore—I dislike it even more than laundry—and I’m trying to be more conscious of our food budget and food waste, thus the pantry and the fridge often look quite bare. Yet sometimes it’s the lack of resources that gives birth to creativity. But I digress.

In the pantry I found a bag of semi-sweet chocolate chips, a bag of old-fashioned rolled oats, some puffed millet, brown rice syrup, olive oil, and some salt. Ah. Right. All of these left over from an attempt at a recipe from Alana Chernila’s “Homemade Pantry” for something called “Car Snack 1 (The Cereal Bar).” They were a hit the first time so I decided to use the recipe as inspiration for these Chocolatey Chewy Granola Bites. Are you going to get chocolate all over your fingers? For sure. But these not-too-sweet chewy and crunchy bites are a healthy treat for kids (and for adults), require zero baking, and use only two dishes so it’s a win for me.

To make these gluten-free, just ensure that you’re using gluten-free oats. If you want them a touch sweeter, consider using milk chocolate chips. Add in nuts if you’d like. Oh! I imagine a combination of dried cherries and dark chocolate chips might also be amazing. The options are pretty much endless. And since it doesn’t require too much work, I’m sure we’ll be playing around with this recipe all summer.

Chocolatey Chewy Granola Bites

Ingredients

• 1/4 cup olive oil

• 1 1/2 cups old-fashioned rolled oats

• 1 1/2 cups puffed millet

• 1/2 tsp kosher salt

• 3/4 semisweet chocolate chips

• 1/2 cup brown rice syrup

• 1/4 cup brown sugar

• 1 tablespoon vanilla

Instructions

1. Lightly grease a 9 x 13-inch baking dish. In a medium mixing bowl, combine the oats, puffed millet, kosher salt, and semisweet chocolate chips. Stir to combine.

2. In a medium saucepan, combine the brown rice syrup, brown sugar, and vanilla. Stir to combine and then heat to a low boil. Let boil for 2 minutes.

3. Pour the syrup mixture over the oats, millet, and chocolate stips and stir until everything is coated evenly and most of the chocolate chips have melted.

4. Spread the mixture into the pan and then refrigerate for 1 hour. Cut into small squares when ready to serve.

Life + Bacon Jam

I feel as though I'm retracing lines in a book, over and over again, watching the pen marks deepen and widen. But this is life: some sort of motion that looks like a sine wave but feels more like a circle. Every transition—the wishing, the getting, the releasing—is different and yet the same. And yet, that doesn't make each one any less hard. So I'm here, still gripping on to the bits of myself that have stayed the same while staying open to what newness might develop. 

“A kind of light spread out from her. And everything changed color. And the world opened out. And a day was good to awaken to. And there were no limits to anything.”

— East of Eden

After a morning of antiquing, we stopped to have lunch at Preservation Bread and Wine in downtown Geneva. Why we had yet to dine there, I do not know. Small plates are our favorite way to eat and their charcuterie and cheese options are amazing. It's tucked into a narrow building with exposed brick and close tables, and filled with the smell of grilled dough.  The wine list is eclectic and fun with a good mix quality, affordable wines. But it was the slab of slate hosting large crostinis topped with a savory and sweet bacon jam, peppery arugula, and tangy blue cheese that gripped me.

The following morning I set out to find a recipe that I could replicate and share for an upcoming dinner party. Thankfully, my neighbor Katie shared her version with me. I made only a slight modification from her original: cooking the bacon first so that the onions can cook down and caramelize in the drippings, adding a little more depth and flavor. There are a handful of other recipes I'd still like to try, but this one is a simple one to begin with. 

BACON JAM CROSTINI

•  1/2 lb of thick cut hardwood smoked bacon cut into 1-inch pieces
• 1 red onion, thinly sliced
• 1 tsp of apple cider vinegar
• 1 cup dried pitted dates
• Black pepper to taste
• French baguette
• Butter
• Arugula, washed and dried
• A good blue cheese of your liking 

1. Using a cast iron skillet, cook bacon on medium-high heat until done but not crispy. Use a slotted spoon to remove the bacon from the pan. 
2. Toss in your onions. Stir constantly to keep your onions cooking, but not burning, until they turn deep in color.
3. Add your caramelized onions (plus any remaining drippings), bacon, dates, and pepper into a food processor and pulse until smooth. 
4. Slice your baguette into 1/2-slices, spread a thin layer of butter on both sides, then add to a heated pan. Toast both sides until golden brown.
5. Remove your grilled bread from the pan, top with the bacon jam, a layer of arugula, and a few sprinkles of blue cheese.

Life + Bacon Jam

I feel as though I'm retracing lines in a book, over and over again, watching the pen marks deepen and widen. But this is life: some sort of motion that looks like a sine wave but feels more like a circle. Every transition—the wishing, the getting, the releasing—is different and yet the same. And yet, that doesn't make each one any less hard. So I'm here, still gripping on to the bits of myself that have stayed the same while staying open to what newness might develop. 

“A kind of light spread out from her. And everything changed color. And the world opened out. And a day was good to awaken to. And there were no limits to anything.”

— East of Eden

After a morning of antiquing, we stopped to have lunch at Preservation Bread and Wine in downtown Geneva. Why we had yet to dine there, I do not know. Small plates are our favorite way to eat and their charcuterie and cheese options are amazing. It's tucked into a narrow building with exposed brick and close tables, and filled with the smell of grilled dough.  The wine list is eclectic and fun with a good mix quality, affordable wines. But it was the slab of slate hosting large crostinis topped with a savory and sweet bacon jam, peppery arugula, and tangy blue cheese that gripped me.

The following morning I set out to find a recipe that I could replicate and share for an upcoming dinner party. Thankfully, my neighbor Katie shared her version with me. I made only a slight modification from her original: cooking the bacon first so that the onions can cook down and caramelize in the drippings, adding a little more depth and flavor. There are a handful of other recipes I'd still like to try, but this one is a simple one to begin with. 

BACON JAM CROSTINI

•  1/2 lb of thick cut hardwood smoked bacon cut into 1-inch pieces
• 1 red onion, thinly sliced
• 1 tsp of apple cider vinegar
• 1 cup dried pitted dates
• Black pepper to taste
• French baguette
• Butter
• Arugula, washed and dried
• A good blue cheese of your liking 

1. Using a cast iron skillet, cook bacon on medium-high heat until done but not crispy. Use a slotted spoon to remove the bacon from the pan. 
2. Toss in your onions. Stir constantly to keep your onions cooking, but not burning, until they turn deep in color.
3. Add your caramelized onions (plus any remaining drippings), bacon, dates, and pepper into a food processor and pulse until smooth. 
4. Slice your baguette into 1/2-slices, spread a thin layer of butter on both sides, then add to a heated pan. Toast both sides until golden brown.
5. Remove your grilled bread from the pan, top with the bacon jam, a layer of arugula, and a few sprinkles of blue cheese.