Where I been

Two weeks ago, my husband announced "Honey, I pulled a cottage out of my ass!" After recoiling in horror that such a structure was to be found up his colon, I realized that he was telling me that we were going on a last-minute vacation.

I spent the last week at a cottage called Snug Haven up at Georgian Bay, just north of Parry Sound.

It was just gorgeous; see, here is my kid looking poetic instead of frenetic:
We canoed or kayaked almost every day:
The last time I was there was when my now-six-year-old son was one. Brian and I took him on his first canoe camping trip out to Franklin Island and we visited the place again, this time for a picnic and a little skinny dipping.
It is a most excellent thing to be the one with the camera when skinny dipping.

The landscape is so beautiful it is hard to take in--there is a lot of mica in the pinkish granite rocks and this means that everything sparkles. You stick your hand into the shallow water and stir up a little sand and it looks like someone just dumped in a container of glitter. And thanks to the glaciers, there are the coolest chains of islands to explore--I found this image on Flickr that gives you a sense of all the little bays and inlets there are to poke around in a canoe. And much of the area is Crown Land so you can pull your boat out of the water and explore the islands and let your kids run around like little mountain goats without fear of trespassing.

The cottage itself was pretty nice--incredibly clean and spacious enough for me to enjoy a week with husband, kids and my mother-in-law (yes, we brought Brian's ma with us and didn't abuse the built-in-babysitter feature too much). However--you knew there had to be a "however" in there somewhere, right?--the kitchen supplies were woefully inadequate. I adjusted to the electric stove quickly enough and it wasn't an evil one like our old "inferno". But I can't understand how anyone is expected to make a sandwich, much less a meal, with one crappy 3 inch serrated knife.

Note to self: things to bring to supplement otherwise-perfectly-satisfactory-rental-cottage:

• your own chef, paring and bread knife
• a decent sized cutting board
• your cast iron skillet
• a pot wide and deep enough to cook 5 ears of corn on the cob (for one meal I had three tiny pots of water boiling each of which fit 3 halves of a cob of corn)
  
• a salad spinner

I did remember to bring my little red Melita coffee cone and filters so I didn't have a replay of my disastrous encounter with an unknown coffee maker from last October.

So I spent last week cooking a lot of food on the grill (to get around the absence of reasonable sized pots), canoeing, kayaking, reading three terrific books--Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, Mary and O'Neil, and Small Island (reviews to come shortly)
and mostly managing to stop obsessing about the start of a new school year and whether Ian's new teacher will "get" him or not.

Room to think

Open the door (and please note the pretty glass door knob you are turning), come on in. Welcome to my thinking room.
Yes, folks, after 5 years of weekend projects my office is finally habitable! I no longer have to tap away at my keyboard in a dark unheated corner of the house (though the duct work isn't actually finished in this room either...sigh). Now I have this lovely airy space to call my own:
To the right of my desk is a whole wall of book shelves with the gems from my old collection now accessible and not packed away in my parents' basement, and with the rest (lots of good books, mind you, just ones I don't plan to read again or need to reference with urgency) donated to the Friends of the AADL bookshop.

Is it just a fluke that when unloading and sorting all the stored books I found three copies of Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own? Not at all. (Yes, two are now available for sale at the library!)

I was once castigated by one of my grad student officemates for liking such a white, bourgeois treatise, but guess what? I'm white and kinda bourgeois (with a little rebellious bent, I like to think). This officemate mocked Virginia for complaining about the difference between the meals that women at university were served compared to the relative splendor of the men's accommodations and, while I take her point that there are graver injustices in the world than bad food and drafty rooms, I think the essay makes its point and can be extended to people whose live in much more dire conditions. Later she lays it down: "Why did men drink wine and women water? Why was one sex so prosperous and the other so poor? What effect has poverty on fiction? What conditions are necessary for the creation of works of art?"

I'm not claiming that I'm going to create great works of art in this room, but I do have a new sense of mental freedom to now have a space of my own (and I have plenty of wine!) In a completely unintentional move, this room has also become the most feminine in the house--to start off with there is my pretty doorknob (which Brian picked out), and then there is this curvaceous light fixture on the ceiling:
You can't tell when it is off (or really see it in this picture), but the shades have a gentle pink color which I was surprised by when I first turned it on, but have grown to like.

And then there is the unintentional femininity of the curtains. I had a dickens of a time finding any sort of fabric that would look ok with the (I now realize slightly eccentric) blue paint I chose and serve as half curtains for my five (count em' 5!) windows that look out on the street. I think the blue is the color of the perfect summer sky, but clearly most textiles were not designed to coordinate with the summer sky...I tried hanging rice paper, I bought some raw silk that ended up looking like a Chanel summer suit draped over a curtain rod, and finally I found amidst the chaos of the Joann fabric sales shelf this grass green linen fabric, with what I thought was rather subtle embroidery on it:
Only when I got home and unfurled the stuff I found out that the whole time (including when they measured and cut the fabric for me) I had been looking at the wrong side. When flipped over, it turned out that the embroidery was done in silver and there were a whole lot of sequins too!
Surprise! A little more femininity than I had intended (Brian is not sold on it--though he admits it isn't his office--and complains that the place looks like a disco in the early morning when the sun coming in the East windows glances off all the sequins and makes the room all sparkly.) I would have been way too chicken intentionally to buy sequined fabric, but it is a happy mistake and gives the room a touch of whimsy and reminds me to lighten up and not take myself too seriously.

I have left-over fabric which, for a very brief moment, I thought about turning into a fairy dress for Fiona, but then it dawned on me that sewing the super basic straight seams for the curtains had pretty much maxed out my sewing skills. If anyone with more sewing skill than I have would like 1.5 yards of sparkly green linen, just let me know. Otherwise the cat will claim it as nap spot #58.

Old School

I have to thank Ami for recomending the Tobias Wolff novel Old School.

The book passes through so many moods. In the first chapters, the narrator lays out the atmosphere of his boarding school in the early 1960's and shows us how the boys with literary aspiration mimic their favorite writers. There is a fantastic conscious parody of Hemingway: "Today is the day of meatloaf. The meatloaf is swell. It is swell but when it is gone the not-having meatloaf will be tragic and the meatloaf man will not come anymore." It made me laugh so hard I risked inhaling my coffee.

Then the book shifts into a different section, much more about self-discovery than about the institution, and how a competition reveals what kind of men the boys will likely grow up to be. There is a culminating event (which I'm not going to give away) which in any other author's novel would be The Climax, the do-all and end-all, the tragic moment. But while writing clean, clear prose, Wolff inserts a much more complex view of the world and doesn't stop the story here. Bad stuff happens, characters make stupid decisions, but life doesn't stop there, nor is a life necessarily ruined by a major mistake.

The last section of the book is more reflective, the adult narrator contemplating the institution of the boarding school from afar, how he eventually became a writer, and what he learns about and from his old Masters. It would be very easy to lapse into sentimentality in this section but Wolff touches on innocence, self-awareness and memory so lightly that it never gets bogged down.

I'm trying to think of another writer who manages to convey the balance between masculine desire for power or dominance with the craving for tenderness. I'm not sure what it is about these passages that touches me so much, but the last line of the book (which doesn't give any of the plot away, if you are worried about spoilers) is an example that makes me all choked up when I read and re-read it:

"...he felt no more than a boy again--but a very well-versed boy who couldn't help thinking of the scene described by these old words, surely the most beautiful words ever written or said: His father, when he saw him coming, ran to meet him."

(Even such a heathen as I am, I managed to recognize the story of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11-32)--Thanks undergrad "Bible as Literature" class!)

Gluttony fest # 3000 or so....

Book group met on Tuesday evening and this time I remembered to wear shorts with a very loose waist band. An excellent piece of foresight since the evening quickly turned into our usual Gluttony Fest.

We read Louise Erdrich's The Antelope Wife which, I think we all agreed, was not one of her best; definitely not in the class of The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse. The story was very fragmented and while Erdrich often shows what tangled family lines are all about, this one felt both more tangled and less subtle than the others. I felt like I was being beaten over the head with family disfunction and intermarriage. It didn't help that I had a first edition copy which did not have a family tree included--clearly the editors received some feedback about this omission and its use-value for readers because the family tree appears in all the subsequent editions of the book.

But back to the food....

We were a bit loose with the food connections to the book with the great exception of Ami and Sarah's contribution (noted below).

I brought an aperitif and canapes consisting of Bellini's made with a puree of local red haven peaches and prosecco sparkling wine. The canapes were a terrific (and really easy) assemblage of baguette topped with smoked trout and then blopped with a sauce made of creme fraiche, mayo, lemon, chives and dill (recipe at the end of this post).
While sipping and nibbling, we watched Ami make frybread (which was mentioned numerous times in the book). Here you see Ami demonstrating the many uses of the spirit hole that is punched in the center of each piece of dough:
Some of the frybread (cooked in pure Lard! Yum!) were popped into a bag with cinnamon and sugar and shaken until coated. The others were sprinkled with salt. Both were damn good. In this photo you can see Halla's nicely manicured fingers making a grab for one.
For the main course, Marilyn shared the bounty of her glorious garden with us in a potato, corn, roasted chile chowder (gotta get that recipe). The corn was so sweet and still a little crisp and the chile gave it a nice kick.
And then there was the overladen plate to go with the chowder. From top and then proceeding clockwise around the plate you see: Halla's cheesy and meltingly tender summer squash dish, Meg's garlicy tequila shrimp, a varied summer fruit salad provided by Diane, some of Marilyn's roasted beets (if she didn't provide them, I probably would have snuck away from the table and been found in the garden eating them raw with dirt smears all over my face, so thanks Marilyn, for accomodating my beet fixation!), and a pasta salad she made with the beet greens, dried cherries and Parmesan, and a salad that Lea brought with toasted pine nuts and sliced pears. Whew!
It was incredibly tempting to go back and get seconds on some of these fantastic dishes, but already I was feeling rotund in the belly region and I knew we still had dessert to contend with, so I stayed put and had another glass of wine instead!

Sarah made a blitzkuchen--a cake which is prominent in the book--and I brought along a quart of raspberries that we picked at Makielski's the other day. Thankfully the cake wasn't over the top rich--Sarah's inspired addition of lemon zest brightened the cake and helped it to not sink beneath the medly of complex flavors that preceded it.
No, we didn't serve it with a candle on the plate; by desert time it was pretty dark and we were eating outside so votive lighting by Marilyn-the-pyromaniac was the way to go.

The next book around which the glutton-group will assemble is:
Alexandra Fuller's Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood

Smoked Trout Canapes with Lemon Chive Sauce
adapted from the NY Times dining section, August 9, 2006

2 medium smoked trout filets
1/4 C mayo
1/2 C creme fraiche (1/2 C heavy cream with 1/2 T buttermilk stirred in and allowed to sour overnight in a warmish place)
zest of two lemons
2 t lemon juice
1 T chopped chives, plus some extra for sprinkling over the top
2 T minced dill
1 baguette, sliced thin into rounds

• Peel skin off of trout and discard. Break up trout filets into pieces that will fit on top of the baguette slices.
• In a small bowl, combine mayo, creme fraiche, lemon zest, lemon juice, chives and dill. Mix well.
• Place a piece of trout on a slice of baguette and top with a blob of the sauce. Sprinkle with reserved chives.

Buckle for Breakfast

It is berry season in our area now with blueberries, blackberries and raspberries all available. Yesterday we went out to Makielski Berry Farm and picked two quarts of blackberries and two quarts of raspberries. The thorns on the blackberries were ferocious--my legs look like I've been playing with a whole litter of needle clawed kittens (the raspberries were much more kid-friendly picking). But I can handle a little pain for berries!

The whole time I was picking I kept chanting the rhymes from the picture book Jamberry which I have read to my kids so many times that I have it memorized. So my kids could keep track of where I was in the row by listening for "Clickberry clackberry pick me a blackberry; trainberry trackberry clickety clackberry..."

By the time we got home, I was a little tired and not quite up to dealing with the fragility of pie crust, so I turned to the recipe sheet that I picked up at the farm and settled upon Blackberry Buckle. The great thing about a Buckle is that it can pass as either dessert or as a fruit-loaded coffee cake the next morning! In the interest of testing both options, I consumed it both ways.

Buckle is fast to throw together--a basic cake batter, topped with berries (lots of berries),
then sprinkled with streusel and baked until it looks like this:

Mmmmm. Buckley goodness!

Blackberry Buckle
from Makielski Berry Farm

2.5 C fresh or frozen blackberries
1 C all purpose flour
1.5 t baking powder
1/4 t salt
1/2 C butter
1/2 C sugar
1 egg
1/3 C milk
1 t vanilla

topping:
1/4 C sugar
1/4 C flour
1/2 t cinnamon
2 T butter

• Preheat oven to 375.
• Stir together 1 C flour, baking powder and salt. Set aside.
• In a mixing bowl, beat together 1/2 C butter and 1/2 C sugar until fluffy. Add egg and beat until smooth.
• Combine milk and vanilla. Add dry ingredients and milk alternately to the beaten mixture, beating at low speed after each addition.
• Pour (or spread) batter into a greased 1 and 1/2 quart pan.
• Arrange berries evenly over the batter.
• Combine 1/4 C sugar, 1/4 C flour and cinnamon. Cut in 3 T butter until crumbly. Sprinkle over the berries.
• Bake for 35 minutes.

The 4th Gallon

Finally. It took screwing up three gallons worth of milk before I figured out how to make good fresh mozzarella. The first gallon's cheese, I stretched too little (bread dough texture). The second gallon's cheese I stretched too much (dry texture, like normal pizza mozzarella). The third gallon God only knows what I screwed up since it remained a curd puddle and I couldn't get it to form a ball at all. That batch was dumped into the trash.

But last night I finally shook off the cheese incompetence curse and made this:

Firm, but creamy.

And just in time too since my tomatoes and basil are all ready to be picked and turned into this little darling that we consumed at dinner last night:

Tomato mozzarella salad--dressed with a little good balsamic, olive oil, salt, pepper, chopped up basil and a few chopped chives.

I gotta say, the instructions in the mozzarella kit suck. I ended up taking what I had learned from the previous three gallons and finally getting it right. One thing I did was use the damn cheese cloth that came with the kit and that they never tell you to use. It made draining the curds from the whey so much faster--I was actually able to make the successful mozzarella in about 30 minutes. And I was very careful not to over stretch or under stretch the cheese--I ended up reheating it twice and stretching it just until it turned shiny and then I shaped it into balls and popped them in cool water.

By my count I have enough rennet left to make 36 more batches which should take me through tomato season nicely.

Why finish?

Because really, five works-in-progress really aren't enough, correct? Yeah, so instead of finishing one of them, I started a new sweater. This one does have a deadline, though, so I'll have to finish it by November-something-or-other when my kid's pre-school has their annual fundraising auction. It is a baby sweater and will have a coordinating hat--a hat that actually fits babies, rather than one of the many out there that look cute and then fall off. It isn't the most exciting pattern--pretty damn simple in fact--but it makes for much more relaxing knitting while reading or watching a video than the red cabled sweater. That one makes me pay a little too much attention to it to avoid making big mistakes.

The middle bit

I admit that when I started The Stolen Child by Keith Donohue, I didn't think I would finish it. At first it struck me as a bit twee and I felt as though it was talking down to me, as though I had only ever heard of fairies like Tinkerbell and needed to be informed of the much darker myths. What with the popularity of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell (which I quite enjoyed), I think much of his readership is prepared for faeries (spelling change intentional) who don't have wings and wands, but are grungy, fierce and wild. It always bugs me when a writer underestimates the intelligence of his readers.

But the story grew on me. The structure, alternating chapters between the stolen child who lives with a band of faerie children in the woods and the changeling who took his place and lives his life, was surprisingly effective. Often this kind of predictability starts to bug me or becomes tiresome, but this time the simplicity worked.

The middle section, in which both characters are trying to access their buried memories neither with terribly happy results, is the most compelling. I quite like the emphasis of the ending, about finding love where you are and not continually hankering after what isn't there, but I was turned off by the musical "apology" that the adult Henry Day writes to the faerie child Henry. I think I preferred the adult Henry as a character who was motivated and entranced by music (due to his pre-changeling time as a piano prodigy) but I didn't need this to culminate in a symphony, something more subtle would have been better for me--a tune that the faerie overheard from his studio window, perhaps, rather than the public adulation and performance. The symphony was just too bombastic. I think it is very difficult to write about other art forms in fiction--the most recent example that I found excruciating to read was the "artist"/wife character in The Time Traveller's Wife (which I and my book group intensely disliked for many other reasons too).

Can anyone think of a novel that writes about another art form effectively? Where it doesn't seem to be the author begging you to believe that the character in question is soooooo special because of this talent that they will describe to you ad nauseum? It seems like the worst case of the fiction rule that you should "show" not "tell".

I still don't think that the actual language of The Stolen Child is very good--the writing is serviceable and there is so much that could have been enhanced with this subject with prose that is a bit less safe. Also, there were a number of cultural slips that struck me as sloppy. For example, the story is set in some nameless east coast U.S. town and when the stolen child of the title decides to run away, he stuffs his pockets with biscuits, not cookies (and they weren't talking about the baking soda variety). There were a number of these little slips and it made me feel as though the author got a little carried away with the fact that the bulk of faerie stories come from Europe and so he inserted a few little Britishisms. The book won't be going on my recommended books list, but if you really have nothing to read, this one is worth looking at for the middle bit.

The book made me think of a play that I saw at the Royal National Theatre back in 1994, Caryl Churchill's The Skriker. In 64 pages, Churchill presents the nightmare of a shape shifting/changeling faerie that is so intense it permeates the viewer. I left this play unable to get the images and language out of my head, appropriately haunted by the performance I saw. Talk about a writer who doesn't underestimate the intelligence of her audience. So The Stolen Child leads me to recommend to readers who are attracted to the dark faerie tales this hallucinatory play.

Definitions

Fiona just defined the word "knuckles" for me. She said that baby pigs drink milk from their mommy's knuckles. This gets even better when you realize that one of her favorite songs of late has been the Jim Gill's song "Knuckles Knees" from the album Jim Gill Sings Do Re Mi on his Toe Leg Knee in which "knuckles" is pretty much every other word. I don't have the heart to correct her definition.

More than it might first appear

Good god I'm on a lucky reading stint! (Which isn't that big of a surprise considering the number of books I currently have checked out of the library....)

Black Swan Green by David Mitchell is my latest literary thrill. The book is composed of thirteen chapters which comprise thirteen stories about thirteen year-old Jason Taylor. There aren't obvious transitions between stories, but they are all clearly connected even when their tone varies widely from nearly gothic moments in "January Man" and European philosophy in "Solarium" to contemporary political repercussions of Thatcher and the Falklands war in "Stones" and the liberated ecstasy of a boy in nature in "The Bridle Path". There is a load of complexity lying beneath the simple surface plot of a year in a 13-year old boy's life.

What ties all the disparate parts together is the main character who allows us to understand both the cruelty and the beauty of a 13 year old boy. Jason's awareness of social castes and rites does nothing to help him get through life any easier than anyone else. Instead he shows us all the stumbles and excruciating moments as he navigates a year while writing poetry under a pseudonym, trying to avoid the local bullies and confronting daily wrestling matches with "Hangman," which is what he names his stammer. There are moments of longing and joy and excitement as you watch Jason's maturation over the course of the book. I may have related to Jason even more closely when I realized that I was the same age as the main character in the year that the book is set, 1982.

The writing is beautiful and Jason's internal observations (things he'd never dare say aloud) can give you shivers, like this line, "Listening to houses breathe makes you weightless". To go from shimmery prose like this to the condensed slang of adolescent boys (everything is "epic", that is, until that word is no longer hip) gave me an appreciation of the variety of prose in which Mitchell is proficient. There is so much British slang used in the book that it serves as a warning to any American writer who thinks they might be able to reproduce such dialogue--they would invariably get it wrong.

And on that subject, I have just two teeny weeny uninvited editorial comments: one, the only American who appears in the book (and then only very briefly) uses the word "polystyrene" for "styrofoam" and "stone" for the "pit" of a cherry. Why didn't the editor catch that? (Though I realize this is a small blip compared to all the errors in American speech that Deb at Blue Pencil found in Joanna Trollope's novel Girl from the South.) And there was one faulty food reference that I detected: after the main character's mother has gone back to work, he comes home to find "the pressure cooker sat on the stove, leaking stewing steak fumes. (Mum starts them off in the morning so they cook all day.)" That wouldn't be a pressure cooker she's using if it cooks all day--that would be a crock pot, slow cooker or whatever they call such a contraption in England. A pressure cooker is used to cook things faster than normal, the kind of pot you might use when you come home from work and are trying to get dinner on the table (the lid is sealed to the pot so when the liquid inside boils, it is trapped inside the pot. Having nowhere else to go, steam builds up pressure. This results in shorter cooking times.)

But these really are small complaints when compared to the wonderful story that takes you so many unexpected places.