Why Did the Food Blogger Cross the Road?

To get to the donut peaches!

Last summer I was in Washington State, visiting my mother on Vashon Island. One day I drove from her house, on the southern bit of Vashon, to the ferry at the northernmost tip of the island, to catch the boat into Seattle. It's about a twenty-minute drive and I had left a bit later than was comfortable; I wasn’t sure I would make the ferry.

Suddenly, while driving through the small downtown area of Vashon (one intersection with a blinking light; nothing too urban here, and delightfully so), I saw a sign I couldn’t resist: Donut Peaches.

Ferry be dammed, I pulled over and ran across the street to the small and utterly sweet Vashon Farmers’ Market. I had to have donut peaches.

This story has a sad ending, for they had just sold out of the donut peaches. I didn’t get any peaches that day, but I did make the ferry. Between you and me I would have been happy to skip it for a bag of good donut peaches. This summer I have been making up for peaches lost, indulging in donuts as often as I can.



Donut peaches seemed to appear out of the ether six or seven years ago. I had never seen them before but there they were, in the produce section, looking like some strange flying saucer fruit. They are alternately called UFO Peaches, Saturn Peaches, Jupiter Peaches, Peento Peaches, Saucer Peaches, or Chinese Flat Peaches.

Donut peaches originated in China. These flat, white-flesh peaches were grown in the U.S. in the 1800s but eventually fell out of favor; Americans seemed to prefer yellow peaches. These days donut peaches are making a comeback, being grown commercially in Washington and California (see how clever I am in deciding where to live, I'll never be at loss for peaches). The UFO Peaches are an engineered variety, designed by the University of Florida who took an Australian Saucer Peach and inserted a gene that would give it the firmer flesh that is better for commercial shipping (the UF in UFO refers to “ultra firm”). UFO Peaches are grown mostly in central Florida.

Why should one care about donut peaches? Well, they are low acid which means they are deliciously sweet; their skin is quite thin and soft which means you don’t need bother with peeling them; and while it is true that eating a round peach with the sticky juices running down your face and arm and into the crook of your elbow is one of summer’s great delights, donut peaches provide their own pleasures. They are small enough and shaped in such a way that, when they are ripe, you can take one in your hands and easily break it in two pieces.



Not to mention, they have the smallest, cutest peach pit you've even seen, which pops out of the fruit easily. No muss, no fuss.



This may seem like no big stakes to you, but it makes them my favorite nibble when I am in the car driving home from the farmers’ market. It also makes them fantastic snacks for road trips (because a girl cannot live on onion rings alone).

Next time you see a funny, lumpy little donut peach, give it a try. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed. I never am, except when they've just sold out.

Local Fast Food?

I don't generally eat fast food.

I wasn't raised eating fast food, you see, so I am not of the habit. Then, there was that one time driving home from a backpacking trip and eating at McDonald's (the only place open that late at night) made me sick—and don't mean figuratively. These days the only time I have fast food is when my friend Violeta comes to visit from the East Coast, once a year or so, and talks me into going to In-N-Out Burger with her. She used to live in San Diego and misses In-N-Out.

I will say, however, that I like fries as much as the next salt addict; and a couple of times a year I do crave a burger; and road trips, which are not designed as a leisurely, get-to-know-a-town sort of experiences, seem tailor-made for fast food consumption. If I am going to eat fast food at all, it's probably going to be on a road trip.

But I wouldn’t be eating any fries on this trip—it’s the Eat Local Challenge month, you see. I can’t imagine anything more incompatible with eating local than a fast food chain.

But not in Oregon. In Oregon, they have Burgerville.

I first heard of Burgerville on the food board Chowhound, when I stumbled on a post asking for food recommendations for a trip up the California and Oregon coasts. Burgerville, they said, was fast food with a difference. They used local products and were—get this—concerned with sustainability (a fast food joint, really?). Not only that, they had a seasonal menu—blackberry shakes with real Oregon blackberries in the late summer and fall.

It was months ago that I read the post, but I knew I’d be driving south in the late summer or fall, and a blackberry shake sounded pretty good to me. Real blackberries, really?

Burgerville was founded in 1962 in Vancouver Washington by George Propstra. His father had immigrated from Holland and established a creamery in the early 1920s, and when George begin his business he made it a point to purchase his ingredients from local suppliers such as his father.

To this day, Burgerville sources their ingredients locally, believing that this contributes to a healthy local economy. They use Tillamook Cheese, Walla Walla Sweet Onions, Rogue Creamery Blue Cheese, and Oregon Country Beef (hormone and antibiotic free, raised on family farms, grass fed and grain finished). They purchase wind power to run their offices and restaurants, offer health care to their employees, and took the huckleberry shake off their menu when they feared they were overharvesting the berries. At Burgerville they convert their used fry oil into biodiesel and their kids meal gift-with-purchase is likely to be mini-gardening tools and seeds. This is a different sort of fast food.

Even though I don't usually eat fast food, I knew I was going to have to try it.

And that is how I found myself in the drive-through lane at Burgerville. I ordered a burger, a small serving of Walla Walla onion rings, and an Oregon blackberry shake. The menu was actually quite extensive, featuring two kinds of Gardenburgers and wild coho salmon salad with local hazelnuts.

The onion rings were good—and big!



Have you ever seen such a big piece of lettuce in a fast food burger?



And the milkshake? There were real blackberries in there all right, I tasted the seeds. If truth be told, it was a bit too sweet for me. Next time I’d opt for a blackberry smoothie instead, made with yogurt from a company in Portland.



And I think there might be a next time, even though I normally avoid fast food. I should be traveling through Oregon in November or so. The blackberry milkshake will be long gone by then—seasonal, you know—but I hear they have pumpkin shakes in the fall.

Fast food that is local and sustainable, who would have thunk it?



Apparently I am late to the Burgerville party, Gourmet magazine named them the "freshest fast food" in 2003. Jane and Michael Stern have sung their praises. They've been lauded in Treehugger, who points out that their decision to purchase wind power saved 17.4 million pounds of carbon dioxide from being released into the atmosphere. They've even won awards from Portland’s Office of Sustainable Development (how cool that a city has an office of sustainable development). But if you want a taste of this sort of ethical fast food, you'll have to come to the Pacific Northwest, all 39 Burgerville outlets are located in Oregon and southern Washington.

The Lure of the Backroads

After the emotion of departure, there is a road trip. That’s the best part.

I don’t know about you, but to me there is nothing so pleasant as turning onto a road you’ve never been on, a route picked off a map. The potential and possibility of what might lie around that unknown turn makes me bouncy with anticipation. The excitement of discovery is delicious

And if the road happens to be a backroad, a smaller country highway perhaps, then all the better.

My favorite backroad adventure took place one summer as I returned from a three-day backpacking trip with A. Our route back to the city was shut down due to a forest fire, we detoured far around the fire area, lost many hours doing so, and ended up in a highway motel when we were both too exhausted to continue driving. The next morning, after breakfast, we found that one of the tires on the car had been punctured and was now completely flat.

(I later discovered that my horoscope for the month warned that any travel would be plauged by delays and detours, which made me reconsider the wisdom of astrology and think that perhaps I should be reading my horoscope at the beginning of the month rather than the end).

Because the spare tire wouldn’t allow driving at the high speeds expected of the large highway we’d normally take back to San Francisco, we made one small but ultimately significant decision: rather than spending the day hunting down a new tire in an unfamiliar town, we decided to take the backroads all the way home.

That day took us down rural winding roads lined with walnut trees and past lakes that twinkled in the sunlight. There were leafy valleys and farms and rolling hillsides covered in grapevines. I had driven past these hills every summer since I was a teenager, on the big super-highway that leads north to the mountains, with little besides gas stations and roadside fast food joints to punctuate the journey. I had been missing out.

On the highway, the drive was something to get over with as fast as possible, a necessary inconvenience between departure and destination. But this long slow drive home was a different sort of trip. We threaded our way past green rivers, stopped to look at waterfalls, and arrived back a day late but filled with memories and joy that even now, years later, gleams in the palm of my hand. That detour became a journey all of its own, the drive home was every bit as exciting and adventurous as the vacation had been.

Ever since then, I take every opportunity to choose the road less traveled.

That is why I was so happy to turn off the behemoth of a highway and onto a smaller road, one the leads from Salem, Oregon westward to the coast. Though I have explored much of Oregon, I have never driven this particular road. It would all be new and surprising, and that sense of hope fluttered in a heart that was feeling weary and worn from too many questions, too many goodbyes. The day was warm and clear, with an unbelievably blue sky, and as soon as I made the turn I began to feel buoyant.

Not six miles later I pulled the car over for the first time. That’s the thing about the backroads, you can’t go very far without seeing something interesting that just calls at your to explore. In this case it was this sign:



And this lovely house.



The Brunk House was built in 1861 for Emily and Harrison Brunk, originally of Missouri. In 1849 they packed their possessions, freed their slaves, and spent the next seven months making the journey westward on the Oregon Trail. They were following Emily’s brother, who has established a church in the nearby town of Eola. Emily and Harrison hired a neighbor to build the house you see here, it cost them $844.

While the house and farm is open to the public, under the auspices of the Polk County Historical Society, it was closed while I was there. I couldn’t help peeking into the kitchen, and taking a few blurry photos through the window pane. How fascinating to think about life back then.



And to look at the actual implements they used in daily life. No packaged food here (no KitchenAids, food processors, or immersion blenders either). I bet this farm was a world unto itself—churning it’s own butter, raising animals for eggs and meat, growing fruits and vegetables in the garden. Grains and straw would have been harvested around this time of year, put up to sustain the family and the animals through the long winter ahead. I imagined bread backing, jam making, and drying herbs, fruits, nut, and beans—not to mention seeds from the garden. I wish I could learn from these farm matriarchs how to do all this.



The only thing I wouldn’t have been thrilled about: the outhouse in the garden.



Walking back to the car I passed an old apple tree and wondered if these were the original fruit trees, planted by the Brunks low these many years ago.



This part of the country is known for fruit trees, but these days a new sort of fruit is taking over. Just beyond the Brunk house stands a sign for three different wineries and I again pulled over. Though I didn’t have the time or interest in tasting, autumn is the best time to appreciate grape vines. The ones here were heavy with clusters, each one tight to the touch and warm from the sun (don’t worry, no Oregon wine was harmed in the taking of these photos). I thought of how the yield of these grapes will go to tank or barrel and then to bottle and then out into the world to be purchased, brought home, and savored.



And the road stretched away from me, with the apple trees of Oregon’s past on one side, and the wine grapes of Oregon’s future on the other.



There were fields of corn as well, a green blur with golden tassels out the car window.



And old barns, surrounded by leaves just beginning to turn. I love old barns.



And even older barns.



As the road climbed into to the hills there were forests, the trees Oregon is famous for.



This too is part of the story of Oregon. Forestry has for years been a crucial part of the economy.



As is this: a clear cut. It always takes my breath away and turns my stomach to see how an entire patch of forest can be eradicated, turned into a dead zone.



The road twisted and turned and each vista, each new discovery, buoyed me up, excited me, and calmed me all at the same time. I settled into the rhythm of the road, the smooth curves and the fresh wind in through the open window. Finally I reached the ocean and stared at its vast greatness, the one thing that never fails to make me feel small and my worries smaller still. I breathed deep and the cares of the past few months, the underlying questions that riddled me night and day (here or there, there or here?) fell away and I simply was. Happy.

If You Must Leave Seattle

If you must leave Seattle, do not do it on a day where the sun glints off the lakes and there are sailboats and kayaks out on the water. To leave on a day like that would be unbearable. If you do accidentally pick such a day, postpone departure. Push it back twenty-four hours, hoping for less perfect weather. To leave Seattle on a beautiful day would be too awful.



If you must leave Seattle, try to go early. Do not wait for the morning clouds to burn off; do not wait for Mt. Rainier to appear out of the mist to tower over the lake; do not wait for the dogs and the kayaks and all the things you like so much about this sweet little city. Do not let Seattle continue to charm you.



Especially do not think about your nieces. Do not think about the baby, just turned one and on the verge of walking. Do not think about how she will be a toddler the next time you see her, walking and likely running around. Do not think about how delicious her pudgy arms and legs are. Do not think about how she gets so excited when she sees you that she bounces up and down and flaps her hands like she might actually be able to fly.

Do not think how long it will be until you see her again.



Certainly don’t think about your oldest niece, the one who got so sad when she heard that you were leaving that you had to scoop her up in your arms and carry her into the living room for some private time together. Don’t think about how frail and fragile she felt curled up on your lap, like a wounded little bird, or how she wouldn't look you in the eye even though you promised to come back soon and call her in the meantime. Don’t think about how empty your Fridays are going to be without your weekly adventures together. Don’t think about the fact that she might forget you in the few months that you’ll be gone; or worse yet, she might ask for you, want to see you, and you won’t be there for her.

Don't think about any of that. If you did, you might not be able to bear it.



If you must leave Seattle, distract yourself. Decide to stop at your favorite café—the one by your house that you love so much that you seriously consider settling in the neighborhood permanently because then you’d always be within walking distance. It’s the café that makes your neighborhood feel like a community, makes it feel like home. You’re not quite a regular yet, but everyone is always kind and friendly and the food is good and the whole place makes you want to move in and never leave. If you could have thought up a perfect cafe—of the restaurant variety—this might be it. You don't need food right now, you're not even hungry, but the cafe feels comforting.



Don’t think about how your oldest niece calls it the sunflower café. How when you take her there she picks out one of the sugar cookies with pink sprinkles that are shaped like animals and always chooses the cow cookie over the pig.



Don’t think of any of these things.



Instead think of the open road before you, the guaranteed adventure along the way, and the fact that there is a city you love waiting at the end of this journey—filled with people you adore, foods that you have missed, a farmers’ market that is second to none, and a place you still call home. At least that is where you mail is still being sent.

Perhaps you need to leave Seattle, if only to discover how much you don’t want to.

Good-bye to the Garden

Nobody told me how very addictive gardening can be. Sure there were weeks I barely looked at my little garden, and a few times I was remiss in my watering duties (the occasional Seattle rainfall was much appreciated), but the garden was a significant part of my life this summer. I checked for the drooping mint plants that told me I was falling behind in my watering; I practically skipped outside to snip fresh herbs for cooking; and I took the failure of my beet seeds rather personally. I was surprised to discover that the garden owned me as much as I owned it.

It also owned my summer travel plans.

I had wanted to go to the island in Canada this summer, I had it all planned out. I’m living closer than I have in years—not since I was a baby and living on the island. I could leave this morning and, if I were lucky, be on the island for a late lunch (after a border crossing and three ferries, thank you very much). If I took a floatplane I could be there in a few hours. After years of living in California and having a two to three day journey between me and the island this is an amazing and exciting thing. If I reach out I can practically touch it.

But I didn’t go to the island this summer—not at all. You may not have noticed the loss, but let me tell you I did.

It’s not entirely the garden’s fault. There was work and the literary festival and things that required me to be within range of postal service and reliable DSL, but the garden was a part of my decision. If I went away the cilantro I had just planted might die—or worse yet, come up and go to seed before I returned. And who would watch over my radishes that seemed to be pushing themselves out of the ground before my very eyes? When I added up all the pros and cons to my decision, and threw in the garden as well, it just made more sense for me to stay in the city. And summer in Seattle felt almost vacation enough. I only left the city twice all summer long, I didn't need to.



But now it really is time to say goodbye—to the city and to the garden (and to my nieces, though I cannot quite think about that yet).

I found myself pottering around the garden a lot this week, fussing here and there, finally planting some things I’ve been meaning to get to for ages, tidying up. I am sure there are end of season things I should be doing for the soil and such, but the season hasn't quite ended. If I could stay another month I could really see things through. There are still green tomatoes on the vine, only one has turned red. I picked it, even though it is not fully soft, and I am going to take it with me. There are a few raspberries here and there, a lone blueberry or two, some radishes still in the ground; it’s sad to have to leave prematurely.

But mostly I’m pleased with what I have built, small and amateur though it may be. I don’t think of myself as a gardener yet, but there’s a tremendous sense of satisfaction at carving something out of brush and woodchips, of creating a little world that hadn’t been there before. So much of our work these days—or perhaps just my work—doesn't ever result in a tangible product. It's a great feeling to be able to point to something and say, I made that.

There's been forward progress where the raspberry patch is concerned.







I have a place for tomatoes and basil that's a far cry from the brush I found at the beginning of the summer.









And there's a bit of an herb garden as well. If I could have had a motto this summer it would have been: happiness is a garden of fresh herbs. I'm not nearly where I want to be with the herbs, but it's a start.







It might be easier to walk away from a garden at the end of the season, when things are really settling down for winter, but the garden seems to just keep going, still gathering momentum.

The zucchini vine keeps on churning out more blossoms and baby zucchini. In terms of reproduction, zucchini are the rabbits of the garden world. My gosh, guys, aren't you worn out already?



The tomatoes have gone a bit out of control the past few weeks. One of the plants has branched out with three renegade branches that all needed propping up.



On each of the branches there are blossoms for yet more tomatoes.



Silly plant, don’t you know the growing season is nearly over here? Where do you think you are—California?

No. But I will be, soon.

I’m sad to leave my garden behind. It’s serious stuff when they talk about “putting down roots.” I’m not looking forward to the transplant process.

I just hope what they say about it raining all the time in Seattle really is true...

Someone's got to water the garden while I'm gone.



Good-bye, little garden. I'm going to miss you.

For the full garden story:
Part I
Part II
Part III

Plums Aplenty: Plum Apple Chutney

Do you remember that Italian prune plum tree I noticed in my neighborhood earlier this summer, the one simply laden with (not yet ripe) fruit?

You encouraged me to introduce myself to the owners, to volunteer to help them with some of their outrageous plumy bounty, and I really did plan to do so—I swear I was going to, but the plums found me first.

You see, my dear friend Shauna has recently moved into a dreamy little house with a huge yard that includes a number of trees—apple, pear, hazelnut, Asian pear, and plum. Guess who was foisting apples and plums off on friends before she left for her honeymoon?

Her friends, of course, were only too happy to help. She had a party, we all went home with bags of fruit. It was beautiful.

And then my neighbor, she of the miraculous mojito deliveries, asked if I wanted any plums. She has a tree on the other side of her house that was laden, dripping with plums, and she is in the middle of getting ready to move (sniff, sniff, it’s true, and tragic, and I don't want to talk about it). Could I take some of the plums off her hands?

Without even trying, I have plenty of plums.



I must pause here to tell you about the smell, the deep, sweet, and musky scent that a bagful of ripe plums give off. That scent encapsulates the place we find ourselves—summer slipping into autumn. It is warm and sweet but rich and earthy all at the same time. It is the last note of summer, heralding the wealth of the harvest. To my mind, plums may be the coziest of fruit.

What to do with such bounty? And especially, what to do with such bounty when I have plans to leave soon? I am packing up the Treehouse, at least for a few months. My plans had been to return to San Francisco for good in the fall, but Seattle has a hold on me—something I did not expect. I need to be back in California, for a couple of months at least, so a departure is coming soon. I may return to the Treehouse later this year, but for now my path leads south.

But before I leave I’ve got two bags of plums to play with. And the funny thing, they are completely different fruit, depending on whose trees they came from. the small ones are soft and sweet; the larger ones are crisp and refreshing. I love them both.



I admit it’s a little odd to be embarking on canning projects when you have a house to pack up, but this is the nature of harvest time—the fruit and vegetables come ripe when they want to, not when is most convenient for me. Late summer-early autumn is a busy time. I remember my interview with Adam, one of the stewards at Linnea Farm. “It all happens in six weeks,” he said. “Everything is ripe and you’re harvesting as well as putting up food for winter...every day you put up a week’s worth of food.”

No wonder winter comes next, you’d need an excuse to sleep, to hibernate a little after all that work. But right now, it’s time to get busy. And if nature wasn’t telling me that already, there’s always the Eat Local Challenge this month. Time to preserve as much of the bounty of this season as possible.

I decided to try to make a plum chutney. For you see, I’ve fallen in love with chutney.

I realize this is an odd statement to make—I mean, who even eats chutney, and how does one eat it? Chutney seems like something people serve alongside roast meats, or with traditional Indian foods, but in my daily life I do neither of these things. This former vegetarian is not given to roasting large pieces of meat, and my neighborhood Indian restaurants don’t serve chutney. I don’t know too many others who eat chutney on a regular basis either ( few British friends, but that's it). Perhaps your experience is different, perhaps there are chutney fiends out there, but in my world, chutney gets rather short shrift.

Until last holiday season, when I made Molly’s cranberry chutney.

I made a very large batch, canned up jars of garnet-colored gorgeousness, and gave them away as presents. I used the chutney myself as well—putting small bowls of it out on platters with crackers and goat cheese for the holiday and birthday gatherings I hosted (yes, I am one of those poor souls with a holiday birthday, condolences are in order). Everyone loved the chutney, ate it right up. I loved it too—sweet and tart and slightly sour, with ginger and dried cherries and cranberries. I couldn’t get enough of it. More than once I found myself eating it out of the jar with a spoon.

As soon as the holidays were over I planned to make more, and that is where I ran into problems. You see, cranberries may be the last holdout of true seasonality. They begin appearing in stores in mid-November, just before American Thanksgiving (did you know Canadians have their own, in October?), and they disappear the week after Christmas. You can’t even order them online after the holidays (I tried). I was shut out of chutney goodness for a whole year. But make no mistake about it, I am going to make more this year (or just not give so much away). This chutney thing is good stuff.

For my own chutney I started with plums, lots of plums.



I added apple as well, big chunks of it.

And I wanted some spices—cinnamon, anise, cloves. I put them into these handy-dandy little spice pouches that I finally went out and bought this year (isn’t it a delight to have just the right tool or implement for the job?). Of course, in my recent reading about canning I came across a clever tip on Alanna’s site, A Veggie Venture, that points out you can use a coffee filter stapled together to accomplish the same thing.



I boiled and simmered and stirred, until I got the consistency I wanted. It turned into a lovely plummy pink color

(though what on earth happend to that poor spoon? I think the garbage disposal must have munched it; the lovely things you notice only after you've downloaded the photos).



At the last minute I tossed in a bowl of leftover chopped red onions. They had been chopped by my darling friend Melinda, when she was helping me with food prep for a little dinner party I had thrown earlier in the week, and I hadn’t known what to do with the leftovers. I initially feared putting onions in my pretty pink chutney, but then I remembered Brandon’s incredible rendition of Zuni’s pickled red onions—a sweet and aromatically spicy pink crunch that is just about the best thing ever (and Matt’s version, and Kevin’s). Emboldened, I throw in the onions, where they gave the chutney a much needed little crunch.

Tangy and sweet, with mellow late summer flavors of apple and plum spiced up with hints of the holidays in the cinnamon and anise, this is a chutney that makes me happy. Once the flavors started emerging I had a hard time not eating out of the pot with a spoon. The onion crunch was the perfect touch, small enough pieces so that it didn’t overwhelm the flavors but blended in, giving texture more than anything else. On a cracker, with a generous smear of goat cheese, it’s late summer-early autumn perfection.



That cranberry chutney is going to be given some competition this year in the favorite chutney category. No worries, there's plenty of room. I think my chutney phase is just beginning.

What do you think about chutney? Do you like it, do you eat it, what do you do with it?



PLUM APPLE CHUTNEY

6 cups coarsely chopped plums
3/4 cup vinegar (I used distilled white, but a commenter below suggests apple cider)
3/4 cup sugar
3 cup apples, peeled and cut into one inch cubes
4 oz crystallized ginger
Half a cup minced red onion

1 stick cinnamon
1 star anise
6 cloves

Put all but one cup of the plums into a large, heavy-bottomed pot and add the vinegar and sugar. Set heat to medium high and when the vinegar has begun to simmer, turn the heat down to medium low and cook for about 15 minutes. Add all but one cup of the apples and the crystallized ginger and cook another 15 minutes, stirring frequently.

When the fruit mixture has begun to break down and become softer and more sauce-like, add the spices, tied either in a small cloth bag, a piece of cheese cloth, or a coffee filter and stapled together. Make sure the spices get under the fruit mixture and the bag or cloth gets wet with the juices. Continue cooking, at medium heat, until the mixture begins to resemble a thick applesauce-like consistency (you might want to raise the heat a bit to move things along).

Take the remaining one cup each of apples and plums and chop them a bit. You’re looking for a rough, relish-like consistency here. Add this mixture, along with the minced red onion, to the chutney and cook for another 10 minutes, until the additional fruit has become warm and fully incorporated (for a smoother, more sauce-like mixture you can skip this step, adding all the fruit at the beginning and reserving only the onion, but I like a little consistency to my chutney).

Chutney can be preserved in sterilized canning jars, processed in a hot water bath, or kept in the fridge and eaten within a week or so.

White Peaches + Thai Basil = Bliss

I don’t know what made me do it the first time, but one day this summer I returned from the farmers’ market and was putting my produce away when I tore off a leaf of Thai basil and wrapped it around a piece of white peach that I had been eating and popped the whole thing in my mouth.

And then I swooned.

I’ve had peaches and basil before. Shauna, my dear Gluten-free Girl, made a dessert of yellow peaches broiled with butter and brown sugar and a chiffonade of basil the very first night I met her last year. We sat in her living room, talking a mile a minute as if we were old friends though we had only met in person a few hours before. But as soon as we took bites of this amazing dessert all talk stopped. You really owe it to yourself to try that recipe. As far as I'm concerned, peaches and basil are a swoon-worthy combination.

But white peaches and Thai basil? Double swoon.



I love white peaches, even more than their yellow brethren I think. It’s a more refined peach flavor, a higher and sometimes sweeter note. Perhaps it is because I am still stuck on the ecstasy of the Japanese white peach experience (second to none), but I am a slave to white peaches. I’d be willing to suffer a bit for white peaches, give up other pleasures, sacrifice for the extraordinary. I don’t have to, but I would. That’s how much I love my peaches.

Thai basil is a more recent love for me, but one that is growing daily. This bushy herb with it’s more angular, pointy leaves and purple red stems is similar to the common Genovese basil but with a stronger anise flavor, a bit more mystery, perhaps a touch of peppery sweetness to it. I’ve known of Thai basil for awhile, but this summer I really fell for it. Perhaps this is because it is easier to find in Seattle. You can find it in San Francisco, of course, but it requires a little bit of hunting. It took me visits to five different Asian markets before I chanced on one that carried the herb, while in Seattle it abounds. I've even found gorgeous bunches of it at the farmers' market.

My love of and need for regular bunches of Thai basil was helped along this summer by a delicious dish I ate when I had lunch at Jennifer Jeffrey’s house. She served warm fingerling potatoes tossed with a rough cut mixture of Thai basil and walnuts and drizzled with olive oil, perhaps there was even some cheese in there. She called it her non-traditional pesto; I called it addictive. That dish was reason enough—though there are plenty more—to keep a ready supply of Thai basil on hand all summer long. I highly recommend you try it.

And I’m about to give you another reason.

I was so enamored of my white peach Thai basil combination that I wanted to turn it into something more—at least something more lasting. It would, I decided, make a great ice cream.

And so I turned to David Lebovitz—or at least his ice cream book—as I have done all summer long. The great thing about this book is that it’s so thorough, such a good guide to principles and techniques, that soon you’ll have the confidence to try whipping up new ice cream recipes on your own. In my case, I took a quick survey of different fruit ice cream recipes and plunged into inventing something new.

I cut up a bunch of peaches and set them to simmer with some water and sugar. I didn’t peel the peaches, I wanted that lovely rosy color for the ice cream.



When I pureed the fruit, the color came through beautifully.



Then I infused the cream with Thai basil until it had taken on the fragrant green herby flavor with hints of licorice. I mixed the cream mixture with the fruit puree, which looked a little freaky and dramatic for a moment there.



The resulting ice cream was a lovely pale pink. It was creamy, slightly sweet, with the background notes of Thai basil.



It was good, but it wasn’t great. It wasn’t what I had been trying for.

This might be because I am coming to realize that I’m not really an ice cream kind of a girl. Don’t get me wrong—I love ice cream, I really do. But more and more I realize that what I really love is that intense fruit flavor you find in sorbet and gelato. I’ve made a few fruit ice creams this summer and none of them had the intensity of fruit I was looking for, that knock-you-over-the-head-because-it-tastes-like-the-essence-of-fruit. That’s what I was wanting.

So, what about White Peach and Thai Basil sorbet? Would that work?

Back to David’s book, a little bit more research, and I had an outline for what I thought might work. This time the basil leaves were infused into water, the peaches added to that, just a bit of sugar (depends on the sweetness of your fruit), and the whole thing was blended together. The result was so much more vivid than the ice cream.



It froze up quite hard, so it was best served up out of the ice cream maker or after it had been left out to soften a bit. But the peach flavor was a knockout, the green basil notes danced with the sweet fruit, fragrant and mysterious.



Sweet peachiness, it was good.



It didn’t stick around long, I can tell you that. When bliss is at your fingertips—at least a sweet, about-to-melt sort of bliss—don’t postpone.



And while we're at it can I just say that photographing ice cream is hard!
Eating it, however, not so hard.

WHITE PEACH & THAI BASIL SORBET
With help and guidance from David Lebovitz's, The Perfect Scoop

1 1/2 pound white peaches, pitted but not peeled, cut into 1-inch cubes.
3/4 cup water
1/2 to 3/4 cup sugar
4 Tbs fresh Thai basil leaves

Place 2 tbs of the basil leaves in a pot with the water and simmer for 10-15 minutes, until the basil flavor has infused the water. Remove the basil leaves and wring out all water before disposing.

Add the peaches to the water and simmer for another 10-15 mintues, until they are soft. Puree with a hand blender or by transferring to a blender or food processor until the mixture is smoth. Add 1 tbs of fresh basil leaves and puree briefly. Test the flavor. Add more basil as desired (I added the full remaining 2 tbs, but should probably have stopped at 1 1/2 tbs).

Return to pot and add sugar as desired (I started with 1/4 cup and added more slowly, allowing it to dissolve and testing the sweetness; I stopped at 1/2 cup). Depending on the sweetness of your peaches and personal preference, you could add as little as 1/4 cup or as much as 3/4 cup.

Remove from heat and allow to cool before placing in refrigerator and chilling. When fully chilled, put in ice cream maker and freeze according to directions. Eat, savor, swoon.

As for the peach and basil ice cream—don't bother, it really doesn't compare.

Plum-Peach Jam and a Goodbye

I got into the Eat Local Challenge action promptly on September 1st. I started pitting plums and canning.

I do my darnest to eat local all through the year—with some exceptions, certainly (you’ll have to wrench the Maldon salt from my cold and dying hands), My produce for the most part comes from the farmers’ market, I use local products and merchants unless I simply cannot find any other option, and this year I even tried growing some of my own food. Hard to get more local that just outside my front door.

But the Eat Local Challenge month is an opportunity to take a little closer look at where my food comes from, what shopping habits I have, and to see if there are places where I can make some changes. And this month the challenge is all about canning and preserving the harvest.

An excuse to can things? Sign me up!



I had a few brief encounters with canning when I was growing up. One year, when I was about ten, a babysitter of ours attempted to turn a mess of overly ripe plums from our yard into jam, which never properly jelled. Later, when I was in high school, I spent a holiday season under the sway of Martha Stewart and canned jelly and chutney, fudge sauce and cranberry cordial to give away as gifts. I remember liking how all the jars looked nestled in their baskets ready to be given away, but I never did any canning after that.

It was last year that really got me hooked on canning—and the kiss of a certain Meyer lemon vanilla bean marmalade sealed the deal. This ambrosia of Meyer lemon with their fragrant sweet tartness and mellow rich vanilla won me over, but the experience of producing a line of jars, all gleaming and filled with food to sustain you through the months to come was a revelation. That pride and pleasure is pretty incredible—and addictive. I went through a brief mad canning phase, having much fun with preserves: peach, blueberry, blackberry. I still look for any excuse to can, whenever I can.



So early this September I broke out the heavy pots and Mason jars. I had found a recipe for Plum Vanilla Jam and wanted to make some. I particularly wanted to can a batch of jam on that day, for soon I would be leaving Seattle. The literary festival I help produce is drawing me back to San Francisco, at least for a little while (I know I said that last year was going to be it for me, but some ties are hard to cut). This would likely be my last weekend at the market.

Because I would be leaving, I wouldn’t be around when many of the farmers pack up for the season and stop attending the market. By the time I return, in late November, most of them will be gone. I wanted to do some canning so I could give gifts to the farmers who had fed me so well throughout the summer. I realize this is a little dorky, a little bring-an-apple-to-the-teacher, but it’s my way of letting them know how much I appreciate their hard work.

I would make plum jam for Taki-San, the Japanese farmer behind Mair-Taki Farm who has kept me happily in organic apricots, peaches, and plums all summer long; who sells the freshest shiso leaves I have ever tasted; and who, early this season, told me how to make umeboshi pickled plums. I always look forward to seeing him, and the sweet young woman who helps him. Every week we chat and joke a bit, in Japanese or in English, although talking with them makes me realize how very rusty my Japanese has become after nine years of non-use. They also remind me of how much I love the Japanese sense of humor. One day Taki-San’s cell phone rang as we were chatting and, looking at the incoming number, he said, “It’s my boss.”
“Your boss?” the girl asked, confused. Taki-San owns the farm, he doesn’t report to a boss.
“Yes,” he said with a mischievous grin. “My boss: my wife!”



I would make beet-pickled radishes for Joane of Rent’s Due Ranch, from the beautiful beets and radishes she grows. Joane is a delight to talk to each week, so full of energy and humor I have a hard time believing she has been farming for thirty years and is a grandmother. This summer she introduced me to the beauty of Chuckanut Drive, a gorgeous scenic route near Bellingham, and told me funny stories about when her kids were young and they could never go camping in the summer because of the farm work being so intense that instead they traveled in the winter and told the kids they were “indoor camping,” staying in hotels and such.



I’d also make pickles for Steve of Tolt Gardens, who has kept me in lettuce all summer long. The lettuces that Steve and his wife grow are amazing—huge heads in gorgeous greens and deep purple (a variety called Merlot that is simply stunning). They started farming after Steve had retired from a job at the university and now sell lettuces so flavorful they remind me of the lettuce from my mother’s garden when I was little (have you noticed that most lettuce barely tastes of anything these days?). And you might not believe me when I tell you but these lettuces are so fresh they last for up to three weeks in the fridge, I discovered this when I forgot about a partial head that got shoved behind something. Three weeks later it was still fine. I realize this does not say good things about my housekeeping skills, but holy moly, that’s one fresh head of lettuce.

When it comes to canning, all I can say is what a difference a year and a half makes. About eighteen months after my first batch of marmalade, canning seems like a pretty easy thing to do—at least small batch canning. In fact, it seems so easy that I might just whip up a batch of jam and some pickles on a Saturday morning before I go to the farmers’ market. And in case you’re wondering, no, I don’t wake up too terribly early in the morning.

While this may sound like a recipe for a canning disaster, it wasn’t. I went a little off track with the jam, adding chopped up lemon peel at one point because I am one of those who believes there are few things in life that cannot be made better with lemon. Turns out that Plum Vanilla Jam is one of those few things. So I strained the lemon peel out. Then I decided to add chunks of white peach, to give it a rustic feel. I don’t put pectin in my jams these days, as I like the softer more natural consistency, less jellied. The thing I’ve discovered about jam is that, once you start to feel comfortable and get a feel for it, jams are a bit like soups: very forgiving.

The pickles are a snap, sliced radish, cubes of beets, slivered garlic, chopped celery hearts and leaves. Best of all, it looks really pretty.



And when you pour in the brine, made simply with water and vinegar and a pinch of salt, it turns a lovely hot pink color.



There are certainly things to be careful about when it comes to canning. I always sterilize my empty jars, and boil them once they are filled to make sure they seal properly. I know there are those who don’t, but I’m a nervous nelly when it comes to these sorts of things and would rather be safe than sorry. Of course, if you’re making small batches, you could easily just keep the results in the fridge when you’re done and skip the canning bit all together. No shame in making refrigerator jam or pickles.

But I have to tell you, there’s something so satisfying, so pleasurable about hearing the popping noise that a screw band lid makes when it seals shut and you know your food is safe and sound and will wait until whenever it is that you want to eat it (hopefully within the next year). I imagine it must be the same sense of satisfaction that a squirrel has when he sees the nuts piling up in the corner, or the farmer with bales of hay. Winter may come and the winds may howl, but I’m set, thank you very much, at least when it comes to jam.



So I made my jam and my pickles, and I wrote my little thank you notes, and then it was off to the market. I even got there before noon, morning canning session and all.

My last day at the market was the most beautiful day. We’re at the cusp between seasons, the peaches of summer still sticking around while the apples of autumn begin to shoulder their way in. There are tomatoes still, and melons to boot, but the berries are winding down and corn is on its last legs as well. Soon it will be squashes and potatoes, apples and persimmons.





I gave my little jars to my farmers and told them thank you. Joane gave me a big hug and laughed when I said she’d be gone when I return to Seattle in November. “Yep,” she said, “I’ll be sleeping.” Taki-San wanted to know why I wasn’t going to be coming to the market anymore and his assistant, again exhibiting great Japanese humor, piped up and said, “She doesn’t like you anymore!” and we all laughed. Steve seemed surprised and thanked me warmly.

I have to say, it seemed wrong to be saying goodbye to these people I look forward to seeing each Saturday. I am not used to a seasonal market and the idea that my favorite farmers are not going to be there each Saturday to say hi to as I pick up my produce for the week. The University District Farmers’ Market does run year round (as of this past winter), but the number of participating farmers drops significantly in the winter; Washington doesn’t have the same year round growing climate that California does.

But how excited I will be when they all begin turning up again next spring.

I stayed at the market until the end, until there were only a few market customers left and vendors begin taking down their stalls and it felt like the circus was leaving town and I was as sad as any little kid would be. I didn’t want to go, didn’t want to leave. In the same way that I felt heartbroken when I left the San Francisco Ferry Plaza Farmers’ Market to come up to Washington, now I feel heartbroken leaving my Washington Farmers’ Market to go back to California. This being in love with two cities thing is rough on the heart.



But I have a little reminder of my Seattle market and my favorite farmers to take with me. I’ll stash them away carefully and save it for a day when I am really missing them, when the winter feels too long and I sigh and wonder if spring will ever come. Then I will break the seal and taste the food I put up so many months ago, and I will remember the good people who work so hard to bring it to me.



For more information on the September Eat Local Challenge
Good links to information on canning

PLUM VANILLA JAM
Adapted from Martha Stewart, original recipe here. Makes 2 cups

This is a very plummy jam, please only make it with a variety of plum whose flavor you really enjoy. This is not suitable for Italian prune plums or other thick skin variety.

1 1/2 pounds red plums, halved, pitted, and coarsely chopped
1 cup sugar, more to taste, depending on the sweetness of your fruit
1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice
3 large white peaches, peeled and cubed (1 inch cubes)
Pinch of salt
1/2 vanilla bean

Bring the plums, sugar, salt, and lemon juice to a boil in a heavy pot (this is important, don’t try to make jam in a flimsy pot; Le Creuset or similar brand soup pot or cast iron is best). Split the half vanilla bean lengthwise and scrape out the inner seeds. Add bean and scrapings to the jam. Cook on a low boil until the plums have softened and melded together and the jam begins to resemble a thick syrup. This can take 10-20 minutes. Stir frequently.

At this point you can strain the jam, to get any remaining peels out, or leave them in for texture. Add the peaches and continue to cook until desired consistency is achieved. Skim off any foam that rises to the surface. To test consistency, spoon a bit of jam onto a saucer and wait until completely cool (you can stick it in the freezer for a minute or three to accelerate this process). When this cooled off sample has reached the thickness you desire, remove pot from heat.

To can, follow instructions for your particular jars and canning equipment, but I’d recommend boiling water processing for five minutes at a full boil, then turn off heat and let sit for a further five minutes.

And if you have any of that foam you skimmed off the top of the pot, stir it into yogurt. It's lovely.

Summer’s Over

I found nirvana this summer. It had been hiding in Seattle all along.

Nirvana—for me at least—is waking up early on a summer’s day and throwing on a pair of shorts and a t-shirt. Nirvana is hopping on my bike—in sandals no less—and pedaling off into the warm morning, the sun already up and cheery.



Nirvana is following a road though a green woods and down a hill.



This road leads to a street that runs down to a leafy little neighborhood along the shore of a large blue lake.



There’s a flower shop here with a red British phone booth, and a name that always makes me smile.



If you follow this road it ends up in the waters of Lake Washington.



But my destination is just to the right, a park along the lake, and a place to swim.



Nirvana is ditching those sandals and shorts and diving into water cool and refreshing, swimming back and forth with the sun beating down and the calm rhythm of a stroke, the water buoyant, the air warm.

Nirvana is looking up and seeing in the distance, illusive and astounding, the outline of Mt. Rainer, shimmering like a mirage.



Nirvana is, upon finishing the laps, stretching out on a towel in the grass, letting the sun dry my hair, looking out at this amazing new day.



Nirvana is also the cup of yogurt and fresh blackberries brought for breakfast, the blackberries picked just down the hill.



Nirvana is watching little kids play at the water’s edge.



A lifeguard rowing at his post.



And feeling that nothing can be bad on a day that begins like this.

All dumb jokes about nineties grunge bands aside—Seattle, in the summer, is nirvana.



This is all by preface for something I need to talk about, it’s a bit more on the life side of that food/life equation than I usually spend my time on. If you’re here for recipes, I’m afraid I don’t have any for you today. These days all I have is questions.

You see, the truth is, I didn’t really move to Seattle.

I know I said I did, but it wasn’t a real move. Not the sort of move where you give everyone your new mailing address, pack what you own into a big truck, and say goodbye to wherever you have been living. I didn’t do any of those things. I left most of what I own in San Francisco, in an apartment that is waiting for me to come back, along with a big pile of mail I didn’t have forwarded. Instead I escaped to Seattle, for the summer.

Some of you have sent me emails telling me that what I’ve done is brave and maybe even a little inspiring—this turning my life upside down—but I don’t think I can take credit for that. I’ve done something different—merely taken a step back from my life. I needed some space and time to think. I wanted to write, and to spend time with my nieces, and the stars aligned in a way that gave me the time and a place to spend it in and I am grateful for all of those things. But I fully expected to return to San Francisco at the end of the summer. As many of you know, I love San Francisco. To me, it’s home.



If I am completely honest I will admit that maybe in the back of my head I thought there might be something else going on. I remember talking to a friend of mine and saying what if I met someone in Seattle and fell in love—I think I am finally coming to a place where I am ready to not be on my own anymore. Meeting someone would be bad, I said, because it would mean that I couldn’t easily come back to San Francisco, back to my life.

But my friend is an optimist and suggested that perhaps I might meet someone in Seattle who is ready to leave the city and wouldn’t mind moving to California.

I had to laugh at that, the likelihood of all those variable lining up seemed beyond impossible. No, I said, falling in love with someone in Seattle would be bad.

I never expected that I might fall in love with Seattle itself.

It happened slowly. I remember sitting in a coffee shop the first week I arrived in Seattle last March. I watched people come in and out of the café (and believe me when I say that people in Seattle like their coffee, there was a lot of foot traffic). I began to notice that most of the women were dressed like me. In my jeans and fleece and down vest I fit in perfectly. And my car happens to be the most common car in Seattle, only my out-of-state license plates mark me as an outsider (and a dreaded Californian no less). Have I been a Seattleite all along and just not known it?

But it’s more than clothes and cars—those are silly and superficial things. It’s the parks everywhere, the trees, the dogs, and the bicycles. It’s the fact that people are friendly (I’ve never thought my hometown an unfriendly place, but Seattle puts us to shame). It’s the boats and the community gardens and the values that makes Seattle build a showcase of a library (Seattle residents check out more books per capita than any other US city). It’s the fact that when a big chunk of prime downtown waterfront property came up for sale recently it was turned into an outdoor sculpture park, open free to the public. In most cities that lot would have become luxury condos or the evil but now ubiquitous live-work lofts.



So yes, I have been falling in love with Seattle. In the beginning of the summer I told friends that I was cheating on my city—having a summer fling. And while I loved the fact that I could ride my bike to the farmers’ market, go the beach with my nieces, and bike for hours along Lake Washington, I fully expected to go home at the end of the summer. Seattle might be my summer fling, but I have loved San Francisco all my life. In my mind I was already married. I might be cheating on my city, but my heart would find its way home. It had to. I am a Northern Californian, fiercely so. This Seattle thing was just a phase.

Then I fell in love with my nieces.

I had always loved them, of course, but I fell in love with being in their lives on a regular basis. I fell in love with taking Alice to the farm, with feeding Cece berries and tickling her and reading her books. I fell in love with trips to the wading pool and the playground and making up silly songs to make Alice laugh. The first year of her life I saw Alice three times—I told myself that was okay, she wouldn’t remember seeing me anyway—but I don’t want to be an aunt only on the holidays, I want to be an active part of my nieces’ lives. The other day we were driving in the car and Alice said to me, “I love you all the time, Aunt Ti-ti” and it almost made me cry.

How can I walk away from that?



I’ve cried a lot this summer. Nearly every day I go back and forth, trying to find the answer, the way forward. Could I really leave San Francisco? My friends, my memories, my childhood all live there, my beloved Mt. Tam. Even though I have traveled and lived in other countries, the Bay Area has always been my home, the place I knew I would return to. If I leave I pull up roots so deep and strong I may not know who I am any longer. I can’t contemplate the idea without bursting into tears.

And yet, San Francisco may not be who I am any longer. I came to Seattle for a reason—and part of that was the need to get away from my life in California. My life there is busy, overbooked, often exhausting. The Bay Area is huge these days, I have friends who have moved to far-flung towns miles away, everyone is so spread out. I spend too much time in a car, too much time in traffic (and I don't even communte for work). More and more these days I want something simpler, easier. When I think about the kind of life I want to build for myself going forward, it seems easier to find in Seattle, more accessible.

That has been part of my process this summer, stepping back and looking forward. Taking myself out of my daily routines has been good, it helps me to see what it is that I am yearning for these days. What is it that I need and want? When I moved back to San Francisco from Asia, nine years ago, I knew what I wanted: a life in California. I wanted a home, a career, a community, and friends—none of which I had at the time. I’ve spent nine years building that life—but nearly a decade later I find it doesn’t fit as well as it once did. I no longer want to be rushing about, involved in this project and that, busy all the time. I have wonderful friends that I rarely get to see anymore, when we try to plan dinner together we are looking at our calendars months out. I don’t know if this is an early mid-life crisis or urban burnout but it’s something, let me tell you. It's something important.



More often these days I want something smaller, slower. I want a garden, and a big dining table where friends and family feel welcomed and comfortable. I want to walk amongst trees, to know my neighbors, to build a community. I want nature nearby and accessible. All this feels possible in Seattle, more so than San Francisco.

But oh, to leave the Bay Area—the very idea wrenches my heart. How can I give up the farmers’ market, the year round growing climate, and fresh and plentiful Meyers lemons? (I have paid staggering amounts of money for some of the saddest lemons I have ever seen in my life this summer). How much will I crave the Tea Leaf salad at Burma Superstar, the burritos from my neighborhood taqueria, the peaches from Woodleaf Farms, and Joe Shirmer’s dry farmed early girl tomatoes? How sad will I be not to be able to drive down the coast for a walk on the beach, a hike in the redwoods, and dinner of artichoke soup and olallieberry pie at Duarte’s Tavern in Pescadero? How wrong is it that I am contemplating moving to a region that is famous for fish? Fish!

I don't even like fish.

Have you ever fallen in love with someone you didn't expect to? I have, several times. I sit there and watch them—and already I can feel that I am falling—and I think: You? Really? You're the one I'm supposed to love? I thought you would be... taller... blonder... more intellectual... more adventureous... more...

In this case, I thought you'd be San Francisco.

My friends tell me that I’m lucky, I am choosing between two really great cities. That, however, is precisely the problem. And how does one choose between a city and region you have loved for years—that you have given your heart to and expected to live happily ever after together—and this upstart of a city that has captured your attention for the moment but who knows where it’s going? I feel like a woman thinking of leaving her marriage for the affair that seems great now, but who knows what the long term might be. It’s a lot to put on this fledgling romance I’m having with Seattle: will you be enough to make up for all that I will have to leave behind?

Because leaving San Francisco, if that is indeed what I end up doing, will be like leaving a part of my soul behind: my history, my heart, my friends, my life. How can I do that?

I don’t have any answers at this point, but sitting in the sun on the grass next to the water on a summer’s day makes me want to be here, in this smaller, slower city. Summer in Seattle is nirvana.

But summer’s over, and the rains are coming.



PS. Just to take this romance metaphor to even more ridiculous proportions (you didn't think it was possible, eh?). Some friends have suggested I try polyamory—split my time between the two cities and love them both. While this may sound like the best of all possible worlds, at the end of the day I'm not that kind of a girl. I really want to settle down with one city, I just have to figure out which one it is.

My Ironic Garden, Part III

For the full garden story, see Part I and Part II

As the summer went on, the garden I had planted began to grow. The tomato plants started to produce fruit. The cherry tomatoes were numerous. They went from green to yellow and I kept on waiting for the to turn red. Then one day I noticed that the fruit had began to split open (see lower left tomato) and I realized that I had bought yellow tomatoes and not red. Chalk one up for being a dopey first time gardener.



I quickly gathered the rest of the tomatoes and made a Caprese salad with basil I had also grown. To be able to sit down to a bowl filled (half filled, at least) with the product of your own hard labor was a revelation. I grew this stuff. It was pretty amazing.



The raspberry canes started taking off as well. I didn’t expect to get any berries this first year, but soon was seeing small pale fruit that turned a dark pinkish red.



I tasted a few and was blown away by their flavor. I had picked plenty of raspberries when I went to the U-pick earlier this summer. The berries had been huge, but their flavor was not great. I imagine the raspberries had been bred to be large and beautiful and able to withstand shipping. My berries were small and soft but they had a hit-you-over-the-head flavor, an old fashioned sweetness and intensity. I silently thanked Else van Baldrick for growing her Sebastopol raspberries all these years, and Flatland Flower Farm for continuing the tradition. Those heirloom flavors are so worth preserving.



I snagged a few berries here and there, but most of them I saved for my little niece. I wanted her to have the same experience I had when I was young, of plucking berries off a plant and popping them—fresh and sweet—into her mouth. One day, when the berries were ripe, she came over to play and I took her around to the side of the house where the berry bushes grow. She's showing them to you here—but don't for an instant think she's giving them to you. The girls in my family take their berries very seriously. They are sweet and loving otherwise, but don't get between them and their berries.



All berries were gobbled up quickly.



Then she said she wanted more, and I had to explain how fruit gets ripe and that we have to wait for it. She seemed okay with that.

The blueberries surprised me as well, producing a number of berries. I tasted a few—sweet and tart—but the rest I saved for my niece's next visit. There was a good handful or so for her to pick, and I was looking forward to that Friday when we have our playdate.

Imagine my surprise when I went outside on Wednesday to discover all the ripe berries gone—gone! I couldn’t figure out who had done it. Was it my neighbors? (impossible); the neighborhood kids? (unlikely); the raccoon family I once saw in the backyard? (do raccoons even eat berries?). Then I remembered David Lebowitz writing in his fantastic ice cream book about the blueberry bush in his childhood home and how they never got any berries to eat because the birds got them all first.

Dratted birds.

Next year I will have to rig some sort of netting over the bushes, which shouldn’t be hard. I remember hearing about the bird struggles that my favorite blueberry growers had with their berries. The birds won this year, but next year I will be vigilant and prepared.

They did leave me one ripe berry. So nice of them.



I had to scale back my aspirations as to what seeds I was going to plant, as I got started far too late and don’t actually have the space for everything I would like to grow. I opted for radishes, beets, and cilantro, all of which have short growing cycles. I planted to seeds, watered them, and got ready to wait.

But I didn’t have to wait long—within a day or two there were tiny radish sprouts poking up from the soil. I was stunned and amazed. It felt like a little bit of magic that I could plant this tiny brown seed and two days later it had turned into a plant. I had never grown anything from seed before and it felt like a small miracle.



They quickly grew, those first round leaves being replaced by the serrated leaves.



They grew bigger still, until I could see the red root pushing out of the soil. Wow, this gardening thing is addictive. I was already hooked—what else could I grow?



The cilantro had begun to sprout, but the beets never made it. I watered and watered but grew only weeds. Gardener's heartbreak.

But the tomatoes and basil were flourishing. After years of growing sickly basil in pots, I had the healthiest basil I’ve ever produced. I grinned every time I walked by.



Sadly, the tomatoes were having a hard time turning red. It was a cool summer in Seattle this year, or so I am told. Every day or so I urged the tomatoes to hurry up. I’m sure I could find something to do with green tomatoes (green tomato chutney, perhaps, or fried green tomatoes), but I’d prefer them red and juicy.



The cucumber and zucchini plants took off. I picked zucchini blossoms and stuffed them with goat cheese mixed with garlic and chives from the garden. I then dipped them in buttermilk and then in a mixture of cornmeal and sorgum flour ( a good gluten-free breading mixture) and fried them until they were golden brown. I ate them drizzled with chimichurri sauce. It was an experiment that turned out so well I couldn’t wait for my little plant to produce more blossoms. I know they don't look that pretty (I don't really do plated food), but they tasted incredible.



And one day, earlier this month, it was time to harvest the garden. I had been picking here and there, as things got ripe, but I was heading out of town and needed to collect the produce before I left. I pulled up my first radishes—crooked and funny looking, and so peppery they surprised me. I even cooked the radish greens—with onion and lentils—because I couldn’t stand to waste something I had grown. There were cucumbers and zucchini, basil that soon became pesto, and the first almost ripe tomato. My own little harvest.



Not bad for a vertical garden, grown alongside a house, that wasn’t supposed to exist in the first place, eh?

And I can’t wait for next year.

My Ironic Garden, Part II

To read part one of the garden story, see here

The narrow area alongside the Treehouse, where I live in Seattle, was not a bad place to plant a garden. There had been stairs built into the hillside, and between the stairs and the house were a series of terraced beds. They were covered in woodchips, to keep the weeds down, and a scratchy sort of brush (horsetails, I've been told—thanks, Zoomie), but it wasn’t a bad gardening option.



Once the beds had been cleared, they looked quite promising.



But there was one big problem. The stairs had been built with pressure treated wood, not good for anyone who wants to garden organically. The wood is treated with chemicals that help preserve it, but these chemicals can also leech out into the soil. Organic gardeners generally use redwood to build frames for their raised beds. Redwood has natural properties that make it resistant to mold. It's not as resistant as pressure treated wood, but it also doesn’t have chemicals.

So, what to do about pressure treated wood right next to my intended garden?

I spent a bit of time on the internet. Though the lumber industry claims CCA wood is safe for gardens, there is proof that it leeches into the soil. A small amount of this can be absorbed by vegetables growing in that soil. It’s not considered officially toxic for people, or so I read, but it didn’t make me feel great about it either. I was going to have to do something about the problem.

Since I didn’t have the option of moving the stairs or the garden, I did the next best thing—I decided to create a barrier between the two. I would dig out the earth in the beds, and put down a heavy plastic barrier. Then new soil would be put into the bed. It wasn’t ideal, but it would work.

Work, that was the operative term: it was a lot of work.

I discovered that a pair of old clogs are the perfect gardening shoe—that thick sole helps give leverage to the shovel, driving it into the soil. Again, and again, and again. Shoveling, it turns out, is quite an aerobic exercise.



The beds got dug out.



New top soil was added, with some organic compost worked in as well. Before long I had sweat streaming down my forehead and into my eyes, as I shoveled and shoveled. The next morning I woke up sore in places I have never been sore before. My hands felt rough after each gardening session, and I had to scrub and scrub to get the dirt out from under my fingernails. More than once I thought I was crazy to have taken on this project. More than one person told me to hire some strong guys to do the work for me. This had not occured to me—but by that point I was almost done and I took a perverse pleasure in having done it all myself. I was carving my garden out with my own two (increasingly dirty) hands. It was hard work, but it was also incredibly satisfying.



I began to look forward to the late afternoons and early evenings when I could finally push the computer away and go outside to garden. One day my neighbor found me shoveling during a brief break between bouts of rain. It had been wet all week and I was sure the rain had softened the earth and it would be easier to dig. She laughed as she saw me trying to squeeze in a little bit of gardening as it got dark on a Friday night. “You’ve become a Seattlite,” she said.

Once the beds had been cleared and lined and the soil had been turned and amended with compost, I could finally begin to plant.



I put in some raspberries that I had brought up from California in the car with me. This made me feel a little like those explorers of yore who brought seeds with them for their life in the new world; I went to Seattle bringing raspberries with me. These raspberries are from the plant merchant at the Ferry Plaza Farmers’ Market, Flatland Flower Farm. They tell a story about how they discovered them growing in Sebastopol, a Sonoma County town that I love. They were cultivated by an old Dutch couple who had planted them forty years ago and are named after the wife, Else van Baldrick. I loved having a bit of California in my Seattle garden.



Then I planted tomatoes and basil, which I hoped would grow thick and bushy. I’ve grown basil before, in pots, and they never seemed to thrive. I hoped my two plants would do better than they had in the past.

I planted blueberry bushes—two of them—and bought more herbs: Thai basil, lime basil, and two different kinds of thyme. I bought a zucchini plant and a cucumber, and some lavender for the front of the house. I went to the nursery and spend over a hundred dollars on plants. Plant shopping came to replace shoe shopping as my dangerous indulgence of choice—and so much easier to justify. After all, those blueberries might be feeding me and my family (the berry fiend niece-lets) for years to come.

Then came the seed packets, those little envelopes of temptation. The brightly colored packages of seeds are another version of the gardener delusion. As soon as I began to finger them at the store I was wisked away into thoughts of all the great things I would plant—carrots, and beets, and arugula, and chard. It would be so nice to grow my own Halloween pumpkin, and I love delicata squash. And what about melons? I amassed a good number of these magic packets before reason reared its head.

The truth was that I didn’t have enough space to grow all the packets I had bought—and then there was a little thing called maturity cycle. In my excitement and rush to buy seeds to plant in my small vegetable kingdom, I hadn’t stopped to read the instructions. If I had I would have discovered that each seed takes a certain amount of time to germinate and a certain amount of time to come to maturity. By this point it was already the second half of July, too late in the season for planting many of these vegetables. They wouldn’t mature quickly enough, some of them required over two months.

I should have started earlier—March or so, at least April.

In the end I planted those things that would mature quickly—radishes and beets—and put away the other seeds for next year, when I will start as soon as things start warming up in the spring. The gardening compulsion has clearly taken hold and was flourishing.

To be continued—stay tuned for harvest time in the newbie garden.

Read Part III of the garden story.

My Ironic Garden, Part I

The house that I am living in here in Seattle, the place we call the Treehouse, was bought based on three criteria: location was important; a view would be nice; but most of all, it needed to not have a yard.

There wouldn’t be anyone living here full time, you see, so any yard would be difficult to maintain. Trying to buy a house in Seattle without a yard is a challenging prospect—this is a city of blooming gardens and lush green lawns. The Treehouse is as close as you can get—there’s just the tiniest bit of lawn out front, a postage stamp, really, and a hill sloping down in the back with no landscaping. This is about as maintenance-free as you can get outside of a condo.

So what did I do as soon as I moved here? I tried to plant a garden.

The gardening urge had been growing for a while. For years I swore off gardening, remembering the hassle of having to help weed my mother’s garden when I was a child (or maybe I just watched her do the weeding, but it seemed like a hassle to me). In recent years, though, I felt the pendulum swinging back from where it started. I covet gardening books, my collection of potted plants has grown, and a year and a half ago I bought hanging window boxes for my apartment in San Francisco as a birthday present to myself—which is really the best way to get exactly what you want for your birthday. That year I wanted window boxes.

I went to the gardening store the day of my birthday, after breakfast at my favorite diner. I was giddy when I got the window boxes home, wanting to dance a little jig. I persevered through getting them installed—hanging out of a third floor window to wield the power drill and attach the brackets, losing more than one screw when they fell into the void far below. Once it was all done, I filled them with soil and happily planted a collection of herbs. One window box was devoted to basil; another held Italian parsley, cilantro, and thyme; a third was filled with sage, rosemary, oregano. I couldn’t wait to have fresh herbs to pluck for whatever dish I was cooking. I watered them carefully, checking their progress daily, happy to see that they weren’t showing any signs of shock from the process of being transplanted into their new home.



Then, about a week or two later, once we had all begun to get friendly with each other, I noticed the sage, rosemary, and oregano plants all had white spots on them—was it a fungus? Had I been watering them too much?

No, those white spots were the work of pigeons that perch on the roofline above the planters and (ahem) let things fall where they may.

I knew then that I would never be plucking herbs to add to my cooking. Perhaps my gardening urges were incompatible with my urban lifestyle.

So when I got to Seattle I couldn’t wait to get some plants—I bought herbs within the first week or so. I potted them and put them on a shelf in the sunny bay window in the kitchen. Parsley, sage, thyme, cilantro, and oregano, to complement the huge rosemary bush by the front door. And I was happy.

But it wasn’t enough. I wanted more—more herbs, basil and chives and lemon thyme. Let’s face it—as nice as small potted herbs are, if you harvest enough to season any one dish you feel like you are raping your tiny plant. I needed more than one oregano plant, more parsley too. I knew a lone cilantro plant—which bolts and goes to seed quickly—was never going to be enough for a good batch of salsa.

Not to mention basil—you need a lot of basil to get through a summer, at least that’s what I think. And what about tomatoes? And did you know that one zucchini plant will keep you in squash all summer long? And berries! I dreamed of planting raspberries that would bloom and fruit and provide berries like my mom’s garden did when I was a kid. I loved plucking the little thimble-like berries—tiny, delicate fairy caps—and popping them into my mouth. If I planted raspberries, maybe someday my little nieces could have that same amazing experience.

Clearly I was in that zone, known to most gardeners, where you dream big—thinking about all the amazing possibilities of your garden, all the wonderful things you will grow.

But the Treehouse has no yard, remember? It was chosen for this very fact. There’s a driveway on one side, lined with the tiniest bit of grass, and a steep slope on the other, filled with bramble.



I did think about taking over the slope. What if I pulled up all the brush, dug out terraces, and turned this unused land into an urban cornucopia? I got excited about the things I could plant—beets, radishes, spinach, arugula, winter squash, melons, and green beans that would twine around strings I would attach from the ground to the railing of the deck above.

Then reality set in. That terracing I thought about doing was a job for a professional. It would require moving large amounts of earth, building retaining structures, bracing things. I knew enough to know that wasn’t a one-person job.

So I turned my attention to the side of the house where stairs had been built into the hillside, leaving some beds that were covered in woodchips and sprouting a bushy sort of brush I had never seen before. Could I turn these into my garden?



Stay tuned, the quest for fresh herbs and a homegrown tomato continues...

Read Part II of the garden story here.

Bookworm in the Pantry: Best Books About Food

Do you have a perfect pantry? I certainly don’t, though I am always growing it and learning more. Lydia, the blogger behind The Perfect Pantry, has been one of my teachers, educating me about such things as how to use epazote, where arrowroot comes from, and that pimentón (smoked Spanish paprika) comes in three different varieties (I didn't know that). She’s a great resource for when I don’t know how best to use the new ingredient I picked up at the market because it looked interesting, and her blog is a great regular read, as it educates me about all manner of food stuffs. Each entry includes the history and background of the featured ingredient, along with a recipe that uses it.

One of the fun features on Perfect Pantry is Lydia’s Bookworm column. Here she invites other bloggers and readers to recommend food related books that are not cookbooks. I love a good cookbook, and am grateful to them as resources, but the chance to immerse myself for a few days in a story that is interwoven with a love of food is an experience It's the intersection between food and life that fascinates me, and to put myself into the hands of a great storyteller who explores that territory is pleasure indeed.

I have always loved this junction of literature and food, and often the reading of a book will send me running to the kitchen. As a ten-year-old I tried to recreate the light and puffy “vanity cakes” that Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote about in her The Little House on the Prairie books (with disastrous results, I might add). A few years later, I tried to make the “onion sandwiches,” that were prepared on Sunday nights by Betsy’s father in the Betsy-Tacy and Tib books. Most recently I made vanilla ice cream with black peppercorns as I tried to bring to life a dish from The Book of Salt, by Monique Truong. If only all novels and memoirs came with recipes interspersed between the chapters.

That is why I was excited to get the chance to contribute a few books to Lydia’s growing list of Bookworm recommendations. The list is quite large and impressive by this point—over 100 titles—and a great resource for anyone looking for food friendly reading material, but there were a few titles that I was happy to add. Here are some of my favorite foodie books:

The Book of Salt, by Monique Truong
This book is the sole reason I wanted to take part in Lydia’s Bookworm recommendation program, so I could again gush about this gorgeous and lyrical novel by Monique Truong. Set in the fictionalized kitchen of Gertrud Stein and Alice B Toklas in Paris, this is the best food-ish book I’ve read in the past few years, and one that I wish I had written. Some of you may remember me raving about this book last year, when it drove me into the kitchen to attempt Singapore vanilla ice cream with candied ginger and pepper. It is still the most amazing literary food novel I have ever read.

The Hills of Tuscany, by Ferenc Mate
For anyone who loves Italy, there is no shortage of books to read. Chief in the genre is Under the Tuscan Sun, by Frances Mayes, a memoir (and subsequent film) about moving to Tuscany and starting a new life. While I love the lyricism of the writing in Under the Tuscan Sun (Mayes is a poet and you can tell), I’d rather spend my time with Ference Mate and his wife. They, too, move to Tuscany, but this is a book of the people. They become part of the neighborhood and learn the local customs and traditions—pressing olive oil and making wine with their neighbors. This book has a fun boisterous personality, a love of life and food and people.

The World Is a Kitchen, edited by Susan Brady and Michele Anna Jordan
For me food is the most universal thing—no matter who we are, where we live, we all have to cook and eat. When I travel I am fascinated about the food—where it’s bought and how it’s prepared. I try to work my way into kitchens when I travel, and always come back with recipes and cookbooks. This is why I was so excited when the publishing company I used to work for decided to do an anthology about learning to cook all over the world—recipes included. Even if I can’t jet off tomorrow, I get to read about other people’s adventures, to prepare dishes they first tasted on their travels. It’s the next best thing to being there myself. [A disclaimer: this anthology includes a story I wrote, but I don’t make any money off the sales and I would recommend it regardless].

The Magic of Provence: Pleasures of Southern France, by Yvonne Lenard
Peter Mayle may have put Provence on the literary map with his book, A Year in Provence, but Yvonne Lenard includes recipes in her book about local life in the South of France. It’s another one of those books that leave you wishing you could run off to Provence, buy an old stone cottage, and live happily ever after (Carol Drinkwater’s books are good for this as well), but Yvonne gives you the recipes to at least be able to recreate the experience in your own kitchen. Her recipe for Pistou soup alone is worth the price of the book, and I use her versions of Provencal vegetable pizza/tarts as well.


Gluten-Free Girl, by Shauna James Ahern
Many of you probably know Shauna and her wonderful blog, Gluten-free Girl. Many of you know she’s been working on a book. But most of you (and here I get to brag just a little bit) won’t have gotten to read chapters in draft form, won’t have heard about the manuscript as it developed, won't have gotten to taste (and test) some of the recipes in the book. I have, and I can tell you that you’re in for a treat. The book won’t be published until October (though you can pre-order it), but it’s worth the wait. This is a book not only for people who cannot eat gluten. It’s about learning to embrace life and good food, regardless of the situation.

There you go, good people—some of my picks for what to read when you have to put down the cookbook. I love talking about books—it’s my job, after all—so you may find me continuing to recommend good ones as they come along. I love reading blogs, but there’s nothing like a good book—especially because you can’t take your computer to the beach (okay, you can, but you probably shouldn’t).

And the beach is where I am heading, along with a good book. It’s a gorgeous weekend here in Seattle—what feels like it might be the last real weekend of the summer—and the beach is calling me. I hope wherever you are this weekend, you’re having fun.

And if you're lacking for reading material, take a look at Lydia's list.