Silence, with Jam and Thanks

Oh my friends, I have been quiet over here. I’ve been so quiet you might have suspected that I had up and moved to the island, but that’s not what has kept me quiet. I still dream about the house (well, not so much the house but the gardens and land) but I know the timing isn’t right. Not right now, but maybe soon.

I’ve been quiet most of the winter, really. I usually can be fairly chatty, but not these days. These days I just want to be quiet. Phone calls have been unreturned, emails too (sorry if I owe you one!), while I keep mostly to myself. What can I say—we all go through phases and these are unusual times. I know this for a fact because at this very moment it is hailing (hailing!) outside my window. There go my plans for gardening.

But I do have stories to tell—they’re piling up, actually. In due time they will come tumbling out (starting Monday, in fact). I do love the virtual tea party that takes place around these parts.



As an example of my lack of chattiness: this winter I spent two months without DSL or television—two months. Talk about being quiet.

There were both extremely gratifying and also annoying parts to this experience (and my inbox may never recover from the backup), but I will say that it was a pleasure to read books again. In one of those months alone I read seven books—that's more than I’ve read the entire rest of the year put together, I’m sad to say. I fell back in love with libraries (Seattle’s are incredible) and with the experience of curling up with the heft of a book in my hands rather than a laptop. Of course, once the internet was hooked up again my reading habits slowed down considerably. I’m still reading books, just not nearly as many.



So I am going to start a new feature here on the site. Each month I am going to share a food-related book with you. They probably won’t be cookbooks, I’m more drawn to narrative, but they will be books I’ve read and loved and which may be a little under the radar. This way I’ll have the impetus to keep reading and seeking out new things to share, and perhaps you’ll be inspired to pick up something bound rather than pixelated. There’s so much out there in internet-land to get sucked into that I’ve been forgetting about my first love—a good storybook.

I’ve already found the first book I want to share—and it’s great. Stay tuned this week for it.

I also just want to say thanks—for all your lovely, cheering comments; for showing up and reading, even when I’m not saying much; for the sweet emails and wonderful real-world friendships that have come out of this little site. Blogs are funny things; they can only ever be a small snippet of our much larger, more complicated lives, and yet there is a profound thing that happens when people connect and share their lives, even just a little bit. It humbles me, really, and I know my life is richer for it. So, thank you.



This jam is another thing I owe thanks for. It was given to me at the end of last summer by Dylan, perhaps better known as Sourdough Monkey Wrangler. He’s another lovely person I never would have met except for the connection we made through comments on each others sites. The day I met him and his sweet children he sent me home with jam—and a magical jar of sourdough starter for my own.

I have been nibbling away at this jam throughout the winter. When I taste it I think of Dylan and his family in a kitchen hot from the steam of a water bath. I think of the fruit he gets from his in-laws, who grow them on their property, and I think of all the good intentions that go into something like homemade jam. I know about these intentions because I make jam myself. I now know when I am given a jar of jam from someone’s kitchen that it’s a gift of their summer—their time, their effort, their affection—it’s something precious. No supermarket jam ever made me feel that way.

And this jam in particular—strawberry peach—is luscious. I have to admit that I’ve eaten most of it on a spoon, so as to fully appreciate its sweet crystalline notes. Dylan’s not joking when he calls it “crack sauce,” this stuff is good.

Thanks, Dylan.



I have one more little bit of housekeeping, before I sign off until Monday. I may not be writing much here these days, but I do have a piece in the winter issue of Edible San Francisco. Bruce Cole, of Sauté Wednesday fame, was nice enough to let me write a piece for his lovely magazine that I have enjoyed so much over the past few years—and Bonnie Powell, the genius behind the Ethicurean, did a great job of editing it. It’s more on the journalism side of things than my musings and ramblings here, but you might want to take a peek. It’s about a wonderful new urban gardening pilot program underway in San Francisco. I was completely inspired by the people behind it and what they are envisioning.

That’s it for me, folks, at least for now. The hail has stopped and I might just get a bit of gardening in this weekend after all.

Have a good one, I’ll be back here on Monday.



The bread in the photos is the WHO bread from Amanda and her family at SouleMama. Easy to make (yeasted but otherwise straightforward) and delicious. If you haven't seen her lovely site yet you are in for a treat—and her book is out next month. It's definitely on my new reading list.