Dog Days

The temperature’s hovering around 95 degrees, and through the back window, the neighbor kids are splashing in an absurdly large plastic pool. One of them hoists a bucket of water over the head of a smaller girl, freezes for a second and lets loose. Squealing and laughter. In a neighboring yard, a middle-aged man sweeps his patio and wipes his forehead, squinting in the sun. Inside, the cats are lazing on the wood kitchen floor like long, open parentheses. It’s almost too hot to write. In the meantime, I’m sipping a glass of this:

Wine Cooler for Grownups
[from "The Splendid Table"]

* Juice of 2 fresh limes
* 1/3 cup sugar
* 1 bottle of light-bodies, fruity red wine, chilled
* Ice
* Lime wedges for garnish

In a large pitcher combine the limejuice and sugar; stir until sugar dissolves. Add the wine and stir. Pour wine mixture over ice in chilled glasses. Garnish with a wedge of lime.

Pistachio butter-cream cookies and an anniversary

These little inventions are a simple sugar cookie topped with pistachio butter-cream frosting and a pinch of crushed pistachios. I nabbed the frosting (only the frosting) from Nigella’s macaron recipe, and used a basic sugar cookie for the base. The VIPs of this cookie are really the pistachios and salt. Without a food processor, I used my coffee grinder to pulverize some pistachios for smooth, creamy frosting. Finally, crushing a few more with a rolling pin and tossing them onto the finished product supplied crunchiness and, according to Justin, “drew out the pistachio-iness of the frosting.”

After some experimentation, I discovered that sprinkling sea salt over the plain cookie resulted in a pleasant salty-sweet taste once I'd slapped on the frosting. I know next to nothing about how ingredients interact during the baking process, and I wondered how the addition of salt at various stages of baking might impact the final product. I played with salting the cookies immediately before or after they went into the oven, though I didn’t bother adding salt to the pre-rolled dough because I wanted to retain that crunchy sea salt texture. Salting beforehand resulted in a slightly warped cookie when compared with the consistently smooth, white results of salting afterward. I didn’t really detect much of a taste difference, and the warped effect may have been caused by some other factor. Sadly, I can’t offer anything really conclusive about the addition of salt to cookies, but would very much love to know more, if anyone happens to have, say, minored in that in college.

Unsurprisingly, this little adventure ended with a massive sugar headache (I don’t recommend baking desserts before breakfast). While I poured myself a fistful of asprin, Justin offered his sympathy and took over as taste-tester. He bit into a cookie, squinted, and chewed skeptically for way too long before pronouncing the thing tasty. It’s good to live with a tough critic, even though at least half the time his judgments make me stomp my feet and pronounce him wrong, wrong, wrong-- at which point he smiles knowingly. I’ve worn a hole in the kitchen floor with all my stomping. As of last Friday, we’ve been married for five years. Laissez les bon temps rouler.

How Body Piercing Saved My Life

I'm only six pages in and already really liking this book. It's always so flattering when someone takes your youthful self as seriously as you did.

On shoes and being young

Bringing home a pair of fire engine red sandals the other day from Steve Madden reminded me another shoe shopping trip about a month ago. I was heading out of town on short notice and was in need of a pair of basic walking shoes. I checked a handful of stores without any luck before wandering, with some hesitation, into a chain store known for its comfortable and “therapeutic” women’s shoes. As I entered the store, a nice elderly man with a store nametag held open the door for me. I headed for the displays and had been browsing for a minute when I glanced up and noticed that everyone else in the store—employees and shoppers, every last one of them except me, were senior citizens. I shrugged and went back to shopping but soon started feeling unnerved by the throng of grandmothers quietly browsing around me. Had I missed the sign on the door about a minimum age limit? Now the shoes in front of me appeared in a new light. Heels and sandals that had before looked pleasantly sturdy suddenly seemed aggressively orthopedic. I half expected to see Janet Reno, that tyrant of sartorial practicality, elbowing her way toward the counter and slamming down her AARP card and a pair of oatmeal pumps.

Was I overreacting? Making drama out of something mundane? Well, duh. There are, after all, worse things than discovering one shares the same retail impulses as people over 65. But standing there glancing from the shoes to the customers and back again, I also felt something more personal. I have always had the sense that, though my birth certificate swears I’m only 29, I am at heart going on 80. I’ve always had an affinity for old ladies. I like their circular, patchwork stories, their dreamy complaints and their unexpected ease in their own skin. I like their nostalgia, how they insist on dreaming in reverse when the rest of the world is busy lunging into the future. I think I’m fascinated most by how they risk being lost in that past—something I can deeply relate to, though I can’t say precisely how. In college, my favorite sweater was a grubby white cardigan that resembled nothing so much as a doily crocheted by an angry blind woman and pinched from the back of a Victorian armchair by a dirty-fingered street urchin.

A student once told me that I have “an old soul” and hastened to add that the remark is a compliment. I take it as such. I'm glad my soul is old, but do my shoes have to be?

So there I was in the store, contemplating all this. Meanwhile, shoppers were making their selections, and helpful employees with bifocals and glasses cords were entering and exiting the back room with stacks of shoeboxes. Then the little bell jingled to signal that more customers were entering. The nice greeter straightened up a bit and held open the door for two new arrivals: a pair of wrinkled nuns in their habits, headed straight for the walking shoes.

I named this blog a few months ago, long before it was a full-fledged blog—back when it was just a little blog-twinkle in my eye—because it occurred to me that of all the earthly things I love, two of my most favorite can be reduced to the categories of salt and paper. Salt elevates eating from a ho-hum duty to pure delight (think of a plate of fresh-picked tomatoes, sliced and scattered with salt), and paper is for scribbling and scrumpling, not to mention folding, stitching and binding into books, which in turn can be cracked opened and enjoyed with a piece of dark chocolate or a bowl of salty peanuts. See how it comes full circle?

Salt and paper inevitably point to bigger things—a bite to eat with people you love, an empty page for filling, a good read. In that light, food and books will pop up a lot here. I'll sometimes post about what and where I eat, but only if it’s worth sharing. If it’s another supper of black beans and fried eggs, I promise to spare you. This summer I also want to try to document my attempts to make a book. With fear and trembling I recently took a book binding class at the Center for Book Arts, where I studied book anatomy (case-spine, foredge, etc.) and was shepherded through the meticulous process of creating three books of my own (see yonder photo). Now, with even more trembling, I’m going to attempt to duplicate the results at home, though I don’t know how I’ll manage without the Center's heavy book presses and savvy instructor. (Oh, Laurel, where are you when I need you most?). The plan is to make just a simple book to begin. Okay, an extremely simple book. Fine, a piece of notebook paper folded in half with my name written on the front in bubble letters. Care to buy?

Tokyo Dylan

I wish every workday were like this.

Typically, my student Hiroyuki meets me on Wednesdays to practice his pronunciation and conversation, but today he surprised me by bringing a guitar to our meeting. In the little cramped classroom he opened the case, tightened the strings, and began to play and sing. I already knew he was a Dylan fan, since we’d spent some time parsing Bob's lyrics (he also loves John Lennon and was a Lennon impersonator back in his high school Beatle Mania club in Tokyo), so I wasn’t surprised when he kicked things off with “Positively Fourth Street” and “Like a Rolling Stone.” While he paused to catch his breath, I hummed a few bars, trying to recall the name of my favorite Dylan number. He guessed right and launched into an awesome, passionate rendition of “Don’t Think Twice, it’s All Right.” Imagine Dylan himself—the precise nasal twang, the tortuous vowels, the sheer persistence of it—but with a Japanese accent. After several more songs, I realized I hadn’t been keeping track of his pronunciation errors or doing anything else particularly teacherly. I’d been too busy singing along like a contented, old drunk.