There’s certainly a touch of mania in my psychological makeup, and I’ve been having a week full of wild dreams, fantasies, ambitions, and have begun a number of new projects.. all of which will most likely be abandoned in due course. I wish all the mental energy would translate into physical energy (more hours in the day would mean more got done), but instead it translates into my body slipping into an exhausted sleep at the usual time, while my brain continues chattering endlessly.

As you might imagine, this makes for some pretty vivid dreams:

• Sunday night’s dream inspired me to buy a tiny island in Sebago Lake, upon which i should erect a small cottage and hang a hammock, and live from the beginning of June until August, observing a strict media fast. Weekly boat trips into Windham or Standish for food, then back out again. Think of all the novels that could be completed in such a place!

• Last night was an action-adventure set in a Disneyland gone awry (”Oh, I never allow guests into the Northwest parking lot alone after dark,” said the desk clerk), which evolved into an action adventure of this basic equation: Sims 2 + Barack and Michelle Obama as superheroes + Harry Potter-syle magic = awesome⁷

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We just bought two tomato cages for our savage tomato plants… far too late, as we probably would have realized if we were anything but starry-eyed hipster poseur gardeners. So, between the two of us, we pretty much massacred the two tomato plants that had any chance of delivering fruits this year, although we had many straight sticks of bamboo readily available. Forethought is not my forte these days, apparently.

So then, of course, I tried to stuff our MONSTER pumpkin plant into the tomato cage so it won’t be massacred itself by our apathetic lawn tenders on Friday. That exercise didn’t go well, either, if you were wondering, but I still hold out hope for them. Howard Dill bred ‘em hardy. I hope.

On our trip to procure tomato cages (actually it started as a pansy run), we decided to treat ourselves to ice creams, with disappointing results. Although it did prompt a baby (embryonic) Proustian meditation on whether every job requires skill. Conclusion: yes. It may seem that ice cream scoopery is a pretty basic, mindless job, but no. Proper cone construction doesn’t come naturally to everyone, and it sure didn’t to this woman.

Picture your ideal cone. Now imagine its exact opposite. That’s what I got.

And let’s talk for just a second about sizing. What does “one small cone” mean to you? Does it mean 16 ounces of dairy perched off-centered on a cone whose structural rigidity wouldn’t have been able to support that mass even without being exposed to 550% humidity for three weeks? Well, that’s not what I meant by “one small cone” either.

Damned First World problems. If all those starving Ethiopian refugees found out about this kind of travesty it would be a real eye-opener.

Feel-good story about France’s far-reaching efforts to boost its stork population. Quite a successful program; they’ve gone from 9 breeding pairs in 1983 to 270 pairs today. I especially like the schoolchildren’s efforts to repair nests during the birds’ migration.

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The best ratio (so far) for Kung Pao Tofu sauce is:

1 cup vegetable stock
3 tablespoons oyster sauce
2 tablespoons corn starch
2 tablespoons brown sugar
1 teaspoon habañero sauce (2 t if using Tabasco)
1 soy sauce (only if the peanuts aren’t salted and you’ve forgotten to salt the tofu)

Food blogs worth visiting regularly:
Fine Furious Life
Evolving Tastes

Is this gorgeous-looking rum bundt cake on Design Sponge worth making even though it calls for both cake and pudding mixes? Am I being a snob? Or am I just easily swayed by its sculptural qualities?

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You know someone at The Wall Street Journal hates you when this is the photo they use to illustrate a story:

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They Feed the Lion
from Philip Levine’s New Selected Poems, Knopf

Out of burlap sacks, out of bearing butter,
Out of black bean and wet slate bread,
Out of the acids of rage, the candor of tar,
Out of the creosote, gasoline, drive shafts, wooden dollies,
They Lion grow.

Out of the gray hills
Of industrial barns, out of rain, out of bus ride,
West Virginia to Kiss My Ass, out of buried aunties,
Mothers hardening like pounded stumps, out of stumps,
Out of the bones’ need to sharpen and the muscles’ to stretch,
They Lion Grow.

Earth is eating trees, fence posts,
Gutted cars, earth is calling in her little ones,
“Come home, Come home!” From pig balls,
From the ferocity of pig driven to holiness
From the furred ear and the full jowl come
The repose of the hung belly, from the purpose
They Lion grow.

From the sweet glues of the trotters
Come the sweet kinks of the fist, from the full flower
Of the hams the thorax of caves,
From “Bow Down” come “Rise Up,”
Come they Lion from the reeds of shovels,
They grained arm that pulls the hands,
They Lion grow.

From my five arms and all my hands,
From all my white sins forgiven, they feed
From my car passing under the stars,
They Lion, from my children inherit,
From the oak turned to a wall, they Lion,
From they sack and they belly opened
And all that was hidden burning on the oil-stained earth
They feed they Lion and he comes.

Not the stratospherically-rich kind who took their time in discovering the less fortunate, the frugal kind.

October 2007 article in the Telegraph Fashion section

The July 2007 piece about Hollywood New Victorian types

Sort of related: Elspeth Thompson, a British gardening expert, is converting two Victorian railway cars into an ecohome.

And that Kipling poem that’s always haunting me:

The Glory of the Garden

Our England is a garden that is full of stately views,
Of borders, beds and shrubberies and lawns and avenues,
With statues on the terraces and peacocks strutting by;
But the Glory of the Garden lies in more than meets the eye.
For where the old thick laurels grow, along the thin red wall,
You’ll find the tool- and potting-sheds which are the heart of all
The cold-frames and the hot-houses, the dung-pits and the tanks,
The rollers, carts, and drain-pipes, with the barrows and the planks.

And there you’ll see the gardeners, the men and ‘prentice boys
Told off to do as they are bid and do it without noise ;
For, except when seeds are planted and we shout to scare the birds,
The Glory of the Garden it abideth not in words.
And some can pot begonias and some can bud a rose,
And some are hardly fit to trust with anything that grows ;
But they can roll and trim the lawns and sift the sand and loam,
For the Glory of the Garden occupieth all who come.

Our England is a garden, and such gardens are not made
By singing:-” Oh, how beautiful,” and sitting in the shade
While better men than we go out and start their working lives
At grubbing weeds from gravel-paths with broken dinner-knives.
There’s not a pair of legs so thin, there’s not a head so thick,
There’s not a hand so weak and white, nor yet a heart so sick
But it can find some needful job that’s crying to be done,
For the Glory of the Garden glorifieth every one.

Then seek your job with thankfulness and work till further orders,
If it’s only netting strawberries or killing slugs on borders;
And when your back stops aching and your hands begin to harden,
You will find yourself a partner In the Glory of the Garden.
Oh, Adam was a gardener, and God who made him sees
That half a proper gardener’s work is done upon his knees,
So when your work is finished, you can wash your hands and pray
For the Glory of the Garden that it may not pass away!

And the Glory of the Garden it shall never pass away!

I always thought we’d make up. One of these days we’d see each other at the Superstore or on Spring Garden and we’d both apologize — her for having no compassion for a broke illegal scrambling to make enough to pay my share of the power bill, me for refusing to pay rent for the summer months (after they’d forced me out of the apartment five months earlier).

We were great friends for that first year of university, a dozen girls living in a truly golden time, full of curiosity and open to possibilities.

I thought once she’d calmed down a bit, and we’d both grown up, we could laugh about the misunderstanding. We had a strong foundation.

Fast forward six years.

I stumbled across the obituary accidentally, and then I was sure I’d read it wrong. It is with great sadness that we announce the untimely passing of our beautiful daughter and sister….
Ten weeks ago she was cheerfully teaching in Japan, and today I went to her funeral.

But I still think I must have read it wrong. No one was ever more alive than she.

Anyone want in on our office pool to identify the final Cylon?

According to Steve Malloy, all those Love Canal kids were faking, and the subsequent investigation, fining and establishment of the Superfund were all part of an elaborate liberal witch hunt. Actually, I have using the term “witch hunt”, unlike many Congressional representatives, because they usually lose sight of the fact there was never any chance Salem, Massachusetts was ever home to any witches, and such certainty is laughable in the face of… well everything they compare to a witch hunt.

“If a site was deemed by the EPA to pose a risk to human health — say, by divining as little as a 0.01 percent increase in the risk of cancer to a hypothetical person who, however implausibly, might one day subsist on a site’s most contaminated soil and groundwater — then the owners and users of the site could be held liable for the typically exorbitant, EPA-determined clean-up costs.”

Oh, what honest reporting! The fact is, the EPA doesn’t ever specify how much a polluter pays to clean up a job— if it’s cleaned to EPA standards, they couldn’t care less. If, however, you kinda swish a mop around in a now-orange freshwater stream, and half-heartedly sweep at the contaminated topsoil, then yes, the EPA will clean it up, and yes, the Superfund will charge the offender three times the price a thorough job cost them.

I mean, that’s what they used to do. Before Bush. And after him, too, I hope.

Anyway, it’s dishonest and disingenuous to even suggest that the CO2 excreted by actual humans will ever be subject to any kind of Carbon Tax. Angry eyebrows to you, sir, and it’s bullshit to suggest Coca-Cola will be forced to shake the last few dimes from the cash box to pay whatever Carbon Tax is levied on them.

Dear God, I miss Molly Ivins.

Dick Cheney! I broke my keyboard! I was scraping around between the keys and producing quite a sizable dustclump when I got a little too aggressive with the left-side command button (equivalent of control on PC) and off it popped. And either I can’t figure out the plastic spring mechanism or digits lack the requisite delicacy for the job, because after about two hours of breathless surgery and trying many configurations, I’m still without the button. Of course, the reason the base of this particular key was so filthy is because it’s the key I use most, so there has been a VERY STEEP LEARNING CURVE this afternoon as I reacquainted myself with all those inefficient mouse movements that one uses while copying and pasting engineering specs from one document to another. And there’s a gaping wound where I’ve injured my faithful companion here. Sorry, Horatio.

Richard thinks our next door neighbor, an on-site, independent Apple technician could repair the damage, but while we were all wrapped up in our own misery and poverty in 2006-07, he was caring for his terminally ill wife— and we found out so late in the game we were too late to make many overtures, although we had both finished a long stint with palliative care ourselves, and might have offered an empathic ear. The wife was a kind, helpful, sparkly woman, and even seeing him shoveling out his car makes both of us so abashed and embarrassed about our selfishness and unneighborliness in their time of need, I can’t imagine knocking on his door to ask for rescue.

for Stephen Parrish

Thrice Baked Potatoes
4 russet potatoes, pricked with fork
1 bunch broccoli, cut into florets, stem peeled and sliced
2 T butter or olive oil
¾ cup plain yogurt
½ - ¾ cup Cheddar or other semi-soft English-y cheese, grated
salt & pepper to taste

Bake the potatoes at 400°F for an hour.
While they bake, saute the broccoli in butter, seasoning with salt and pepper. Combine yogurt, cheese, and broccoli in a large bowl, reserving a bit of cheese for the tops of the potatoes.
After the hour has passed, remove potatoes from oven and allow to cool ten minutes. Do a U-shaped cut out of the top of each, scoop the flesh into the yogurt mixture, then put potato skins back in the oven to crisp up for eight minutes or so.
Mash and mix the filling thoroughly, seasoning to taste, then fill the crisped shells. Mound it up like I do, or save some filling for brunch. Top with reserved cheese, then broil the potatoes for 8 more minutes.

Taco Filling/Nacho Topping
1 tub firm or extra firm tofu (about 12 ounces by weight), crumbled
2 tablespoons salt-free Mexican seasoning (or a mixture of cumin, cinnamon, oregano, and coriander to make 2 tablespoons)
3 cloves garlic, minced
2 Tablespoons olive oil/mixture of olive oil and butter
1 28-oz can whole tomatoes
1 14-oz can black beans, drained and rinsed
1-1 ½ cups frozen corn
1 chipotle chili finely chopped, or a spoonful of adobo sauce
salt & pepper to taste

Start by toasting the spices on medium heat for 3 minutes or so, until they’re fragrant and faintly smoky, then add the oil and tofu, stirring to coat. Cook 5-6 minutes, adding salt to taste. Add minced garlic (with a little more fat if necessary— we cook mostly in cast iron or non-stick) and cook for one minute, then add tomatoes and , smooshing them in the pan. Bring to a simmer and allow to simmer for 10 more minutes. Stir in beans and corn, and serve when warmed through.
Serve alongside rice in taco shells with the usual variety of accompaniments: spinach or lettuce, salsa, cubed avocado, pickled jalapeños, etc. This goes very nicely with goat cheese, too.

Spinach Pilaf
1 block of firm tofu, cut into 1/2 inch cubes
2 tablespoons butter
3 garlic cloves
2 teaspoons ground coriander + a few scrapings of nutmeg
1 teaspoon salt
2 fresh tomatoes, chopped
2 cups basmati rice
2 big handfuls spinach
½ lemon

In a medium saucepan, fry the tofu in the butter until golden brown on at least two sides. Add the garlic, coriander and nutmeg, saute until fragrant. Then add tomato, rice, stir for one minute. Add 2 ⅔ cups water* and salt, stir once, then cover and let simmer for 15 minutes. Remove cover, add spinach, then recover until spinach is wilted and rice is done (up to five minutes). Squeeze the lemon over just before serving.

*This is assuming you use white basmati. if you use brown, use 2 cups rice:4 cups water, and increase cooking time to 35-40 minutes, adding spinach a few minutes from the end.

This recipe lends itself to many variations… try it with cashews, almonds, raisins or chopped dried apricots, frozen peas, coconut milk, curry powder or garam masala, lemongrass, fennel seeds, green beans, lentils, potatoes… lots of possibilities.

“…and scarcely abated thereafter. It could not have been always winter in those years, summer must have come around as duly as ever, yet universally people remembered winters: the longest, coldest, deepest winters ever known; one continuous winter. Every hardship the Tyrant regretfully imposed or his opponents willfully inflicted in their uprisings against him was made worse by winter, by months of frozen mud and sleety rain that continually mired every enterprise. Winter made ghastly and hopeless the movements of trucks, traffic, brown-clad troops; everywhere, deeply marking the memory, were the huddled clots and queues of refugees, rag-bound against the cold; the stalled trains, grounded planes,; the new frontiers at which lines of slush-bound cars tailpipes breathing cold clouds, waited to be examined by muffled guards; shortages of everything, the awful struggle, the difficulties and uncertainties made more awful by the isolating endless cold.”

John Crowley, Little, Big

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Writing executive summaries for two newsletters doesn’t leave much room for creativity or joy, and then, of course, we live on the Atlantic coast where sunless days can be measured in weeks. A string of twenty gray days in a row ended Monday; three weeks during which the highlight was receiving a Seedsavers catalog of fantastical varieties of melon and tomato that laugh heartily in the carefully moistened soil; mocking my dream of just. one. Brandywine.

Further to my previous two posts, the body of Karissa Boudreau was found on February 9, as I said, and the police announced the following Thursday that she had been murdered. A twelve-year-old, abandoned in a dirty snowbank beside the river.

This winter has gotten a little wearing for all the usual dreary, gray reasons. It snows nearly every day— with little total accumulation— and the sky is always heavy, iron gray. I don’t mind the snow, though; every fall still seems miraculous after so many brown winters, it’s just that I never feel I have the excuse to play in it, nor the proper attire. And with every snowfall, the chances of a happy outcome were dampened.

The body of Karissa Boudreau has washed up on the shores of the LaHave River, just downstream from where she disappeared. No official confirmation yet, but the body is described as an adolescent female caucasian, and there’s only one missing. I do hope it’s not someone no one was looking for. The body was buried in snowdrifts, and the RCMP were out all night carefully preserving the snow around the body.

Like everyone else, I’m so sorry for the family; and I’m sorry for the employees at the Irvings and SaveEasys who will have to take down their posters and fliers. I’m sorry for all of us who searched the faces of girls along the side of the road, and watched the waters of the LaHave with dread, and hoped a little less each day.