Day 2 Day radishes

June 30/ Summer noise

Inside

Drier doing whirl, whirl work

Washing machine going chuga, chuga

Dishwasher: relatively tame

“Where do we keep the knives?” by some one who should know

Fan: shush, shush

Two computers playing games. One saying “Poppit” and “Hello der”

Machine that asks multiplication answers. Bing, bing. really bad noise

Coffee pot buzzing it is done.

Mariners winning for a change, cheers

“No one will share the computer with me”.

Refrigerator door left open and nasty subliminal buzz

Oven timer buzzing

“Don’t let the flies in”
“Dear Lord”, see www.expatprincess.wordpress.com

Another bigger fan :shush, shush,shush

Coffeemaker done beep

Microwave completion beep

Drier done: long beep

“Why can’t we watch tv?”

Outside

Hear the radishes grow.

June 26/ Kids and summer

Soon all of the grandchildren will be here for week or two. It is hard to get in the groove of thinking in children’s think about what to do. I could do it for myself as a child, but I have trouble translating it to current children. I had my favorites of building stone forts with mud. I tried that for three years and it always fell down. Reminds me of the China quakes. When all of the kids are here at once we tell them to “go outside”, and figure it out. But kids really want other kids. My oldest granddaughter, fourteen, is happy to hide and work on her Geometry class, but given the chance, even she would welcome company.

Only part of the problem in our case is that there are the rich houses and the modest houses, and the rich houses are gated. And the rich people own the best beach. But there are kids inside the gated community. Then there are year round people, and there are summer people. Summer people are mainly weekend people. It is hard to get these children together. So although there is the borrowed skateboard, and there is a new electric guitar at our house, what is needed is other kids.

What can pull this group of local kids together? In other times, you would just show up, hang around, and when the crowd moved, you moved with them. Or the other alternative is to have something so fine, that all of the other kids are interested. When I was 13, I had a swimming pool and that helped. I wish it was so easy as to be able have a stand from which to rent umbrellas. Yesterday it was gardening with Grandma.

********

I was talking to another grandmother yesterday, and she said her ten year old grandson, Joe, set up a table and umbrella in the heart of their small town and was selling soap, Eau de Joe. PBS heard about it and has done a bit about him on their show KIDS BIZ in September.

June 25/ Garlic in my times

I grew up about 60 miles north of Gilroy, California. Gilroy was the garlic capital of the world. Christopher Ranch was the main ranch. Two brothers from Italy I think started the ranch. Nearly everyone thought that Gilroy was a place you did not want to be from. We maintained that garlic still came out the pores even after people left.

This being Food Candy Wednesday, I have been reading the columns. On the New York Times food site they have added a new format which collects a lot of articles on one topic. On today’s page is root beer which I didn’t read (as I thought it could initiate another craze), asparagus, and garlic.

Mark Bittman, NYTimes Minalmalist cooking guru talks about packaged peeled garlic. You know the ones at Costco in that large plastic jar, which you may have thumbed your noses as being over the hill, and what would you do with all that garlic anyway. Mark says buy them. The garlic is as good as you will buy most of the season when the garlic is thinking of making its green sprouts. “No one can tell the difference.” And he eats and drinks with some of the food heavies.

But this is the interesting part, how do they get all those peels off. They put divided cloves in a steel container and air pressure them off. The peels just blow off. So we can forget the next question that there are any dangerous chemicals or other conspiracy forces to our health. I did not recognize the places of sale other than Costco. But the brand is Christopher Ranch. How you use up a box of garlic cloves is your call, but perhaps as they are already peeled, you will use a lot more. Me thinks yes.

June 24/

Summer is here for a while; I think until the weekend when there will be family  crawling like hungry ants everywhere.  It will be easier this year as there is only one toddler. Fortunately, he now sometimes sleeps through the  night.  What is great for the adults is, the kids take care of each other, and if one cousin does not work out as a player, there is always someone else.  Now most can go to the beach alone.  But because there is  beach for them to go to, they don't want to go.  Since the 25 cent fine for saying you are bored has been installed, there is a lot less spoken boredom. This year we have two more kids to teach  to play poker.

My youngest daughter is now my kitchen  assistant.  Maybe now we might say I am becoming her assistant.  She and I are cooks, and while time consuming, we like to be the decision makers, and it removes us from any after dinner clean up. Some of our dinners flop. Most are cool.  For example this coming Friday night are homemade hamburgers and buns.  This is not a good example of quick and easy, but  it will be a an example of something really tasty.  Grinding you own meat for hamburgers empowers you.  What can I say? Sometimes the spirit moves us.  Mostly I can not control myself, and it is my daughter who reminds me that a menu is not quick and easy.  The next night is pork kabobs which somewhat redeems me. But then the peaches were going to rot on the counter in their box from Costco. So I made peach pies to freeze.

My daughter says in conversation the other night, "I think our family is defined by food." I then remembered about a blog of Dorie Greenspan about the difference of putting out dead wine bottles  for recycling in Paris as opposed to NYC.  In New York it is ,"All those bottles?", sort of thing as opposed to in Paris, "It must have been a great party."While true, I still do not know how I think about being defined by food.   

June 22/ hair for cancer and family

What a delight yesterday was for me.  It was a GRANDMOTHER’S SPECIAL.  My two granddaughters, fourteen and nine, had their hair cut for Locks of Love.  This is an organization that makes wigs for mostly children with cancer.  My daughter’s all attended the actually cutting.  The mother nearly wept.  This has been a long haul for especially the red head who was able to give at least and inch and a half extra lenghth.  Seeing the girls and how pleased they were, was dream whip.

Dorie Greenspan is a cookbook author and traveler. I have several of her cookbooks, one coauthored with Pierre Hermes the renown Paris pastry chef, and the other Baking, from my house to yours. The first book is impossible to cook from, and the second is just the opposite. She sometimes writes for Bon Appetite. And she loves to be in France. I read her blog,

www.doriegreenspan.com

, which is titled, In the Kitchen and on the Road with Dorie.

The baking book is quick breads and desserts. But she gives a lot of information and choices.

An offspring of this book and blog is another blog called Tuesdays with Dorie, www.tuesdayswithdorie.wordpress.com. Home bakers have joined together over the internet to bake their way through the Baking book. They comment over the recipes and explain their variances. Many take wonderful pictures of their efforts. I myself have recently baked the recipes that were chosen for the week. This week is Berry Cobbler, which is likely the easiest recipe in the book, and is where Dorie says new bakers might start. This is my and my granddaughter Thing 1’s effort at this weeks peach and blueberry cobbler. Thing 1 is a beautiful pastry chef.

June 18/ Summer begins

Monday was arrive from Shanghai day. This required two vans. We are told that most of it is presents, although I have yet to see any. These are pictures of the arrivers and some of the greeters. The arrival of the family is the only way I can tell it is summer.

I realized that I am getting to be an old grandparent, not the fun grandmother who several years ago was drinking martinis playing soccer. My grandson was here one hour and he said he was bored. I am setting a jar out for kids to pay 25 cents each time they say they are bored. I could have a Bobbi Brown blow out at the end of the summer. The kids are fun to have at the dinner table as they are comedians. I am not allowed to use these grandchildren’s name on this blog, but my oldest grandson is referred to as “Thing 2” on his mother’s blog. At dinner he announces that he can not wait for hair to grow on his face because he wants little tufts under his lower lip. When I married 48 years ago, I did not know that I was signing up for facial hair on a grandson. Who saw beyond having children? Now I hope to see five grandsons with facial hair. Tufts are going to be tough.

june 14/ Bear

Fourteen years ago, our family went on vacation to Nantucket Island.  Mr. Radish and myself, three girls and two sons-in-law.  We went because one son-in-law had vacationed there as a boy at his aunt’s house and the house was about to be sold. While there, I noticed in Nantucket that the homes had names, and signs were attached to the houses with the name.  Our house was Fred.  We took the sign down when we left.  We did not want the new owners to have Fred, and we also did want to keep the sign. The signs there on those homes lingered with me. 

About four years later we moved to Washington and we had a house on the water.  It was a great place for the family to gather although it was very crowded.  Over the years Mr. Radish has received from the family as gifts, bear paraphernalia.  He had received his law degree at UC Berkeley and that school was the Bears.

I thought one Christmas that I would buy Mr. Radish a sign for the house that said, “BEAR”.  However, I did not really know how to have a sign made.  Nantucket signs were done in gold traditional lettering, or carved, or painted.  But all were New England straight forward, traditional, and appropriate on the homes. 

Early in December I was having my knives sharpened at the grocery store.  I started chatting it up with the young man behind me in line.  I asked the man who was sharpening the knives if he knew of anyone who did  sign carving.  No, he did not.  But the man behind me said that he had studied some art at Stanford.  A young man from Stanford should surely know the fine signs of Nantucket.  In fact, he said that he did not know the Nantucket signs, but he was pretty sure that he could do one that would be appropriate.  I was adamant that I wanted one that would be nice, and I wanted it special for my husband, and I wanted it to say, “Bear”. He could not do it for several weeks, but it would be done by Christmas.  We agreed on $125.00. I think I gave him money. 

Of course I did not worry for a couple of weeks.  But when December 22 rolled around, I was concerned.   I called the young Stanford grad up, and he said it would be ready the afternoon of the 24th.  It was a nice ride out to his house with my daughter.  We felt it was a “ over the river and through the woods,” sort of thing.  So Christmassy. We drank our coffees along the way, got lost, but what the heck it was “Christmas”. We went into his hippy dippy house which was tiny and filled with children’s toys and furniture.  He said that he was sorry that he took so long, but he was building the outdoor hot tub for his wife to deliver there second child.  Right there should have been the clue. 

He continued, saying how happy he was with his sign.  He felt it appropriate for our local and expressed the feeling of the “Bear”.  At last I said that we had to go.  Could we see the sign.  Out it came. It looked like a black and red, Indian smoke signs totem pole with the work “BEAR” on it. It appeared to have been made in ten minutes.  I was stunned. I think my daughter had to drive because I was crying and laughing so hard.  I had bought some Stanford grad a lot of dope. 

June 10

I am ever on the look out for recipes for summer. I want recipes that low energy, I can eat more than once, you can plug a helper into a job and it all works out. I include the below recipe of Nigella Lawson‘s, from her book Forever Summer.

I liked what she had to say about recipe collecting. She says that she is a shameless collector. And in that spirit of things, I hope she will not mind that I quote her. “This is how this game works: cooking isn’t about the suspicious guarding of closely kept secrets but is a matter of sharing, passing on, the almost gossipy dissemination of habits and practices; recipes that are considered high-level security documents are not recipes that survive (or frankly that you’d want to eat).

RIGATONI AL POMODORO E PREZZEMOLO

6 tablespoons good olive oil

3 cloves garlic , slivered

14 oz. canned chopped tomatoes

½ cup vegetable stock (I used chicken broth)

Bunch of fresh flat leave parsley roughly chopped

Salt and pepper

1 pound rigatoni

Boil lots of water for pasta.

Heat the oil and gently fry the garlic over low to medium heat. Don’t let it scorch. Add tomatoes and turn up the heat. Add stock. Turn up heat a little. The sauce should look lumpy and oily; about 10 minutes. Add parsley.

Meanwhile cook pasta. When cooked add to a big bowl with the pasta sauce and toss well.

The second point I wish to make is that you should plant three plants of flat leaf parsley. It will over winter depending where you are, and in the winter when you would slash your wrists for fresh herbs, there it is outside your front door. If there is no ground, use pots. Fertilize. Water. Parsley from my garden made the above deceptively simple recipe a mini little masterpiece.

june 9/ House on water

Just when you think unexciting has gotten stuck, along comes unstuck. For starters at about 5:00 last night the sun comes out. For us in the Pacific Northwest, as apposed to the simmering East coast, this is a huge plus. Then around six I looked out the window, and there is a house on the water.

It is not like Jesus walking on water, but close. There is a tugboat with a barge with a truck, and the house is on the truck. It is like the book/movie Shipping News. The barge fiddles around in the bay waiting for the crest of the tide. A eighty year old salt box house from Seattle, likely moved off its site for the building of a larger, fancier house has come to its quiet second life near the State park. In the meantime, another flatbed truck drives down the hill, with what I guess is a folding ramp. The tugboat maneuvers the barge into the right place and then they wait for high tide so that the unfolded ramp will meet the barge, and then the truck with the house will drive off. The feuding neighborhoods all converge on the beach to watch this spectacle. High tide is at 11:00 PM, but I go to bed. This morning the house is gone and there is no sign that anything at all had happened.