I emptied two bookshelves in the kitchen this weekend, wiped them down and relocated the tea mugs. The two shelves – which carried space for new cookbooks only if I situated them horizontally along the tops of the others – are now three, with books arranged by subject and room enough for the Suzanne Goin cookbook I was eyeing at Powell’s a few weeks ago. Plus a few more down the road.
read more »
Summer has decided we need less fruit landing on the pavement in an end-of-season downpour and more blue-stained cuticles and lips. My son and I acquiesced and set out for some blackberry bushes that are a few blocks from our house. It was a surprise: my husband got home a little early, my daughter decided to stay home.
The two of us made our way along the sidewalk in our short-sleeved shirts, bypassed the wooden stairs that lead down to the trail that runs through a park in our neighborhood. The berries, bordering the backside of the park, grow on unruly plants that have been chopped back to hedge-like proportions along the edge of someone’s front lawn. Our plastic containers and shopping bag on the ground, we hovered at its edge, surprised there were still some to be had.
Before my kids were in school I remember parents of older kids telling me how much they like vacation days. The kids sleep in. Everyone eats breakfast in their pajamas. Then they might go on a family outing. A hike, maybe.
I couldn’t conceive of such pleasure. When the preschool was closed due to a holiday it meant time lost on my own projects; more hours to juggle the needs of a toddler and a preschooler. My daughter would complain (read: pout and refuse to budge) if I tried to take them hiking. I couldn’t wait to get everyone back into a routine.
But this year I guess we’ve turned the corner because the kids actually play together in their pj’s when there’s a holiday, building things like toy villages and Lego sculptures before their dad and I are awake.
Monday was one of these lazy, lovely mornings and afterward we took the kids to the Museum of Glass where we saw these exhibits. My favorite was a glass forest in the Glimmering Gone exhibition: layers of clear glass forming the likenesses of underbrush and trees with a mirrored river cutting through. Sublime! I would have stood there all morning if I’d been alone.
No cameras are allowed in the museum so I can’t show it to you, but I did catch an image of the kids near the entrance to the museum.
It was raining when we went in and also as we left, adding to the charm of being indoors among beautiful objects for the morning.
Because of all the showers this week, we’ve spent a lot of time indoors at home, too. And something that makes it cozy? Sea vegetables. Since we’re still waiting for the foraging season to begin, over the next few weeks we’ll turn our attention to different types of sea veggies.
As you’ll see in this week’s salad, sea vegetables often don’t require cooking. Rehydrate and – voila. You have salad. And they’re full of good stuff. Nutrients in sea vegetables – a laundry list of vitamins, minerals and trace elements – are highly bioavailable, meaning it’s easier for the body to absorb them than those in land plants.
Wakame is native to the California coast and that’s where the seaweed I used in today’s recipe came from. (I wrote about the company that harvests it once. You can go here and scroll down to the sea veggies article to find out a bit about the mindful, hardworking folks at Rising Tide Sea Vegetables.)
Sea vegetables may not be local in the strictest sense, but they’re wildcrafted and sourced on the West Coast. And since dried sea vegetables keep for a long period of time, they’re something to keep on hand in the cupboard. You never know when you might want a comforting broth or simple salad on a rainy day.
Salad of the Sea
by Chie
Wakame is traditionally used in miso soup, and in a summer salad
with cucumbers. This is a refreshing, mineral-rich salad with Asian
flavors. I love to have this on hand as a side dish.
½ c dried wakame seaweed
3 T tamari
2 T extra virgin olive oil
2 tsp toasted sesame oil
2 T apple cider vinegar
juice of ½ – 1 lemon
1 tsp maple syrup (optional)
1 T ginger, minced
2 cloves garlic, minced
½ bunch green onions, thinly sliced
½ – 1 bunch cilantro, stemmed and chopped
½ – 1 bunch Italian parsley, stemmed and chopped
1 tsp Celtic sea salt
¼ c toasted brown sesame seeds, ground
Soak the wakame in water to rehydrate, about 15 minutes.
Drain and chop into bite-sized pieces.
Mix the rest of the ingredients in a medium bowl and stir in the wakame.
Adjust the amount of cilantro and parsley depending on how
much green you like in your salad. I like to add finely chopped daikon
radish, carrots or celery for more color, crunch, vitamins and flavor.
Allow the flavors to marry for an hour or so. Enjoy!
Sometimes on a Sunday night I’ll walk through the back door after a day away from home and see my daughter’s backpack on the floor, so crammed with stuff that it’s lying on its face, straps and back padding exposed.
It’s always a forehead-slapping moment. There’s a lunch bag with Friday’s meal half-eaten in there, and a thermos of milk that’s turned. Also a stack of crumpled papers from the previous week: finished worksheets, art projects, reminders, homework. Each requiring an action: file, recycle, tape to the wall, add to the calendar. So I sit down after the kids are in bed and sift.
One of the papers this week was a white sheet with the title of the school-wide theme for the year printed at the top, Sense of Place, and a list of questions to discuss at home, including the obvious starting point, “What does home mean to you?”
That’s an easy one. Home is finally normal again, I thought when I read it, a warm place where the washer works and the freezer stays cold. Where the last dirty blobs of snow on the driveway have melted away and the frost in the yard burns off by mid-morning.
But, as I said, that’s the easy answer. Home is figurative, too. Maybe even primarily figurative. This week I sat in a pew beneath a ceiling paneled in blond wood and heard a sentence that began, “You sit wallowing in all that old sourness…” (quoted from here). It was a moment of coming home, again and briefly, to myself. Sourness and disappointment tend to crop up again and again for me and they make the world a smaller and less possible place and isolate me from my pod of friends and family, my community – the people who make life engaging, challenging and, during the times when my heart is breaking, more bearable.
You may be wondering about the pensive mood I’m in this week and what all this has to do with food. An awful lot. Connecting with people over food is one of the ways I unpack my own neglected stuff and pick through it, one thing at a time. I think a lot while I’m mincing, boiling and combining foods and photographing them for you. And it’s a homecoming of sorts to cook with someone else, observing their work patterns in the kitchen, how exactly they grate a nub of ginger, what triggers them to dig through the fridge for some fresh tarragon.
This week Chie and I got together to cook, something we’re hoping to do more often, and it was fun and healing to talk and laugh and chop together, tasting as we went. She came up with this warm potato salad held together by a vinegar dressing. Which, in my current state of mind, is something more than coincidental. The sourness of the apple cider vinegar (something you couldn’t happily consume straight from, say, a shot glass) is mixed with oil and mustard, blending boiled potatoes and chopped vegetables into something more.
Community Potato Salad
by Chie
A mixture of red, yellow and purple potatoes (about 4 lbs.)
¼ onion, thinly sliced
2-3 ribs celery, sliced into moons or on the bias
4 small carrots, halved and thinly sliced on the bias
4 small green onions, finely chopped
1 apple, chopped into bite-sized pieces
2-3 leaves lacinato kale, finely chopped
scant 1-inch nub ginger, peeled and grated
a handful of flat-leaf parsley, finely chopped
juice of 2 lemons
zest of 1 lemon
Dressing
½ cup olive oil
⅓ cup apple cider vinegar
1 ½ tsp spicy or Dijon mustard
2 cloves garlic, smashed to a paste
½ tsp Celtic sea salt
freshly ground black pepper
Fill a large pot with water, add enough salt to make the water taste briny and bring to a boil.
Scrub potatoes, cut into 1-inch cubes and lower into the water.
Cook until just soft but not falling apart.
While the potatoes boil, slice the onion and place in a bowl.
Salt the slices and toss to mix. Let stand for 10-15 minutes.
Whisk together the olive oil, vinegar, mustard, 1 tablespoon of the lemon juice, garlic, salt and pepper.
Set aside. Prepare remaining ingredients.
Cover the onions with water to soak
until the rest of the ingredients are combined.
When the potatoes are done, drain, place in a large bowl
with the rest of the ingredients and toss with the dressing to mix well.
Adjust to taste with extra sea salt, pepper, lemon juice and vinegar.
Serve warm.
