Such Life! I can’t wait to share the utter loveliness of the Jubilee Cooking Class we took this past weekend, the exceptional noshes and ever-full glasses of studied wine, the discourse and lending of dear books, the sharing and playing of new music…but in the meantime I’m scrambling to put up what remains of my little backyard garden. After all, this weekend we had our first frost.
This Saturday, after knocking about the flea for a hot second and trying our hands at brunch, we decided we needed to get out. The city felt like it had a lid on it, and we needed to break away. We headed out to Rockaway, the world opening up for us, turning from grey and stifling still to open and cool the farther we got down Flatbush avenue. It was sweatshirt weather, jeans rolled up, swimsuits stuck into our bags as afterthoughts, hopeful necessities included by our road trip habit (swim every day, just in case). We headed to Fort Tilden, drove by the abandoned barracks and strange decaying outbuildings, and crested the dune to find the beach deserted, the sun slinking sideways, the wind whipping the sand low along in that autumn way that is at once beautiful and a little lonely. After a summer of sun, the water was warm, much warmer than the air, and we decided to go for it. Slipped our sandy feet through our skinny jeans, shimmied into our suits piecemeal, shucked our work shirts and infinite necklaces and went for the double-figure-8-high-five-run-in (if you’ve never done this it’s the best way to get into a chill ocean: start back to back, run half of a figure 8 back to your starting point, meet in the middle and high five, run the other half of the figure 8, meet, high five, and then sprint into the ocean). It was perfect. The air cool, the water warm, the wind blowing rainbow spray back from the ocean crests, the wheeling gulls, the JFK 747’s coming in every 10 minutes. 
Getting out, goosebumps and shivers, heartbeats and the golden sun. When we got back home, the sun had gone down, the temperature dropped to 40 degrees. Just like that, it was over. We had gotten the last possible swim of the season, the end of Indian Summer, the start of whiskey weather. But we still had the feeling of wind in our hair and salt on our skin. Perfection.
I’m a sucker for good packaging. When I went to the co-op this week, these concord grapes were laid out like a hot breakfast in their own specially designed little cardstock bag, a squatter version of an apple sack, with a long white stitched handle and perfect Manischewitz-y purple font extolling their delicious and organic status. And, they smelled so very grapey, an olfactory punch powerful enough to create lush sense memories on the spot. I bought a bag and carried them home. By the time I got them back to the apartment, the bag was a crumplety mess, and when I liberated them from their 4x6x4 home it was like a grape clown-car. They just kept coming and I realized I had way more grapes on my hands than I could reasonably eat. Sharp-sweet, tannic, and full of seeds, what to do? Obviously, make Grape Jam. I got out my laminated “making jam without added pectin” chart from the very back of my recipe binder, and went to work. Skinning, seeding, boiling, sugaring, boiling, pouring into jars, putting hot hot hot on toast. Sweet, simple, at once fresh and old fashioned, this jam turned out fantastically, and it’s the most glorious rich dark purple color. Oh boy!
Quick jams like this are sort of just about the easiest thing you can make. Have a pot? Can you stir? Good. You’ve got what it takes. If you’ve never made jam before, this tutorial is ah-mazing and has great pictures of each step. This kind of lazy-man’s jam plays fast and loose with canning/preserving requirements, so it will only keep for a few weeks in your fridge (add “the space to store a pot large enough for water bath canning” to my “homesickness vs. wanderlust” chart) but with enough crusty bread and one or two friends who should be gifted a sweet little pick-me-up-in-a-jar and you’ll go through it in no time.
It’s a rainy chill day in Brooklyn. This and the pending expiration of a big coupon to our favorite restaurant has Sweetheart and I playing hooky for an impromptu movie-lunch-day-date. Brooklyn, we love you, even when you’re damp.
rainy brooklyn image from here
Right on the heels of yesterday’s inspiring daily regimen from Henry Miller, my dear Maman sent me this to-do list from the man in black, Johnny Cash. I particularly like #2 and #3, and in light of the source, #9.
image from here.
It seems like everyone I know is searching for a way to make sense of how we live within our days. Remember Ben Franklin? The 8 hour day? We’re all looking to balance work and life and love and living and adventure, to find time to do good honest labor without sacrificing life for livelihood. I think that’s why I love this sort of schedule making, list keeping, trying to order genius and justify humanity. I also love how this particular list from Henry Miller is a bit contradictory (go drink if you feel like it/write first and always, write with pleasure only/work according to program and not according to mood). The contradictions sort of get down to the basics of the thing: do the best that you can with what you have. And if only: Work calmly, joyously, recklessly at what is at hand.
And now, off to work.
Sweetheart and I had the distinct pleasure of going to this benefit concert yesterday. It wasn’t just an afternoon of fabulous music (though the Aoifa O’Donovan-Noam Pikelny-Chris Eldridge-fueled cover of “Don’t let it Bring You Down” really made my day), it felt like the Gowanus equivalent of a barn-raising. Put together by our late-night favorite high-lonesome crooner (and good god-fearing man) Michael Daves, the concert was put on to raise money to replace the coffered plaster ceiling at the Old First Reform Church in Park Slope. The church was founded by our favorite high-lonesome (and good-godfearing-pegleg) Peter Stuyvessant in the 1650’s (around the same time as the Elmendorf Reform Church up in Harlem), and moved around Brooklyn as the congregation grew, landing in its current location in 1891. Loosened over time by the rumbling of the yellow line under its buttresses, the plaster ceiling of the old church started falling, Chicken Little style, just last year:
The whole story- of how the ceiling fell and how it’s being fixed (a little bit at a time) is poetic and human and beautiful. Learn more here, and if you have a few bucks, put ’em in. We’re working on a building.
In anticipation of the frost, we pulled up all of our flourishing basil and made a huuuuuuge batch of pesto. We’ve now got at least 15 summer-bombs in our freezer to make it through the long winter. I continue to be wowed by the perseverance and successes of our little backyard garden. The last basil plant I kept in the city committed herbicide by jumping out of our 6th floor window and landing, crime scene style, at the bottom of the airshaft. I bet it’s still down there. Are my snack-sized frozen zip-locs a glorious root cellar full of pickles and preserves? Not quite, but, hey, baby steps. Have a wonderful weekend!
This morning: woke up in Brooklyn, trimmed back my tomatoes, thought about ham, filled this out. A true Virginia Absentee.
I love New York. Today: on our way to Ping’s in Chinatown for a traditional Dim Sum breakfast to undtraditionally celebrate Rosh Hashanah with Sweetheart’s family. Shanah Tovah, Cha siu bao!
Feather By Feather 