[San Francisco at dusk, January 2012.]

The other night after work I walked home because I’d sat still all day and my legs were twitching to move through the cool clear almost-dark. It was sort of a last-minute decision; I was waiting for the light to change on my way to the bus, looked over to the right, and saw the early-evening-but-not-yet-sunset light. My feet seemed to turn away from the clutch of commuters of their own accord, setting themselves firmly up the (slight) hill on Bush Street before I registered what was happening. I wasn’t sure where the walk would take me – having walked home previous times I’ve gone up the fairly dirty and unaesthetic Market Street before splitting off west into my neighborhood – but it didn’t much matter. I simply wanted to go.

It’s about two and a half miles from work door to apartment door (aka, home), which isn’t so long really. It felt even shorter as I hiked along past little shops and grubby, tucked-away bars with funny names, laundromats and dry cleaners and churches interspersed with various healing centers (this is SF, after all) and corner markets. I wondered a little over some of the names and thought that the apartment buildings looked so nice but would it be loud in this neighborhood? I thought about what I’d make for dinner. I clenched with anxiety over a few things but pushed them away. I tried not to obsess over did my ITB twinge as I passed the Chinatown gate or is that hypochondria and instead looked out over my city, blue in the waning light. The light in San Francisco is sort of magical I think. There’s nothing else like it.

California shimmers in the sun, it’s true, and has been particularly shimmery this month. Weeks like the ones we’ve had — drought worries notwithstanding, it’s a gorgeous spell of days that’s a sort of time out of time — are to be savored even as we anxiously eye the water table. When real summer rolls around, thick with fog and the drip-drip-drip of water from the redwood leaves onto the ferns, we’re more likely to closet ourselves away with tea and Mozart’s Mass in C- and lots of wool blankets and warm things to eat. Or maybe that’s just me. Summer of the heart? Oh, that comes at the most unexpected times here and we’ll take it when we can.

Right now is a strange season. It’s the very mid of mid-winters but the sun shines and shines relentlessly without even a wisp of fog. I know it is brilliant and gorgeous and polishing the rocks and sand out at Baker Beach, and along the coastal trail that winds from the Palace of the Legion of Honor (you can get a surprisingly good lunch there, just to note) to Land’s End even as I type this. We went out there on Saturday and lazed a bit in the sun and ate the last of the Christmas cookies from Maine and it didn’t feel one bit like January. All the way out to Ocean Beach past the Bath ruins and the Cliff House the sun burned with fierce purpose. The tide was out and the beach, when we peered round the blinding glare, was wider even than at its usual. I am projecting myself there today, would trade the olive trees outside the window for that empty and booming beach just for an hour. A girl can dream …

[Pacific Ocean looking Southwest from the Sutro Baths, January 2012.]

I was talking about San Francisco this morning with my mum-in-law as we ate leftover berry muffins. I kept getting up to put away dishes and gather up the stuff I needed for the day, always with an eye on the clock (though I ended up being late in anyway) and always with an ear tuned to the conversation. There’s so little I know of my city, though I have – and do – make attempts to learn more; I saw an old photograph of the Cliff House this weekend at the museum that has prompted this bit of San Francisco wistful nostalgia for how-it-was. Dirt roads and houses of ill repute and filthy gold miners swinging through town to spend their hard-scrabbled nuggets on whisky and all – I would take it for a week, just to see.

San Francisco was once: gleaming with hope and teeming with horses and trolleys. Ships sailed in and out of the bay and there was no bridge yet (if you have ever seen that Ansel Adams photograph, “Golden Gate Before the Bridge,” you’ll know how strange and different it would have been to our modern eyes accustomed now to seeing that great span). Way out at the edge of town, in what is now the Sunset District, the few people who did start building houses found themselves thwarted by sandstorms when they planted gardens. The tram line ran out there and the tracks were often covered by drifting sand; still, I bet for a kid it was a fantastic place to live. All that empty space along the beach for hiding out and rambling, whichever you chose.

We munched on our muffins and sipped our cups of tea and I could almost see it out the window. Many buildings in my neighborhood – one of which, sadly, burned in fire just before Christmas – are so old they have stood for over 100 years. I love that about the city, that there are still so many houses and structures that survived the great 1906 earthquake and devastating fire. I love that nature is so close here. Perched on the edge of the Pacific, I sometimes think when the earth gives another, inevitable massive heave we’ll slide right into the ocean with hardly a splash. In the meantime we marvel over raccoons in Alamo Square Park and hope to catch a glimpse of the coyotes near the Buffalo Pasture (err — I do) and take walks home that remind us that we humans should tread lighter on the earth. We are the impermanent part of the universe after all, and perhaps in 1000 years San Francisco will be deserted and sand will once again drift over the train tracks along with a wayward grizzly bear come down from the north.

In the meantime, we are here. And when here we must fortify, and there are some days when oatmeal simply won’t do. Instead, muffins. I know it seems like all I do is bake and little else — I swear I have been cooking dinner nearly every night, even if very simple like last night which was just roasted potatoes and cauliflower and chickpeas with garlic and spinach and a piece of salmon baked in white wine and lemon juice and vegetable broth and then, YES, a chocolate-chocolate cake — but it is my wont it seems. Sunday morning I slid out from under the pile of the NY Times and whisked together a batter as quickly as possible using what I had on hand – the best muffins yet. I used a little whole wheat pastry flour here, some slivered almonds, more cinnamon than is usual, and brown sugar. They turned out dense and not-too-sweet and moist and a little crunchy and full of summer – perfect for this strange winter season and for meanderings of both body and spirit.

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[San Francisco, October 2011.]

Fall: utterly, truly. The light is fantastic, slanting against San Francisco’s buildings in the late afternoons and curling around the cyprus trees in Alamo Square Park. Last Saturday I picked roma tomatoes and early girls, the very last of the season, from my parents’ neighbor’s garden (Linus the cat keeping us company), and basil, and lemon cucumbers, and so this week my fridge is full of roasted tomato and garlic soup, homemade tomato sauce, and pesto. The other night I baked my ‘make everything better’ cookies (oatmeal chocolate chip) and the house smelled deliciously of caramelizing butter and sugar, with a sweet under note of roasted cauliflower. Season’s change.

I love fall. I love October.

It’s not just because it’s my birth-month. October in California can be heart-breakingly beautiful. It can rain a lot, and some years it does, but if we’re lucky it’s a year like this one when the sun shines almost every day, the sky is that deep October-blue (I swear it’s only this particular shade during this particular month), and the breeze is mild. I remember an October about six years ago when I was spending time in Northern California as a sort of hiatus making the decision about whether I would finally pack up and move from Washington DC. I was training for the Marine Corps Marathon, my first, and spent hours and hours outside in the cool (and not-so) sun running up and down the back roads of Sebastopol and in the Point Reyes National Seashore. It was one of the Octobers we’re experiencing this year: not a drop of rain, the sky that inimitable blue, the days stretching long and full of sun. I don’t miss that time at all, because it was not a particularly good time, but I do miss the empty days a bit. I miss being outside so much.

Still, time has expanded again for me, and I am grateful for it. And so I chew over what to fill it with — running, of course; writing letters, yes; mailing off a few small packages, absolutely; contemplating the upcoming holidays, um, gulp; considering what to cook next, always. Also this week I made a sort of quinoa risotto with (frozen!) peas and chopped red onion and wilted chard and sharp cheddar cheese that I must, I really must, make again. It was delicious. I made it for dinner the day after my birthday — a treat to myself — and then I further treated myself to the cupcake my friend had procured for me from Miette as a belated birthday present:

[Chocolate cupcake from Jerilee, October 2011.]

I need to make a homemade batch soon, as well as more of that risotto ….

And I want to make

cauliflower soup
roasted butternut squash with maple syrup and sea salt (sorry, husband, but I must)
white bean and kale baked in the oven with parmesan
apple and pear ice cream
a tarte tatin
the perfect loaf of bread
vegetable-laden pizza from scratch
homemade ricotta cheese, and yogurt

[Milk and cookies, October 2011.]

But there are other things on my mind this October, when I’m not playing with the Thanksgiving menu (!) and dreaming about more roasted vegetable gratins. Specifically, writing projects and the reality that it’s time to dive back in. I wish I could show you the number of drafts I have in various folders and states of completion; suffice to say there are a lot. A very lot. (OK, maybe it’s better that you can’t see them. I would rather not see them myself.) Some are food-related, some are California-related, some are related to neither one of these things — but all of them are waiting not-so-patiently for me to pick up the thread I dropped during the last six months.

Truth is, I’ve been trying to work on a book proposal for … oh, let’s say it’s been a quite awhile. I wrote one a few years back and it seemed promising and even made its way out into the world but then there was that whole market crash and the publishing world sort of froze and alas it slunk off quietly to be retired as yet another one of my projects that didn’t go anywhere. It took me a bit of time to work up the mental energy to start another one, but I did … and then insecurity got in the way. (How writers are plagued with insecurity. I can barely even call myself a ‘writer’, even, it’s that bad.) What have I got to say, after all? So much has been said already; can my voice bring anything important to the mix? Or am I just contributing to more background noise? I don’t want to do simply to do — I want it to matter, to have meaning (see also why I got into journalism all those years ago).

I could write about vegetarian cooking; I could write about vegan baking; I could write about California and San Francisco and coming home and venturing out and about all the beautiful places I love in this state; I could write about how I cook not because it is this hugely meaningful thing but because it makes me feel good and I like to feed people (yes, please) and there is a peculiar satisfaction that comes from turning ordinary vegetables into something marvelous that transcends description; I could write about the bits and pieces that make up a life, punctuated by the meals created and consumed; I could write stories about living in this particular corner of the world — Northern California, but my Northern California — and the food that is grown and made and cooked here. But … does anyone really want to read any of that? Can you make that into something … more?

Lately I’ve been reading books about the West — the west as it was once, all forest and granite and desert and shore-into-sea, which is the same but different from the way it is now — written by Timothy Egan and Wallace Stegner and Steinbeck (I’ve even contemplated revisiting Norman Maclean, though he wrote not of the coastal west but of rivers and pine trees) because of the spare cleanliness of the prose, the images there. I fell down deep into “Angle of Repose” this summer and wanted never to climb out — I brought it along on our Yosemite trip, lugging the heavy tome with me as is my backpacking tradition — and I can imagine myself writing in a similar vein about San Francisco as it was just before the earthquake (well, I guess I have done this, but that draft also ground to halt due to my insecurity that I have no idea what I’m doing when I try to write fiction). Or the little towns across the bridge and up north; I long to write about them, too, all that history and magic that still exists (just go out to Pierce Point Ranch on the edge of Tomales Bay and tell me you can’t see the children who went to school there, probably slightly sullen they weren’t allowed out into the crashing day to run down to the ocean below but instead had to read about the Revolutionary War). California is my place, as you know, but dare I even hope to fit myself into the legion of writers who have and do write about it so well?

Well, we all know this is not a train of thought to let continue down the track. The ‘muse’ is nonexistent in my opinion, and instead of waiting and wishing for her you must just get going. Hard work and perseverance makes a writing life, and a bit of luck, and a bit of time, and maybe a small amount of talent, too, but for the most part you just have to work work work. And push aside the lingering feelings of self-doubt that your idea is tired and that even if you had a good one you couldn’t explore it fully. That may be the most difficult bit of all.

(I am putting this here to remind myself, in the sunshine of late October 2011, that the only way to get over oneself is to keep going.)

Spring is often touted as the season of renewal and beginning, when the earth stirs from its long sleep and bursts into bloom and brush. But for me, despite the time change, the shorter days, the cooler temperatures that make me wistful for summer, fall has always been my time to start things. I may not be settling my pack onto my shoulders and lacing up my boots before planting my feet firmly on the John Muir Trail to hike its entirety but perhaps I can do it metaphorically, this beautiful October. I can sharpen the proverbial pencil, square my shoulders, take a deep breath, look ahead, set off. I can take up the work I’ve let drift, and begin again.

And so I will.

[Inverness, September 2011.]

Fall is settling in though the calendar promises a few weeks more of summer — but look, the apples hang fat and heavy and ripe, leaves are turning brittle and drifting across streets and deserted paths in the Seashore alike, blackberries are coming into their waning days (though there are a few left, lingering until October perhaps), tomatoes silently beg to be used now immediately in great pots of sauce seasoned with freshly-picked bay leaves and the last of the basil, in soups with the last of the season’s oregano, or in feta-infused salads, the sun is making more of a regular — if late-breaking — appearance. In these in-between days I am drinking cups and cups of green tea, eating bowls of dried cranberry-studded oatmeal, and crunching on handfuls of salty pistachio nuts as snacks. I am wistful, wishful, pointing my thoughts ahead to mid-October when I shall have all the free time in the world I could ever wish for — yet at the same time I’m wishing time could s-l-o-w down.

Oh. Autumn. The cool breeze, the bluest sky, the ruffled bay subsiding back into its placid, Indian Summer shimmer. I have packed up the camping gear but a little red tin canister of fuel for the stove is still kicking around my bedroom because I am too busy lazy to haul the backpack down and stow it neatly away — or maybe it’s just that I am in full acceptance that summer is practically over and I don’t want to be reminded too much that it’s so. Or maybe I’m just lazy.

Not too lazy to cook, though, and thank goodness. No matter how hectic life can get, and no matter how few minutes I may have, there is always time for the kitchen. Even if I’m producing the usual pots of quinoa with assorted veg, or quesadillas with home made (and not by me) tortillas, or vegan chocolate cupcakes with chocolate buttercream and not being particularly adventurous, the kitchen — in all seasons, though particularly during fall for some reason, could it be all the glorious produce? — is my place to be.

[Sebastopol, September 2011.]

In the midst of the blackberry picking-and-jamming week, I cooked a lot. I split my time between Marin and Sonoma Counties, spending a good portion of that time outdoors madly gathering berries and swimming in Ives Pool (I’ve finally conquered the one-and-a-half mile, hallelujah), as well as behind the stove. There were sweets — a Guinness chocolate cake for one, as well as a strawberries and cream-laden Victoria sponge, a batch of chocolate cupcakes, a vegan mixed-fruit crumble — and roasted cauliflower, big salads and corn on the cob. And there were also roasted chickens. Several of them, in fact, which has this vegetarian cringing slightly at the moral implications (though they were all raised locally, and supposedly humanely) though much more confident — and less squeamish — about preparing them than she used to be.

I am, and probably always will be, strictly vegetarian. I don’t miss meat, never crave it, disdain seafood (always have), and even the supposed ‘vegetarian downfall’ — i.e. bacon — doesn’t tempt me in the least. But I do feel as though I somewhat limit myself as a cook — and also I am marrying someone who, while not a meat-fiend, certainly enjoys it — by infrequently cooking meat. So I’ve been dipping in a proverbial toe into the meat-cooking waters, and not the smallest one either. I do try always to buy the animal of choice from a reputable source (by which I mean employs the words ‘free-range,’ ‘grass-fed,’ ‘local,’ ‘sustainably raised,’ etc.) which soothes my conscience a bit and also it’s important to me. Mostly I’ll do wild-caught fish either baked or sauteed, which is pretty easy and makes everyone happy. I’ve yet to purchase and/or cook a steak or other red meat — and that’s something, strangely, I’m itching to do and may attempt this weekend after a long-awaited visit to my farmers’ market. But mainly, lately, I’ve been roasting chicken.

What is it about roast chicken that feels homey, comfortable? Well, I don’t really known except for it does. And it’s easy to make — rub with olive oil (or butter) and salt and pepper and a variety of fresh or dried herbs, squeeze the juice of half a lemon over the top (and put the other half inside, along with an onion), slip some sliced heirloom tomatoes into the roasting pan and add a decent glug of white wine, and stick in the oven for an hour or so while you make the rest of the meal. It is a lovely thing to make for fall, too, because it’s a good excuse to turn on the oven to warm up the house a bit as the temperature starts to cool down and is simple enough so you don’t have to think about it much; that means of course that you can turn your attention to your vegetable side dishes. This is the time to wallow in late-season corn, summer squash, rainbow chard, beets. You know what I’m talking about.

I wanted to share my new fail-safe for roast chicken. I do think most cooks have their standard roasted chicken recipe, and even though I’m a die-hard (it’s true) vegetarian I’m glad to finally have solidified mine. I’ve done chickens the Zuni Cafe way, which turn out tremendously, but that recipe involves a bit more work (you must dry-brine the chicken for a day or two before you plan to cook it, and need an oven that can perform well on a high-heat setting — ahem, not my crappy little apartment oven). Zuni’s isn’t the recipe you’d make on a Wednesday night after a long day when you’d like to use that hour the chicken is roasting to throw together a salad and bake a few potatoes and then enjoy a glass of wine during the 20 minutes you have left before you eat dinner. But mine — mine is.

I made this a few weeks ago and served it with a large pot of well-buttered mashed potatoes, still-snapping green beans and zucchini, roasted cauliflower, and a big salad. I made it again (mom’s request) a few nights later and served it with a bowl of barely wilted spinach, chopped red onion, and toasted pine nuts, roasted red and baby potatoes, and numerous cobs of corn. (I ate slabs of baked tofu, in case you were wondering.) It’s not on the agenda any time soon but it could be; it’s nearly fall, after all, and I feel like cooking comfort food. This is, for sure, comforting in both the act of making it and the way it tastes.

If you’re feeling extra ambitious — or have a surfeit of plums — while your chicken’s roasting, consider baking this brown butter blueberry plum bread I wrote about for the Point Reyes Light (to help out a friend of a friend, and also for fun). It’s delicious for breakfast, afternoon snack, or post-dinner, and is a perfect complement to fall’s shifting light and cooling breeze.

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[Blackberries, Sebastopol, September 2011.]

This past week or so has involved lots of blackberries. Loads. Some I didn’t pick and many I did, and I still have the scratches to prove it. There were also huckleberries, which are more time-consuming to gather but less prickly, as well as three chickens roasted by me, but I will save the diatribe about the vegetarian cooking meat yet again for another time. Let’s just say I am much less squeamish about it than I used to be and am reminded again that nights when I get to cook good, healthy, happy-making food for others are the best nights, whether or not I actually eat all of the food I make. (Also, I now have a really delicious — I heard — and reliable recipe for a roasted chicken.)

Anyway, hello. It’s September. (It’s September???) It’s September, absolutely. And despite a 5:45 a.m. wake-up this morning, despite a terribly long, terribly foggy bus ride in from Sonoma County, the sun is shining in San Francisco today, I have had a deliciously strong Blue Bottle coffee from Jackson Place Cafe, and I think/hope I will be able to get through the rest of the day in one piece so that I can go home, bake chocolate cupcakes, and fling myself onto the couch to watch the Giants game before crawling into bed early.

Oh, lovely bed …

September means apples and blackberries — to pick, to eat, to jam or sauce, to bake with, to can. There are currently 100 or so tiny apples from the tree stored in my parents’ extra fridge (as an aside, I was glad to see this story in last week’s New York Times, the one I’ve been wanting to write for years, about the plight of the Gravensteins in my beloved home town) to be incorporated into a major event next month, and 80 small jars of blackberry jam neatly stacked in a closet in Inverness. I have about 20 more to go but I also think I have enough berries to manage it. I guess you could say I’m feeling good about the blackberries. (And the apples, but in the interest of the sanity I’m skipping the applesauce-making for now.)

Blackberry picking can seem daunting initially — the thorny vines, the hunting for fully ripe berries, the balancing on tiptoes to grab as many as you can — but it’s also somewhat meditative. It’s repetitive work, but because it’s not my everyday job (which is also repetitive) it doesn’t get too boring; because I’ve chosen to undertake the task it’s more fun than excruciating, which might be the word I’d use to describe it if I relied on berry-picking to pay my rent. Funny how that works. However, I will note that I will never complain at paying x for a basket of berries at the farmers’ market ever again. There’s a lot of time that goes into those pretty displays of fruit.

Out here in Northern California, the summer of 2011, we picked along the coast in Bolinas (foggy) and made friends with the horses at the farm there; we picked along the Inverness ridge (hot); we picked along the bike trail in Sebastopol late on a Sunday afternoon (sunny and just cool enough). We picked with adults and we picked with kids and I’ll go out on a limb here to profess that I think mostly everyone had a good time (the key is to quit before you get too tired/distracted). I estimate we picked about 20 pounds of blackberries in total, though as I am awful about measuring and also about being precise with recipes it’s difficult to say for sure. But — there were a lot of berries that went into the freezer. A lot.

Later, I turned all those berries into jam — masses of it. Me being me, I fretted over how well it was setting or if I’d have enough or if cutting down on the sugar was a good idea or if the mess all those berries made whilst they were cooking down was worth it. But I forged on anyhow — I poured and sealed and processed and tried to let the worry go. (To address the fretting: it set great once it cooled, cutting down on the sugar was a fantastic idea, and messes can be cleaned with just a little bit of extra effort.) I may be slightly crazy, but looking at my jars of jam marshaled into gleaming rows gives me an incredible sense of accomplishment, even if most (all) will be given away. Much like cooking meat, it’s about the doing of it rather than the actual eating of it that makes me happy.

[Breakfast, September 2011.]

Still — and I must honest even if it’s a bit of a brag — that jam tastes darned good, especially on toasted challah bread smeared with a little butter and alongside a 12 oz., double-shot americano from Hardcore Espresso (my new drink, dontcha know);.

[In Sebastopol, September 2011.]

One month ago we were in Yosemite — one month! It’s hard to fathom. I barely caught my breath before going on to the next thing but such is life. I am fortunate mine is made up of so many cooking projects (I cooked not a few good meals during the last week, as well as baked a gorgeous loaf of banana-cocoa bread among other things in addition to all that jam) and walks through the fields and swims in the pool downtown and good company around the table. The little things, of course, but as I’ve mentioned too many times to count, the little things are the ones that last. But they’re also fleeting — just like blackberries. You’ve got to catch hold of them while you can.

Things to do with blackberries:

Eat with Greek yogurt!
Turn into a vegan crumble
Fold into lemon cake
Incorporate into a summer fruit cobbler
Or

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**Canning/preserving instructions are available widely and will be further detailed by me at a later date … but if you choose to preserve the jam, it’s not that difficult (truly).

[Yosemite Valley from above, August 2011.]

It’s difficult to do justice to Yosemite through words though I can try — the waterfalls, especially this summer after an enormous snow fall and long spring, are spilling over in a mad torrent, crashing down into the valley and roaring in a blur of white and green past hikers toiling up alongside. The mountains stand as they have for centuries: still, tipped with gold at certain moments of the day, and almost too perfect to be real. In the back country little streams rush and hum, ferns droop low to touch the water, mosquitoes linger too long and will not depart even when swatted-at. Almost everywhere you turn there is a surprise: a bear sticking its nose into Lukens Lake, a shooting star falling through a Pleiades-flecked sky, the faint sweetness of smoke from a forest wildfire drifting through the air, the bluest afternoon sky at the base of Half Dome, the cleanest, whitest-gold sun.

I can write these things, but they feel thin; most of us know the feeling Yosemite and the high Sierra creates, and each of us has our own private experience of it, perhaps even too precious to articulate. We spent five days there — my brother, my sister-in-law, D, and I — and it never ceases to amaze me how easy it is, in the end, to leave everything behind. Existing without computer, bed (!), running water, or electricity, sleeping outside and waking with the sun (or, err, not), hiking miles up and down rocky trails every day carrying heavy packs, is to reduce life to its most elemental. Time pauses somehow, or at least eases and slows. When I am out there I believe I could stay, and happily so. I would not miss this more settled life; I think I would prefer one fashioned of rock and sky and sharp trees, the world spread out before me to be discovered at my leisure.

Now back in San Francisco, with the press of ‘normal’ daily life once again weighing down a bit, it feels surreal to remember what I was doing a week ago (hiking 18 miles up to Half Dome and back; filtering glacially cold water from mountain streams). I know I was there but — was I?

Instead of analyzing too much, I should just tell you about what we ate.

[Breakfast, Yosemite, August 2011.]

Mornings were usually: oatmeal with chopped apples, dried cranberries, a sprinkle of cashew nuts, nescafe with dried milk and sugar. We’d eat, clean the dishes, finish packing up and set off, stopping in an hour or so for a piece of fruit, an oatmeal-chocolate chip cookie, a granola bar. Lunch was, the first day, hummus and cheese and tomato on whole-wheat bread, with peanut butter and blackberry jam on bread for lunches the rest of of the time, probably more fruit, some trail mix, and whatever bits and pieces survived the smashing into the bear canisters every day that still looked good. Dinner was different each night, thanks to master planners Kurt and Emily: fried tofu with rice noodles, broccoli, and scallions the first; chili mac (the standard Annie’s shells and cheddar, essential to all backpacking trips in the Spiridakis tradition, mixed with vegetarian chili) the second; and brothy noodle soup and a couple of those reconstituted ‘backpacker meals’ the final night (hey — we were tired!). There were also an assortment of chocolate, little snacks, teas (and emergen-Cs) scattered throughout the days at whim.

You could probably argue we brought perhaps too much food but in the end ate nearly all of it, and nothing was sacrificed to bears, raccoons, or forgetfulness. Often we made campfires, and if not too tired sat up and watched the stars come out. We slept two nights next to fairly significant creeks — or, significant enough so their gurgles and rushes sang us to sleep. The last day we packed out and eventually made our way down to the valley for beer, tacos, and the end of the Giants game which they actually won, and recounted our adventures and tallied up minor injuries. Afterward we swam in the frigid Merced near the backpackers camp and went to bed earlyish to wake up at dawn for the long trek up to Half Dome (no cables for me this time, alas; fourth time was apparently not the charm) and back down the John Muir Trail from Nevada Falls to Happy Isles, thirsty and dust-spattered.

[Vernal Falls, August 2011.]

Yosemite basically puts almost everything to rights. It is clean air and the high mountains — lavender some times, grey-blue at others — rising behind Curry Village nearly close enough to touch and granite warmed by the summer sun. It is childhood and memory and climbing and hiking and sweat in your eyes. It is quiet. It reminds you to breathe even when it takes it away (the altitude gains, the sheer beauty of the place). It is the most gorgeous place on earth to me — magical, yet so solid and real that I only need picture it in my mind to be soothed.

In the back country it all fades away: Wedding planning, tired, stupid injury, deadlines, tasks, burn-out. And to be there with three of my most favorite people in the world was a gift. We are still young and childless for now, and I know how special this time was: to walk along for miles, singing — particularly when we saw the bear, to scare it away — or talking desultorily about whatever was on our minds, stopping to eat lunch and swim at the perfect expanse of flat rock along Yosemite Creek, to simply be together without worry or responsibility. I was slightly nervous I wouldn’t be able to handle it all due to the ongoing injury but it turned out to be exactly what I needed. I am still biding my time until I can run again, but it feels just a little bit less desperate (that and hiking all those miles was an enormous ego boost as well as a wake-up call to my muscles), and I am grateful. Sometimes maybe you have to force yourself over the worry, to push past and through.

As we left the valley, tired from the miles logged, dirty and a bit footsore but very happy, I peered round the last bend that takes you away and out, trying to imprint those mountains and trees in my mind. They are already lodged firmly in my heart — so far away now, with the clattering of cars outside my apartment the last sounds I hear as I go to sleep rather than the wind through the pine trees, I cannot help but wish to be back. Still — I know I will be, even if it’s an almost physical pain to not be there right now. The valley and the trails above wait for my returning, shining by early morning sunlight, by starlight, by the moon’s light. I always think of Yosemite as shining somehow, though its surfaces are battered by storm and sun and wear down and evolve each day that goes by. But yes: shining.

While it may be ‘too much’ to quote John Muir yet again I must, for his words still hold as true today as when he wrote them about this beloved spot. I half expected to see him coming down the trail to the Yosemite Falls overlook, the breeze tossing his beard over his shoulder and his feet set straight ahead of him as he ‘sauntered’ over the switchbacks. In his memory, the Yosemite: home, still and always.

Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity; and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life.

No dogma taught by the present civilization seems to form so insuperable an obstacle in the way of a right understanding of the relations which culture sustains to wildness as that which regards the world as made especially for the uses of man. Every animal, plant, and crystal controverts it in the plainest terms. Yet it is taught from century to century as something ever new and precious, and in the resulting darkness the enormous conceit is allowed to go unchallenged.

~ John Muir

[At Green Gulch Farm, July 2011.]

A weekend of good eating and, as sometimes happens, not too many photographs taken. My sister-in-law Emily is in town, and thus we meandered and farmers marketed and drank drinks in West Marin and petted an orange-and-white cat at the farm and wished for the sun in Stinson (fog all the day-long) and yoga-d and drank iced coffees in the park and shopped a wee bit and ate dinner at Zuni Cafe (perhaps not the very best place for vegetarians, but c’est la vie) and went to bed early. A good weekend and a mellow and relaxing one to boot, even if the camera lay quiet. Perhaps sometimes it’s better that way? (Still, thank goodness for the iphone.)

[Pelican Inn drinks, July 2011.]

Emily, as I have mentioned probably many, many times by now, is a fantastic cook as well as a cooking instructor — which means that she knows all the tricks and tips (how to properly slice an onion, grow a kitchen garden, and can describe how to make pizza dough with great ease, etc., etc.) that go into preparing a good meal, and she also knows intrinsically what will taste right. She (and my brother) and I, I think, have a similar cooking aesthetic — we cook fairly straightforward food with good ingredients that is never boring (I hope!) despite its simplicity. And, we love to do it. She has already volunteered to bake a flourless chocolate cake for my wedding this fall — I must provide something for the gluten-free folk in attendance, you see, thus upping the cakes to three at this point — and we had a simultaneously giddy yet serious discussion about should it be one or two tiers, should it incorporate ganache, what recipe should be employed (probably the Julia Child one).

So cooking with Emily is a joy and an all-too-infrequent pleasure I do not take for granted. Perhaps this is was in the back of my mind when I took her to the Fillmore farmers market on Saturday morning? There, I first bought a gorgeous (perhaps second-most gorgeous I’ve ever seen) head of lettuce and some radishes from a youngish farm that’s started selling there — we would have salad soon, for sure. I congratulated the guy who sells the delicious fresh eggs on his recent graduation and thought about the next morning’s breakfast. By the time we made it to my usual farmer’s spot and were galvanized by the piles of beautiful corn on the cob, it was a foregone conclusion that we’d cook dinner together that night.

We made: corn, shaved off the cob, and sauteed with slivers of red onion, garlic, butter and salt and pepper (Emily); three tiny pale green summer squashlets sliced finely and simmered with lots of garlic and olive oil with chickpeas added near the end (me); roasted red and new potatoes (me); a large salad (Emily made the dressing, I did the greens); roasted heirloom tomatoes; with a slab of smoked salmon for the omnivores. We sipped glasses of red wine, our appetites sharpened by a ramble along some of the dirt paths near Muir Beach, and ate and ate — we were too full for the gluten-free brownies I’d baked, even.

And then, last night. Oh, last night. I love to cook for others, yes, and I love to cook with, and even more I love to be cooked for every so often, especially after a long day when the last thing you can bear to think about is what to make for dinner. Lucky, then, that Emily stayed another night in the city before departing for points south and further adventure. She treated us to a feast: corn enchiladas stuffed with roasted sweet potatoes and cheddar cheese and corn and topped with a homemade enchilada sauce, more market salad, brown rice, beans cooked down from scratch and then mashed into creamy perfection. I am eying my lunch as I type — glorious leftovers — and wondering how early is too early to eat it.

[Dinner, July 2011.]

Well, you get the general idea.

Summer these days is very grey and very green, at least in some parts, and so I suppose I must embrace the fog for the gifts it provides. I am crossing my fingers for sun, good news tomorrow, and that the vacation I desperately need will occur tout de suite.

And I’m crossing my fingers I’ll cook with Emily again very soon — next time, I will takes notes and tuck away the recipes for further exploration and sharing here.

ETA: She also made yummy and decadent vanilla baked custards. Spoiled. Utterly.