Oh spring. Oh the lovely season. I just slipped out of work for 20 minutes to take advantage of the day and went directly to the park where I threw down my coat and stretched out like a cat in the sun, The grass was blazingly green. I listened to gulls screaming at each other high above as the fog began its slow whisping in; I heard the dull roar of a Coast Guard helicopter heading for the coast. I dozed for a few moments. I read a little Alice Munro. I watched the butterflies. It was terribly idyllic.

The weather turned last week and while I doubt it will last I’m soaking up every last drop of sun, of blue sky, of sea-swept wind. I realized last week I’ve lived in San Francisco for five years and I barely even noticed it, life has been so busy. Usually I take a minute to reflect, but this year I think it only necessary to say Thank g-d I moved. And, I love this place.

I love this place for many reasons, and one of those is coworkers who have orange trees in their backyards and who then bring those oranges in to the office to share. (Note: these weren’t even the oranges growing on the trees but the ones that had fallen off. A bounty of oranges! In the backyard! I think I’m moving to the East Bay.) I don’t usually like to eat oranges much; it’s such a gamble whether they’ll be juicy or deplorably wizened once you cut into them, plus the pith, plus the effort. But these … these were small miracles of brightness, sweet and full of flavor. I ate three in one afternoon — just eating them! I never do that. Another handful I took home and squeezed into juice for my Sunday morning breakfast.

As I drank, I felt lucky to live here, and lucky to have such generous friends.

Actually, that’s a lot of what I’m feeling lately: lucky. The word ticks away at the back of my mind even when I feel the wee-est bit stretched to my limit (deadlines? I gots ‘em!) and desperately needing a nap. But really — I’m lucky. I need to remember that.

And I am: up the street from me there are cypress that are old and bent with age and wind; the landscape of my childhood. If I run the 4-ish miles through the park I’ll be at the beach, and often there are lots of dogs. I can take the bus up north to home, my childhood house. I can slip across the bay on the ferry to Marin, over the hills and into the woods to a sweet black lab who very patiently allows me to hug him at whim. I can drive up to the mountains and the Yosemite Valley. (Going to the mountains is going home, according to John Muir. Indeed: yes.) I am lucky for good friends, for real love, for piles of books from the library, for rain often and sun oftener (the fog, which comes even oftener than those, I am not so lucky for), for plane tickets east, for making udon noodles on a Friday night and sliding into bed early to watch a movie, for drinking champagne on a Sunday afternoon.

So I guess I do need to mark time’s passing a bit after all, mostly just to say:

Dear California: thanks for five years. You’re awesome.

Yesterday I fell out of strange dreams to make tea, a fried egg sandwich, quinoa soup, read the NY Times, do laundry, think about homemade jam, drink lots of water, lace up my running shoes for what turned out to be a ridiculously long excursion (12! miles!). The sun was out from the moment I stepped out of bed ’til the moment I went back to it, shining along Ocean Beach and up the coast to Marin (I could tell) and bathing the city in that white-gold light that’s so endemic here and which I’ve not seen anywhere else in quite the same way.

Just before leaving the house I drank a glass of the orange juice from my friend’s oranges — it tasted like sun, like spring, like the weather right now. I know it’s the end of citrus season and I may have to wait another year to enjoy its like again but I feel — yes! — lucky I got to savor it while I did.

So: it’s April now. Spring. There’s asparagus everywhere. I saw some tiny strawberries at the market this weekend. The guy who sells eggs at my farmers’ market is graduating college and how nice that is. I forgot my coffee on the table when I bought radishes but it didn’t matter. Later, I thinly sliced those radishes and ate them along with peeled carrots, just dipping them gently into a little pile of sea salt. Bliss.

Did I mention — lucky? I’m going to catch hold of that feeling by its heels and hang on to it for as long as possible.

* A bit of reminiscing today …

[What this fall was all about, November 2010.]

Oh hello little blog! *Gently sweeps dust out of the corners* I have terribly neglected you this fall, what with the running and the baseball and the baseball and the … You have not seen very many recipes of late, and for that I apologize. However, I have been cooking, and I have been cooking a lot. It is just that I have not made time to document it all.

October (and much of September) was marked by 1. Chocolate milk (Clover, please), to soothe my stomach after all those long miles of marathon training and 2. Baseball, specifically the San Francisco Giants who, I don’t know if you heard, WON THE WORLD SERIES this week. The San Francisco Giants, whom I have loved and cursed for almost my entire life, not only barely made the post-season (predictably taking it down to the wire for the final game of the season) but somehow also managed to beat Atlanta, Philadelphia, and then Texas while actually looking like they knew what they were doing. The Giants — my Giants. Won the World Series. The Giants! Won the World Series for the first time ever in San Francisco! Will wonders never cease?

San Francisco was a fine place to be this week — the city was awash in sun and fiery orange with people wearing their hats and shirts, and even those who weren’t ‘fans’ excited and galvanized by the energy (my friend said it felt like a small town, that community spirit, and indeed it did). I’m so glad I live here now and got to experience it; during 2002′s debacle I was marooned in DC (perhaps it was for the best after all, however.). As my brother said after the final out Monday night, “We’ve been waiting our whole lives for this.” (Not, um, to be over-dramatic about it. But baseball seems to make people over-dramatic. It certainly makes me cry, in joy and sorrow both. I’m not ashamed.)

This year we got lucky. It was an amazing run, culminating in this week’s mad parade through the city, orange and white confetti drifting down through the beautiful sun. I saw the start of it, as it magically (there’s that damn word again) began just two blocks from my office. So I baked pumpkin-chocolate chip cookies (Giants colors — “Should I throw them at the cable cars?” in which the players were riding, I asked my coworkers, but in the end they ate them so fast there wouldn’t have been enough) and we went down to yell and take photos. And there they all were taking their own photos and looking like regular guys in their regular clothes, beaming from ear-to-ear and still, I think, a little shell-shocked they managed it.

(OH, you guys. You wonderful, stress-inducing, ridiculous, infuriating, fantastic guys. San Francisco says thank you a million times over.)

Baseball and food probably seem worlds apart but in fact they are inextricably intertwined — at least for me. Baseball is hot, salty french fries (with garlic, if you’re at AT&T Park) and overpriced beer during a day game at the ballpark. It’s smuggling in sandwiches if there aren’t any veggie dogs (and it’s veggie dogs with lots of ketchup if you’re lucky enough to find them). It’s definitely peanuts in their shells. It’s the smell of hamburgers and vendors lugging heavy coolers up and down the stairs, entreating you to buy an overpriced soda or chocolate malt or ice cream cone. It’s me going to my beloved Greens for dinner on my birthday and wolfing down my (delicious) food (beet salad, squash gnocchi, chocolate and salted caramel ice cream eclairs) because a playoff game was on and g-d forbid I missed the final out (though my brother did text me with updates of the score). It’s summer, and it’s fall, and it has marked my life for as long as I can remember.

And I love it. Little else can compare with that solid, satisfying thwack when a ball soars into the outfield (or dribbles down the first baseline, as the case may be), the hum of the crowd you hear even before you enter the stadium, the crisp uniforms at the start of the game, the collective roar when someone manages a home run. If you’re a fan you follow along all the summer-long and even if your team isn’t so good you cross fingers and cheer anyway and sometimes small miracles occur and that is the magic of it. When the Giants made the World Series after 8 long years (and on a called strike!) I sort of lost my mind and screamed and jumped up and down and I know it’s a just a game but OH! It is fun anyhow (fortunately my beau is also a fan, else I might have terrified him with my fervor) and don’t we all need more fun these days (any days)?

Baseball is a silly game, for sure. The players are often overpaid and it can feel like there’s no team loyalty anymore, and ticket prices are so high, and of course it’s just a game. And yet … and yet. If you start so early, like I did, it gets a hold on you and you can’t seem to shake it. You stay up late listening to the games on the radio because you can’t bear to sleep not knowing the outcome. You groan and curse. You get used to getting so close — you get used to the torture. You wish Will the Thrill was still playing. You follow along even when you’re living away and drag your friends up to Baltimore to watch a few inter league games against another team that wears the orange-and-black. You remember the good old days. You resign yourself to always throwing it away, but hey, that’s OK — we got legacy, man, going all the way back to New York City. And then something like this happens — something that is, yes, a bit of magic and which may never happen again — and you know if you ever have kids yourself you’ll raise them up the same way, and you will be happy to do so.

In short, if you haven’t already picked up on it, baseball makes me absolutely crazy. So to counter it — and to mediate the stress during those nail-biting innings (bringing Lincecum in in the 7th?!) — I cook. Last Sunday, for example (WS Game 4) I went on a mad frenzy of cooking and baked: an applesauce cake with cinnamon cream cheese frosting via smitten kitchen; honey cake; a huge batch of cauliflower potato leek soup; whole wheat pasta with mushrooms, red onion, spinach. I’ve also baked cookies (the aforementioned pumpkin-chocolate chip), roasted cauliflower, stirred coconut milk into rice to be served with slivered, sauteed tofu and tiny green beans, made applesauce, stuffed myself with my mom’s spanikopita and grilled vegetable panini (to temper a lackluster game — and loss — during WS Game 3), and eaten a delicious salad from the pizza place in Pt. Reyes surrounded by other like-minded crazies who also could hardly believe the Giants scored 11 runs in one game (WS 1).

So guess what? I have a whole slew of recipes I’m itching to share — and I shall poste-haste. I will move on to the next thing (easing back into running, dontcha know, and I have a quickly approaching dinner party to plan, and oh yeah, Thanksgiving is mere weeks ago not to mention the new year …!), get back to the good stuff, forget all this baseball crap. Je promesse, mon petit blog! I will not leave you for such frivolous pursuits again.

But … just for right now let me say once more: The darn Gigantes won the World Series! We’ve all gotta savor this now, because it probably won’t happen again. But I think that’s what makes it so very sweet.

Of note:
- My photos of the parade on flickr
- Jon Carroll’s marvelous column about the whole thing, on sfgate

Tomorrow I am 32.

Tomorrow I am 32 and I am not, for once, baking my own birthday cake, though it is often my wont and wish to do so — no, this year will be spent drinking lots of water, carbo-loading, crossing my fingers for the Giants to win the first game of this next playoff round, and obsessing about Sunday’s 26.2 miles to be run so awfully early in the morning.

For, OH, the marathon. It is all I can think of right now — fearfully, and with great excitement. The forecast here in San Francisco has changed from sun to fog with possible rain, and though I envisioned running along the Great Ocean Highway in the wild, hot sun with salt drying white in funny tracks on my shins, I know it is far, far better to run in cool temperatures. And how pretty the bridge will look with the fog misting about its columns. Maybe I will catch sight of a few pelicans winging purposefully out to sea, like I did the time I ran a half-marathon four years ago, and the fog will burn off after all.

Oh, the marathon. Despite my hip that aches so deeply and inexplicably, despite my nerves, despite all else — I am impatient for it, eager for the camaraderie that comes with these things, the anonymous companionship of 20,000 (!) others slogging along with you, in pain and exhilaration. Into the quiet morning I shall go, solidly 32, belly full of chocolate cake, to run past the Transamerica Building (and perhaps even my office, for I work a hard stone’s throw away) with the Financial District still and nearly empty for once, and down along the bay and up through Seacliff into the park, and back ’round Lake Merced for the last four miles (I hear they are the longest slog of the long slog), and then … and then by 12.30 pm on Sunday it will be all over. I will cry and cheer and get fetched home for food and later will finally open that delicious bottle of rosé I’ve been saving since I bought it in Sonoma two (!) months ago.

It is my birthday present to myself.

But wait a minute — back to birthdays. And also cake. I have this funny thing about birthdays wherein I often end up baking my own cake/s, or throwing my own party (very happily so, I will add). See, please, a few years ago — for 29 — when I had a little wine and cheese party with a friend of mine who shares my birthday; we drew an eclectic collection of friends to my apartment (some of her law school friends, some friends I went to kindergarten — and earlier — with, an old college friend, new San Francisco friends) and stayed up late but not too drinking wine and eating fancy cheese and the madeleine cookies I for some reason thought would be a good idea to bake. We also ate cake — three of them: a coconut-pineapple (my most asked-for birthday cake, still), a chocolate with chocolate butter cream, an opera cake, sliced into thick wedges and piled high with strawberries. I’d stayed up late the night before baking. This seems to be a pattern for me.

See also my last year in DC, when my brother had me stay the night in a wonderful old farmhouse b+b near Wheatland Vegetable Farm in Virginia, where he was working and finishing out the growing season. We ate a late and delicious dinner (his treat) and I woke early on my birthday to eat fluffy scrambled eggs and pet the malodorous dogs. After, I came back to the city to cook — I’d decided, darn it, that what I wanted most to do for my birthday was to cook a birthday dinner and invite my best beloveds and so, I did.

The thing is, I love cooking, I wrote to a friend in California before the party. Love it. And I love throwing parties. So, what would make me happy would be to have a little dinner party for my birthday and I even know what I would make: a soup of wild mushrooms and herbs; onion foccacia and rich cheeses; pesto or some sort of baked-in-the-oven dish; some kind of green; chocolate cake, to finish. And drinks beforehand, and champagne also, and wine. Simple, but nice, and what I would really like to do seeing as how I won’t be sunning myself in Hawaii or washing my feet out at Keyhoe Beach with the dogs.

I think my friends thought I was slightly crazy for cooking a big meal on my birthday (I mean, it was my birth-day), but it was so sweet and satisfying to make Amarula martinis (I was on a kick with those for about six months — they are deliciously deadly, imminently sippable) and crack champagne and nibble cheese and eat the food I’d made. Those days … What better than to indulge myself in the thing I loved best? Birthdays might be a little bit selfish, after all.

For my 26th, I remember, there was

1.
-foccacia: one onion, one olive (?) with basil and tomato and fresh mozz
-hummus
-cheese and crackers

2.
-roasted garlic and tomato soup

3.
-mushroom/asparagus risotto
-green beans with garlic and lemon
-spinach/greens salad with almonds

4.
-a variation on something called a ‘Cuban Opera Cake’

We all had so much fun.

Birthdays, birthdays. One year I was in Scotland (bliss). Last year I was in London and saw the Tower (and shivered over poor Anne) and went for high tea (and a pint later). Sometimes I worked and went for dinner after; sometimes I cooked; once I was in California similarly obsessing over a marathon and went to Goat Rock in the bright sun to chase the seals. (I may have to cook belatedly this year, after the miles are logged and the shoes stowed neatly away for a little while). This year will be smaller and sweeter — I will go to the farmers’ market; I will have an early dinner at Greens; I will eat chocolate cake; I will read Dylan Thomas; I will go to bed early, in nervous trepidation, clothes laid carefully out for the morning’s early start — and I think that will suit me just fine.

Tomorrow I am 32. What comes next.

**

I know I posted this last year but I feel it is appropriate for any and every October birthday — and so here it ’tis again. I shall read it each year on my birthday, swear. Dear Dylan Thomas, you have part of my soul.

Poem in October

It was my thirtieth year to heaven
Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood
And the mussel pooled and the heron
Priested shore
The morning beckon
With water praying and call of seagull and rook
And the knock of sailing boats on the webbed wall
Myself to set foot
That second
In the still sleeping town and set forth.

My birthday began with the water-
Birds and the birds of the winged trees flying my name
Above the farms and the white horses
And I rose
In rainy autumn
And walked abroad in a shower of all my days.
High tide and the heron dived when I took the road
Over the border
And the gates
Of the town closed as the town awoke.

A springful of larks in a rolling
Cloud and the roadside bushes brimming with whistling
Blackbirds and the sun of October
Summery
On the hill’s shoulder,
Here were fond climates and sweet singers suddenly
Come in the morning where I wandered and listened
To the rain wringing
Wind blow cold
In the wood faraway under me.

Pale rain over the dwindling harbour
And over the sea wet church the size of a snail
With its horns through mist and the castle
Brown as owls
But all the gardens
Of spring and summer were blooming in the tall tales
Beyond the border and under the lark full cloud.
There could I marvel
My birthday
Away but the weather turned around.

It turned away from the blithe country
And down the other air and the blue altered sky
Streamed again a wonder of summer
With apples
Pears and red currants
And I saw in the turning so clearly a child’s
Forgotten mornings when he walked with his mother
Through the parables
Of sun light
And the legends of the green chapels

And the twice told fields of infancy
That his tears burned my cheeks and his heart moved in mine.
These were the woods the river and sea
Where a boy
In the listening
Summertime of the dead whispered the truth of his joy
To the trees and the stones and the fish in the tide.
And the mystery
Sang alive
Still in the water and singingbirds.

And there could I marvel my birthday
Away but the weather turned around. And the true
Joy of the long dead child sang burning
In the sun.
It was my thirtieth
Year to heaven stood there then in the summer noon
Though the town below lay leaved with October blood.
O may my heart’s truth
Still be sung
On this high hill in a year’s turning.

- Dylan Thomas (b. Oct. 27)

And for reading all that — a reward:

Coconut-pineapple layer cake, long-ago adapted from gourmet.com

For cake layers
2 1/3 cups cake flour (not self-rising)
2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup milk
1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla
2 sticks (1 cup) unsalted butter, softened
1 1/2 cups sugar
5 large eggs, beaten lightly

For filling
a 28-ounce can crushed pineapple in unsweetened juice
1 tablespoon cornstarch
a rounded 1/4 cup sugar

2 2/3 cups sweetened flaked coconut (a 7-ounce bag), toasted golden
and cooled

Make cake layers:
Preheat oven to 350°F. Line bottoms of 2 buttered 9- by2-inch round cake pans with rounds of wax paper. Dust pans with flour, knocking out excess.

Into a bowl sift together flour, baking powder, and salt. In a glass measuring cup stir together milk and vanilla. In a bowl with an electric mixer on medium speed cream butter 1 minute and add sugar in a steady stream, beating until light and fluffy, about 4 minutes, scraping bowl occasionally. Beat in eggs, a little at a time, beating well after each addition, until pale and fluffy. Stir in flour mixture in 4 batches alternately with milk, beginning and ending with flour mixture and stirring after each addition until batter is smooth.

Divide batter between pans, smoothing tops, and bake in middle of oven until a tester inserted in center comes out clean, about 30 minutes. Cool cake layers in pans on racks 10 minutes. Run a thin knife around edge of each pan and invert cake layers onto racks. Remove wax paper carefully and cool cake layers completely. Cake layers may be made 5 days ahead and frozen, wrapped in plastic wrap and foil. Thaw cake layers in refrigerator 1 day before proceeding with recipe.

[Spetses from the boat, August 2007.]

My coworker just gave me the August issue of Saveur, which is the Greece issue, and just a quick glance-through has me sighing, and exclaiming over the photos (oh, it is so real, so truly Greece), and wistful for that place — and also wanting to cook. Soon, soon.

For me, everything began with Greece in both the real and literary sense. It was the place from where my grandfather came, providing me with my name and my very existence. It was also the first country I visited outside of the United States. And it was the place that informed my childish imaginings –- a country of golden light and mist over the hills, strangely resembling the California landscape to which I was accustomed though I wouldn’t know how similar they are until later when I finally visited.

Hellas, agapi-mou, I’ll whisper into the stillness some nights before I fall asleep. Sweet dusty country of battered boats and ferries filled the brim with cars and mykanakis roaring back onto to land at the docks. Younger, I always pictured the Mediterranean as perfectly clear with a deep, true blue farther out and indeed it’s mostly thus though I have seen it also muddy and wild after a storm.

I’ve only gone to Greece in the summers: once in July and twice more in August. When my brother lived there for a year he’d call me from a pay phone during his first few weeks on the island where he’d landed up. February, and I could hear the rain in the background because it was so quiet then, all the tourists safely at home in Athens for the winter. At first he had a tiny apartment he had to scour out upon move-in with not much heat, and I tried to imagine him from my bigger apartment in San Francisco, so far away.

“It’s cold here,” he told me once and we were silent a little, letting the rush of the international phone line fill up the space between the words. I could see the dark, wet streets, the few cafes that were open spilling their light out onto the stone sea-wall, the horses that usually crowded the narrow alleyways shut up for the season.

Greece in the summer is hot and messy. Dogs linger around the train stations and the souvlaki sold down by Piraeus is pretty much the worst souvlaki you’ll eat when you’re there (the frappes, however, are icy cold and delicious). It’s dirty and sometimes it’s hard to breath through the smog and heat. And yet in Athens and Thessaloniki almost all the apartments have balconies and on almost all of the balconies there are plants: bright flowers spilling over the sides, herbs, strange palm-like shrubs with fronds that lift in the occasional, longed-for breeze.

I don’t know what it’s like in the winter -– my brother tells me on the smaller islands it’s quiet and people save up their summer earnings because there is not much work in the off-season, or else they go to Athens –- but I promise myself I’ll go sometime. In the cities at least the bakeries will surely still be open and if I can’t swim I can prowl the ruins of the Acropolis in the rain. I would like to see Athens just once not pressed down with the blasting white heat of summer.

[Spetses, harbor, August 2007.]

As a child I was fascinated with Greece from the moment I learned my grandfather was born there. Though I never got to have him in any real way, he left me my first name (he was “Nicholas” and so I was “Nicole” — or so I like to think it went this way) and my last (originally it was “Spyridakhs” though it was changed, probably when he came through Ellis Island, to “Spiridakis”), a wish to find my lost relatives that is yet unfulfilled, a wicked ability to acquire a good tan, and an affinity for cooking.

Then, I wanted to learn everything. I wanted to breathe Greece. I let audio tapes of the ancient myths lull me to sleep at night and proudly identified with my ancestral land when my skin turned ever browner in the summer. I longed to go, even though I couldn’t speak the language other than a timid “yassou” and “please, thank-you, what-time-is-it.” Greece was my destiny; I knew this before I set my feet onto its dusty roads for the first time.

Rather predictably the first time I went there I found the reality did not live up to the glossy fantasy –- how could it? I had swooned over the country for so long it had grown in my mind into a mythical place of sheep and ships, sweet milk flowing like the nectar the gods and goddesses drank on Mt. Olympus, buildings standing white and sharp against a smear of blue sea. Nevermind I couldn’t speak the language (or read it, for that matter) — I knew it was my place.

[Mt. Olympus, photo by Simo, August 2005.]

It took me three tries to love it. The first time I went I was just 21, traveling with my college boyfriend, and neither of us could speak the language. It was my first transatlantic flight and I sat up through the night wide-awake and clenched with anxiety until I caught the first bright glimpse of the Mediterranean. The man next to me told me how to properly pronounce Aegena (with the hard ‘g’; we’d always thought it was with a soft one), where my grandfather had grown up, and wished us luck.

Athens was brutally hot. The airport was filled with jostling travelers and cigarette smoke; few signs were in English. People rushed around frenetically. I dug my backpack out of the heap of bags that made up baggage claim –- in those pre-Olympics times things were somewhat … disorganized (it’s much better now). Finally we caught a bus into the city, me drooping with heat and fatigue and wanting only to sleep. Everything felt strange, incredibly foreign, and I wondered what I was doing there.

The second time was better. I met my best friend –- a Greek-American -– in Thessaloniki and traveled with him even further north to his family’s village in the mountains. The first night there we drank icy cold retsina and ate tzatziki thick with garlic and cucumbers, onion ‘pita,’ and good, fresh bread. We climbed high through the woods to drink from a mountain spring and ate cold cucumbers rubbed in salt. We visited a matriarch of the village who offered us corn roasted on a wood-burning stove and potatoes dipped in sugar, all of which she’d grown in her sprawling garden. I felt a little bit like I belonged.

But the third time I went to Greece something shifted into place. Maybe it was because I was visiting my brother on one of the beautiful islands –- Spetses –- or because I’d been there before and finally knew a little bit of what to expect. Whatever the reason, that summer I slipped under its skin and it under mine, inexorable and finite. I come to my love of the place now with a more clear-eyed love that sees it both for what it is and what it could be.

[Spetses, harbor, August 2007.]

The last time I went to Greece was over three years ago now and some days it feels so very far away. All I really did was sleep and eat and swim and eat and swim and swim and swim and read on the little rocky beach that was my brother’s favorite. I probably have never been so tan in my entire life and I never got sunburned. We ate languid meals during his lunch hour and then I was dispatched back to the beach for my afternoon. The day I left I felt like planting my feet on the dock and wailing; it was impossible to imagine coming back to the states.

One day we road bikes to the supposed best restaurant on the island (and it was very good) up the hills and past the horses in the blazing sun. The last bit was down a dirt path and as soon as we got the beach we threw the bikes down and jumped in the water to wash away all the dust and sweat. We drank beer with dinner and rode back through the deserted roads to town, me stopping every so often to take pictures of the bay and the boats anchored there. It was so quiet I could hear the wind rushing through the dry grass. A tanker ship sailed serenely in at dusk

Every day I drank cups and cups of coffee and frappes and slept dreamlessly and deeply at night even so. I’d have coffee first thing in the still, heavy mornings right when I woke up, with the milk heated in one of those little Greek coffee pot-tins on the hot plate. Then I’d walk through the narrow, hot streets to the kafenio near the boat yard where my brother worked to meet him for a mid-morning frappé (mine I liked metrios, and with a little milk) or met his girlfriend Emily at a restaurant above the dock to watch the ferry come in. We cooked enormous meals at my apartment –- roasted chicken, vegetables baked in the little convection oven, drizzled honey over nectarines and thick yogurt –- and sat outside drinking dry white wine.

For a long time previous, though, I eschewed the tastes of Greece. An early aversion to eggplant meant moussakka, that heavy, baked casserole full of eggplant and cheese, was out. Olives for a long time I found to be too bitter, maybe because I was mostly only familiar with the tinned kind strewn across pizza and I didn’t like those. I turned my nose up at feta for years –- it was too salty, too crumbly, too unfamiliar. I may have draped myself in sheets at Halloween pretending I was Artemis, the goddess of hunting and nature, or wished for a swim in the Mediterranean every time I shivered through another Northern California summer along the coast (the Pacific Ocean, of course, being cold in all seasons), but I missed out on the really good stuff: the food.

Fortunately I grew up a bit and my taste buds developed. Perhaps it was just that I finally forced myself to expand my palate. After all, how could I be a true Greek if I didn’t eat the things so indicative to that dusty, wind-blown place? As a vegetarian I couldn’t eat fish or meat -– a shame, my brother would later tell me, shaking his head in regret that I’d miss out on lamb slow-roasted outside during a spring afternoon and liberally flavored with rosemary, garlic, and olive oil –- but there still were so many other things to snatch up and devour.

Olives, especially when perched alongside a cold glass of retsina and a dish of pistachio nuts, are perfect during a lazy afternoon in the shade (or anytime, really). They’ve become one of my staples when I serve appetizers and it’s rare I’ll have a dinner party without placing small bowls for olives and pits within easy reach of my guests. While it’s unfortunately true I still can’t stand eggplant, I’ve fallen hard and fast for fried zucchini ‘coins,’ particularly when they’re eaten outside at a seaside taverna. And feta -– oh lovely feta. I’ve learned to love that pungent cheese baked with tomatoes, gently warmed on the stove in a pool of olive oil, scrambled quickly with eggs and spinach, or simply crumbled over salads laced with cucumber and mint.

My dad wasn’t –- and still isn’t –- much of a cook when I was growing up. But he always made dolmades, the Greek dish of grape leaves stuffed with slow-simmered rice flecked with onions and tomatoes. The recipe he relied upon is from a book titled “Can the Greeks Cook!” which apparently my grandfather gave my mom when my parents married. They are the best grape leaves I’ve ever had in or out of Greece, and they are still the only ones I’ll eat and then ask for more.

When I’ve made these dolmades myself they never taste quite the same as his version. Probably this is because there is an inexplicable sweetness to a dish your dad has made you because he knows you like it -– an invisible ingredient that serves to elevate a humble meal of grape leaves and rice to something memorable and lasting. Or maybe it’s because I don’t make them enough; I am working on remedying that situation as often as possible.

Living in California, the place that is forever home to me and where I am most contented, I find I miss Greece. It’s a patient, quiet, back-of-the mind ache that is nonetheless always there, a particular kind of homesickness that can’t really be assuaged by looking at photos or eating a certain kind of food (though I try.). And really, Greece has never been my home – I didn’t grow up there, after all, and I don’t even speak the language! But perhaps these things aren’t necessary at the end of it: to love and miss can’t always be explained. It just simply is.

See also a piece I wrote for NPR’s Kitchen Window, on feta:
The Making of a Feta Fan.

Dolmades

1 jar grape leaves, 15 oz. (or fresh, if you’re lucky enough to have them)
1 cup rice
1 cup olive oil
1/3 cup lemon juice
5 cups water
3 onions, chopped fine
2 Tb. tomato paste
2 Tb. chopped parsley or mint
Salt and pepper

Soak the rice for 20 minutes in two cups of cold water and one teaspoon of salt. Drain. Sauté the onion over a medium flame with one cup of the water until tender, about 15 minutes. Add oil and cook five minutes. Add rice and tomato paste, salt and pepper to taste. Cook for five minutes, stirring occasionally.

Add parsley and cook for about three minutes. Add half the lemon juice and cook for five more minutes. Spread out the grape leaves and place one teaspoon of the filling in the center of each one.

Starting from the stem of the leaf, turn in the ends and roll tightly. Arrange in layers in a medium saucepan. Pour remaining lemon juice over the rolls, and add one cup of water.

Cover and bring to a boil for five minutes. Reduce heat to medium and cook for 15 minutes. Add one more cup of water if needed. Reduce heat to low, and continue to cook for 15 minutes or until rice is tender. Serve at room temperature.

[Tomales Bay, August 2010.]

It is, you know. Still summer. At least for a few more days. For a few more days it’s still acceptable to eat soft serve ice cream; still possible to believe the Giants have all the time in the world to make it into the post-season; still hours to dream over Kristen‘s beautiful photos of her trip to Greece and wish I’d been able to tuck in a trip this year myself (it’s been three years since I’ve been to that well-loved country. Three!). For a few more days I can pretend we actually had a summer here, though it didn’t feel much like it. And now fall is knocking at the door; I’m holding fast to the sash and waiting it out as long as possible. Soon enough I’ll invite it in and pour it a glass of wine and settle in before a fire. I’ll make my annual pot of applesauce and bake it a nice cozy gingerbread — but not just yet!

In these last fleeting bits of true summer as determined by the calendar, there has been:

Roasted tomatoes with thyme and basil
Pasta with peas + mushrooms + roasted cauliflower
Pasta with lentils + chard (bridging the gap between the seasons)
Pasta with walnut pesto + green beans + potatoes
Fruit crisps
Multiple batches of oatmeal-chocolate chip cookies
A few glasses of white wine
Quinoa-vegetable salad
Sweet potato fries with tahini-yogurt sauce
Ice cream
Way too much running (22 miles on Sunday morning and yes, my brain did indeed go all mushy and loopy by the end of it)
New books (“Private Life,” by Jane Smiley, the latest)
Work
Rain! (a little bit)
Swimming to and fro across Tomales Bay (no sharks, but no seals either)
Veggie burgers piled with slices of perfectly ripe avocado
Pounds and pounds of delicious heirloom tomatoes (at last!)

[Grapes, Sonoma, September 2010.]

Alas dear summer! I am sad to see you go though I hardly knew you at all — I look at 2010 as The Summer That Wasn’t, at least in San Francisco — and I know we would have been the best of friends had you but given me just a little bit of sun, and warm breezes (yes, fine, there were a few days sprinkled in here and there, and once I even wore a skirt and didn’t freeze but still — but still.).

Yet onward we go, time marching relentlessly on, as it tends to do. I yearn still for Indian Summer though I’ve (mostly) made my peace with the reality it may not exist this year; anyway, there are still peaches and plums to be had at the farmers’ market even if I must wear my down vest when loading up my bag. I will try to appreciate the quickly approaching golden days of October — a birthday looms, with a marathon directly on its heels, and these are both very fine things. I will try to cheer myself along up to winter (!) with thoughts of brussels sprouts and kale and pear-butternut squash soup. I will try to crack open the real-deal cookbooks again and re-find my inspiration.

[What summer felt like, September 2010.]

For I have a confession to make: I have not been feeling particularly inspired lately. This is no small travesty given the usual seasonal bounty — the luscious tomatoes, the tender and sweet summer squash, the ears of corn wanting only to be eaten boiled quickly and lashed with melted butter or roughly skinned and stripped and dropped into salads, the spindly, skinny green beans I wait ’til August for every year … and I have been taking advantage of all this loveliness, and nearly every week. It’s just that lately, technically still summer or no, I am feeling a little wan. Cooking has become slightly rote — and I do not like this at all. It’s disheartening, really.

I could blame the surfeit of baking that marked June-August; I could blame the fog and damp chill; I could blame a lessening of free time; I could blame marathon training and the ensuing exhaustion (and I feel like I can never get enough sleep); I could blame any number of things. But does it matter? The main thing is that I miss the kitchen, though I’m still in there a fair amount … if that makes sense. I want to cook for pleasure again, not just sustenance to be wolfed down after running for three-and-a-half hours at a stretch.

And I will, I know. This, perhaps, shall be my gift to the next season: to get back to it. I have a few days yet to lament and moan about our almost-summer; I have a few days still to eat leftovers and cobbled-together sandwiches and feel a bit woebegone. But then! I will square my shoulders and take a deep breath and look firmly ahead to what comes next, clear-eyed and ready.

So.

What should I cook first?

[Redwood, Armstrong Woods, August 2010.]

I was trying to write this thing about summer — how I felt like I finally caught it on Saturday driving along the Russian River but wishing to be out upon it, kayaking or canoeing, how a champagne picnic under the redwoods really is the best use of my time on an August afternoon, and how the air smells near Monte Rio, charged with the energy of almost-fall (oh, but not just yet!) and the dry, slightly smoky smell of trees and dust and river water shot through with sunlight — but it’s coming out all wrong.

So instead I am sticking that photo up there and giving you a recipe for brown sugar blueberry-plum-walnut bread, though I don’t have a photo for that. (Breads don’t always photograph so well, anyway, or at least they don’t if you’re me and throwing something together in the one hour you have between going for a run and going for a drink, with little time to arrange and polish and prettify.) Still, it was a good bread — delicious, in fact, and I will have you know, and came about as these things so often do: because I have a surfeit of some fruit or other (in this case, the plums) and am going to visit friends and of course must bring something homemade (of course, of course, for c’est moi.) in small offering. If I’d had the time for dog biscuits I’d have whipped up a batch of those as well but alas the day slipped away from me ….

I took a banana bread recipe I’ve made a lot (I think originally it came from williams-sonoma.com) and actually considered just making as-is (my freezer usually contains at least 2-3 bananas for use in a last-minute baking pinch) but I didn’t have any chocolate chips and then after all there were those plums softening in their bowl on the counter and I didn’t want to waste them. I’ve been swapping in a bit of brown sugar recently in a lot of recipes because I find I really like the taste of it in baked goods (it’s a sort of deeper, more caramelized sweetness than results from plain white sugar) and then I thought there should be some crunch in there, too, to balance the sweet and the soft … so I used all of those things, plus a few extra blueberries to elevate it a little bit. It turned out pretty great: not too sweet (the plums still very plummy and a little tart) and rich with good butter and nuts. I will make this again and again for sure; cherries would be wonderful here, I think, or even apricots in season, or maybe pears or apples (or a combination) when true fall descends.

As I have mentioned many times, I bake a lot. A lot. Sometimes I feel like it’s something I do almost by rote; I have learnt my oatmeal-chocolate chip cookie and my vegan chocolate cake recipes by heart, and another favorite banana bread is nearly there. I am often loathe to tweak baked goods too much because it’s a science, after all, a peculiar and mysterious alchemy of flour+butter+sugar+vanilla+baking soda or powder that perhaps should not be tampered with. And yet it’s imperative to do so as long as the basic principles remain — and, this is a note to myself — I wonder if it might make the act of baking even more enjoyable. I have that M.F.K. Fisher quote tacked up there to the right for a reason — Cooking made me feel creative and powerful and that is perhaps the truest reason for my continued preoccupation with the art of eating. — and it reminds me to trust my instincts. Yes maple syrup in a cream cheese frosting is often just right, but it should top a nut-and-raisin filled carrot cake rather than a red velvet. Yes substituting a 1/4 cup of cornmeal for white flour in a cake recipe will make it not only more textured but interesting besides. And yes plums go just as well with walnuts as they do with almonds, and chocolate is not always necessary (perish the thought!).

Mixing things up a little (oh, ha ha) also helps with the occasional baking burnout. After doing the wedding cakes for Kurt and Emily a few months ago (two months ago exactly this Thursday, if you care to celebrate these monthly milestones which, yeah, I do) I thought I would need a long and solid break from the oven for at least a month or so. But I think I was back to it straightaway that first week back in San Francisco and not just because I wanted to keep my apartment warm; clearly it’s an addiction, or maybe I just like it a lot (or I know a lot of people with summer birthdays). A few weeks ago I was tasked with making three different and distinct cakes for a 50th birthday party, and spent not a few hours making sure the German chocolate, the carrot, the cheesecakes (with blueberry compote) were just so. I was pretty sick of baking after that but then I had a little dinner party and made a cornmeal-plum tart, and then later this week I am baking two birthday cakes (one, a yellow cake filled with strawberry buttercream and lemon curd; the other a rich, deepdark chocolate cake) for Saturday parties … and while sometimes it feels a little much once I am firmly planted in the kitchen, the oven creakily warming up and butter going soft in the bowl, I feel I am exactly where I am supposed to be (place, map, circled and all that).

I mean, you combine these fairly basic ingredients together and with a little effort and thought — less, if you stick absolutely to the recipe — you’re rewarded with something beautiful and good-tasting. And then if you give it away and watch the recipients licking their fingers and going miam miam and taking seconds “even though I shouldn’t” and smiling because, really, what’s better than a homemade brown-butter-plum-walnut bread? … well, it’s slightly miraculous (and I use that word advisedly), what can come from virtually nothing. It is one of the simplest — and most wonderful — pleasures going.

Another simple — and most wonderful — pleasure is going to the woods. Here I am lucky, because I have the redwoods, and other than the maple and oak trees I climbed all over in my childhood redwoods are absolutely my favorite tree. They are home and California to me. But any woods will do, really, and there are gorgeous forests on the East Coast, too: piney, sweet-smelling, leaves thickly carpeting the ground in autumn to make stepping comfortable and quiet. My beloved John Muir knew it (The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness, he wrote, perhaps about Yosemite but it could also have been about Shenandoah, or Mt. Desert Island) and some days you just ought to go, cake not required. Some nights in this city all I want is the calm peace of the redwood forest, to lean up against a tree to feel its shredding bark damp and cool against my back and look up to see the Pleiades in the high dark. Maybe it’s enough simply to know it exists.

This weekend I wasn’t in Armstrong at night but it was perfect all the same. Things slow down down there; sound and light drift and swirl under that green canopy that I have gone to for my whole life: summer for camping by the pond; fall for hiking on those gorgeous warm Indian summer afternoons; cold-midwinter for cracking puddle-ice and wishing for gloves; spring for rain and the streams swelling their banks. I love it in all seasons.

Now it is nearly fall here in this western state and summer has been a dream, a haze of fog and mist. Yet despite the (seemingly) endless grey bits it has been for the most part the best summer I’ve had in ages. I bake things and I can’t always write and I sit by a fireplace and have a cup of tea and I take photos of Tomales Bay in that 6p light and I spill Hardcore Espresso coffee all over myself (they are nice there and will give you another for free) and I hug a black lab and I go to the trees, when I can. I can rest right here in this moment, and I find this moment to be pretty good.

And so I am grateful. Always.

I hope you have fared well this summer, too, that you’ve been able to steal away to cook delicious things, to go to your favorite places, and to simply, if at possible, just to be.

Let me desire and wish well the life
these trees may live when I
no longer rise in the mornings
to be pleased by the green of them
shining, and their shadows on the ground,
and the sound of the wind in them.

-Wendell Berry

Brown Sugar Blueberry-Plum Bread with Walnuts

8 Tbs. (1 stick) unsalted butter, at room temperature
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/4 cup regular sugar (I always use a raw/organic sugar I buy in bulk)
3 eggs, lightly beaten
1/2 cup buttermilk
1 tsp. vanilla
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. nutmeg
1 tsp. cinnamon
1/2 tsp. salt
4 plums, quartered with their pits removed, and then coarsely chopped
1 cup fresh or frozen blueberries
1/4 cup coarsely chopped walnuts

Preheat an oven to 350°F. Grease and lightly flour a 9-by-5-inch loaf pan.

Beat together the butter and sugar on medium speed until creamy, about 1 minute. Add the vanilla, and eggs and beat until smooth. Add the buttermilk and beat just until combined.

In a bowl, stir together the flour, baking soda, baking powder, nutmeg, cinnamon, and salt. Add the flour mixture to wet mixture and beat just until combined. Add the fruit and walnuts. The batter should be slightly lumpy. Scrape down the sides of the bowl.

Pour the batter into the prepared pan. Bake until the loaf is dark golden brown and dry to the touch and the edges pull away from the sides of the pan, 50-60 minutes. A toothpick inserted into the center should come out clean.

Makes one 9-by-5-inch loaf.

When I was a kid growing up in Sonoma County I had neighborhood friends — lucky me, they were girls near my own age — I’d meet up with for dog-playing and creek-exploring and all else. I can’t remember if we used to call each other; we were so young then so maybe we just met up on the street, a sort of desultory let’s hang out and roam about in our respective backyards kind of a thing. One in particular I had such fun with because at her house they had ducks (!) and chickens, too, I sometimes took care of when they went out of town. We’d go blackberry picking in season, not anywhere in particular but just ‘around’. We’d take them back to her house and douse them with cream and sugar — did we rinse them off first? I hope so but the memory eludes; if not surely they were dusty and a bit disheveled, much like glorious summer itself — and eat in the cool dimness of her parents’ kitchen, swinging our legs under the wood table and trying not to kick the dog.

Last summer I went to the blackberry bush at the edge of my parents’ field and sifted through the berries for the best ones. I made crumbles and sorbet and it was familiar and right. I felt like things had come full circle somehow, though my old friends had long since moved away. What remained was the dry grass under my feet, the sun, the blackberries, that feeling of peace.

When I didn’t live in California — all almost-nine-years — I missed it fiercely. There’s something about this place and if you’re born here it’s hard to leave. If you do leave you most often pine for it; I met many displaced Californians at East Coast parties who felt the same. Invariably we’d end up on someone’s porch clutching our bottles of beer and talking about Pt. Reyes, I mean, that is my place; you know, Wildcat for camping even though the campground isn’t the best but it’s so close to the beach and when the sun sets on a clear night… god! or It’s so different here not that I mind exactly but it’s not California and just can’t ever be

or There are no real mountains around here and I try to go home in the winter so I can go skiing in Tahoe because, I mean, it’s Tahoe right? We’d chuckle fondly about San Francisco and its intensely liberal atmosphere — though, to be honest, it was tinged with the wistful as we swatted at mosquitoes; the nation’s capital, in summer, being not a place for the heat-averse –, about that time the Giants lost the World Series (eternal tragedy), and how the air just feels better out West. For awhile I had an old friend from home who lived in Maryland and we’d meet up every so often for happy hour, mostly to moon over West Marin.

[Near Calistoga, March 2010.]

When I didn’t live here I came back as often as possible. Sometimes my brother was there, too, and we’d go backpacking in Yosemite or to Point Reyes or just took the dog to Goat Rock back when you could still take dogs. Sometimes my dad and I went kayaking on Tomales Bay, to sit in the sun afterward on the dock of that little place right near the kayak rental and drink root beer. One August it was so hot I wore all my DC clothes and swam in the Russian River and didn’t miss the Atlantic Ocean one bit. The next day we went out on the bay on a blazing morning and saw, incredibly, a whale that had drifted in with her calf (I still swam off the sandbar later, even though I was a little bit nervous). Then I started coming for stolen days here and there in spring, too, to run along the backroads and see the hills green for once. Every single time I left it felt not-right; my heart ached and even though I had a good life back East there was always something missing.

I think what it was was a feeling of place — my place. The ocean-place. A blackberry-place. Home. Now, I do not take for granted I know where that is; I know I’m lucky. I also do not regret the time I spent on the other coast, for I met so many wonderful, true friends and learned a lot and had a good, full life. Anyway — if I’d never left California perhaps I would never have come to appreciate it quite so very much; sometimes to discover where home is you have to leave it. The other side of this is, of course, if you come back you might have to rediscover it — and yourself — all over again.

Four years ago this month I moved to San Francisco and when I think about it the time has slipped by both in a flash and very slowly. It certainly doesn’t feel like less than four years. My life now is so different than what it was when I lived in Washington, not least of all because I tramp up and down steep streets every day, and every so very often — namely: July — I find myself wishing for just one week of heat and humidity and an ocean safe for swimming in. But these are small trade-offs. What I miss most is my little community of friends (for a time we all lived within walking distance of each other and the impromptu barbecues and coffees and chats and meet-ups …) and wearing lighter clothes in the summer and my brother living close enough to see regularly. But that is why there are plane tickets I suppose.

[Pacific Ocean from Bodega Head, December 2009.]

California has given me so much — those blackberries, good coffee (my god, the coffee! I never cared so much until I moved here and lest you think I’m being awfully pretentious I will hasten to add that it’s just that I didn’t know how good a good cup of coffee can be, and thus learned to truly love it for the first time), the picking wild berries for dessert at dusk in the woods, a throwback to that childhood memory, going to my old house in Sebastopol whenever I feel like it, inspiration to write I never quite could hold on to before, being able to go down to the ocean without flying across the country or driving four hours. Among other things, I always ached for that lack of water.

The sea is everywhere in this city. I love the mountains, too (do I!), but my heart belongs to the ocean. You forget sometimes how close it is: the Financial District is brick-red and full of narrow alleyways and miles from the beach. But then the wind picks up and brings with it the smell of salt and brine and you know. You trot down to the Ferry Building for good bread and cheese (and sometimes cupcakes) and watch the ferries sailing serenely off to Marin or the East Bay — water, everywhere, blue and grey. That has been perhaps San Francisco’s greatest gift to me: to be close to water.

The first days living in San Francisco are a blur: I didn’t know the city well, and was sorting out Muni and where exactly was the Main Library and and and. A little bit I missed DC — at least, that familiarity — though not enough to move back. My apartment was beautiful but temporary (a sublet for a few months), and I was ready to settle in somewhere and start the next part of my life. It was an in between time, which is always a bit hard, and so to ease myself along I cooked — I cooked a lot, and I cooked a lot of things I’d cooked when I lived in Washington: tofu baked in peanut sauce served with piles of wild rice, spinach stirred in at the end; asparagus-mushroom-white bean stirfries with brown rice; roasted red potatoes; vegan chocolate cakes. It helped to bridge the gap.

This is a soup I made a lot in those early days; it’s spring, and simple, and just right for now. The main farmers’ market I frequented back then was down at the Civic Center, and I remember for some reason there was always an abundance of broccoli mixed in among all the weird greens I’d never seen in my old life. I’d buy great bunches, take them home, put them in a pot with a few potatoes and vegetable broth, and that was dinner. It comforted in those heady, strange days when I was figuring out how to live in a new place — thrilled and terrified both. And I make it now, to remember.

This city — this shining, white-gold, blue city: mine in a way DC never was. You never know where life may take you and indeed I may not live here forever but for now, and for the last four years, it is good to be home.

And mixed with these were splashes of California poppies. These too are of a burning color- not orange, not gold, but if pure gold were liquid and could raise a cream, that golden cream might be like the color of the poppies. ~ John Steinbeck, “East of Eden”

Broccoli Soup

1 clove garlic, sliced
1 onion, diced
1 carrot, peeled and diced
2 russet potatoes, peeled and sliced thinly
2 cups vegetable broth
4 large bunches broccoli

Sautee the onion and garlic in a little olive oil in a large soup pot (I used my big blue). After about five minutes — or until they’re soft — add the carrot and cook a few more minutes. Add the potatoes and the stock and simmer for about 10 minutes until potatoes begin to soften. Add broccoli and about 3 cups of water; salt and pepper to taste.

Bring to a boil, then cover and reduce to a simmer until both broccoli and potatoes are soft and broken up. Remove from heat, add a teaspoon of dried herbs such as basil or herbs du provence, then puree in a food processor or with a stick blender until smooth.

Reheat gently, and serve hot.

[Leaves, Sebastopol, October 2009.]

Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns. – George Eliot

Beautiful October, you are sweet blue skies and cool breezes flowing through the screen and the bit of melancholy that always seems to crop up around this time every year. The air is simmering down from its Indian Summer and in Sonoma County it smells like smoke and damp earth and the coming of winter. Crickets are busily singing their last songs. The redwoods yesterday afternoon were quiet and beautiful and still.

The thing is, Ms. Evans’ sentiments aside, autumn tends to makes me homesick even as I love it dearly. But what’s that — aren’t I already home? and this indeed would be a valid query. The answer is: yes. And also no. I am that peculiar kind of person who can feel homesick at any given moment for a given moment, if that makes sense — sometimes I feel like I’m missing someone, all the time, even if that person is just a bus ride away or in another room. (But mostly: yes. I’m home, well and truly. It’s just that feeling.)