A weekend on the Cape
January 14, 2014 § Leave a comment
After rescheduling our getaway weekend due to the snowstorm last weekend, we finally made the drive down the Cape to the Old Manse Inn in Brewster. Just off of Route 6, the Old Manse Inn is a charming white 19th century house from the outside, with a bit of a kitschy antique interior with some nautical touches, notably model boats and some historical pirate information on the second floor. The Inn had recently changed hands, and for much of the weekend, we were the only guests, given that January is very much the middle of the offseason. The innkeepers Brian and Charlie did everything they could to make our stay enjoyable, from calling ahead to restaurants, to giving us a tour of the entire house and grounds, and providing us with a complimentary bottle of wine.
It was a quiet sort of weekend, and I had the feeling of having the entire Cape to ourselves. Traffic was easy, the beaches mostly empty, the wind forceful and assertive. Many of the shops were closed for the season, especially in more touristy towns such as Provincetown, where we sat by the window of one of the only taverns still open with frosty mugs of Cape Cod beer and plates of fish and chips. A rainy Saturday afternoon drove us back to the Inn for some reading (I’ve started Alice Munro’s Dear Life) and napping before dinner. After a glass of sherry in the inn’s living room, we headed to the Rock Harbor Grill for a dinner of wild mushroom pizza, lobster-stuffed cod over a bed of mashed potatoes and green beans, and fresh mozzarella with baby heirloom tomatoes (not so seasonal but that’s alright). We skipped dessert that night but I did go back to the Cottage Street Bakery for a second chocolate croissant the next morning, perfectly flakey, with the inside chew that I love. Sunday, we sat on the wooden steps leading to the Marconi beach, eating sandwiches from the bakery on slightly sweet squash bread before heading down for a walk along the water. The waves crashed on the shore but the intense wind had a way of pulling the very tops of the waves back, created a delightful misty puff coming up from the water’s surface every time a large wave surged.
We stopped in Sandwich on the way back to Boston for dinner at the tavern in the Dan’l Webster Inn with my grandparents. It was un repas correct, as my former co-workers liked to say in France — I had a nicely wok fired Atlantic salmon with a crisp exterior. Then we piled ourselves back in the car to start the drive back to the city. Back to the grind it is. But a three-day weekend to look forward to next week!
New Hampshire getaway
October 8, 2013 § Leave a comment
Last weekend, we drove north to New Hampshire. Or rather, Dan drove us north, since I still can’t drive. The idea for the weekend originated with my registering for the Applefest Half Marathon in Hollis, a course of rolling hills through the fall foliage with the promise of apple crisp at the finish line, and baskets of apples and pies as prizes if I did well enough. Luckily we were not disappointed — I say we because I got cornered into promising to make several apple pies if I didn’t manage to win one at the race. The course was tough, much hillier than I had pictured (word is, my website reading abilities aren’t the greatest as the rolling hills were clearly indicated when I signed up to run), and I never felt like I settled into a real rhythm. But I came in just two minutes behind my half marathon PR and was pretty pleased that I had finally gotten back into training and racing, even if the actual race had moments that could have gone better. And the prize, a towering basket of apples, for winning my age group, was a pretty nice cherry on top.
From there, the weekend was mostly eating. A first post-race stop at a nearby apple orchard where a wood-fired pizza cart had set up on the lawn for lunch included a pizza topped with spiced pumpkin sauce and bacon, another with peppers, onions, and spinach, blistered black crust and the squeals of children in the rows of pumpkins by the general store. Then, we drove north to Concord, where we stopped at the Gould Hill Farm in Contoocook. A delightful orchard nestled in the rolling hills, now flaming orange and red, specked like evergreen, we ate hot fluffy cider donuts, drank apple cider, and picked a peck full of Empires, Macouns, and Hampshires. We also played catch with an apple and ate a few, but we don’t tell everyone that.
We drove two more hours north, through the lakes region, to North Conway, where we stayed the night at the Isaac Merrill House (Thanks, Mom!), a sweet, white house, dating back to 1773, with creaky floors and fluffy blueberry pancakes and French toast for breakfast. We spent a lot of the trip in the car, expressly to see the fall foliage, which draws so many people north every year. Sunday morning, we drove through the national forest, stopping every so often, emerging into the chill to take in the river winding down next to the road, the mountains streaked with color, vibrant orange hitting the blue backdrop of the sky. As we approached Boston, the rain started to come down, at first a light mist but increasingly heavy, and we stopped again in Concord, this time to discover that most bakeries and restaurants are closed on Sunday, and settled for a veggie pizza, that was actually quite good, as pizza tends to be.
I’ll spend the next week coming up with ways to use all of the apples we brought home; it started with an apple crisp, topped with vanilla ice cream last night, which we’ll continue to eat for breakfast these work-day mornings.
Remembering
September 29, 2013 § Leave a comment
Stepping out of the house this morning and seeing the street sheathed in white fog was like, for a moment, stepping back home, stepping into a different city, a different time. Walking down the street towards one of the few cafes in the area I thought both took credit cards and provided free internet (as it turns out, it had only one of the two) to do some writing was like stepping back half a year, to writing my thesis in Small World, my thesis that now sits on my desk, bound, and untouched. It’s the first weekend I’ve had to myself in a long time, and I’m using it to find my voice writing again, which is much harder than I thought it would be. Call me crazy, but I miss my thesis, I miss having work that was mine only, I miss the life that was my research, I miss the farms, the mountains, but mostly meeting new people every day. I don’t miss them individually, but as a whole, as people who pushed back on the comfortable lifestyle many enjoy (myself included), as people who nonetheless welcomed the intruder (me) with open arms. But I also miss the vast openness of the farms, and the routes we often drove to the farms, the kind of openness that makes you and your problems feel so, so small.
I had a moment like that the other day, sitting at a picnic table on our farm in Lincoln, preparing for an interview with our head farmer. One of our other farmers had given me a ride down to the farm, and then excitedly shown me a ripe green-stripped tomato in the children’s garden and wandered off into the fields for a walk around — she emerged toward the end of my interview with a bouquet of flowers. So I sat for a few minutes before the interview, looking out over the fields, which ran into forest, trees whose tops are already turning red, under a cloudy, gray sky. And for a moment, as cliché as it is, I felt at peace, like the world wasn’t about to close in around me, but as open as the fields before me.
And now I’m sitting in a café in Davis Square, listening to a young woman rant about her brother at the table next to me, having to do the dishes, and listen to his phone messages, while watching the toddler across from me struggle to eat a cranberry roll by shoving it in his mouth. It’s funny how that vast openness can break down into such minuscule moments, pithy complaints, and dissatisfactions. I have small plans for today, just a bit of writing for work, harnessing the rutabaga and daikon radish from my CSA share into red curry, and maybe a batch of cookies. I’ve been doing a lot of cooking and baking lately, but have lost of rhythm of photographing and writing about it. It’s starting to become routine — a batch of coffeecake muffins on Sunday for the week’s breakfast, an acorn squash galette with caramelized onions and pecorino, served with greens and raspberries, a couple of pizzas topped with whatever vegetables are hanging around — and that’s an interesting discovery for someone who is used to writing about being in the kitchen as an event, as something that is blog-worthy. I made a batch of pumpkin-cranberry granola yesterday after my 14-miler with the team, and was pleased that it came out in crisp, sweet clumps rather than as loose, toasted oats, as my granolas sometimes do. I’ll post some of the dishes I’ve been more proud of soon, but for now I’m just working on rediscovering that I know how to put a sentence together.
Brief weekend eats
September 2, 2013 § Leave a comment
Just a quick little note that I’m unable to upload pictures from my camera – I don’t often post my Instagram photos, but a couple from this weekend turned out better than expected, so here we are. We did a little bit of lazy food adventuring this weekend, starting with breaking in my new waffle iron on Saturday morning with some multi-grain waffles, then a pick-me-up at Tatte Bakery in Kendall Sunday afternoon (which included this spiraly brioche with halva paste) before heading to a backyard party, then homemade pizza (with homemade tomato sauce, using up all of the tomatoes from the CSA!) topped with you-name-it which we grilled at our own backyard party today.
Anyway, fingers crossed that my photos aren’t lost forever in the black hole of my camera! Happy (end of) Labor Day weekend!
Rest, Recovery, and a little Coconut Cake
May 8, 2013 § 1 Comment
I’m sitting in the backyard of my house in San Francisco, trying unsuccessfully to find a patch of sunlight streaming through the branches of the fir tree overhead, in which to dry my lemon-juice soaked hair. I’m commencing my summer rituals — which yes, include naturally lightening my hair — a bit early this year, and they could not be more welcome. If you’ve noticed the blog becoming a bit of a recluse compared to what it once was, it’s not that I haven’t been doing things, it’s just that every time I sit down to write about them, my mind is predictably elsewhere in the pits of fragile worries. But right now, there’s a loaf of coconut bread, studded with unsweetened coconut curls, a healthy swig of vanilla, stirred with browned butter, in the oven, the sun is out, and I’m wrapping up a weekend spent at home with barbequed scallops, pumpkin tofu curry over brown rice, and a walk on the beach in the late afternoon. But the best part of the weekend has been sleeping in my own bed, sitting at my desk by the window eating leftovers and planning summer travels — Portugal! Morocco! — with my parents’ seventies music drifting up from the basement and my little brother studying for the SAT subject tests at the dining room table.
Not surprisingly, as the end comes to what my mother calls my R&R weekend, I’m finally being able to sit down and write about something that isn’t required. To say it’s been a difficult month would be an understatement; I initially thought the stress would begin to fade when I finally handed my thesis over to the printers, but it just kept coming. Some days, it felt as if I was drowning in my own head, then my body took over and with it came a week of sickness and infections. But somehow, it all seemed to melt away this weekend — it’s a pretty magical feeling when peace finally comes, when you can just sit down, look out the window, with a couple of slices of warm bread — er, cake — and finally feel a bit more complete again.
And write. Even though I don’t know what to talk about really. Only that it felt good to be back in the kitchen, felt good to open the oven and feel successful, and that I’ll be very sorry to leave tonight. But while just sitting in peace is pretty great, that peace can follow you anywhere, it just sometimes doesn’t come as easily.
Word is I’m in the market for a place in Boston with a window-full kitchen.
A day on the Apple Farm
August 16, 2012 § 2 Comments
Stuck in bumper to bumper traffic for two hours on 101 — making the total drive home about five hours — it was easy to forget that we were coming back from an overnight stay at The Apple Farm, a lazy night and day spent eating, exploring the various ice cream and baked goods options, and sampling a variety of apples, straight from the trees surrounding our little blue doored cottage. A sugar-crusted blueberry scone and honeyed sticky bun from the Downtown Healdsburg Bakery. A scoop of fresh mint chip ice cream, and an assortment of cookies — peanut butter and ginger molasses, our favorites!— from Paysanne in Boonville. Later on, a couple more scoops of homemade ice cream in large waffle cones, in the cold, breezy, seaside town of Fort Bragg.
At the farm, I somehow managed to score the comfy bed in the cottage, snuggled under five quilts and duvets, a heavy shield against the chilly air coming in through the many open windows. Outside, rows of apple trees stretched into the distant dry, yellow hills, most of the fruit still green, firm, and tart to the taste, as the season for most apple varieties begins in September. Still, there were several kinds for sale at the farm stand — the royalties originally from Minnesota, the pink ladies, tinged pink on the inside as well as out — which was self-service on an honor basis. Lines of apple cider vinegar and syrup, jams in apricot, plum strawberry and blackberry, fig and apple chutneys, and cold apple juice in the fridge, next to a small haul of beets and kale.
Breakfast was served in the main building, a very simple affair of crusty toast, with holes where the melted butter seeped through onto the plate below. Little bowls of apricot and strawberry jam (strawberry jam tart recipe to come — they just came out of the oven and are simply adorable!). Raw milk from the farm cows for coffee and black tea. Thick yogurt, topped with raspberries, and, for me, a swirl of strawberry jam and raw cane sugar crystals.
Down the road, kids played in the stream under the bridge, and I turned off into the state park for a quiet run in the shade of the towering trees. The smell of burning wood for campfires creeping in in the evening and then, again, in the early morning. Damp cold air, with just a spit of rain, that melted into the heat of an inland summer.
Soufflé Days 