An Octopus’s Garden

Zazou hasn’t yet decided whether the beach is actually part of her garden or not. We deduce this because not only have we never seen her down there, but she persists in bringing mice and voles into the house, instead of clams and oysters.

Beppo definitely prefers the terrestrial garden, although since he’s a big copycat, the day Zazou goes down to the sea will certainly change Beppo’s life too.

We happily take advantage of the best of both worlds, the early crop of flowers on our little water-facing patio, and the amazing crop of water birds and water vessels that we can watch from it. So far, in only three weeks here, we’ve seen gulls, ducks, geese, cormorants, pigeon guillemots, eagles, otters, seals, ferries galore, sail boats, motor boats, tug boats, barges, an aircraft carrier, and three

submarines. Really and truly, aircraft carriers and submarines go right past our back door, on Rich Passage, the stretch of water otherwise known as WA Highway 304, a nomenclature that we find hilarious.

The aircraft carrier, the USS John C. Stennis, passed us with 3000 sailors onboard, many of whom were on deck waving their white caps at us. The submarines, on the other hand, slip darkly past,

escorted by Navy and Coast Guard boats, on their silent and spooky way to the octopus’s garden under the sea. It’s impossible for me to imagine life in a submarine, and what sort of person would choose that life. Outside, eternal darkness, crushing pressure, and deadly chill, with no way out. Inside, tiny spaces, a nuclear reactor, artificial light, recycled air and water, and, I suppose, nonexistent privacy.

No sunsets for those submariners, no sunrises. No salt breezes, no flowers, no cats. I wonder what inspires a person to choose this life. You can read the fascinating details of life in the octopus’s garden here.

Moving Is Exhausting

Beppo and Zazou have come home at last. Although at first they looked relieved each time they encountered some familiar piece of furniture, the stuff that smelled reassuringly like home to them, they were absolutely astonished by the sight of water, water everywhere, and the looks on their faces as they gazed out the windows were priceless.

The sounds of the small waves, the cries of the gulls, the various honkings and quackings of the seabirds, all were a foreign language to them. Beppo and Zazou have lived in France and America, in several different places, but they’ve never before seen water

or boats. The sight and sound of the first few ferries to pass sent Zazou off to sleep in the closet on a favorite sweater, and although Beppo was brave enough to come out on the deck with us for lunch, Zazou wanted nothing to do with it.

But now, after just 48 hours in their new home, they run in and out the cat door, lie in the sun, and roll on the sandy terrace. I don’t think they’ve been down to the beach yet, but we’re having a nice low tide soon, and perhaps they’ll follow me down and discover a taste for clams.

And In With The New

Moving is hell, let no one say otherwise. On the first morning in our new home, the kitchen looked like this, as seen by my phone, which just wants to be a phone, and not a camera. Nonetheless, I coerced it into documenting just what a mess our life had become, in the space of only 24 hours.

We’d had the foresight to set out the coffee grinders, but the espresso machine wasn’t yet in shape to brew up our morning cup of contentment.

Cooking is utterly out of the question when you can’t even find a wooden spoon. The dining table was still at the old house, but fortunately, what we did have was boxes, and donuts for Shel, and nuts for me.

And so hey presto, breakfast was had on a box. Actually, it had a certain charm. Some of the hundreds of boxes were especially mysterious, especially early in the morning.

It was definitely too early for the bar, especially a bar serving cat food. And was there an app for that? What on earth was the mover thinking when he labeled that box?

Since the front yard looked like this on the day we moved in, the cats definitely weren’t with us anyway, being safely sequestered and pampered at their favorite kitty camp. And really, who could complain about the front yard, when the back yard looked like this?

And so, off to days and days of unpacking, which, through the miracle of time-lapse reality, shall soon be complete.

Out With The Old

Moving is horrid! That is, it will one day be wonderful, but that day isn’t today, nor will it be tomorrow. Tonight we collapsed amid the boxes, captured via cellphone because the camera is packed, after a dinner cobbled together from the local deli because the kitchen is all packed up. Shel had to carry a bottle of wine up to the neighbors to beg for a corkscrew, after we failed to be able open it at home. The dishwasher soap got packed by accident. We have to be three places at once tomorrow morning. My garden is in exquisite springtime bloom and seems impossible to leave, whereas my soon-to-be new garden is currently all heaps of dirt and rock, moved to make way for some actual parking spaces near the house. Beppo and Zazou are off at kitty camp to escape the horrors of seeing their home uprooted. We’ve stocked up on Feliway to help them adapt to their new home, but where’s the human version of a calming spray??? One thing we made sure not to pack: Advil. We were a lot younger the last time we moved, we ached less, we were more cheerful.

But in just a couple of days it will be over, and we’ll begin to settle into a new life. We’ll figure out which drawer is for the silverware, where to put the linens. Most maddening of all: a kitchen with no place to keep a broom and dustpan. I kid you not. Not a broom closet, not even a broom slot. But this too we shall survive – (hope to) see you on the flip side.

Woodpecker Morning

Rising-with-the-sun season is here, hurray! Today the sun and I rose at 6:30, but in a month or so it’ll be 5:30, and then close to 4:30 by mid-summer. It’s the season of not-enough-sleep, but then, it’s also the season of morning wonders.

Today, as I went out into the garden to gather rosemary, thyme, and parsley there was the percussion-with-echo of two woodpeckers. We seldom hear them here, and today they were evidently on two separate trees, as their rat-a-tat did a duet between a deep bass and a lighter alto. I can just imagine what all that head-banging does to their little brains, but their music gave my own personal brain a bright morning lift. The sun was already warm, the garden fresh with dew, and it’s going to be the most beautiful day of the year, if you like sunshine, warmth, and blue skies.

Making a purée of the herbs with roasted garlic and mint and slathering it over the leg of lamb I’ll smoke this afternoon I planned a lunch picnic on our new deck. We’re still weeks from moving into our new house, but a sunny picnic on the deck, the house quieted from its weekday contractor cacophony? Oh yes. Time to break out the sun screen and praise the day.

Up In Flames

It all started innocently, with a can of beautiful foie gras that a friend brought us from France. That, and an invitation to a French-style potluck-type dinner with a group of old friends that we hadn’t seen in a while. For a true first-world problem, I’m trying to clean out the pantry before we move, and I wanted to use up the foie gras. But because it’s not every day that I have foie gras that needs using, I wanted to make something truly special with it. And because I hadn’t seen these friends in a while I wanted to dress up a bit. As any moron knows, dressing up and cooking are non-compatible activities, but still, I forged ahead.

I conjured up a dreamy dish, chicken roulades with a mushroom and Madeira duxelles stuffing and a foie gras and Madeira sauce. And yes, it was as delicious as it sounds, and yes, of course, I’m going to give you the recipe. But this is a cautionary tale, and so I must tell it from its optimistic beginning to its ignominious end.

I decided to use chicken thighs, since I don’t really enjoy the breasts, but I wanted them with the bone out and the skin still intact. Sure, I have a boning knife and I know how to use it, but it occurred to me that boning 14 thighs would be a chore and that the butcher might be persuaded to remove the bones for me, and happily this was the case, since I thereby avoided the opportunity to stab myself in the hand and miss the evening altogether.

I found a nifty trick for the duxelles in my online research, one I’ve now added to my permanent repertoire. After chopping the mushrooms up fine in the food processor, you drop them into a tea towel and squeeze with all your might and main, thus expelling an astonishing amount of liquid, and ending up with dry mushroom crumbles that look a lot like kasha or kibble.

I then proceeded to make the stuffing, stopping only for tastes and a little ecstatic yumming, trimmed off extra chicken fat for rendering, and stuffed the now-boneless thighs before tying them up with twine. It occurred to me that removing the twine after cooking the chicken at the party might be a splattery sort of affair, and that perhaps my dress-up scheme was ill-adapted, but no worries: I assigned the de-twining operation to Shel. Next I made the sauce, which was about the most enticing thing I’ve ever tasted, got dressed up, packed the food into the car, and hopped on the ferry. There were actual whitecaps on the normally placid crossing to Seattle, and perhaps I should have taken that as an omen of rough times to come, but no.

Once happily installed at the party with a heady cocktail in hand and a happily chattering group around me, I noticed that the before-dinner gougères, prepared by a very accomplished cook, had fallen flat as pancakes, perhaps under the prodigious weight of the three cheeses they contained. Nonetheless, they were pronounced delicious and vanished with a rapidity that belied any fault.

And then, as the before-dinner oysters were being shucked, this one appeared: no oyster inside at all, but instead, a tiny mussel nestled into the oyster shell. This too, might have been a portent, but the rest of the oysters and their absinthe dipping sauce and the freely-flowing cocktails perhaps clouded the face of my worry meter, and I popped my chicken in the oven, twine and all. Later, after the leek soup and its paired wine, and the pear and gorgonzola salad and its wine, and the mussels with Pineau des Charentes and their wine, I blithely, perhaps a bit too blithely, went into the tiny kitchen to finish and serve my chicken dish.

The host had made spaetzle to accompany my chicken, and so he and I jockeyed for space around the stove, he frying spaetzle, I stirring my foie gras sauce, over the electric burners. He took the pan off the stove, I removed the chicken from the oven, and Shel started snipping the twine, to save my lovely flowing top from getting grease on it.

I turned back to the stove, reached across the burner-formerly-used-for-spaetzle, to get my foie gras sauce, and my clothes went up in flames. Did I mention a flowing top? Did I even think about the fact that it was rayon? Did I even know the flash point of rayon or that a burner that’s not even red could set rayon on fire?

Fortunately, I somehow put out the fire before any more damage occurred other that filling the kitchen with the acrid smell of burned cloth instead of the lovely smell of the chicken. Oh, and the fact that I can never wear that now-holey top again. But the chicken was fabulous, and I’ll certainly make it again the next time I get my hands on some foie gras. I hope you’ll make it too, but always remember and never forget, this recipe comes with a dress code.

Chicken Roulades with Duxelles Stuffing and Foie Gras Sauce

 8 servings

8 chicken thighs, bone removed, skin left on
1/2 lb crimini mushrooms
2 T duck fat, or use butter
2 large shallots, finely diced, divided use
1 tsp thyme, divided use
3/4 cup Madeira, divided use
1 cup dry white wine
2 T butter
3/4 cup heavy cream
4 oz foie gras, mi-cuit
salt and pepper

First make the stuffing. Remove the stems from the mushrooms and whiz the mushroom caps in the food processor until you have fine crumbs. Place an old tea towel over a small bowl, dump the mushrooms into the towel, and twist tightly, squeezing, until no more juice drips out.

Melt the duck fat in a nonstick pan and sauté 1 shallot until translucent. Add the mushrooms and 1/2 tsp thyme, salt and pepper, and sauté, stirring constantly, until they begin to brown. Add 1/4 cup of Madeira and sauté for a couple of minutes until it is all absorbed by the mushrooms. Taste for salt and pepper. Set stuffing aside to cool.

Preheat oven to 450°. When stuffing is cool, open each thigh and put a spoonful of stuffing inside each piece and roll it closed, tying with twine into neat roulades. Place the chicken in an oiled roasting pan. Sprinkle the chicken liberally with salt and pepper, and the remaining thyme. Pour the white wine into the pan and bake for 45-50 minutes.

While the chicken is baking prepare the foie gras sauce. Melt the butter in a small saucepan and add the remaining shallot. Sweat the shallot gently over low heat until translucent. Add the remaining Madeira and simmer to reduce by 1/3. Add the cream and continue to simmer, reducing again by about 1/2, until you have a lightly thickened sauce. Remove the pan from the heat and crumble the foie gras into the sauce. Let it sit for a few minutes to melt the foie gras, then whizz it all with an immersion blender until you have a silky smooth sauce. Add salt and pepper to taste and serve over the chicken (after removing the twine).

You may want bread to mop up the sauce, or then again, you can just lick the plate. And be sure to save the juices in the roasting pan, which will make the base for a killer soup the next day.

The Cookie Contract

We’re going to be moving soon, and we have a horde of contractors working to get the new house ready for us. Since hordes are invariably described as hungry, I had the happy idea right from the start of keeping the guys supplied with cookies.

I took a pretty plate over the construction zone that will be my new little kitchen, as well as a glass pastry bell to keep out the various particles of dust, debris, and paint that are always flying around there, and I keep it filled with fresh cookies. I started with brownies, then chocolate chip with pecans, and then peanut butter. Our main contractor Paul especially liked the peanut butter (Alice Medrich’s recipe) and that gave me the idea of asking the guys for requests.

At first they were shy and just happily ate whatever I produced, and so I made crispy oatmeal, ginger molasses, and blondies. Then a new guy, Andrew the tile setter, appeared, and asked me to make chocolate peanut butter chip, something I’d never made before, but surprise, the recipe is right on the peanut butter chip package. Both he and Mike the sheet rock guy loved those.

And then today the painters, having eaten their way through a couple dozen ginger molasses cookies in a day and a half, had a request. Bruce wanted oatmeal raisin, and he was very precise about them. “A little under-baked,” he said “still soft in the middle, and made with Snoqualmie Falls oats.” Whoa! A cookie gourmet painter, alright!

So I searched the web for a cookie that sounded like what he wanted, and I found these, which 953 reviewers swear are the best oatmeal raisin cookies in the whole wide world, especially if you add a little cinnamon. Bruce didn’t mention cinnamon, but I dared to add a little anyway. After all, the bedroom’s getting painted a sort of cinnamony color and the cookies ought to fit right in.