In my mind there is a hierarchy of oysters and the reigning variety come from the Damariscotta River in Maine. That river is to oysters what champagne is to, well, Champagne. There’s nothing like a cold water oyster, is an opinion I’ve come to harbor as fact.

I didn’t grow up eating oysters and I don’t remember grown-ups eating oysters. Shrimp cocktail, sure. Pate, yes.

I have Gloucester fisherman in my blood and that makes us hardy cold water halibut people. Creamy chowder and baked cod in buttered bread crumb people. Not oyster people.

But I’ve sort of become an oyster person as an adult. My boyfriend, sister and her husband, my friends, and cousins are oyster people. My nieces and nephews will have memories of taking a freshly shucked oyster to their mouths, pulling away at the last minute in exaggerated disgust, scrunching their faces as they lick the ocean from their lips.

I learned to shuck oysters working the grill at brunch at Prune. It was 2009. It was New York City. It was sink or swim. I loved the challenge of doing my job well at top speed. The jagged edges of the shell against my soft palm. The attention required to catch a speck of mud clinging to the shell before taking a knife to it. The exact combination of strength and restraint that pops a shell without shattering it. The severing of the muscle without spilling any liquid. The gentle lift of the oyster with the dull blade so it floats like a frilly cape settling in a puddle. All in just seconds. This is what made me an oyster person.

On a recent trip to Charleston I was prepared to turn my nose up at Carolina oysters. I was prepared to not eat oysters at all. You may have heard it isn’t safe to eat wild oysters in months that end in “R” and, well, it was May in the South. On principle I wasn’t about to order the oysters on one menu shipped from Connecticut. That makes about as much sense as ordering grouper in South Dakota.

But I was with people I love, most of whom hail from the south whose oysters have always come from a Carolina or Apalachicola or the Chesapeake Bay. So when we ordered three different varieties of Carolina oysters at a restaurant called The Ordinary on King Street in downtown Charleston, I thought “When in the lowcountry.”

We were seated upstairs in what is basically a loft. A very pretty loft, with a sprawling bouquet of American Sweetgum branches in the middle of the room. A tree native to the southeastern United States, a member of a genus of just six species. The others you have to travel all the way to Asia to see.

The oysters sailed up the stairs on a tray of ice: three Carolina varieties, single lady’s, bird island blades, and steamboat creeks. I had come prepared to miss the mineral bite of Maine; to fear the mud and the heat. I steadied myself for disappointment at best, a night on the floor of the bathroom at worst.

But when I took each in my hand I felt the familiar dull scrape of the shell against my palm.

Each oyster showed up proudly as themselves: deep cupped and plump; shallow and knife-edged; wild-harvested and farmed. Well rested from the winter cold. Fed by the estuaries and saltmarshes of the lowcountry. Forged in the salty pristine waters of the southern Atlantic, the Coosaw River, and the pluff mud that draws you in deeper the more you struggle against it. These oysters did not pretend to be anything but what they were. I tasted the ocean that cooled our bodies in the hot spring sun earlier that day. The sun, it turns out, has a taste. It is salty on the front with something sweet like stone fruit on the back.

I am pleased to report, not a single oyster eater from that table spent the night kneeling at the altar of the toilet bowl. I love having strong opinions. I love watching them fall apart. Call me a convert.

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TO HARVEST

News of a single eggplant ready for harvest reaches me via text. Another garden update from my boyfriend, who is tending our crop in Florida while I’m in Colorado for the summer.

There are also some mini butternuts I planted from saved seed that have survived squirrel pillaging. We still have to look up how and when to harvest them, like, do they need to be cured once they’re picked?

TO TEND

The parsley and lemon balm at the end of our herb bed were not protected from the intense summer sun and so have perished. Which means there’s a good amount of space there to get something new going.

The collards and kale bed is doing okay but, honestly, their time for clearing has come, so that the bed can be planted with sweet potatoes.

The butterflies have identified the passionflower and initiated their feast. Our Meyer Lemon tree is in Struggle Town. Luckily our neighbor over the fence has the citrus touch, as in she goes to a lot of garden classes that are scheduled when the non-retirees are working, so we will wait for her counsel.

TO LEAVE WELL ENOUGH ALONE

The basil overfloweths. The corn crashed and burned, so did the peppers, as did this mystery cucurbit hanging on for dear life at the corner of the bed.

The climbing beans are showing off. I love the time of year when foliage flows from the ground and clings to anything it can find. Not much is flowering, however. Maybe it’s the sun, a phosphorus or calcium deficiency, or over watering because it’s the wet season. Maybe it’s July in Florida. But look at this single little flower freak on the Snake Melon plant.

And this aloe in bloom, yes!!

SUMMER SCHOOL IS IN SESSION

I teach ceramics to the most special freaks. They are incredibly bright and driven high schoolers who have elected to spend their summer doing more school: STEM type stuff. The kind of subjects I wouldn’t touch with someone else’s 10-foot pole.

They are smart, but mostly they are fun. I get to have 26 of them, four times a week, spread over two class sections. I look forward to their arrival as they cross the threshold into the studio, tying dusty aprons behind their backs. They pull their projects from the shelf labeled with their name on painter’s tape, sit down at their table with their classmates, collect their tools, take a moment to behold their progress, and get back to work. They sing, they laugh, they sit quietly, they help each other, they play fight, they don’t hide their frustration or disappointment, they keep going even when things get hard or boring or tiring.

It is my absolute favorite time of year. And this year, the students I started the program with will graduate (they come for three summers). Graduation will be fun and I will also cry my eyes out.

APOCALYPSE GARDENING

My sister and her husband live near where I teach ceramics, so I stay with them over the summer. My brother-in-law recently built raised beds in their backyard with lots of good mulch because he’s an arborist and gets whatever’s gone through the wood chipper. I helped him clean up a job site a couple weeks ago and I was surprised at how wet the freshly cut cottonwood was. He says that often they hiss like a snake when he cuts into their trunk, which surprised me, because I have never cut down a tree. I found more evidence of this on arborist forums online. And even a video of water squirting out of a walnut tree.

When I press my palm against the papery skin of a birch or cottonwood; the scaly skin of a cedar or pine; the splintered skin of juniper it is easy to forget that, besides carbon, much of a tree’s mass is water. And that a tree is a giant water pump moving the fluid from roots to trunk to limbs and buds and leaves. Of course it leaks when it’s cut.

Anyway my sister and her husband filled their beds with soil from the dump which was so dense with mulch and clay that I believe it was strangling the roots of the tatsoi, kale, arugula, nasturtium, and tomato seedlings. So we dug out the top foot of the bed and blended top soil, mushroom compost, cow manure, and some blood meal. Next year after the dump compost decomposes a bit I think it will be great gardening soil. Gardening is a long game.

All the while we’ve been toiling under a steady haze of smoke from 10 large fires blazing in Utah. As I write, the cottonwood fire has burned close to 100,000 acres over the last 20 days. The summer before my first year of college was the first time I saw the characteristic haunted sun of a wildfire. That June ash fell from the sky in the front range, like soft snow and deposited an inch thick blanket of burned trees and homes on the cars in our driveway 35 miles from the Hayman fire.

CARAVAN PASTRIES

Two older women run a pop up bakery called Grenatta Panini although I’m not sure how pop up it is anymore as it’s been here the last 3 summers. It’s run out of not really a food truck but a caravan, think Danny King of the World. I look forward to their cardamom buns on Tuesdays and Thursdays and rotating seasonal fruit in their personal-sized tarte tatins. Most recently it was strawberry apricot or blueberry.

A NEW ME (?)

After over two decades in various approaches to therapy and a handful of diagnoses that didn’t seem to clarify or offer respite from how my brain works…I finally have a diagnosis and a medication that make me feel understood and not under the thumb of my mind.

I am currently hyperfocusing on the diagnosis: reading, listening, and learning so much. I’m devouring podcasts, books, and subreddits. I’m also letting myself be sad for what this late diagnosis means, grateful that I got it at all, day dreamy about what could have been had I known sooner, and full of intermittent grief that those alternate paths have grown over and it is unlikely I will happen upon them again.

THE NEW YORKER COVERS ALPHA GAL

Longform journalism is not really my thing so I’m only half way through and I may not finish it, to be honest. I am also slightly annoyed at how sensationalized it is. I rolled my eyes at the title alone.

As a person with AGS who has done a lot of reading and researching, not much of this is new to me. But, as the article points out, AGS is “the most rapidly spreading tick-borne illness in the country”. So, I should probably finish it. And you should probably read it. At the very least you’ll learn about permethrin.

What the article doesn’t mention is that Alpha Gal Syndrome is not exclusively a tick borne illness. Up until recently Alpha-Gal has been famously under researched; we are only now seeing medical interest match its prevalence. My point is, we don’t actually know how many insects transmit the illness, there’s evidence that chiggers also cause alpha-gal sensitization. Since it lives in the saliva of ticks, chiggers, or who knows, the insect doesn’t have to be attached (unlike Lyme disease) to transmit AGS.

One thing I appreciated is mention of all the conspiracy theories. Conspiracy theories are one of the more annoying side effects of having a condition most people know nothing about but are desperate to explain in a way that makes it the fault of some kind of diabolical inspector gadget plot rather than a condition of the world we have made for ourselves: one that’s rapidly warming and—in this country at least—over run with deer living in poorly managed forests where working lands are disappearing and industrial farming thrives.

The reality, I suppose, is much scarier than BILL GATES DID THIS TO ME. There is proof that fossil fuel companies knew about academic climate science in 1954. We know their own scientists made accurate predictions about global warming by the 1970s and 1980s. And then chose to mislead the public about their business and their products. And we know a significant percentage of the population chooses to believe that fossil fuel companies have not conspired to deny climate change through mis and disinformation. From what I’ve read, the conditions that contribute to warmer or more unpredictable winters aren’t doing us any favors, but they sure are helping the ticks survive.

The one thing I want everyone to know about Alpha-Gal Syndrome is more practical and that is: it’s an “anytime allergy not an every time allergy.” Which means you could eat meat or dairy or Jell-O three times a week and only get sick once a year. It also means you could know you have AGS, roll the dice and eat a delicious Taco Al Pastor and be fine! But the next week go out for a hamburger and end up in the hospital. So if you’ve experienced mysterious violent stomach upset mixed with hives or weird heart stuff or itching or a tight throat (another thing worth noting: not all of us react to the same stuff in the same way), you may want to look into it. Many of us are misdiagnosed, often with IBS, or undiagnosed for years while getting invasive testing done. But AGS can be identified with a simple blood test.

I’m really not trying to get everyone wondering if they have AGS, but it is truly awful to have anaphylaxis and not know what it is, so if you have patterns talk to your doctor about it just to be safe, okay?

Until next time, the world is so much fun to live in when it’s not on fire.

xo

It feels like someone painted sand on my eyes, and like there is a cork wedged at the base of my throat beneath my collar bones. My bed sounds like the best and only place to be. (Allergies give me horrendous fatigue!)

For these reasons, I have not felt much like writing or doing much of anything. So I am only here briefly to share the tea I’m drinking to help make this season of unseasonable pollen counts a little less miserable (I am also taking over-the-counter allergy medicine and going to my acupuncturist for a nap that I pay for and also genuinely gives me some relief).

I mix together in a large bowl:

1 part dried chamomile flower

1/2 part dried nettle leaf

1/2 part dried plantain leaf

Then take 1 oz of this mixture (about 1 cup) and put it in my French press.

I then add a handful of chopped fresh lemon balm and mint from my garden. And pour hot water (about 4 cups) over it all, letting it steep for 15 minutes.

I prepare green tea separately. A heaping tablespoon of Gunpowder green tea to 6 oz hot water, steeped for 4 minutes.

Then mix equal parts of the herbal tea and green tea with a heaping spoonful of Tupelo honey because it’s good, and honey helps my throat feel not so dry.

This is an earthy, appley (chamomile), umami (nettle) tea. It’s not super floral, but it’s not a viscose vegetal syrup either. The chamomile and plantain balance the drying effects of nettle and support my respiratory system. A thing I’m sure to do is deeply inhale the tea vapors as I brew the tea; the scent is calming and feels good in my throat. Nettle is supportive to the kidneys and adrenals. As a diuretic, it helps move fluids through and out of my body, keeping things “running clear.” The green tea gives me the soft nudge I need to shed the cloak of fatigue (even if it’s just for an hour or two). And lemon balm and mint are good for the nervous system, but really, I just like the flavor they add to the mix.

I like to drink it over a single large ice cube that melts just fast enough to keep the drink at the perfect cool temperature.

And as a “see you later” here’s a winking sunflower from my garden (not responsible for aforementioned allergies).

FREAK OF NATURE is an outpost for offbeat beginners who want a life that feels more creative and connected. I share seasonal, plant-forward recipes and practices for exploring the unexpected places where creativity thrives.

Well, the weekend after I posted about plant blindness and what to do about it, I attempted the elderflower fritters Tom and Pete mentioned in their field guide. I walked up to the stand of elderflower on my street in a wooded lot behind a bunch of fallen down trees and brush. Elderflower is a pretty flexible bush, so it was not too difficult to bend the buoyant and bouncy blooms toward my scissors. I got about 5 or so and then walked back to my house to make the batter.

I thought I would make a kind of tempura from cornstarch, all-purpose flour, and orange zest. I didn’t have bubble water (I thought, actually, Orangina would be fun, but I didn’t have that either), so I just used ice water.

Holding the bloom by the bottom-most stem, I dipped and dragged it lightly through the batter. Once dredged, the flower kind of collapses into itself, but when you slowly submerge it in the hot oil, it spreads back out into its original shape, and the stem acts as a handle, convenient!

I did a double fry: frying once until set, cooled, and then again until each shimmered golden brown. I dusted them generously with powdered sugar and squeezed fresh orange juice over top.

The thing is….they were just OK. Cute and fun to make, but I probably won’t eat them again.

Honestly, if I’m going to have a thing fried like this, it might as well be a funnel cake or Oreos from the State Fair. Go big or go home is how I feel about fried stuff. I do, however, suspect this would be something my nephews and nieces would really enjoy making and eating. What’s an auntie good for if not frying up flowers and drowning them in sugar? I plan to try it out on them this summer when I’m in Colorado. I don’t think there’s elderflower out where my sister lives, but other mild edible flowers would work, like calendula or borage.

I really liked the idea of an orange and elderflower combination, though, and got to thinking about what that could look like. Most of my thinking happens on walks with my dog in the state park near where we live. I remembered reading someone’s story about baking a 100-year-old orange fritter recipe made with lard, which could potentially kill me. Then I thought of donuts, then baked donuts. Then, jelly-filled donuts (which I love) and thought, “Hey, what about an elderflower marmalade-filled donut???”

I just really didn’t feel like frying anything, is what it came down to. And then I remembered I’ve been wanting to make gnocchi from some purple sweet potatoes in my fridge, and I thought ITALY and then olive oil cake.

And there it was: Cake. I’d rather eat cake. My personal opinion is that cake is better with butter. Butter in both the batter and in the frosting. I was the kid who dipped her finger in the stick of butter on the counter and put it in her mouth without an ounce of shame. My family is the kind of family that proudly believes this trait is genetic. If, before alpha-gal syndrome, you dared me to peel a stick of butter like a banana and eat it, I would, probably for a very small sum, possibly for free. The problem, now that I have that meat allergy, is that these cakes (the ones with butter) are off limits.

So I am coming to you today, FREAK OF NATURE readers, who I know know food, in search of a fun orange cake recipe. Maybe you have an orange angel food cake you love? Or know of a Pan d’Arancio made from blending whole oranges that you can vouch for? A Sunshine Cake? Or another orange cake that is Fun (with a capital F) but made without butter (because I am allergic because of my tick-borne syndrome).

Do you have that recipe? Fun, delightfully orange-flavored (like true, complex, bitter-sweet, sour notes all rolled out one after another), and free of (shudders and cries) dairy and butter (I’m OK with subbing margarine)?

Lay it on me in the comments, please!

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FREAK OF NATURE is an outpost for offbeat beginners who want a life that feels more creative and connected. I share seasonal, plant-forward recipes and practices for exploring the unexpected places where creativity thrives.

I’m a dinner-leftovers-for-lunch person. It simplifies almost everything for me: click-clacking on the computer to figure out what to eat, pulling whatever’s coming up in the garden, shopping for food, prepping the food, making the food…you get it.

Even though I try to be pretty good about using up food I’ve made, sometimes there are stragglers: dressing for two salads but only enough greens for one, a lonesome chicken thigh, 5 falafels floating around the freezer. So when I do have time to assemble lunch, it’s fun to be spontaneous and make a meal out of what I can forage from the fridge, garden, and pantry.

Here are three of my recent faves.

One Pan Chicken, Zucchini, and Okra with Creamy Chat Dressing and Green Cilantro Seeds

Man, my very first single okra was ripe for the picking, and I had some time, so I gave it the full treatment. I seasoned two chicken thighs with salt and pepper and cooked them up in a cast-iron. While I let them rest, I sauteed the single okra and two measly zucchinis in the salty chicken fat. I made a sauce from about a ¼ cup of this vegan sour cream I like, 1 teaspoon of chunky chat masala, and a squeeze of lemon. Garnished with cilantro leaves and tender stems, plus green cilantro seeds. This was so good, like, plate-licking good. The thing that drove it home was the green cilantro seed; if you aren’t eating these, you are missing out on what I think is the best thing a cilantro plant has to offer. And you can really only get them if you grow cilantro! The only thing missing was some kind of warm flatbread to wipe the plate with.

A Falafel Sandwich Bursting Out the Pita

Afia falafel was BOGO at Publix, so I warmed up 5 of those and a whole wheat pita in the oven. I slathered on hummus and baba ghanoush from our favorite local restaurant. Then I piled on a mix of greens from the garden: parsley, collards, cilantro, dill, plus shredded cabbage from the fridge. And added homemade pickled jalapenos and beets. Topped it with the falafel and dumped on a bunch of my signature Garden Goddess dressing (I’ll share the recipe next month). It was filling and so flavorful. Now that I’m looking at it, I see where some hot sauce would have made a nice addition.

Bagel Salad Sandwich with Fried Eggs

You’ve heard of salad pizza? Well, this is a salad bagel. A simply dressed salad (lemon, olive oil, flaky salt, and black pepper) of in-season greens: red and green lettuce, arugula, and a mix of herbs and flowers. This had lemon balm and tarragon with broccoli and arugula flowers. A little spicy, a touch sweet. With two fried eggs. I have to tell you, when I make this with a plain bagel, I put Guava Jelly on it, it’s so good. I like Bagelista bagels, they are freezer bagels that you bake in the oven and I think they taste pretty dang close to the NJ bagels I grew up eating. This works as a great before-the-gym snack, or lunch, or breakfast on the go.

And for tomorrow, Happy Earth Day from my stunning little corner of our one and only planet floating in space.

FREAK OF NATURE is an outpost for offbeat beginners who want a life that feels more creative and connected. I share seasonal, plant-forward recipes and practices for exploring the unexpected places where creativity thrives.

In 1998, a couple of botanists, Elisabeth Schussler and James Wandersee (what a last name for a botanist!), coined the term “plant blindness,” describing it as “the inability to see or notice the plants in one’s own environment.” Even though we can see more shades of green than any other color, our smart-but-dumb human brains tend to lump together all the non-threatening things…like plants.

Plant blindness has cascading negative effects, namely widespread disinterest in plant conservation and alienation from nature, which has such observable psychological, physical, and cognitive costs that people call it “nature deficit disorder.” Ugh.

There is hope, though! Turns out, we just have to learn how to ID some plants. Schussler explains, “Humans can only recognize (visually) what they already know.”

If I’m being totally honest, my eyes glaze over halfway through a dichotomous key, and getting in the weeds (pun intended) of botany is kind of a snorefest. So I have learned to identify plants in a much more fun way: by first going outside with someone who knows way more than me (I have a friend who is an excellent botanist and I love being outside with him).

After spending time outside with an instructor and taking notes, I then read my guidebooks at home to reinforce what I’ve learned. A handy thing to do while you’re outdoors is to make a herbarium specimen by snipping a sample of the plant and taping it to a piece of paper. You can take it home with you to study.

I go back outside, armed with printed and digital references as I work on identifying the plant in a new location, making the plant undeniably familiar. While looking at a plant, I use the guidebook as a checklist, confirming the plant’s height, the pattern and shape of its leaves, and the color, shape, and arrangement of its flowers. Rubbing my fingers on the leaves and lifting them to my nose for any noticeable scent. If I feel like I got it, then I use the app to confirm or deny. When I’m at 100% identification, with absolutely no doubt of what I’m looking at, I will harvest wild edibles.

Plant ID demands time and attention, but I love it as a way to get to know a place. Our plant blindness makes it easy to breeze past trees, ferns, flowers, and grasses. But some basic plant identification can make a strange hike familiar and a walk down a pretty ho-hum residential street a little wilder. Plus, it’s a point of pride to know what’s growing around me.

Knowing even just a few plant families and their traits lets me spot a friend on most walks, giving me a sense of belonging and a boost of confidence that I find therapeutic.

Guidebooks help us ID plants, but they also offer glimpses into how people have thought about plants across cultures, place, and time. Hidden between all the morphology and taxonomy are contextual gems on history, ecology, foodways, and ethnobotany. Just recently, I went out to inspect the elderflower in full bloom up our street, and as I walked out the door, I grabbed Edible Wild Plants by Thomas S. Elias & Peter A. Dykeman.

This time of year in Florida, the shrubs stand over 9 feet tall and provide excellent shade from the strong late spring sun. A perfect place to get some reading done. And right there in the middle of the description was my answer to this weekend’s Sunday breakfast…

“Dip flower cluster in fritter batter and deep fry; dust with sugar and sprinkle with orange juice. Add cup of blossoms to pancake batter.”

OKAY, TOM AND PETE!

Get to know what’s growing by making plant ID greeting cards.

I have made many plant ID art projects over the last decade: watercolors, collage, cyanotype, herbarium specimens, leaf rubbings to name a few, that help make plants stick in a brain that learns ok from reading but best from doing.

In the last few years, I’ve made plant ID greeting cards that I give to people on celebratory occasions. It helps me connect emotionally with plants, something scientists say is just as important as plant ID for overcoming plant blindness. It’s also a sneaky way to snuff out plant blindness in whoever receives the card.

The latest iteration has taken the form of digital collage using words and images both found and original. I see different things the longer I look at plants. It helps reinforce identification and acts as a record of my shifting perception.

Here are my tips for getting started on basic plant identification.

1. Find someone in your region who leads nature walks. Native plant societies and groups, local agriculture extension offices, biological stations, and individual naturalists who host walks in public, state, or national parks are fantastic resources. You can narrow your search based on your interests: wild edibles, native flora, or learning to identify and mitigate invasives, for example.

2. Look for botany classes at your local botanical garden, public library, cooperative extension, college, or university. These are typically geared toward a specific audience, like gardeners, horticulturalists, kids, etc.

3. Build a guidebook library of general botany books and regional guides. It’s important to have up-to-date and recently published editions, but I love thrifting older books, mostly for the contextual gems I mentioned earlier.

   

Subscribers to Freak of Nature live across 49 states and 29 countries, which I think is VERY cool. What’s one plant you’re confident IDing where you live?

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There’s no snow to melt, the sun is high, the air is warm, and still—still—there’s this lingering, aching feeling of “Will winter ever end?” Even in Florida, the question endures.

We’re in an extreme drought; the landscape, for the most part, has been brown and yellow for months. It’s dangerous, making the land and everyone in it (42-year-old human, newborn Sandhill crane, sexagenarian Gopher Tortoise) more vulnerable to wildfire.

It’s also a bummer, all the miles of beige. As trichromats, primates evolved to see three primary colors: red, green, and blue. Most human retinas1 can detect these colors on a range known as the visible spectrum: wavelengths from 400 and 700 nanometers. At the center of the range, 555, is green. This is where perception is at our best.

We can see more shades of green than any other color, giving us an advantage over other mammals in identifying food sources. Scientists say that it helps us identify and forage red fruit against green foliage. They also hypothesize that the color calms our nervous system, that looking upon a nearly all-green landscape without having to strain to perceive other colors permits us to relax.

My theory? The source of winter blues or spring sads or whatever you might call it, may not have anything to do with the presence of snow, but more to do with the absence of green. The question then is actually “Will it ever be green again?” And the answer, of course, is yes.

Let’s start with (leafy) greens: backyard herb edition.

Spring is the time of leafy greens. When the earth softens enough to let the first signs of green emerge, my body buzzes with excitement over spring teas, soups, sautés, salads, soft omelettes, and tarts.

The edges of my own garden and yard offer a buffet of “weeds” to gather and nibble at while outside enjoying the gentle sunshine.

Below are 4 plants whose presence signals to me the arrival of spring, plus some favorite ways to eat them.

1. Dandelion in a Salad

Dandelion has a reputation for being bitter, but the young leaves are incredibly mild. I like to fill a big salad bowl with dandelion leaves, wood sorrel, and other garden herbs for a Yard Salad. I add toasted seeds and nuts, spring radishes, and a bit of protein: tinned rainbow trout or a crispy chicken thigh. A simple dressing made from Dijon mustard, lemon juice, a touch of honey, olive oil, and salt and pepper does the trick.

2. Nettle in Soups and Pasta

Dr. Annie Fenn, author of Brain Health Kitchen, suggests aiming for two cups of raw leafy greens (or one cup cooked) each day. Wild growing weeds like stinging nettle are one way to help meet that goal, especially in the spring when they’re abundant. Because you have to puree, crush, dry, or cook nettles to stop their stinging effect, I love adding them to soup or pasta. Try them in Amy Chaplin’s Miso Soup with Spring Greens or — ooo! — in a riff on Spaghetti Primavera. Got a recipe you love that uses spinach? Swap it for stinging nettle.

3. Chickweed in Smoothies

The cutest of all the spring greens, chickweed is a snappy, juicy green perfect for smoothies. In early spring, when mornings are still cool (even here in Florida), I like to blend a smoothie that brings the best of the winter and spring seasons together. Representing winter: some citrus (usually a quartered orange, peel and all) and ginger. Blended with chickweed from spring. I alternate a frozen ingredient depending on what’s in the freezer: banana, pineapple, papaya, or mango. Rounded out with a splash of coconut milk. Delicious.

4. Smilax (Greenbrier) in an Omelette or Frittata

When we think of seasonal eating, fruits and vegetables generally come to mind first: early spring greens and late spring berries, summer watermelon, corn, tomatoes, and eggplant, fall pumpkins and squashes. But animals also follow a cyclical flow, even if it’s not represented on shelves at larger grocery stores. Chicken egg production slows in the winter, but ramps back up in spring. Over the last week, I have noticed a considerable uptick in cartons for sale at the eggstand outside my neighbor’s house. This is the season of gentle cooking, and so I love the idea of soft spring eggs paired with the tender tips of smilax, AKA greenbrier. They are delicious raw or cooked lightly, like asparagus. Try them in a folded French omelette or frittata.

There’s a good chance many of these herbs grow on farms near you and are sold at your local farmer’s market. If you can’t find them for sale, you can grow or forage them.

To help you get oriented, look out for a backyard identification guide next week.

Happy spring!

FREAK OF NATURE is a little outpost for fellow freaks who don’t always know what they’re doing, but are doing it anyway. I point a mirror at unexpected places where creativity thrives and share realistic, low-effort practices that connect us to ourselves, each other, and the natural world.

I’ve weathered Florida’s usual dry season before, but this year, we’re approaching saltine-challenge levels of dehydration. La Niña and deep freezes throughout the winter haven’t helped, forcing me to snuggle my Meyer lemon tree, lettuce, eggplant, squash, sunflower, and watermelon seedlings under blankets more times than I’d like to count.

Everything is stressed. We are in what they call an “extreme drought.” The sand is dry, the vegetation tanned and crisp, the lakes sag.

It’s common to find Marsh rabbits munching along the borders of wetter overgrown lots that dot our neighborhood, but in six years, I have never once seen a rabbit in our yard. So I was surprised to see one staring blankly into the car’s headlights on multiple evenings last week.

When we exited the car, the rabbit didn’t move. Look, my soil-stained hands are already full battling squirrels, deer, aphids, and cabbage caterpillars. So we ran the poor bunny off, down the path through the ferns, past the loquat trees, and across the street into the empty lot. Then I checked the garden. It survived unscathed, no evidence of bunny destruction.

But the next night, there it was again, the bunny, in a word, confused. “You should be scared and running,” I thought. We looked at each other, my wide eyes pleading, “But what does it want?”

“It’s probably thirsty,” Joe said matter-of-factly and went to fill an empty plant tray with water from the hose. “There’s no water.” He set it out at a corner of the house, far from the garden. We haven’t seen the bunny since.

I have a garden because I like growing food, but I also have a garden because I’m interested in supporting wildlife, namely native pollinators (though I admit I am not as interested in sustaining the local deer population). We made an effort this year to introduce more native plants to our yard to support local butterflies, moths, wasps, and bees. And just when the temptation returns to buy and fill bird feeders, I remember it’s only the squirrels and bears who’d end up enjoying it.

Not all birds eat seeds, after all. In fact, many of the birds in our yard are migrating warblers and flycatchers, arriving from their wintering areas in Central America and the Caribbean. Most of them are small, weighing under an ounce even, and move fast in all directions, snapping up oak caterpillars, beetles, moths, egg clusters, ants, bees, wasps, spiders, flies, and others. My point is, I could offer all the bird seed in the world, and it would attract only a fraction of the birds who take up spring residence in our yard, and even then, the seed-eating ones would just end up having to fight the much larger squirrels for their scraps, so.

Enter: The Bird Bath

But then I saw blue jays flapping in Bunny’s water the other morning. It gave me an idea. Given the drought, how about a bird bath?

Most songbirds drink water. And many bathe. It cools their small bodies, which lack sweat glands, just as ocean, pond, river, lake, and pool water evaporating off our bodies cools us. Their feathers also require maintenance for proper insulation, waterproofing, and flight. Water, or sometimes a dust or sand bath, helps them remove dirt and parasites.

I got quickly carried away by the idea of constructing an elaborate cement bird bath. Tiered like a cake, with bubblers and gorgeous curves. Possibly a set of stairs. I’m talking mosaics, House of Medusa/Fountains of Pompeii type shit. “I should apply for a grant,” I thought.

But then I remembered mosquitoes.

How exactly did I plan on mitigating an infestation? Cleaning my masterpiece every day sounded hard, and if I’m being totally honest, I wanted a “Just Add Water!” situation. I turned to Reddit, hoping for a way to keep this simple for me, what I found was a gentle call-out.

And there was my answer: If you’re not up for the responsibility, Christine, then forget it.

Concrete is porous and heavy, making it hard to clean, but glazed ceramic can be slippery (I did not want to be scooping the limp bodies of drowned lizards and weak birds out of a death trap). And despite hours of research, I couldn’t turn up any evidence that proved caulk and grout have been vetted by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology according to avian safety and health standards. I emailed them my questions, but I have not received a response, which is fair, they are busy doing science.

But hello? Birds don’t care what the bath looks like. I’ve seen them flock to ground-up gravel next to a dumpster to gleefully flap and flit around. My only job was to mimic nature as best I could: make puddles and shallow pools of water with gentle slopes. Bonus points if I could figure out how to introduce a slow stream (the sound attracts the birds). And to keep it clean, which I should be able to easily manage in my sink.

My solution: Plastic trays that I already had lying around. I washed them with Dawn dish soap (it’s what they use in oil spills) and arranged them in my yard and porch in spots that are shaded, elevated, and surrounded by ample open ground so the birds have the best chance at spotting prowling predators. I’ve experimented with hanging a plastic bag filled with water and pricked with a pin above the bath to introduce the sound element. I’ve got a solar-powered bubbler on the way. The total time it takes to wash and change the water in the bird bath is 2 minutes and 31 seconds. Yep, I timed it. They aren’t the most beautiful structures, but that’s not exactly the point in a drought.

So far, no birds. But it can take a while for them to get used to something new. I just need a brave bird to try it out and prove it’s safe.

In the meantime, I’ll continue to brainstorm possible more permanent, less plastic, but safe, practical, and beautiful baths for the birds. I am open to your recommendations!

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FREAK OF NATURE is an outpost for offbeat beginners who want a life that feels more creative and connected. I share ways to explore the unexpected places where creativity thrives, with encouragement to be as freaky as possible.

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I could send an invitation I could leave the chipped paint on my nails I could wash my hair I could show up on your stoop I could offer you seconds I could say come by anytime I could kiss you when you walk in the door I could wrap it in waxed paper, take it outside, leave the last bite for the birds I could learn who you are becoming I could cut vegetables fresh from the ground I could get down with a six pack and a bag of Utz I could ask you to bring something sweet I could try something I’ve never made before I could double the recipe I could say forget it and order pizza I could call it letter writing or music videos and popcorn or wake or baby shower or going away or girls night I could pop the champagne I could take your coat I could do it with my eyes closed I could blame it on a break up I could make way too much and send everyone home with leftovers I could come in from the rain and get towels from the dryer I could make your mom’s chocolate pie I could probably pull something together I could say thank you I could see what’s in the fridge I could turn the music up and throw the windows open I could do this every night I could stop what I’m doing I could set it on fire I could make a wish

I wanted to make my own “I could” poem after reading Margaret Grayson’s Ways to Change Your Life and Robin Dunbar’s “Breaking Bread: the Functions of Social Eating“. Have you seen/read/tasted something recently you’ve wanted to try yourself?

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FREAK OF NATURE is an outpost for offbeat beginners who want a life that feels more creative and connected. I share seasonal, plant-forward recipes and practices for exploring the unexpected places where creativity thrives, with encouragement to be as freaky as possible.

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I’m keeping track of the meals I make for guests in our home. Late last year, I chose a navy Moleskine with blank pages from my embarrassing hoarded notebook stash and painted the words “Dinner & Drinks” in acrylic paint on the front. It will likely chip off at some point, who cares.

I write down the menu, scribble illustrations, and record any funny jokes I want to remember, a weird fact someone shared, something significant from the day's news, a bit of gossip, anything to ground the dinner in some sort of timeframe. As I'm typing this, I'm making a mental note to also make a record of how the dinner was received. It's nice to remember when people like what I made them. It's also helpful to jot down suggestions I hadn't considered.

It functions as a time capsule, a tiny cookbook, and — now that I'm writing about it — a gratitude practice. I love having friends over. I love cooking in my home. Presenting a meal is my favorite way to show and share my love.

Pan-Roasted Chicken with Balsamic Tomatoes AND Focaccia

Today I’m sharing a meal I’ve made a few times for friends. I find it to be very low effort/extremely high reward. The focaccia and chicken go into the oven at the same time. First, the focaccia comes out, about 45 minutes later, the chicken.

In the interest of keeping this post tidy, I’ve included the menu below and linked each recipe. Simply right-click the title, to open the recipe in another tab.

One last thing before I go, if you are also a person who likes to show care through cooking, this tip from my friend (and FOOD PROFESSIONAL) Meghan Splawn opened a whole other dimension for me:

It has never occurred to me to just DOUBLE UP WHAT I’M ALREADY COOKING, which makes taking dinner to a friend or neighbor a pretty low lift, especially if I already have the ingredients. Anyway, I think this particular meal would be pretty easy to share in this way. Just do two batches of the chicken and split the focaccia between your home and the other.

The last thing I made for my neighbors was a big saucy lasagna. What do you like to make and share with your neighbors? Is that a thing people are up to these days?

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This recipe comes together quickly, but looks and tastes like something way more time-intensive than it is. It’s great for a low-key dinner party: giving you a block of time to get apps and drinks together or take a quick nap before company arrives. You can also prep it ahead on a Sunday and pop it in the oven on a busy Monday for a weekday dinner that’s low effort but feels pretty special.

The other night, I reheated some roasted eggplant I found in the fridge and added it in before serving. Just a reminder that, in the words of Louise P. de Gouy, “dishes are made not born.”

Makes 6 servings

Ingredients

• 6 bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs (about 2¼ pounds)

• 28 oz can diced tomatoes, drained

• ⅓ cup balsamic vinegar

• 3 tablespoons olive oil

• Kosher salt

• 2 small red onions, halved and thinly sliced

• 3 garlic cloves, minced or grated

• 3 sprigs each fresh thyme and oregano

• ½ teaspoon red pepper flakes (optional)

Let’s Do This

Step 1

Heat the oven to 450 degrees.

Step 2

Place the olive oil, onions, garlic, tomatoes, 1 teaspoon salt and balsamic (plus red pepper flakes if you choose) in a 9-by-13-inch baking dish and mix to combine.

Step 3

Season the chicken with salt and pepper and arrange, skin-side up, on top of the tomato mixture. Sprinkle with fresh thyme and oregano. Roast for 20 minutes, until the chicken skin is deeply golden.

Step 4

Turn the oven down to 350 degrees and cook for another 40 minutes, until the chicken is cooked through.

Step 5

When ready, remove the pan from the oven and serve hot straight from the dish, garnished with more fresh thyme and served alongside focaccia.

This is a riff on a Boulevardier (a Negroni made with whiskey) featuring Cynar: an amaro infused with 13 herbs and plants. It’s a member of the carciofo subcategory of amaros, flavored by artichoke leaves — responsible for its signature vegetal flavor. But it’s also delicately sweet with a bitter-ish finish. I named the drink for our dog Royce, who, like Cynar, is full of surprises. She always greets our guests before they are asked, “What can we get you to drink?”

Makes 1 drink

Ingredients

• 1 ½ ounce Michter’s Bourbon

• 1 ounce Cynar

• 1 ounce Carpano Antica Sweet Vermouth

• Meyer lemon twist

Let’s Do This

Step 1

Add the Michter’s, Cynar and Carpano Antica to a mixing glass filled with ice, and stir until well-chilled. You can grip the glass with your hand and feel it get very cold.

Step 2

Pour the cocktail through a strainer into a glass (on the rocks or drink it neat). Twist 1 wide stripe of Meyer Lemon peel directly over the cocktail’s surface, then garnish with the peel.

Some of us live in food oases, where specialty stores do the work of imagining variations on favorite appetizers and snacks. The rest of us make do with the usual suspects in the olive and pickle aisle at the grocery store. Warming olives in olive oil infused with citrus, herbs, and spices is a pretty easy way of adding variety to standard fare. It doesn't take long, looks beautiful, and feels genuinely fancy. If you don’t have ground sumac, substitute grated zest from half a lemon.

Makes 2 cups

Ingredients

• 1 cup whole Castelveltrano olives

• 1 cup Kalamata olives

• Peel of 1 small navel orange

• 1 ½ teaspoons fennel seed

• 1 teaspoon dried ground sumac

• 1 small chile de arbol

• ½ cup olive oil

Let’s Do This

Step 1

Drain the olives from the brine or oil that they’re packed in. Add the orange peel, fennel seeds, sumac, and chile to a mortar & pestle. Smash everything together with a couple good pounds.

Step 2

Add the olive oil to a small (8-inch or so) sauté pan. Add the gently smashed aromatics to the pan and heat over medium until the oil begins to sizzle. Add the olives, lower the heat, and sauté for 5 minutes, stirring occasionally, until the olives are heated through and fragrant.

Step 3

Take the pan off the heat and let sit for 15 minutes. Serve warm right from the pan or transfer to a serving dish. Don’t forget a receptacle for the pits.

I make this no-knead focaccia on a 24-hour schedule pretty much once a week:

• Mix the dough at 6:00 PM and put it in the fridge

• Pull it out at 3:00 PM the next day to stretch and fold

• Let it do a second rise in the baking pan

• Preheat the oven around 5:45 PM

• Bake at 6:00 PM

• Ready to eat around 6:30 PM.

Focaccia is the most delicious the day it is made, fresh and warm. What we don’t eat I slice and freeze immediately. It’s great reheated in the oven.

Makes one 9 x 13-inch pan

Ingredients

• 4 cups all-purpose flour

• 2 teaspoons active dry yeast (check the expiration date!)

• 2 teaspoons honey

• 1 tablespoon salt

• 6 tablespoons olive oil

• 2 cups room temperature water

• Flaky salt

Let’s Do This

Step 1

In a large bowl, whisk together the water, honey, and yeast. If it doesn’t foam or get kind of creamy looking it probably means your yeast is dead and you should start over with new yeast.

Step 2

Add the flour and salt to the water mixture and stir with a rubber spatula until all the flour is incorporated and a wet, shaggy dough forms.

Step 3

Pour 2 tablespoons of olive oil into a medium bowl. Transfer the dough to the bowl, turn to coat, and cover tightly with a lid or plastic wrap. Place in the refrigerator to rest for at least 8 hours or for up to 2 days.

Step 4

When you’re ready to bake, line the inside of a 9-by-13-inch baking pan with parchment and coat with 2 tablespoons of olive oil. Pull the dough out of the refrigerator.

Step 5

Stretch-and-fold the dough in the bowl: with wet hands, reach into the bowl, grab the underside of a section of dough and gently stretch it upwards until you begin to feel resistance, then fold it over the top of the dough toward you. Rotate the bowl a quarter turn and repeat until you’ve done a full rotation, then turn the dough over so the folds are underneath.

Step 5

Place the dough into the prepared pan. Using your hands, gently spread the dough out a bit, adding oil to the dough if needed to keep it from sticking. (Don’t worry if the dough doesn’t cover the full pan; it will once it relaxes and rises.) Place the dough in a warm place and let rise until about doubled in bulk, 1-3 hours. The rising time will vary depending on the season and temp (meaning it could even take less than 1 hour). When the dough is ready, it should fill the pan and be very fluffy.

Step 3

Heat the oven to 450 degrees. Oil your fingertips and play the dough like a piano, dimpling the entire surface. Drizzle it with the remaining 2 tablespoons of olive oil. Sprinkle the entire surface of the focaccia evenly with the flaky salt (and herbs! If you want).

Step 4

Bake 20-30 minutes. Use the parchment to lift the focaccia from the baking pan and transfer to a wire rack to cool. Enjoy it fresh and warm from the oven.

I’m Christine: low-woo herbalist, ceramics teacher, lapsed line cook, fervent gardener (despite frequent failings), person with Alpha-Gal Syndrome, and author of Plant Magic: Herbalism in Real Life (Shambhala Publications 2020).

FREAK OF NATURE is an outpost for offbeat beginners who want a life that feels more creative and connected. I share seasonal, plant-forward recipes and practices for exploring the unexpected places where creativity thrives, with encouragement to be as freaky as possible.

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I am persistently astonished at the amount of effort required of recipes that claim to be perfect for “WHEN YOU’RE TOO TIRED TO COOK.” Every recipe advertises “minimal effort,” but upon closer inspection involves a substantial amount of cooking, something we’ve established in the query, and confirmed in the title, the audience is too tired to do.

Maybe I’m not clear on what cooking entails. If you ask me, the presence of a heat source defines cooking. Perhaps we don’t all agree?

By my definition, stating you are “too tired to cook” means you are too tired to use the oven, the stove, an open fire pit, the fireplace, the grill, a match, a Bunsen burner, or a rotisserie. What have I left out? Nevermind the labor required to get something ready to cook (chopping being the main one).

Why then am I corralled toward the stove to boil pasta and bake a chicken breast? How is cooking mussels a solution in this scenario? Who looked at Marcella Hazan’s tomato sauce (admittedly a very easy recipe that I make often—when I am not too tired to cook) and thought, “Yes, perfect for a person who is exhausted, they can wait an hour to eat.”

I resent being tricked into cooking.

I guess it’s possible the people writing these articles have never had their creative energy compromised, which I find hard to believe. Surely at one point in their lives, they have not been able to move from their bed to their kitchen to boil a pot of water. Surely, they have avoided the grocery store for weeks on end, gripped by some paralyzing anxiety or pain. Surely, they have been afraid for themselves or their neighbors. Surely, they have been too sick to stand. Surely, they have spent their energy reserves attending to the news, their safety, their jobs, and their duties as citizens, and then pulled themselves together to read their children a story, waited for them to slip peacefully into sleep, and only then, think, after maybe dozing themselves, “It is after 10 and I haven’t had dinner.” Surely, but maybe not.

When I go looking for "too tired to cook"meals, I expect to be presented with suggestions that meet the occasion, an acknowledgment that it is normal to feel this way, because being alive is hard. To not guilt us into cooking, but grant us permission to do as little as possible in the kitchen so long as we are still fed. Some solidarity’d be nice. That is what seems like the appropriate response.

Since I cannot find this information on the internet, I am giving it to myself and anyone else out there who is too weary to cook tonight.

As most of you know, I tend to rely on medicinal herbs, eat seasonally, and prepare food from whole ingredients.

I also rely on medicinal fried chicken, sugar cereal, and tv dinners.

Here are 19 dinner ideas that believe you when you say you are too tired to cook:

1. A bowl of cereal and a beer. You don’t even need a bowl for a variety pack of tiny cereals. The box is the bowl.

2. A peanut butter and jelly/honey/banana sandwich. You can eat this on bread or a flour tortilla.

3. Any sandwich: two pieces of bread, a sliced meat or tofu, some condiments or hummus, a crunchy pickle, a leafy bit if you have it.

4. Roll-ups: a tortilla, mustard, mayo, cheese, deli meat. Tortilla optional, sliced cheese rolls up just as well.

5. A bowl of ice cream (dairy-free for my dairy and mammal-allergic people). With crunchy toppings! Walnuts are good for your brain.

6. A plate of oiled or buttered noodles with some kind of seasoning shaken on top: nutritional yeast, grated parmigiano or parmesan from a Kraft plastic jar.

7. A bowl of rice microwaved with whatever chopped green is nearing expiration in the fridge, mixed with soy sauce, a dash of toasted sesame oil, and some sriracha, if you want. Add canned salmon or tuna, cold or hot smoked salmon if you have it, tinned mackerel or sardines, again, or not! Just a thought: next time you make rice, cook extra and freeze it. Or get some Ready Rice you can make in the microwave.

8. Pancakes or waffles from a box mix. Or frozen that you put in the toaster.

9. Broth or soup warmed from a box or can.

10. Frozen pizza and a soda.

11. Scrambled eggs with toast.

12. Sardines, pickles (I like cornichon), dijon mustard, and Triscuits.

13. A protein shake with frozen fruit and spinach or kale.

14. Silken tofu with grated ginger, soy sauce, rice vinegar, and bonito flakes atop a fistful of greens.

15. A bowl of fruit with granola and yogurt.

16. A can of beans, fresh or dried herbs, olive oil, lemon juice and some zest, grated garlic, salt and pepper.

17. Takeout. TAKEOUT! Just let yourself get takeout. Sheesh, get it delivered if you can. I live too country to get food deliverecd, but Fried Chicken from Publix does the trick.

18. Frozen dumplings.

19. Popcorn.

You can eat any of these meals with a cloth napkin and lighted candles. You can eat from your very best plates. You can eat them alone in the blue light of your TV or with many loved ones at a table.

I hope they do the trick and make space for you to rest or read or grocery shop for your neighbors who can’t leave their homes or draw or write about what you see and feel or cry or march against ICE and mass deportations or dance or make calls to your representatives or laugh at jokes or rage and get caked up at the gym or kiss someone or build Legos with your children and sleep and wake up again tomorrow.

I bet you have no-brainer meals you turn to. I would love to have more easy things to eat in my back pocket pantry. What are yours?

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Dry January is not something I “do.” But I think it’s a fun method of propulsion. The same way I like when a member of my writing club draws a slip of paper from a prompt jar. Creativity needs a path so ideas can make their way out and a cage so that they don’t run rampant.

So I’m using this month as a challenge and an opportunity to experiment with non- and low-alcohol beverage formats. I assembled a set of criteria to guide my explorations:

1. The outcome is a non-alcoholic or low alcohol beverage.

2. Prioritize produce that’s available this time of year.

3. Use what I have by looking to the pantry, refrigerator, garden, and freezer. Don’t forage beyond our yard, don’t buy additional ingredients from the grocery store or online.

I live in Florida, and it is citrus season, so naturally, I thought of sours, a family of cocktails with a base spirit, citrus, and sweetener. They are, apparently, some of the oldest written cocktails. They include the Whiskey and Pisco Sour, Daiquiris, Margaritas, Sidecar, and a favorite of the early 2000s, the Cosmopolitan, among others. Sours are fun, their simplicity and bright flavor say “PARTY TIME” to me.

I looked to my garden for inspiration. Our newly planted Meyer Lemon tree isn’t producing mature fruit yet, but its cute flowers and budding fruits reminded me of the ones from the store rolling around in our refrigerator citrus drawer. Sure enough, there they were nestled in with Navel oranges, Cara Cara, and Ruby Red Grapefruit.

Growing up, my grandparents drove from upstate New York to spend the winter in Vero Beach, FL, and would send us a box of grapefruits. We dusted them with brown sugar and ate them with special serrated spoons. I love grapefruit spoons.

Meyer lemon, grapefruit, and brown sugar. But how bout some foam?

OK, I would like to admit that I cheated and walked up the street to buy eggs from my neighbor because rules are made to be broken. Sorry, but I wanted a foam so bad! And did not want to use aquafaba as so many mocktails do for some reason, and we needed eggs anyway.

I went to put things together and realized I did not, in fact, have brown sugar. I was committed enough not to buy anything from the grocery store, so I went back to the refrigerator to have a look around and decided to try maple syrup.

I share the recipe below.

Snowbird Sour

Lots of people show up in our part of Florida this time of year, many with sour attitudes in tow; this drink is not for them. Here’s to the snowbirds who are not rude to the people working at Lowe’s, who don’t pull out into three lanes of traffic without looking both ways, and wear smiles instead of puckered scowls on their faces. To the ones we protested with this last weekend against ICE and the violent occupation of Minneapolis, I hope I am like them when I grow up.

Serves 2

Juice from 1 Ruby Red Grapefruit, ¾ cup

Juice from 1 Meyer Lemon, 2 Tablespoons

1 Tablespoon Maple Syrup

1 Egg White

1. Juice the grapefruit and Meyer lemon, then pour the liquid through a sieve to separate the pulp.

2. Add the strained juice, maple syrup, and egg white to a cocktail shaker or a large jar with a good lid. Shake well to combine.

3. Add two handfuls of ice to your jar or shaker, put the lid back on, and shake very vigorously for 30 seconds/until the sides of the shaker feel cold. Strain into coup glasses.

4. Cheers :)

Thanks for reading!

Next time, I’ll share the menu I’d make for you if you were coming over for dinner. A low ABV drink to start with a snack. There might be focaccia, there may be a chicken situation with tomato and balsamic vinegar. It will be cozy, warm, Alpha-Gal friendly, and pretty simple to make.

What’s in your fridge and pantry that could be turned into a beverage? I’ll let you know what else I’m experimenting with in the comments. Maybe we can help each other come up with something FUN.

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A NEW YEAR

An old-time classic!

A New Year stretches out before me. The dirt from working in the garden yesterday clings to my fingernails. I am carrying with me the promise of projects half-started and the relief of abandoning others half-finished. Before this year becomes mundane or something to contend with, I will let it be a kitten lapping cream from a plate, a colt presented with an apple, a kid feasting on a bushel of green hay. A whole year where I have never been. I hope, even with everything we face, that it holds many moments of something new and something sweet, maybe both, for you.

Ingredients

0 apologies

6 lettuce seedlings

a stack of unread New Yorkers

salt to taste

Directions

1. In my early twenties, I squeezed past a woman in her sixties in the narrow hallway between the pool hall and the swinging western doors marking the entrance to the bathroom. I ducked and turned my head, pressed my back against the wall, but still managed to graze her shoulder with my chest and touch my toes to hers when I tried to shimmy past the payphone mounted on the wall. "I'm sorry," I said and smiled. She turned toward me, grabbed my arm just below my elbow, her fingers bony and soft. She said, "Honey, don't ever be sorry, just say excuse me." Her voice rattled from cigarettes, her eyes were kind and firm as they settled on mine. I will think of her first this year when the urge to apologize tugs at my jaw: reaching over someone to pull my carry-on from the overhead compartment, and before I explain my allergy to a server or my host. "Excuse me," I'll start, and we can all relax.

2. I think it's so delightful that the language for the place where plants grow in a domestic setting is a "bed." And morbidly interesting that the beds resemble graves. This year, I will remember that as a site of renewal and death, my garden is prepared to shepherd me through every celebration and sorrow.

3. I pick up the stack of New Yorkers and carry them from a shelf to the kitchen table so I can leaf through them one by one before they go to the dump. One drops from the pile and lands open on the floor. "I didn't see that cartoon!" It's a good one by Elisabeth McNair: a butterfly lies prone on a psychoanalyst’s sofa. Actually, why am I describing a cartoon to you? You can see it here. This year, I could beat myself up for not staying on top of my weekly reading, or I could look forward to the end of it and the beginning of the next when I sit down to review it all at once and am met with pleasant surprises.

4. I will know whether my year requires salt and how much if I remember to taste my year as I go and resist turning to the Google search bar or Instagram or, for the love of god, not a WOMAN’S MAGAZINE™️ to ask “what does it need?”

Additional Notes

Thanks for reading today’s newsletter!

My parting recommendation to you is the free to watch on YouTube documentary LISTERS. Two roller hockey-playing, weed-smoking midwestern brothers travel the continental US (I can’t remember, but I don’t think they go to Canada) in their van, not a Mercedes-Benz Sprinter, but a used 2010 Kia Sedona, sleeping in Cracker Barrel parking lots and cooking out of their trunk. I loved it for what it is: two outsiders looking in on the beauty of birds. I especially love that it’s free to watch. In an interview, one of the brothers, Owen, said “I like that better than some rich guy in Hollywood taking 65 percent of the sale to HBO, and they have no connection to nature.” Seriously, bro.

Next time, I’ll share successes and failures from my recent adventures in botanical mocktail land.

Until then, the year is new all year long :)

Christine

This time of year drips. The air is drenched in scent, and the days stretch long and slow. The wet season has arrived.

Even though the humidity is thick and it's 90 degrees by 9 AM, something about it makes me want to bottle it up. It’s a good time of year for hydrosol-making as a way to slow down. To notice a plant’s shape, smell, and essence. To watch it soften in the steam, releasing what it’s been holding. Distillation is a way of getting at something underneath.

The wet season in Florida confuses a lot of people. It’s, at times, unbearably hot. It’s not the season the postcards sell, not the one the snowbirds stay for. But I kind of like it. Everything slows down. The days are sticky, but they shimmer in their way. The lake days, boiled peanuts, the thinned-out traffic on the coast, plus I don’t have to water my garden. The wet season has its perks, if I let it seep in.

A hydrosol is a gentle water extract of a plant, not as intense or concentrated as an essential oil, but still holding its scent, subtle compounds, and energy. It’s made of what rises in the steam and drips back down, carrying traces of a plant’s flavor, aroma, and the energy of how it is in the world.

I like hydrosols best for leaves. This past weekend, we did 3 separate pots of lemongrass, scrub bay, and wax myrtle leaves. Flowers can be a little trickier. They smell so beautiful on the plant and in the air, but can turn musty in the pot. Still, experiment! But leaves seem to give more freely, and the scent stays clean and light. Leaves with high volatile oil content will work best. A good trick is to crush them in your hand and feel for the oils, notice the strong smell: lemon balm, mint, rosemary, pine, spruce.

Summer moves fast. It’s extreme everywhere: plans stack up, growth explodes, the days feel endless, but after it’s all done, the season itself feels short and I want it back. It’s a sprint, a rush, and then it’s over. There’s gotta be a way to get inside of it. To stop the running from one thing to the next. To let the heat slow me down instead of speeding me up.

That’s what hydrosol-making is for me. An exit-ramp, a way to step off the ride. A lazy thing to make, perfect for summer. A set-it-and-forget-it type preparation: get it going, then sit on the porch.

It’s a way to slow down while everything else rushes on.

Make a Hydrosol

Here’s how to make a simple stovetop hydrosol. No fancy equipment, just a pot, a bowl, and plant, some water, and a little patience.

You’ll need:

• A pot with a lid

• A heat-safe bowl or ramekin

• A steamer or some other stand

• Ice (a large bowl’s worth)

• Fresh plant material

• Water

• Scissors

How to make it:

1. Snip your plant material over the pot and add enough water to just cover the plants.

2. Place the steamer or heat-safe rack in the center of the pot, with the heat-safe bowl on top (this is where the hydrosol will collect).

3. Invert the pot lid and place it on top. Add ice to the inverted lid—this helps condense the steam back into liquid.

4. Bring the water to a low simmer. As it steams, the hydrosol will collect in the bowl.

5. Let it go for 20–30 minutes, then turn off the heat and let it cool. You may need to drain off melted water from the lid and add more ice partway through.

6. You may have to drain melted water from the lid and add more ice.

7. Carefully pour your hydrosol into a clean jar. For ease of use, decant a little into a spray bottle—this makes it easy to mist onto your face, linens, or hands throughout the day.

8. Store in the fridge and use within 4–6 weeks.

9. If you’re curious about scent combinations, try making separate hydrosols first, then blending them in small amounts to experiment with layered aromas.

How to use:
Hydrosols have been around for centuries. Orange blossom water and rose water are hydrosols, traditionally used in the kitchen as much as in the bath. I think of orange flower water in Breton butter cake (that we made when I worked at Prune), or rose water in desserts across the Middle East and South Asia. I’m thinking how good the lemongrass hydrosol I made will be in curry.

Of course, you don’t have to cook with them. Spritz your hydrosol on linens, your face, your hands in the afternoon heat. Keep it by your bed or your desk or in your bag. Hydrosols are gentle because they’re so dilute, so they’re generally safe.

Let the smell remind you: you made this. A small part of the season, held in water, while it lasted.

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We are currently in Kentucky. I am loving the sight, sound, and smell of the plants that I miss this time of year since moving to Florida.

My brain is buzzing with a bucket list of all the things I used to love to make before moving to the subtropics. At the top of my list? Rich, velvety, mineraly nettle infusion (lucky me, I got to have it at my friend’s house last week) and Créme de Violette: a violet flower infused liquor flavored with orange peel and vanilla extract, and sweetened with sugar.

Crème de Violette is featured in a cocktail we love to drink at home: Aviation. But I also add the extract to bubble water if I’m feeling a little bummed and need something cheery or if I have a bit of an itchy scratchy throat from allergies or weeding all morning in the dusty dirt.

It’s delicious and considerably less expensive to make than buy. I think I’ll probably make a very small jar this weekend that I’ll take home as a little memento of our trip and a time capsule of this time of year.

Also, can I just mention, I think it’s such an f-ing treat to make edible, drinkable things from FRESH FLOWERS. To touch them and smell them and then eat them. I think to myself—when I’m collecting them—I can’t believe I live on a PLANET floating in SPACE that grows THINGS I CAN EAT and DRINK. Incredible!

Fill a 2-cup glass jar with violet flowers, pack them in gently as you go so that it is very, very full. Remove the green calyx if you want a brighter colored booze.

Add 2 strips of orange peel, about an inch wide, and 3 teaspoons of vanilla extract and a half cup sugar. Pour vodka over to cover everything completely, put a lid on it, shake it, and store it somewhere out of direct sunlight.

Shake it every day for the next 2 weeks, at which point you strain off the liquid from the plant material and add lemon juice until the color turns bright purple. Then store your Crème de Violette in a green or brown colored glass bottle and out of the light (it will ruin the color).

It does double duty as a medicine cabinet and bar staple.

Five years ago this week, the book I worked on officially for 4ish years (but really for more like 16 years) was published. Plant Magic: Herbalism in Real Life came out on March 31, 2020.

Writing a book is a funny thing. Something you do with a lot of other people, but mostly alone. Not that it's lonely, although of course sometimes it definitely is, it's just a lot of time spent by yourself. That's just kind of how writing works.

But in order for a book to get out in the world, a lot of people have to be involved. From everyone making it to publishing it to stocking it to buying it. It's a big community thing. Filled with lots of creative work, from taking the photos to packing the shipping boxes.

So today, I'm just writing to say thank you.

For helping me make Plant Magic. For gifting it to each other and sending me pics of it in local bookstores or in your hands at home. For coming to online book launch events during quarantine 5 years ago. For signing up and continuing to read this newsletter.

Thank you.