“Okay now..” He dumps all the coins on the ground as loud as possible. Irked, I continue, “Choose a color.”

“I wanna be wellow.” Starts taking all the yellows across the room to various surfaces.

“No, you put them down here like this.” With contrived calm.

“I’m gonna make a sandwich.” Puts two reds and yellow together.

“I am going to go first, I am putting it down this tube.” A gentle redirect.

He proceeds to put in three in a row without breaking for my turn, I race him, we fill the entire board at speed, laughing. Once filled, and although we have practiced the trap door that lets them out, the little tweaker decides to eject them by swirling the entire game above his head. It’s hard to know if I was psychotic before this or, now, because of it.

The second batch of pesto wasn’t as bright and my go to roasted cauliflower lacked its go to spice, cumin. 11 weeks of baby on the outside and 38.5 weeks on the inside equals cravings with attitude. The garden is in a vague season or dying from too much salt water dripped from line drying and daily shredding by monster trucks. Afternoons are choose-your-own-adventure, yard toys or chalk art and moving this to there and getting rid of that which got ruined. Almost a year in we are figuring out our rhythms, or testing how much we can just be, here. No entertaining for the kids sake, no plans, no trying. The popsicle dregs leak onto the table, I angry toss the plastic reusable handles in the grass, take the hose and spray it all down. I lose my mind, yell, stomp, it’s too hot, everything is sticky, as much as “hanging out” sounds nice I have my limits. The chorus I have lived by is still haunting my every move, “I wanna do right but not right now.” Perhaps now it could be, he two-year-old’s anthem, from Frozen, “couldn’t keep it in, Heaven knows I’ve tried…” Old me was running 50 mile weeks and drunk drunk most Saturdays. Working 14 joyful hours a day and going on a travel bender, sleeping on airport floors. This was mirrored in Tweaker when we met, both of us bouncing one thing to the next. Him fifteen years sober, but as addicted as ever to surfing, working, making, shaking and baking. Something in me has always been on fire. Even soulful activities like gardening, meditating, folding laundry quiet the charging spirit, but I am still buzzing. Too often, amid the Littles screaming and Tweaker’s tweaking, I spew the energy like fire in a harmful snarl of words. As if their crazy is the craziest I’ve ever felt, or the combined crazy is all too much. Working and going and planning and cooking keeps these internal flames lapping, compelled. Still them, limit them, make them wait around only has them collecting other combustibles, whatever fodder is nearby. I need action and feats and deadlines. I need to crawl into bed dead ass tired or else. Could summer just end already?

Key lime pie is not a tradition or family favorite. I’m sure I stayed away from it in the south growing up because they added a cotton candy meringue topping or stale tasting cool whip. Turns out I was right, the classic version has sweetened condensed milk and sour cream, neither ingredients leans refreshing. But because it’s been a rhythm less year and an even more bewildering summer, I just want what I want. An exacting schedule is not ideal but it’s better than a phony calm broken up by high pitched screeching, full on bored and bothered, to finally make plans. If lunch is at 11:30 one day and 3 the next, I’m making some pie.

The littles aren’t even sure what pie is. They see me get out the blender and assume I am making a smoothie, I fend them off with fried up sweet potatoes. I let them each taste the “crust” which is made of dates and walnuts and a touch of coconut oil. The recipes I found called for a graham cracker crust but I think I know better. Plus the only graham crackers on site are in the soggy bonfire bag stored in the back of the van, rubbing against huge matches and months old melted and rehardened Hershey’s. The filling that replaces sweetened condensed milk is not intentionally vegan but it just sounds better, coconut cream, coconut oil, agave or honey. Also to add to the structure soaked and pureed cashews. No one likes the crust when I let them taste from the fork while pressing it into forms. The cashews turn out grainy without an overnight soak. Fresh lime juice and zest saves the puree which goes over the pressed down base and right into the freezer.

Cooking at home is 70% good, 30% good enough. Like raising kids, the majority of time they are observing, charging forward, establishing appropriate behavior for the situation voiced over by adult commands. More than 30% of the time they mirror my bad behavior, quick to react, irritated, shouty. There are times this year it swung the other way, the minority being the good example from me and theirs in turn faltered. It is tumultuous to try and reign in your spirited vibrations but have them still lurk under the surface, reverberated back in melt downs, fighting, general mayhem. Able to flip a peaceful afternoon with mere intonation. Unchecked power and incomparable weight. The times it has my kids eyebrows tall are the least proud moments of my life. The majority of the time it works in my favor leaking intensity, wildness, unending curiosity into their lives. But when I falter, I pay double. So far it seems the only way to not fall sharply off a cliff is to soften the line between going hard and saving room. To call dinner buttered noodles, or pie. Something homemade shows the effort alone, what it is is not the point. And trying so hard can reverse the intended outcome. There is food, there is a table, eat, FFS.

The pie was okay. I made a few in a muffin tin so they would be ready sooner, the rest in a banana bread loaf pan. The crust didn’t really freeze like I’d hoped and remained too jammy. The fat in the coconut was creamy but the oil tasted oily. Cold, healthy-ish lime dessert at 3pm no matter everyone’s mood, incomparable. I consider making it better and trying again, I care too much. I want it to wobble like a sweaty meringue just not taste like one. The flavors were good enough, blurring the line between parfait and dessert. Never expecting it to be great, only fine, chill, pacifying. Never putting the fire out but not adding kindling. Not so severe a beak from goodness that it requires apologies.

The second try was way worse. I broke my own rule about the cashews, not pureeing separate, and for some reason added them to the homemade coconut sweet/condensed gu instead of eggs. I found the last pack of graham crackers in the van but didn’t pre bake the gram cracker crust which made everything buttery but not in a good way. Both were below average. So I’ll order it while out to dinner once a year or be humbled when it’s sitting there all simple and homemade at a potluck. I don’t need to spend time figuring, I just need to lengthen the times I get it right and shorten the times I get it wrong. Or go to someone else’s kitchen, learn from them. Order out. Hire help. Do less, simmer more. Adopt a new summer song, thinking, “There’s flies in the kitchen, I can hear them a humming, and I ain’t done nothing, since I woke up today.”

If the flaming energy is cooled just enough, lower expectations, less determination, the heat isn’t so inescapable. Scared at times that burning my people, the granola, is inevitable, unable to stop its energy. The fire may be easy to contain if it’s suppressed early enough, releasing pressure a bit at a time. Much less will happen, but it won’t be as fiery, hard nosed, insatiable. The effort kept at a sustainable temperature, the coals simmering, more laughing, more showering, more eating dessert. Proud of how fucking hard I am trying to be even a little better. Not always good, but enough.

VEGAN Key Lime Pie: frozen

Notes: ***Soak cashews for 8+hours – but not a day. Puree first then add the rest of the filling. 2 cups of walnuts/cashews to 1 cup of dates for an alternative crust

***learned this: Homemade non dairy sweetened condensed milk: 2 ingredients and 45 mins!

Not Vegan Version

“Sissy do you want carrots too.” Big brother.

“Yes Bubba, carrots too.” Little sister

“I want the wed ones mom. Sissy you want the red ones too?” Big brother.

“Bubba, them bubba.” She points over his plate to the green onions in a pile.

They climb and bend around the bowls and rolling paper, dumping the warm rice off the seaweed and onto the rolling paper, undoing the process from its start. We spread the sticky grains onto the scratchy nori, piling all the chopped ingredients at its center.

The table is just as I imagined it, hands reaching and sharing, pressing and slicing. Cooking together. Even though I didn’t plan for this life, I have practiced for it.

One great teacher was Doris. I’d grown up helping her out on her farm, tasting the gardens she built, watching her and her farm tangled up in each other’s ways. Doris was partially crippled by a stroke but still the broadest woman I’d ever seen. She strolled out to the garden in the early morning and evening, staying out of the sharp heat of midday. She’d grab a handful of weeds or dried up stalks and throw them down between the rows. Always in a long skirt and short sleeve collar shirt, line dried and stiff, she’d bound by headstones of relatives and dainty lilies the same. I could see her straw hat bobbing in between the rectangle of corn and around the unruly oval of raspberry stalks. Using the end of her cane she would lift a leaf or poke something square on. She might poke a dead animal with the same force as a watermelon. Equally curious and akin, humble, reverent.

I had lunch with her most days. Coming in from the sticky, saturated heat I’d sit down to tomatoes with bouncy skin and seed flowing centers, barely cooked green beans with butter, a moldy block of cheddar cheese, a small dish of mayonnaise, and some kind of cookie the church dropped off. On a nice china plate, sat ready two mirrored slices of bread. A chicken always boiling down on a back burner.

“Seems like those beans need pickin’,” Doris would note.

Which meant, don’t leave here till you pick the beans. One extra day on the plant would cause a toughness that cannot be undone even by the best ham hock.

“Yes, probably do,” so hungry I can barely get it out between breaths between bites. I see my role in it.

“Seems like the rain won’t do us any favors this week,” she’d start.

“When should we plant the melons?”

“ ‘Bout the time the ground hog gives up.”

Sounds so right. I presume she will leave me a clue as she does. A garden glove on the end of a row of tomatoes, weed this. A broken tool, leaned up against the tree where I parked each morning, fix this.

“What’s going on down there with Snookie?”

Snookie was Doris’s neighbor, and my kin. He was always smoking a pig for someone’s graduation or wedding.

“I don’t know, but I wouldn’t want to be standing over a fire today.”

She sucks food from the roof of her mouth, partly because she has no teeth. Adding some volume to the act, is her way of agreeing, like a church amen. She cuts off some of the mold on the cheese, and with a shaky hand, slides a piece onto my plate. She is as regal and as hearty as they come. Pressed napkins, china plates, but severe in never letting a thing go to waste. The forks could go as far back as English royalty, her ancestors have been here since the beginning of this country. Right here on this spot. Freshly polished and sturdy, holding them felt like a history lesson. And still she opts to use her hands, garden fingernails and all. Somehow balancing propriety with necessity in a way I understand. That generation with this. Always connected.

“They ought to move the steers off of that pasture soon,” Doris notes.

It’s fine for me to stay quiet, I know how it goes. Her pulse is the pulse of this land. Her touch senses the order of things, how it’s all strung together, like dewy spiderwebs, bound to teach a lesson. She is old, but her expertise is biblical, the way she folds into these worlds, instinctive. Sometimes I think I’m dining with a ghost, a descendent or reincarnation, or both. From her seat, she can tell you how much water is in the creek over the next hill and if the dogs three farms over are in heat.

I start to rock out of my chair, slowly not wanting to cut brief our exchange of farm niceties. I try to help clean up, but she just tells me to take some cookies from the tin and get on. I see dried beans being shelled in a tin can on top of the deep freeze as I step down onto the back porch. Her straw hat is there waiting for her evening walk. Adjusting to the brightness I take a few slow steps to the barnyard. Then back in the shadows I adjust the blade on the mower. I see the horizon I need to reach by day’s end, but I am content. The tireless sun goes on. The hills rise against it. Our hills are just a few miles down the same stretch of road. I trust them. Plants turn away from the sun as if giving up. Once night falls, they’ll perk back up. Like Doris, I feel responsible for all of it and none of it, belonging still.

Sushi always sounds good to me, especially on the too-hot-to-cook summer nights. It feels like an escape when you cannot escape. I stick to the basics for the kids sake, veggies with a little spicy tuna option. The rice takes regular cooking, then while it’s cooling a dose of sugar and rice wine vinegar. Batting it around the bowl to cool the rice while forcing the ingredients to coagulate is necessary. It works! The squares of seaweed grip the sticky rice as we press in our misshapen veggie sticks and squishy avocado. Rolling it with parchment paper, creating a square form with bent fingers, sealing it all in tight. Once we cut it, the Littles recognize the art.

“I need some of that stuff mama.” Pointing at the soy sauce.

I dribble some sauce on his plate near the sushi and throw a piece of ginger on there to see if he bites. Little sister chomps through the fresh mosaic, just happy to be at the table. They reach and share, taste and compete. She dips in his pool of sauce, he fills her unfinished roll with more bits. In the small ecosystem of a family, they weave together something that looks like work, and play, and being a small piece of the whole. It wasn’t that long ago when I learned I didn’t matter at all, only the baby in front of me did. The days I was sure I could bend to my will were instead bending me. Tangled up in this life force so hard you lose everything. Autonomy you thought was good, the time you thought you had, the good you were sure you earned. Then you’re sat at a kitchen table, hips sore, sweaty, worried. Teaching and aching for your kid and every kid for that matter, your mother and her mother, old Miss Doris and her sisters and daughters, your fathers father and your siblings. Running so far away from alone, taking on all the belonging, all the spiderwebs. Right there in front of me the littles are bending and shifting and carving out pieces of themselves for one another. Fitting it all together like it was meant that way. All of us squished and belonged. Motherhood endures kind of attachment, all the way emptied and utterly essential. As if you could drop dead if another clammy hand clung to you but equally unnerved by any sort of freedom from it.

Assembling this summer, together, instead of cooking feels appropriate. The moment I think the world is circling around me, made in my image, disconnected, the littles prove otherwise. They reinforce what I’ve learned time and again, sharing the soy sauce, noticing the beans, contorting, converged, weaved into a web. Caught up in connection. Lucky enough to be stuck in its conviction.

“I was thinking about cooking with Nona?” The writer.

“Oh that sounds good, what should we make?” The facilitator.

“I haven’t made pesto yet this summer, and we have a lot of basil.”

“Oh that’s easy,” with a wave of her hand, the facilitator will get it done.

“You know, you could talk about soils,” the Farmer looks off in the distance, bittersweet caught in his throat.

Years ago, I volunteered on farms in Italy, working and eating my way through. I’d started in the North where, as my Southern Italian family claims, confoundedly, “they don’t salt their bread.” The way they eat suggests the type of people they are. They grow hazelnuts and hunt truffles. Their vineyards are cooler and they like oozy cheese, with a stinky orangish rind, that they let sit out all day, getting stinkier. At this farm we picked grapes and made grape juice with a manual press. Their Nona sat in the courtyard resting and tanning in between bouts of yelling, each bouncy syllable came with a hand exclamation. She sat up when the crates of apples piled up beside her. She’d motion for me to wash the apples in the kiddie pool, then drain them in a plastic laundry basket. We’d then use paring knives and cut around the bruises, finding 4 maybe 8 slices, depending on the size of the apple. Her constant muttering broken up by the few words I did know, “bene” good, and “basta” enough. Mumbling, gesturing and nodding we transformed several bushels of produce into one of their family signatures, Mostarda, a thick spread that was both sweet and bitter. Perfect for stinky cheese or fresh bread. It took days to cut the apples and quince, adding it all to a massive pot, covered with a bit of the pressed grape juice and handfuls of mustard seed. Then it cooked, at least three days more. As it reduced it got sweeter and more likely to stick, so we stayed close, making sure it was stirred several times an hour. I’d clean the side of the pot where the crust formed, it tasted like a salty, gritty fruit roll up. This was one way the land and people worked in unison, bottom to top. There were many.

The Farmer, the little’s Poppy, sits down tentative. He won’t impose the gospel of soils, but if you ask, be ready for a revival. He moves to the corner to sweep while he talks mirroring my effort at the stove. His sermon mounting, extending, beaming a light into the dark. The image that sticks most are the busy nutrients and their spark plug catalysts bacteria.

“I mean who even thinks about Cobalt, well it matters.”

“Does it replicate in humans, does it absorb like the way our body absorbs?”

“Sure of course, yes, and the other things that help humans absorb from nature, like the blue zones people talk about, the areas where people thrive the longest.”

All the while I keep imagining the beady eyed bugs suckling healthy roots, then burrowing down to bring the plant a platter of calcium, zinc, cobalt.

“That is wild.”

After the Northern stint I moved south, headed towards my own family, spending a week with Marco and Francesca outside of Florence. The old farmhouse sat on top of a hill, the edifice crumbling into the land and the land into it. The simplicity and grandness nodded towards another time. Bright, thorny lemon trees offset arched stone doorways. An open fire in the corner of the kitchen, always somehow at the right temperature. The table under the tinkling shade of shabby olive branches outside the back door of the kitchen could seat 30. Everything about the design of this life, agreed with my soul. Inviting nature in, dressing it up on a plate, sharing it.

There were ancient practices here too, the foot path through fields, the worn stone walk, chipped serving plates, long lingering meals. Rooted in the transfer of dirt to plate. The way Marco selected the white grapes that would get crushed. All the grapes going into the press together, stems included, venerating the whole plant a bit more, its beginning middle and end. His process was effortless. Digging through the bushels we picked, loaded and stacked on the tractor, he flung half into the compactor and half in the compost, up to his knees in plants. Sometimes he would save some for dessert wine, spreading them out in a drying rack, in a room that only captured afternoon light, the dust stuck in a candied, rotten fog. Then the pressed fruit juice went into a steel fermenting tank. He would stand Suspended on a tall ladder, using a fire hose to transfer the liquid. The floor was its own evidence of the process, turning soil into wine. Then the cleaning, always cleaning. If there is food there is cleaning, part of the transformation and it’s meditation. Nothing sticky would be left, the rotten bits washed away and the fruit saved.

Nona, the facilitator, and Wild Thing make pesto. It’s perfect. Sharp and buff, each ingredient out doing the next, in a collaboration of hearty leaves, buttery walnuts, pungent garlic, salty Parmesan, and tart oil. It goes on everything, cold butter noodles, toast with eggs, mixed into warm quinoa and roasted eggplant topped with a sprinkle of feta. Like soil, offering its cornucopia to a root, all in the right proportion. Sat in the thin veil of postpartum, amid the branches of my family tree, I find ground in the notion of coming back. The searching and absorbing is but a recoil. Driving down past the microbes and the beads of water into hard rock, seeking what was always there in the first place, and bringing it back up.

My last night in Florence I stayed late with Marco in his apartment above the kitchen. We ate scraps of bread and olives and carrots with dill. He asked questions with the few English words he knew. I knew food vocabulary, but I couldn’t construct a sentence.

He asked where I would go next,

“Mia famiglia, dove Napoli,” I said proudly. ‘My family, where? Naples.’

“Perché, fare,” which means, ‘why to make’

Italians are always using Fare. To make and to be are the same verb. Perché attempts the same duality, used as “why” and “because” . What you make is what you are, why, because. The root, the nature of a thing is the same. The more time I spend here the more it makes sense.

“Concosco finite,” which what I thought meant, ‘to know it all, from its beginning’

“Ah siiiiii, radici,” he nods. I pretend like I understand what he has said, nodding, finishing my wine. As unsure as I that I understand, he starts to draw on a scrap paper on the table where we are sitting. His swollen fingers and earth soaked nails make holding the pen appear painful. He draws a tree and then the ground and then rapidly the tangled mess under the ground.

“Ahhh, roots,” I say.

“Siiii,” him.

“Si,” me.

“Si si,” him.

“E vero,” me. ‘It’s true,’ I am searching for my roots.

At the park the next morning Poppy, my dad, the farmer stays on task. “I looked up if the soil had been tested in blue zones.”

“What did they say?”

“They aren’t particularly better than others, there isn’t a lot of evidence their food is more nutritious or anything.”

“Huh”

“The one thing that they do do is remedy the soil naturally, no fertilizers or anything, they use what they have nearby.”

“Like fish bones in Sardinia or something.”

“Yes, exactly. The only amending is from what is available.”

The farmer doesn’t mean to be such an intense presence but its his nature. Intense as me needing to mull things and carry them, test them, taste them, setting the example that growth and change is a painful art. Feeling the effort of each energetic node getting deeper, deepest. Seeking, extracting, then returning.

More like an accusation from the ocean guy to the college kids.

Somehow they triangulated a fresh fish drop from one dude to another.

There is a language and a movement to ocean people, even random preteens outfitted with poles on electric bikes get a knowing nod. The dudes pass other dudes.

“They biting in the break?”

“Gotta make it past the barneys dude.”

“Dude grab the shories”

“Totally dude”

So many dudes.

It’s not just whats biting but the water temp, wind, swell, ocean fishing factors add up. More to discuss. More to know. Unlike swampy pond fishing with compost pile worms, or river snatching off a fly fishing cast, the ocean is deeper and meaner. It takes and takes, pounding waves, reflecting sunshine without relief. The boats are bigger, the rigging tougher, ice cold water lapping up the sides, taking and taking. The yellowtail and halibut and salmon off the coast of California is like treasure. Modern day pirates on the hunt, fearless, drunk, faithful.

Little dude asks what a yellowtail looks like. We search it. People standing in the proud catch pose, on a boat or land. The fish is silvery with blue and yellow stripes up the side.

“Says they eat squids.”

“Oh yeah mama like squids from the pool.” There are squid looking toys that sink to the bottom, they even jellyfish amble on the way down, looking the part.

“Exactly dude.”

There is a freezer full of yellowtail when we get home. Some goes directly on the smoker, easy lemon and pepper on the outside. Big dude has a vision. I just want fish tacos. Not battered, not fried. Smoked and grilled, bright and tender. A drippy slaw with too much cilantro and spice. A taste of the sea hammered with mayo and Tapatio.

The dudes send more pictures of more catches. Rumors swirl about Halibut caught from the beach. There is mystery and luck to fishing, and fish. It is unbelievable, each time proof of the miracle. I got the call once “We are leaving at 2am, you in?’ I knew that meant we wouldn’t leave until 4:30am, time has a way of escaping when things need to be done with a certain attention. Taking into account the boat’s tender engines and achy wooden belly, radioing with fisherman coming in, listening for truth behind the exaggeration, all while the current carries us out to sea. Packing a sack with snacks, one extra pair of underwear, ignoring the one bathing suit top I have in the same drawer. I skip the change of clothes and stuff in a sleeping bag. Confident in my resourcefulness and trusting resourceful’s sense of adventure. The things that matter come into focus, coffee in the morning, beer at night, head lamp for when shit goes wrong, and some layer for warmth, a suture, or rescue flag. The not having makes the having so much greater, hands more tender, eyes dripping contentment. Don’t-need-much-at-all-faith. Yeah, I’m in.

Dave, the fisherman, leaves the wheel to check on an omelet he is cooking on the swaying, spitting propane powered burner. It moves with the boat, on its own bearings, the pot is situated deep enough so that it won’t fall. It looks like a wok, lit by a firework, attached to a sinking outhouse. He has two major licenses, one for salmon and one for Dungeness crab. A license is an entire profession, the pirates protect the labor and produce of a dwindling commercial fleet. I take the joint from Dave’s lips, he stirs the omelet, sips his beer, eyeing a sound coming from the rigging, checks the dials, pisses off the back of the boat, all done on a slant, in tune with the rolling ground. We are headed back to San Francisco from 50 miles north, on the way we will fish salmon. We get out to the open water and it all settles. The boat seems at home, coming in and out of harbor feels like asking a 3 year old to put on their shoes. Painfully and not without dramatic antics, dragging feet, an aching heart.

When the morning comes I don’t recognize it. There is no light in the bottom of the boat, instead loud, splintering wood, lunging up hills of water, only to fall flat down on top of them, a long weightless sigh, then gliding, settling back on the surface. We are moving. The birds above are deafening, swarming. I come up to coffee that’s been made long ago, Dave is focused on a tool. Work begins, quick but unrushed, feeling his way around the boat, needing it to stay upright, understanding it when it bends. His eyes are always scanning for the next fire to put out, making small, constant decisions with calculating sureness. Listening to the radio, he ducks into the driver’s seat to see our coordinates, confirming his sense of direction. He sets up the salmon station at the back end of the boat. There is a lower deck to stand on where water pushes over the rails. A big cutting board with a hose pumping water from below, constantly cleaning it. A tool that looks like the leg of a chair but with a sharp hook on the end. We sit on top of the storage bin, waiting. Cold coffee becomes warm beer. My feet are dangling, I feel a dangerous freedom just letting it all happen, the water, a conductor, I’m just in the audience. There is nothing for miles, no other boats, no land. Life surrounds us though, birds fight for fish scraps on the boat deck, all kinds of things are coming close enough to the surface, whales, jumping fish – Dave notices my awe. “It’s a god damn orgy out here isn’t it.”

As the morning wears on, it seems we are doing nothing. Drifting in a world of blue, everywhere. Underneath us and above us, non-stop blue in all directions. Hungover, buzzed, crazed with uncertainty. Then a flick of the line, high above our heads, Dave knows, and moves to the back of the boat. I get down close to where he is working, gloved, hand over hand, pulling in the line. He takes a bit of line and gives a bit of line, leaning back against the forward motion of the boat. He bends to the will of the fish, listening to the movements of the line, still too far and deep to see its form. Even in the ditch of water, a rocking boat, a fighting salmon, he’s making all the adjustments, course, visuals, time. With life in his hands he is noting and absorbing, not directing. He brings the fish finally, just feet from the boat, grabs the chair leg, clubs the fish with it, then hooks and lifts it out of the water. The shadow he has been dancing with is revealed. This moment slows down, smooth but heavy. The chair leg stuns the fish then the hook inserted at a certain speed kills it instantly and makes it easier to grab the slippery body out of the water. Instinct chokes the air, all the blues are dulled, it feels greedy. As if all the believing it could happen is better than the happening.

Laid on the board the length of the boat, in a kind of V that holds the spine of the fish. Dave makes two cuts, its lungs still fluttering, he rips out the guts, tossing them near his feet, they get washed away by waves after a couple passes. He seems like he is performing this from above. His movements are practiced but sad, swift, painful. Blood goes everywhere when he flushes its cavities, searching its eyes, two souls meet, hurt. Dave rests a moment leaning on the side of the boat. He is not tired, he is troubled by what he has taken. He doesn’t feel skilled or worthy, even though he’s the smartest person I know. He knows how the economy works but he can also fix an engine, he can find the fish, kill the fish, and sell the fish, and know what wine to drink with it. Intelligence that is as much in the mind as in the hands, bouncing back and forth, evoking both all the time, the kind I understand.

He wants to feel like he is making an offering to the world, but really he is just making money as a fisherman. He knows that, despite the reverence he feels, he will sell his fish, people will eat it, and no one will care. They don’t know how dangerous and difficult it is. Or how few fish there are left for us to hunt. That salmon climb rocks to make their kids, traveling thousands of miles, and we catch them just before they start on their journey home. It’s human-like, the salmon’s arc, birth, growth, go see the world, come back to spawn, die at home, shedding nutrients for generations to come. I imagine a gesture, or a tendency passing along generations, just like my own family. Pride like sediment, skin and cells in a creek bed. Raised up with a sense of place, a sense of you. Slowly, eyes set towards the horizon, he starts telling me all of this. How what happens up stream on the almond farms has an impact. Or how selling it at the docks, knowing it might get frozen and shipped around the word, disgusts him. Ripping families apart, an end to the passing of traits and last names and blood. Each animal is the end of a story, ours forcefully breaking into it, where we do not belong.

It is contradictory and hazy, even in his own words. A respect far beyond empathy, riding on fumes of faith. He hopes that by killing them he is keeping them, exalted and pure, if only in his mind. If something is going to die, genes packed in the guts rushing by his feet, unfinished, he’d rather do the killing. At least he knows his place in it all. He keeps wrestling with the shadow even once it’s gutted and on ice. All the way back to the city, as the blue turns to fog.

Every time we eat fish I think of Dave. Or of the sacrifice. Mostly of Blind Faith, the name of his boat.

“Is he still alive?” asks my mother.

Last we had heard of him he had “crashed into the continent” in his words, fell asleep at the wheel and drowned his boat off the coast of Marin. The coast guard picked him up minutes later, floating on his cooler of beer.

“Yeah he’s alive. Somewhere.” I also think of minnows in the dirty shallows of ponds and how the Dudes always manage to catch something, off a boat, off a dock, spear fishing with snorkle off rocky shores. Their dude friends too. Everyone’s excitement and disbelief, opposite the anchor of faith, but somehow tied to it.

I have faith in fish tacos, but I am often disappointed.

The simpler the better. This rendition used smoked yellowtail but fresh sauted or grilled whitefish works. A rockfish is better than nothing, and in a pinch frozen shrimp will do. I can get down on a fried version as long as the tortilla and fried layer are not taking over the fish. Often it becomes too much.

1. Salt and pepper the fish just before cooking, add lemon once it’s off the heat. Saute or grill or smoke. Do not overcook.

2. Slice cabbage super thin. I like to add red onion sliced very thin in the slaw too.

3. Sauce: blitz sour cream/mayo, avocado, jalapeno, cilantro, garlic, lime.

4. Top with more Jalapenos and cilantro.

5. Heat tortillas two at a time, double layer them once they are a bit colored and hot. Sauce, fish, slaw, sauce.

Eggplant Parmesan was a mystery dish, slimy with an abrasive edge, spongy and indistinguishable. My mother put enough olive oil on it to slurp it down, always slicing the eggplant too thick and burning the Parmesan top. My grandmother, Birdie, sautéed it a bit, fusing the thin layers with thick pieces of mozzarella in between. She peeled the purple skin but didn’t bread anything except maybe chicken livers and veal piccata. I liked the way she did things. They were both convinced of this dish, convincing me too. Globing a little angel hair pasta to the end of a forkful, delighted. Light, pleasing, sustaining.

“What are those things,” the Head Gardener asks.

“These are eggplant.”

“Wait, are those from the backyard?” breaks in the Head of Maintenance.

“No I couldn’t wait,” inspired, me, Head of Operations.

“Are them the black things mamma?”

“Yes, the tall plant in the back, them are them.”

He comes and goes a few times putting the pieces together. Leaves a few sprigs of thyme and a shell. Tiny sleeps at my feet so I can rock him with my foot. Head of Fashion is twirling in a “prin-tess” gown, in an out of view. I get a haul of tomatoes from the raised bed with a handful of basil. We all work in quiet circles, nearly overlapping but not, absorbed and absorbing.

Alison Roman’s newsletter brought eggplant further into view. This or Caponata? Ratatouille? Eggplant parm? Linda’s rollitini? Or maybe, just cook. Like Birdie. No TV, no radio. No wine, not yet anyway. Prudent and poised, hovering from stove to island and back again exacting and steady. Her hands were slight her opinions were not. Taste in all things, drawn daily toward the ritual of cooking leading to the ritual of eating, eye to eye over plates of tradition, effort, flavor. She held some secrets, pacing about, wasting nothing, bringing to life, a pot, a kitchen, a home. And still, a dish at Mamma Lou’s or Brother Bri’s, any of her seven children, tastes familial, all of us watching or inheriting her ways. Years of babies, years of marriage, years of constant work, what cascaded to all that came after was, cooking, caring, eating, a nice table, dinner time. She gave us the table, for eternity.

“Bless us oh Lord and these thy gifts which we are about to receive from thy bounty through Christ our Lord, Amen.” Hands clasped and squeezed. If you cooked with Birdie you ate with Papa Gene. Her counterpart, he commenced dinner each night with the prayer, tapping her hand in gratitude then pouring her a long glass of Chianti, the “prin-tess”. They were dinner and a show together, each slow bite separated by her shifting back in her seat a hand under the elbow holding the wine glass, so slight and happy. They fielded calls from several kids and often broke into song. Admiring the meal and each other, twirling between what seemed timeless fingers, timeless wine. Her dainty determination and his certain admiration, a pair for the ages.

Rollitini is basically eggplant Parmesan, but a summer version, like a beef braciole shape without the long braising. Instead you fill and roll the limp rafts with rich ricotta and bland mozzarella, dousing the single layer with stewy tomato sauce. I had some frame of reference, I cook. Like the parm, like Birdie, like my mother or uncle Kev grilling the eggplant for Rollitini with the filling of a pork involtini. Because, we cook.

Slicing the eggplant as thin as possible skin on, I do the salt thing that people do when they bread and fry it. Colander over the sink I dribble a few pinches over their surface and the layers after that. Meanwhile I make the fresh sauce, tomato skins removed, seeds removed, added to thick chunks of garlic drowning in olive oil, as Birdie would, fragrant as ever. Fresh basil torn and added at the end.

Squeezing the eggplant dry, they go right into hot oil in a hot skillet. Turning from pale and rubbery to crisped and yellow. The ends burnt while the middles become soggy, salty, forkable guts. Mix the ricotta with Parmesan filling, adding egg, capers, pepper, salt.

Head of Fashion moves her way to the counter, costumed and unruly.

“Whas dat.”

“Ricotta.”

“Wic-tata”

“Was dat.”

“Pepper.”

“Pepa.”

We’re cooking.

Delivering the filling with an offset spatula in three confident swipes per roll. Tini up a few more, tap the baby’s seat with a foot, tini the last of them. Tini until the dish is covered with one layer

of rolls and fresh sauce on top. Penne is all we have, a capellini would be more in keeping. It works, cooking is cooking.

The tablecloth from the top of the closet comes out, flowers from the garden at its center. The cloth napkins are there with a fork on each. My hands follow a pattern I learned. Disciplined and just-so, delicious and good, pretty and proud. First the skillet of roasted italian sausages, then the eggplant rollitini from the oven, just enough to solidify the filling and merge the sauce. All the while Birdie slipped out of this world and into the passenger seat of a shiny convertible, her beloved driving smooth as ever, off and away smiling as ever. The penne looked ready but my little voice counted 30 more seconds, now. Straight into the remaining sauce with the extra ricotta mix, a summertime riff on poor man’s lasagna, a regular in any Birdie kitchen. Maintenance fills plates, I drink a short beer in a cold glass. Clinking forks against piled up plates, let’s say the blessing.

““Bless us oh Lord and these thy gifts which we are about to receive from thy bounty through Christ our Lord, Amen.”

“I have never heard you say that.” Maintenance.

“We always say it,” losing sight of what is now and what was then.

I got a text about eggplant parm from Birdie’s namesake the morning of her passing. Well, we share that, me Lena, her Natale. Lena Louise Natale then Corrigan. More texts, pictures of sauce, pictures of Birdie in equal measure. Sweet beyond compare, her gift we get to share.

“Mommy, mama, mom, mom, maaaaaaaaaa.”

Naked and Whiney are in the back of the van while Tiny and I ride middle. Chatty is in the front. If he’s not on the phone he’s reminding me what he did with the shocks and struts or letting out surfer yelps towards the beach. We don’t leave the park without a couple new phone numbers and when it seems like uttering more words at the end of the day may kill me, he swoops in with, “okay rookies, time to wash your butts.” Funny enough to get their feet moving in the right direction, leaving me to block u-turns back into the yard, silent, steady ish. 

Still they call for me. The yelps shed emotional distress, filling the air with need. This body can’t process any more needs, I can only still it, in this moment Tiny has me spoken for. It's also possible to postpartum weep or cuss, easier to create some space so as not to muck up a chaotic morning with more chaotic feelings. Chatty responds, seeks solutions. I wait. I sit. I still my insides. Like labor, abandoning reason in honor of the senses. A physical decree that there is nothing to know and everything to feel. Ripping and emptying each sensation end to end. Feel jittery, thirsty, weak. Dead and alive, magical and monstrous. Like an exorcism or sacrament, driving all the goodness to the top, saving one nerve at a time, down to the core. You thought you could hear? Wait for the tiny sighs of a newborn. You thought you could touch? Wait until they clamor for your body like it’s the universe, their earth, their bed. You thought you could see? Only so much as you can the wild exclamations of a newborn experiencing every emotion on their face, only to find it was them pooping. Even now for Naked and Whiney I can provide ease, comforting their senses, my slow recalibration instigates their recalibration. Wordless but kind. Distant but empathic. What Chatty can relay, I can inspire. Maybe our bodies still communicate as they did when we cohabitated, finding a home on my chest upon entering the world, milk and hormones and vibrations and stillness emitted from me to them. Using a few pats, long rubs, even a cheek kiss to explain to us both, wordless, everything will be okay. 

The fridge has been empty for a week. The kind where you just get enough for a meal or two and you’re right back to zero. Making pancakes with no eggs and calling frozen peas dinner. Chatty discovers a 25lb bag of beans in the closet. It is in keeping with the theme of Del Taco bean burritos, of which we’ve had too many this week. He rinses the beans and fills the biggest pot, covering them with fresh water and garlic. The garlic wrappers blow off the cutting board as his hands flutter the pot towards the back. He rants on about food prep and getting containers for freezing. Picks a dozen tomatoes. Chops them with hot peppers. The white counter disappears under the confetti of scraps. Then the floor. All the while, quiet and calm, the beans on the back burner soften and soften. 

Beans haven’t always been comfort, pasta and butter have held that spot for a while. My mother hung her hat on beans and greens for a half decade, the garlicky creaminess almost as if it’s a home to revisit. Cooking beans from their beginning feels like humility. The slow simmer a presence in the home while other things go said and unsaid, done and undone. As much a witness as a meal.

“Mama I sing this book like you.” Whiner states.

“I know how do you know all the words,” it’s some out of season Joy to the World song book that keeps popping up in the rotation. 

“I don’t I just know the wolf-es and reindeer dad with the…. Mama let’s read the tractor one ac-two-a-lee.”

I nod. 

“You like this one mama,” Our legs stretch out next to one another, sharing the book across laps.. 

“Yes baby I do.”

“You do.”

I wink at him. Both our hands squeeze in a sort of high five. Beyond seen, felt.

“Do you know that she says, I heard you now?” Chatty snickers, he means Naked.

“Haha, really?”

“I asked her to get her shoes on couple of times and she yelled back, “I huurd you”

All 30lbs of her, crumpled top lip, attitude in her hips. Naked is extreme. She embodies all the senses at all times rubbing her fanny on the silky Elsa dress or eating with her hands, scraping them clean along her open mouth. She spends a lot of hours twirling about, wrapping things in blankets, and speaking gibberish with aggressive hand gestures. I nod, agree, offer help. Whatever Naked is doing in her head, is important. I’m faded into the background, offering one arm hugs while nursing tiny, simmering. 

He tries to get her to say it again. Chatty is better at chatting than listening. Always lost somehow in the next project or excited to interject. Spending time in loud engine rooms and deep diving in water has shattered his hearing too. Creating one way system of telling, not stilling anything, always arousing. But then just as you’re sure the lost sense of sound might create lostness the other senses over perform, touching, smelling, feeling his way. 

I feel Tiny rustle and put a bosom on his head like a hood, near enough for him to engage the faucet but more a gesture of feeling. Watch him watching from the comfort of my chest. Hours and days go by. Nothing pronounced, only here.

Littles like to grocery shop the tomato plants taller than them, getting on all fours with a wire basket, keen on anything tumbling into it without a fight. As it should be, harvesting is the slightest suggestion by the grip, nothing more. The itchy green leaves smell of unripe fruit while the tired brown ones sag off the trunk, exhausted from converting bitty solar panels into a glowing crop. When I think of summer’s tomatoes I think of Sara Lee Barnes to-mah-to pie. Emphasized like Vieee-daaale-yuh onions. All inflection and drawl. Of course her recipe is not her own but a collaboration of a sort highlighted in the Keswick Hunt Country Cookbook, Clever as a Fox.

Nursing tiny against the backdrop of The Bear, a blinding light cast down on both of us in the hours of deep morning. The show is about a restaurant or a person or people and how they cook. And how that obsession with cooking keeps them together. Or the obsession with the obsessing. Each episode ripened with anxiety, unfullfillment, reflection. Like a good chef, iterating until forever. Each episode is named for an ingredient, Tonnato, Caramel, Raspberries. Just enough backstory to unfold kitchen chaos, emotional chaos, and then calling it a dish. The unrest is honest, nothing is really ever perfect. The kitchen is for the unfinished.

Keswick Hunt Country cuisine is nothing if not particular. Not spectacular or even fancy but of a certain distinction. Like Ina Garten but in a garden with the faint smell of mint, a bridle all sticky with molasses, and bourbon. Every full moon in the summer the Hunt Club found a nearby farm to host a “hilltopping”. A few rows of cars, wobbling over bush-hogged fields and ground hog holes, perched with a picnic out of the tail end. Some tables were covered with pressed linens while others only a basket of fried chicken and deep cooler staged in the trunk. But not store bought ice, ice maker ice, rich people ice. And the fried chicken was someone’s Aunt’s recipe, or someone who worked for the Aunt to be sure, crisped in a cast iron, flawless. The tomato pie perfectly sweet from the oldest farm soil, tilled and turned and growing those same tomatoes for maybe a century. Not a seed in sight, all skinned and plucked till only the pinwheel of summer’s glory glistened on top. Years of perfecting could only lead to this version. Balanced against wild grass in the distance setting off fireflies for chasing. Dusk’s cool washing over nearby hills towards the gathering. Mud flaps filled with cow manure. Crickets and cicadas and dissipating heat a low hum. China serving utensils bright as the rising moon serving pimento cheese on white bread. Nothing but mayonnaise and cheddar with a jar of cheap peppers, nothing that particular but particular the same. The kitchen is like that, particular.

The littles rinse the tomatoes from the yard right in the basket. In every attempt to create order, their cutting boards and knives and bowls are pre set. I provide an example of what I expect. Yes Chef! Chunks of summer’s orbs are strewn across the outdoor table while juice and seeds drip down the sides. The littles make a mess, I pick the basil. Far from perfect. We keep trying.

There are three possible iterations amongst the ruin. 1) Tomato pie, 2) Tomatoes and Basil with Oil and Balsamic, 3) Fresh Tomato and Basil sauce. Days go by. The trials and prep loom in between episodes. Research and ripening, getting closer to the particular it. Flashes of Birdie (Grandma Lena) boiling the skins off the tomatoes, slicing peeled garlic long ways. That tool, like a potato ricer, all Italians use for sugo. It is placed right over the pot, collecting seeds and skin and letting only the guts hit the oil below. Or that meal of strained tomato water below cold ravioli, floating lily pads of basil oil, refreshing and bright and suggestive. The mind like a dialogue, a memory book of specifics. Add in the recipes from Clever as a Fox and Vivian Howard and Southern Living, serving as constant murmur. Unsure if the TV episodes or broken memories or sure-of-themselves recipes or what the tomatoes, constantly ripening, are meant to be. The kitchen is most of all collective, joining things real and imagined, episodes and memory. The particular parts too. People to people, conspiring, emerging, better.

The pie…like a biscuit with a tomato mayo sandwich leaking all over it. And why do southern people love cheddar so much. I did not remove any tomato skin and was unbothered but my mother keeps the skin on her perfect eggplant parm and so… maybe some are just unbothered.

Tomato Pie

Butter labs “Extra Flaky Pie Crust” by Deb Perelman (halved) see below

Par baked for 15-20 mins in 375 oven.

4 rough Chopped and strained overnight use the best tomatoes — beat them around the colander a bit and then quick rinse seeds out

4 sliced and roasted at 375 day before (use the not best tomatoes) sliced nice for the top and seeds removed, salt and olive oil.

Add 1 cup mayo, ¼ cup finely grated onion (many sautee the onion, when its this fine it does not taste raw its almost onion juice), handful of chopped basil, salt and pepper, 1 cup grated cheddar — add to chopped tomatoes, mix. Put in pie shell that’s already a little cooked. Top with roasted tomatoes for sweetness and the look!

Bake 375 30-40 mins.

Stunning! simple!

Birdie’s Fresh Sauce

Get a pot of water boiling. Add no more than 2 tomatoes at a time, till the skins burst or 3-4 minutes. Don’t over cook the tomatoes just enough to remove the skin.

Let tomatoes cool a bit, remove skin and seeds, dice the meat.

Slice thin long slivers of garlic. Best if it sits at room temp for a few hours to marinate flavors.

Chiffonade basil and add a little before serving but not too long because it turns black. Salt

*** I usually do the tomatoes over a strainer with a bowl, a lot of good juices get lost when breaking down the tomatoes. Keep them and pour them into the finished tomato sauce!

The best July side

Slice tomatoes 1 “ thick

Sprinkle with salt

(Garlic optional)

Top with sliced basil lots of olive oil, some dribbles of balsamic.

Drown it a bit

Serve within the hour otherwise salt starts to take away from the tomatoes. Of course add fresh Mozzarella or Burrata if you must, but don’t over take the star of the show.

Resources:

Review of The Bear: https://www.metacritic.com/tv/the-bear/critic-reviews/

Vivian Howards: https://www.thebutterlab.com/blog/tomatopie

Aunt Freedom’s Tomato Pie: https://www.sundayinsouthcarolina.com/recipes/tomatopie

Butter lab cheat sheet:

Clever as a Fox Cookbook:

Tuesday baked ziti

Wednesday barbecue takeout

Thursday Italian surprise

The train is here, dropping off aluminum foil covered pans with labels and reheating instructions. Narrowing the afternoon, if we can get to 4pm then it’s a few hundred bubbles and a few tears until 5pm and 5 is when the train arrives.

Last night I opened a beer at 4:58, parking myself by the front door, just to see the operation up close. Right on time two figures appeared with all their arms full. Come in come in.

The tiny one has his own meal train set up too. He whines, desperate, searching. As if he expects a nipple to always be in lip distance. Quivering and lurching about. Around the clock, the big train runs – both consuming and being consumed. From the veins coursing across my chest carrying boxcars of milk towards Tiny’s suckles, hands flung towards the sky as if he’s falling. Letting me try and press his stiff alien fingers around my side boob, tracing my fingertips along shallow eye sockets, craning for the squeaks and quacks of newness. Or a sliver of eye looking up, sometimes, acknowledging our parallel paths.

This train can feel uneventful, filling a plate from the dish in the fridge here, defrosting the homemade mom dinners there. As if it is simply fueling and administering and nothing more. Without the lift of a knife or a recipe to riff, the kitchen is dull. Like a station after hours, with tickets and dirt swirling under benches, people loitering by the clock over the stove waiting for some indication they are on the right track. So when do we eat?

All day.

It mirrors the season. Blood shot eyes tell of long sessions at the beach or pool or tossing all night against sticky air and mosquitos and sand in the sheets. It’s about the time of opening day at Camp Wahoo, a family tradition, nestled in the backroads of clammy Virginia. Consumed by unshakable heat, tireless play, and chubby pills — ice cream, milk, warm cookie. From sun up to sun down we consumed summer as if it was a cool Gatorade cup first sipped and then dumped over our heads. Activity after activity after meal after tom foolery after meal and competition and canteen and lights out. Making sure several times a day the same 36 sets of knees were counted, side by each, along the shade of the canteen porch.

The littles hair is tangled and greasy and sandy. The white couch is a shade of smattered black heel prints, grey. A dishwasher churns. A coffee pot sputters. The winds blow from the West then the North and occasionally the South. We all slip into being. No planning, no objectives, no clock. Consumed by the moment at hand, as it is, nursing tiny, in between, nursing me, then back around the loop. Puzzles, Legos, watermelon on the stoop, visitors with food, packages on the porch, movies, beach, bath, eat. Somewhere along the course, emptied and filled, the consuming becomes the routine, following its hearty, happiness over and under and around. Turning the temptation towards action into a habit of acceptance.

Camp Wahoo was more than summer’s best, it was summer’s simplest. Often counselors who had played and coached and cooked all day, sat in the shade of a tree while 9 year olds made up games of wall ball, or chipped plastic balls into hula hoops on the root bound 9 hole 3 par course in the bullring. One memorable character, Hacksaw Haden, easily 50, was almost disqualified from Camp when he lost his cool as a referee at the notorious Tuesday night Badminton tournament. The co-director, my father, made a slip and slide so fast and soapy kids shot 10 feet past its boundary into grass, scraping legs from knee to hip, over and over. Nail hammering contests and cards were an afternoon session, consuming hours of attention. Fred Wawner, the oldest cousin, mouth of the operation, filibustered for hours on his podium at the Canteen porch, in a play-by-play commentary designed to confuse. The head cook and director, my mother, used her spatula to make a point to campers or staff, whoever needed a directive – taste this! Try everything. Just like the sunburned knee skinned kids, the adults left nothing in the tank. Wednesdays were deemed Big Huge Day to conjure some enthusiasm for the rest of the week. Since Sunday everyone had laid on the line, not just effort, but joy, wins, strike outs, and homesick sleeplessness. It’s hard to know who named it or what year it was created but every week, on Wednesday, counselors donned BHD letters on their hands, necks, foreheads. Kids skirted, feverish, high on anticipation for what they did not know. Each meal ended with a chant, stomping and shouting, chairs lifted above heads, kids lifted above heads – “Big Huge Day” could be heard a county over. No one let down all day, keeping the balloon of BHD teetering, consumed by the power of its words.

Tiny hit like BHD, when it seemed the tank was empty, we needed only a reminder. Can this be real, I look around like I did that dining hall at camp, does it get better? I think not? No cooking or planning, only savoring.

This summer time, this day, this unnerving, rewiring for consumption.

All of it, so big and huge.

Camp Wahoo’s goal is for each camper to have a joy-giving, health building, character-making experience. The program is designed to promote initiative, self-confidence, and sportsmanship. Our hope is that campers will gain a sense of purpose and fair play and a love of all things that make for a fuller life.

Sports Instruction:

basketball

soccer

volleyball

tennis

lacrosse

touch football

baseball

golf

Supplemental Sessions:

cricket

flyfishing

carpentry

backyard gardening

Top 10

10. Be on time (or do the robot)

9. Listen to staff, coaches, and each other

8. Be Safe

7. Hang up wet clothes (or feel the wrath of Tony Z)

6. Two Claps

5. Respect the Grounds and Staff of Miller School

4. Bring a talent

3. Take something from each session

2. Be a good teammate

1. Play

“I’m hungry mamma.”

“Yeah I know we’re almost there Bubba.”

I glance at the gluten free Annie’s Mac and cheese rice noodles dissolving into the pot. I could have gotten him to share mandolining the cabbage slaw but I don’t have the nerves for it today. Repeater organizes lines of walnuts and raisins on the cutting board, soon to be chopped for the curry rice salad. A mere 20 minutes ago I sat in the same sous chair, leaning my forehead into palm, asking for water from the dispenser 2 feet away.

“You gonna to make it?” The Muscle.

“I just need some water.” He fills the nearest glass and hands it over.

“I’m going to start the fire.”

“What’s our plan with the baby coming,” Muscle asks. Previously this would have set me on edge. But having lived in this reality for a while, I know, 1) anything goes, 2) he’s got me, so we build.

“I don’t know. I mean I have to get good on the inside, I can’t handle the rest.”

“I’m thinking Val is gonna be better at answering the phone at 2 am than my mom.”

“Good call.”

“I want to get baptized on Sunday. I mean I’m already baptized but they said anyone can and I want to.” My real plan.

“That’s awesome, a pregnant lady getting baptized. Sounds great.”

“Yeah everything comes kinda after that.”

I am almost proud the Littles hover around the kitchen, not just confident they can assist, but hungry. Starving. There are a few snacks we keep, Trader Joe’s white cheddar puffs, random granola bars, cut up fruit. Too often an after nap popsicle or ice cream bar from the corner store. But snacks are a cheat, and we do real. They can really save a transition from house to car or stroller to park. But more often they are a crutch. And what is earned that is not suffered? The College boys go diving for seafood, we collect bits of beasts from meat shop missions, wrangle veggies into an already full stroller at the market, search for cheap necessities like rice, mayo, salt at the same shameful places anyone would. Costco, Trader Joe’s, Vons. Cranky, thirsty, diligent in the pursuit of real food. It takes work.

After a hectic Tuesday morning, I pull the brisket out of the fridge. Quarter the baby potatoes, putting cut side down into a greasy skillet, ripe with leftover butter and egg shrapnel. The meat looks good, real. Thick head of fat over tight lines of dark red flesh. Pulling down all the spices out of the shelf to coat each side of the brisket, sticking it a 375 degree oven uncovered. Potatoes go in below.

“Set a timer for 20 minutes.” I demand from the body on the couch.

“Okay and then what,” College requests.

“Potatoes out, brisket covered with foil, heat down to 275.”

I walk out to go pick up, Exuberant, the 3.5 year old that has a particular way of agreeing whole body, like he’s been here before, decided, conclusive, yeahuh. A forceful love for all.

College texts me the thing I just vocalized.

I heart it.

Tensions rise around 4pm when the real food timing slides into unfinished projects, fatigue, a promise that we will go to a baseball game by 6. Littles gather, I fend them off with oily potatoes. Check the brisket, pull it, let it rest.

“I’m so hungry,” Muscle whines with a caulking gun in one hand. “Then feed yourself.” Scoffs out.

“If you’re lucky I make one meal a day, if you’re lucky.” I haven’t made any yet today. He did breakfast for everyone and I’m sure we all skipped lunch, living off the brisket smells and sweet tea and a sliced apple.

“Geez tensions are high in the kitchen,” he spits down the hall.

The brisket is divine, with the generous helmet of fat dribbling over the chewy center for hours, slipping between grooves, ushering in beads of moisture, sliding around in lots of salt and pepper and smoked paprika and garlic. The roasted potatoes are crisp on one side, barely dressed with apple cider vinegar, thin celery, thin red onion and a whap of mayo. Picked fresh basil and tangy Japanese bbq sauce launched over it all.

I put the plate on the corner of the outdoor table, walking away muttering, “Whew, tensions are high in the yard.” Somehow, with God’s help, having prayed a lot for it, able to enjoy the chaos and banter.

I make similar but smaller plates for Littles. Park them at the outdoor table. Muscle comes in for more sauce.

“It’s fire.” Barely looking at me. “You got lucky with this one.”

“I’ve been making brisket for years,” I shout after him.

He’s gone. They’re all at the outside table face buried in plates from what I can see. Worth the waiting, suffering, each bite more blessed.

Growing up in the church of “thoughts worth thinking about” as my mother deemed any Sunday service, spirituality was floating wisps of considerations, strangled by a bad preacher, or pinned to your chest by a good one. Choosing, dissecting, snacking.

Then Aaron died and there were no choices, only full immersion, real pain. Submerged to unavoidable depths. Baptized into bigness, stripped down to the leastest layer. Forcing it all out into the open, with no considerations or thinking, just pieces of a story to pick up and reorganize. So real it felt mystical.

Back between the narrow counters painfully rubbing the too tight sensitive skin around my belly button, I curse the fake, snackey rice noodle white cheddar mac. This is the least on a table of bright slaw, tangy rice, and blistered salmon. Tonight, one of the four nights where everyone had to suspend their terrible claws, unearth their desperate layers, dig deep into the void to get to dinner time.

“Say the graces.” I wave at Exuberant, even though everyone has already forked in a couple loads.

He mumbles something about something but crescendos to “God is good.” More than enough for all of us to feel worthy and keep eating.

“What was the best part of your day?” College asks Exuberant.

“Jesus.” Standing tall on the shifting chair, mouth full of food.

Kids aren’t afraid of the mystery, mystical, imaginative, not being the center but observing it from their wobbly chairs. The grilled salmon is crisped by the fire, the slaw wilted just right. That damn curried rice salad like a pillow of comfort under it all, bitey onion, gentle heat, spoon sticking rice.

When College asks in disbelief, “you made this?” His way of saying, wow. I bend a response around the bigness in the way, “this is not even all of it”. Me, the story, the commitment, the leastest and worstest things to feel. Oh what I can cook, how deep it can go, how long it goes back. It’s not even all of it.

The day of the baptism is also the day of the Scuttlebutt. God mother Sandy has sent an inspired text and I abide. Feeling so sure of the priority of things I get on with the morning stuff so I can dig into what matters, this sandwich. Sneaking out of the house to write by the water, coming back to half dressed half fed big feeling midgets, regrouping the unraveling of things in the house, starting a food project. Everyone is hungry, but I push deep, deepest yet, fresh focaccia, pickled beets, garlic aioli, hard boiled eggs bouncing off an overfilled pot. Littles come and go during the process, peeling carrots into ribbons, eating “not yummy” dough from the spoon, piecing the pieces together.

We step into a breezy, smiley church, late. I start to sweat and cry, next to Muscle who is always on the verge of doing the same. We argue on the way to the baptism. We eat and smile and admire the backyard of someone who loves plants. I feel silly walking into the water in front of everyone, my kids start to implode because…what is happening. The water though, distracting, washes me. Not in a cleansing way, more in a who gives a fuck about you anyway, you’re not the story, isn’t that great to hear! Stop snacking on short things, look lady look, feel mamma feel, tell everyone, I am sure I cannot do this alone, I am not doing it alone, to feel so least and little is a gift, this goes so deep, laughably so, beyond and beyond. Real. Give it all up, give thanks, all of it. I listen and lay back…..they are saying something about “immersing, and stories, and writing a new.” I come out wiping my eyes looking for my people. Growing up on scary cloaked priests shaking wands of smoke and small damp churches with squeaky floors that felt like snake charming was inevitable if you stuck around long enough, I wonder if I just solidified my own children’s strange wonder.

Or maybe one day they will say, Mamma didn’t believe in snacks, she wanted the whole meal. The sweating and crying and lack of satisfaction with small nuggets of God. Wanting it all, everyday, dripping down the gutters on the sides of my mouth.

This was always part of the story, somewhere bouncing around and off the other stories. Now, though, I choose it to be the hunger in this house. Residing in our depths, piecing the pieces. Hovering about the kitchen, filling real voids, desperate and deep, with real food. Shuddering off convenience and ease and worry. Speaking it at the dinner table. Committed to the long, big, unending meal.

If I disappear for a couple weeks, say a little prayer, that baby is here safe and mamma is sound.

“The uterus is ripening, about half a centimeter dilated,” as if she’s taking my forehead temperature with her hand fully inserted into my body. Thanks, I know, my Venus center knows all. Waiting for the nurse to dismiss me, I use my phone to watch a man make pizza dough and want to have sex. Not like with my husband, touching me, but the feeling of being naked and absorbed without doing anything about getting to that point. The doctor does say one thing that sticks, “if you’re worried about baby movement, drink ice water, eat something sweet, and lay down.” Now you’re talking sister.

The reckoning is upon us. After years of letting this grip go and that grip go but also fighting desperately, daily, we are once again entering the zone of dessert and nudity. Been here twice before. Each version is a bit less timid, more body, less control. First baby, measuring a tidy bowl of ice cream, laying by the fire rubbing (tiny) body, waiting for any sensation anywhere. The second, one baby on hip, wearing only underwear and a big t-shirt, eating ice cream from the carton, squatting every chance I can to get something started. Third, popsicles for breakfast, letting this butterball hang out in public, laying around like I am being painted into a masterpiece. It’s richer in a way, the giving in and giving up, and boundaries that have no boundaries at all. “I don’t want to talk to anyone, you do it.” I text the Layman. The next day I have made a 3 course meal and invited anyone to join. I scream too much, slapping my heavy feet on the cold tile down the hall to send the point home. Worry about bowel movements inciting active labor more than I do anyone else’s feelings. Believing that my underside might land in the toilet and knowing I will fully be okay, eventually, time heals ish. Loving my body and what it teaches me each moment, consumed with this animal self, awed and lusting.

The littles are here. Inserting requests that are mostly ignored. Watching too much “shows”. All of us getting by on summertime highs amid the blistering domestic lows. Because labor could kind of happen any day, I don’t prep the coffee pot, or engage the sourdough, or leave any leftovers. As if when its time, I may never come back. Having never felt so alone and so prepared for it all. Evolved to be unflappable but even more so uncompromising. The daily orchestration I usually perform is paused, you all figure it out, has become the mantra.

In this case we resort to staples. I get halfway through a plan to eat the same things weekly, Lasagna Mondays, Tacos Tuesdays... so lame. I realize this is how people manage their way out of chaos, our path instead seems to be, let it all hit, delegate, laugh, occasionally lose it, and in sensing what really tipped me past the breaking point, try to correct better for next time. An example might be, bedtime. We have been dedicated to a system for years. It has worked mostly. A form of physical exhaustion, dirty bath water, naked dinner, wiping hands from rabid beasts, alligator wrestle into pjs, books and lower voices, back rubs, lights out. But the last two nights have gone like this; neighbors pool, letting Layman cook while I hide in the backyard painting container spare bedroom project, dragging one screamer to bed who needed a nap but didn’t get one, books for the other, Layman gets in bed with whoever is still awake and falls asleep, I read untouched and unbothered until drooling. Solo nights have been running around the neighborhood barefoot, baths, pasta on the fly, books, one passing out as soon as they hit the pillow. The other gets cozy with me on the couch, when I have reached my limit and take her to bed, she screams. I tell her to get in bed with her brother, lock the door, and get in the bath. They are both snoring and spooning when I emerge from my spa. New systems on old systems, less restricting, more desirous.

It’s not to say I have no conscience. I pray going to bed and pouring coffee in the morning, to have patience with the littles adding in gratitude from the depths of my toes that no one is deathly ill. I pass a mom going into to school as she’s coming out. She mentions a park hang. I barely engage. I text her once I get back to the car…

“Thanks for the invite, I’m just grumpy”.

“Me too, I think I’m hungry.”

“Yeah and we’re exhausted.”

“Want anything from Trader Joe’s?”

“Yes, two packs of cream cheese, just the basic block.” Yes. Help me.

“Got it. See you at noon.”

It’s a strange, short era where I perform the minimum, if and only if it feels like decadence. Sometimes decadence looks like celebrating my newest level of unhinged, a headband, loud music, staying up late tweaking this writing thing. Other times it’s the ability to control my OCD instead of accosting the Layman I research “how best to organize tools for an ADHD person.” Often it’s the suppleness to do nothing, phone lost somewhere hours back, moving my body the least. Or sweeping and mopping and folding the towel just so over the impeccable sink, decadence. Never sure. This era might even translate into positive memories for Littles when mom would get in bed at 10am with cookies and let us trash the house yelling improbable threats. It might be a decadent unraveling that doesn’t hide from the truth of real unraveling. Because I guess what I am scared of most, is forgetting how to let go.

Letting go used to look like going on remote trail runs or far far away on planes with passports. Watching every quarter of a basketball game with a 7% beer to match. Cooking to an entire album, indulging in nature, indulging in conversations that were really just foreplay. Giving no credence to time as the sun licked my skin a bit more, finger nails full, bent over weeds and plants and dirt. Taking physical exhaustion too far, hunger too far, art too far, lust too far. The luxury that is uninterrupted time to indulge. When getting lost is gone, letting go is shallow. The interruptions by this Little or that impatient need, kicks from the inside of my belly. Time limits and physical restraints become limiting self talk, I can’t walk to the beach today with both toddlers its too hot, might have to pee, can’t push stroller on sand, can’t get up and down off of the sand. The lostness I long for is hindered by the physical nature of this job. Whatever the name for this job is, feeder, rememberer, maker, disrupter, feeler, tidier, healer. The work is this skin, muscle memorizing presence, feeling too much, never getting lost, being used up.

There is getting lost in the mundane, practiced, physical labor. With all the bodies hovering around sure they might be able to latch onto something. Recalling the many fleshy feats this body has endured, sure this is its climax. Soon it will all be besides the point, insides turning out splayed like a porno, grunting and sweating and so on, all power to resign and reside between these legs.

These are the lowest barrier things that are muscle memory in our kitchen, so worn into the everyday, grounding but passionless.

Pasta with frozen veg, heavy on the butter and Parmesean: Big fan of a real noodle like fusilli, cooked with lots of Littles sampling doneness. “Nope, too hard!” (almost offended that I have asked him to try it) For the last 3-4 mins of pasta cooking we toss in classic frozen veg, pea/carrot/corn/green bean — yes the water temp drops potentially effecting a perfect noodle but not enough, not enough. Strain it all and add generous butter, olive oil, parm and salt if needed.

Popsicles and smoothie leftovers: A twofer, one afternoon snack becomes instant frozen mood lifters. Any frozen fruit, yogurt, dairy or non dairy milk, honey, bananas, coconut cream. Blend, drink, pour rest into molds for melt downs.

Mini muffins: something about minis makes them more delicious, accessible, fun. Carrot cake, banana, and special this week lemon! Use whats rotting or extra. One dozen regular size makes more than 24 minis. What a treat!

Granola: same old same old. 1 cup coconut oil, 1 cup of honey, 1 cup chopped nuts, 3 cups oats, pinch of salt, tsp of cinnamon. Bake at 325 for 20 mins, turn off oven and let it dry. We all prefer really tart full fat yogurt, okay so we are pretty healthy, at least we got that going. It’s 3am and I’m having some.

Tuna fish with Potato Chips: Must have mayo, Dijon, celery and red onion. I like to add dill but why is it so hard to remember the fucking dill! No need for bread we eat it like a dip. Walking to the corner store to get chips elevates the whole experience.

Arnold Palmer tea time 3pm. Sweet, tart, icy, with just enough caffeine to get down the afternoon road. I make one concentrated batch and water down with lots of ice.

The sun makes all kinds of wild statements before lowering its intensity on the wide, white blinds facing west.

“It will be dark soon.”

I remind Littles, night animals - their fascination and fear - are coming, time to turn in. The system runs its course, people fall asleep. I note the full moon as I lock the back door. Bodies appear in my bed, I pee it seems hourly. The ribs I have been relying on for 40 plus years are smooshed and uncomfortable any way I lay. I’ll just breathe less I guess.

The owl is back. I wonder if I can masturbate my way out of this. Why are 3am and 3pm the same vibe! I look at Layman’s location, somewhere off the coast of El Segundo surrounded by blue, fucking useless. I still attempt a “this moon bruh” as if my slutiness hasn’t already landed me in this exact predicament, pain and pleasure as one. Wanting to feel lost at sea too, but here making popsicles and light porn, until.

One distant place, trapped in my spoons, with dream like access, is Cloverfields farm. Not just its rigid history painted against watercolored, country hills. But the women. The way time disintegrates, a plow leaned against an outbuilding covered with weepy grass, a wire fence molded into a cedar tree, walking paths traced over by patterned feet, decades and decades of sorcery. Beyond its fertility, happy birds, leaping vegetables, snake smelling creeks, a magic resides.

We take a watermelon to the park. I slice and serve it to any kid coming by my shade. It’s a good one. Big kid shows off, muscling his bike into the play structure to ride it over a mini bridge with stairs on either end. Little kid keeps her concentric circles a bit closer, peek-a -booing anyone and anything. Once she’s done she puts herself in the car seat, we wrap up what’s left of the watermelon, and head home belly’s dripping with juice. Unpacking the watermelon, not a thing in the fridge, not a thing to do later, we extract and chop. Converting the fingered waste, it’s taught green dress and perky white flesh into a pickle.

Who isn’t partial to a deviled egg with pickled something on it? Not the squirtable relish, dyed extra green, but real country chutney of a sort. I send a text to my advisor Linda*. She sends back her version of it, a rendition of chow chow, with pickled green tomatoes. We watch a YouTube by a woman from Arkansas who “loves the land, the Lord, and family around the table.” Big kid asks why she talks that way. I hang my head, one of the great deprivations of California, not a twang in earshot. As the sugar and vinegar mound on the counter, flashes of bright yellow ball jars on country tables come to me, set down near a plate of meat or sweaty cheese. More often closed up in a dark pantry with yesteryears dates, handwritten, ancient, eerie. That’s that chow chow. Traveling, not to any one kitchen but like a life flashing before one’s eyes, all the witchy kitchens.

At Cloverfields you must slap back the uneven screen door, scraping the stone threshold, take three steps down into the main house kitchen, each stone colder upon descent. In the haze of the daylight through low windows you might catch a shuffling old timer. The hands of a slaves great granddaughter, Mrs. Charles, or a big boned woman named Peaches. The four women who inherited the farm, spread out in the perimeter homes, shuffling too. From garden to back porch to the chair under the tree. From kitchen to outdoor pantry. From pantry to wash house. Circling and circling, whipping up a rain storm for the garden, a cornbread, taking down washing from the line bright as Heaven. The motions, almost scary, in their native ways. When I think of ancient processions, recipes bound up in a place, pickles and country delicacies, I go here.

Surveying the scene in our galley kitchen it appears inevitable. Damn if that’s not all we have right now, bunch of green tomatoes growing and some watermelon guts. Hallelujah, the witches are here. The YouTube woman talks about how chowchow is what’s left in the garden, getting all cooked up and turned into a condiment. I dig through other old cookbooks only to find the old timers made things in batches. Well beyond what we can handle. 10 pounds of this 4 pounds of that 8 cups of sugar. I don’t even have a pot big enough. Sounds like sorcery.

A few things are consistent across all the potions:

One, if you want a crisp pickle, you set it in salty water overnight.

Two, you must cut it with a little pairing knife, every small piece. Cutting and sitting there like the Italian nonna’s under a fig tree, dicing, and resting, putting their magic on each bit. Like a tall farm woman tired from her outside duties set at the kitchen table still working.

Three, a pickle is going to be whatever spice you add. The sugar/vinegar/water is a base, to mystify that old vegetable, sprinkle seeds and herbs and foolery from above into the cauldron.

Peaches held a special kind of country wisdom. She was so big if she needed to she could put old Anne Barnes over her shoulder and carry her. As Mrs. Barnes see-tooer, she did everything from cooking to cleaning to nursing. She grew and canned everything she ate and kept Mrs Barnes in stitches, one contrary country witch to another. Ask her a type of fruit, she’d name the slope it grew best on. How to kill a hog, “what you need first’n do wif it”. If you let her she’d plow a field or birth a calf. Her hands were as bent as they were sturdy. She loved in a way like she was always watching. It was folklore and witchcraft to watch her work, getting Mrs Barnes to giggle down her pills while peeling apples for saucing and drying out work boots by the fire. You take an eye off of her she’d have slipped the clean sheets on and moved Mrs. Barnes to the porch, where it appeared no one was doing nothing at all.

We core and chop the green tomatoes. After big kid has uses the loader to hack and haul them out of the yard. Pairing knives notch the peppers, onions, and cabbage, all in the pot for soaking. Salt and cover with water. Make a list for store spices. Check recipes, check cabinet, check texts, cross this with that, reference the witches. Less worldly than trying conjuring up a distance taste, more like practicing potions from suspicious recollections. The next day after straining off the salt water, I make a quick turmeric/celery/salt/sugar/vinegar boil and a cinnamon/vinegar/sugar boil. Cooking down the green veg and watermelon respectively. The house smells foul, sourdough rises near the bubbling pots. For a time, the concoctions, dreams, country witches seep their way in.

Post script:

That damn chow chow delivered. Under a blistered hot dog with spicy mustard. It could be just as good on a hot dog, we will try on a smoked brisket soon too. Its meant to be on your summer plate.

*Linda my advisor

Well into prepping a dense, not promising loaf for baking, barnacle walks in (who should be fast asleep). Just over two, she is gesturing and commenting, hitting a couple actual words, “hot,” “help me”, which she always reverses with “help you”, inserting the opposite every time, and on repeat with pride, “well-wo” (yellow). Despite having distributed multiple penalty box violations all afternoon, whispering under my breath “I fucking hate them”, for the wet rug and the screaming and the needing, rearranging my face and attitude when I actually speak to reflect a person in control, I give up. Help you.

She climbs to the helper chair, sniffing the pot holder, ohhhhing and ahhing to see if she can wear them as a hat. “I want some, I want some.” As if I’ve ever stopped her from fingering the butter bowl until she’s disgusted herself. Steady through the motions of sourdough we go. The surge of energy was the direct result of two things; one, the starter neglected in the fridge produced a viable offspring, two, the internal confidence to make another counter bubbly in addition to the one in the current dough and the mother in the fridge. All viable, committed, growing.

She gets down, she gets up. We check the first loaf in the yellow Dutch oven.

“Well-wo”

“Good girl, you’re so smart.”

She lifts her body off the chair, pushing on the counter, with a bounce.

“Help me, help me.” Meaning get the bread out of there so I can touch it.

“It’s hot baby, just wait.”

But neither of us can wait. My barnacle leans so that I must catch her while whimpering, “hold you”. Like after nap, and each morning, or when she’s cold because she won’t put on a towel after bath, or anytime she wants to set a leg on either side of my pointy belly, arms around arms, dragging her nose from my nipple to my arm, tracing her babiest ways. Instead of God damning these kids, flying into a rage of negotiations with whoever might listen, “is it possible for them to be any more insane, this is insane, it’s insanity…..”, we dance. Folding over corners and adding flour to the parchment, a breakthrough it seems for us sticky, unskilled bakers. The expanding dough feels right. In this fearless surrender, barnacle remains close, not threatening any movement or creativity, adding gibberish and tisking her finger about, both of us as lost as ever.

The first loaf is steamy and crusty but dense and under proofed. As expected. Sourdough is the epitome of failure in this kitchen, and the one before it, and those before that. Once after creating the starter from scratch for 7 days and then letting it proof its first 4 hours on the counter, big barnacle ran by looking to wipe his hands and pulled the whole bowl down, breaking everything open, even me. It’s shameful to be so bad. Considering our other successes in the kitchen. There is also a letting go, through the failures, that is mighty. Losing the novelty of nice dish soap to just get it done for cheap while already losing at Home Depot. Losing feeling in your legs, maybe the sciatica, from too much bending at the hips, belly hung down between wide knees. Desperate failing, looking at the tight arms and bouncy legs at step sons college track meet, oh oh oh did I feel that way once, light, muscly, insatiable. Failing to have a plan to get through the day where everyone is happy because it’s good to fail at that, to see how unsustainable it all is, and that failing at something, all of it, is a kind of necessary relief. This particular day of failing to plan left too much room for big Barnacle to circle his wagons, instigating destruction and turmoil, amid the “ghat ghat ghat” of some power tool Biggest barnacle was using in the backyard. “Help you, Jesus, please!” He’s already in trouble for saying butthole and throwing rocks and I, just, can’t.

Like failing at sourdough. Like birthing from a body another body. Like having nothing left and arriving to church where they are preaching how, “God never runs out.” Getting to “I can’t” speaks to only how deeply you are. The way through each obliterating rise and fall allows it to crack more open, anointed, defenseless, doing.

It’s after 9pm now and there is no slowing us down. A second batch started and rising, another bubbly for the counter, embracing the years of failures. Little barnacle makes her way to couch barnacle rotating from snuggling up, wiping butter on things, and nibbling on uncooked dough. It just never ends, there is only lighter and less lighter. Couch barnacle reads my mind, “it never ends, these teenagers are still doing the same things.” He means the big boys, calling with automotive questions that sound dangerous enough to not be driving at all and telling their friends to come take stuff from our house because “it’s never locked”.

Surrender now. Lose the battle to sourdough’s particular nature. Lose and lose and I can’t until…one Sunday night, out of gas, ideas, patience, little barnacle and Surrender Dorothy, do.

A note about recipes and tribulations.

My dear stepmother gave me the scale, a book, and the desire to try again recently. I did in earnest continue to fail or give up over many weeks this fall.

This NYT no knead recipe is where I landed after creating a very detailed starter from this book, The Perfect Loaf. The starter from The Perfect Loaf in the fridge is somehow still living despite full neglect. (also who couldn’t figure this out with no barnacles at your knees and belly’s exploding from hips, it is all to peaceful and calm to get it “right”)

For now, I am satisfied with the happy proofing starters and their babies, making mediocre bread, without much brain power. This is a level I have not reached ever and so I will stay here for a bit, feeding and failing.

Despite all the concessions of marriage, made on both sides, there is one I never have to make, my man is a good traveler. He lurches the car towards antique stores and roadside tacos. Eating with equal enthusiasm from truck stops to campfires to vegan juice bars. For the amount of times I have to endure the dumb shit men be like, much more often I can trust in his wanderers intuition. Not only the food and hotel choice and the “window” of activity and “window” of napping inherent with littles, but the fuel pump and the diesel prices and those intuitions. So I compromise my ears, leaning towards the poetry, in a directionless direction.

I subscribe to not knowing. I subscribe to God and poetry. That this journey is not narrative, and if you get lost in the words, and the chatter, you are lost. Getting road trip lost is a special kind of gift, to my marriage, to my soul. The inherent trust reminds me of the trust necessary for daily life, without it having created a kind of scar tissue, it might be impossible to endure sleepless nights camping and screaming littles in a hot car. The daily demonstrations make us sturdy enough for days on end of proclamations. A wonder it is, to still wonder. As if there is some alignment just waiting out there to capture us, if only we’d go, windows down, phones down.

The littles, tuned in to the changing scenery, the lack of routine. They ate whatever and missed naps. We all slept in. The freedom of adventure brought out the best in us, and the universe conspired.

So this is what we ate and cooked. And some poetry that came along for the ride, drinking it down, like the rest of the moments.

First breakfast: Happy Girl Kitchen: fresh grapefruit and mint juice, turmeric tea, curry chickpea salad, almond croissant, ginger scones.

Second breakfast: Smoked salmon plate with all the fixings and fresh focaccia.

Lunch: Not good Cheeseburgers, decent fries.

Whole Foods dinner buffet: mixed fruit, hot bar sweet potatoes, lentil soup, beans and rice, chocolate covered cashews, yogurt.

Breakfast: grocery leftovers

Brunch: Joe’s Pho : Beef and tripe Pho, fried lemongrass tofu vermicelli bowls, Thai iced coffees.

Campfire dinner: on the grill cowboy steak, Aleppo pepper marinated prawns, premade sides by Market Hall: orzo with feta, broccoli / kale slaw with parmesan and olives, big potato wedges, double chocolate cookies, popcorn.

Breakfast: Chard and red onion quiche, Meyer lemon scone from Night Heron farmers market stand.

Lunch: Pappos margarita pizza with the fresh ricotta, Caesar salad, Arnold Palmer. Some ate Delmonico’s deli peppered turkey sandos

Route 5 snacks: Yogurt, pistachios, beef jerky and Gatorade (90+ degrees)

Late dinner: Del Taco bean and cheese burritos with green sauce for the adults only

Because even after we got home we couldn’t bare to cook food the next day… fish tacos and poke from Bear Flag

Teach the children

Mary Oliver

Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front Wendell Berry

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,

vacation with pay. Want more

of everything ready-made. Be afraid

to know your neighbors and to die.

And you will have a window in your head.

Not even your future will be a mystery

any more. Your mind will be punched in a card

and shut away in a little drawer.

When they want you to buy something

they will call you. When they want you

to die for profit they will let you know.

So, friends, every day do something

that won’t compute. Love the Lord.

Love the world. Work for nothing.

Take all that you have and be poor.

Love someone who does not deserve it.

Denounce the government and embrace

the flag. Hope to live in that free

republic for which it stands.

Give your approval to all you cannot

understand. Praise ignorance, for what man

has not encountered he has not destroyed.

Ask the questions that have no answers.

Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.

Say that your main crop is the forest

that you did not plant,

that you will not live to harvest.

Say that the leaves are harvested

when they have rotted into the mold.

Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.

Put your faith in the two inches of humus

that will build under the trees

every thousand years.

Listen to carrion – put your ear

close, and hear the faint chattering

of the songs that are to come.

Expect the end of the world. Laugh.

Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful

though you have considered all the facts.

So long as women do not go cheap

for power, please women more than men.

Ask yourself: Will this satisfy

a woman satisfied to bear a child?

Will this disturb the sleep

of a woman near to giving birth?

Go with your love to the fields.

Lie down in the shade. Rest your head

in her lap. Swear allegiance

to what is nighest your thoughts.

As soon as the generals and the politicos

can predict the motions of your mind,

lose it. Leave it as a sign

to mark the false trail, the way

you didn’t go. Be like the fox

who makes more tracks than necessary,

some in the wrong direction.

Practice resurrection.

Her people came from the Lake Como region of Italy, no slum. Her husband, raised just like his 5 brothers to be a tailor, was the most skilled in his small town of Paternapoli, in the hills winding East out of Naples. The family gathered what they could to put him on the boat to America, he had the best chance of making it. He did. He found an Italian queen and bought a stone house in a yellow neighborhood. They wore the finest clothes.

Bamma’s pizza, the version I inherited, reminds me of the best recipes. Simple but specific, requiring more restraint than skill, more humility, more nuance. There is no written account of this recipe but there is no room for interpretation, Jarlsberg, whole canned tomatoes, fresh thyme. The taste and look and smell are there, etched, like my mother stretching the dough, only for it to shrink back against an oily pan. My grandmother’s hand squeezing the tomatoes gently to let loose a ⅓ of the juice back into the can, dropping the meaty bits and most of the juice on the pizza, reserving the hard butt ends in her palm. One focused hand doing three simultaneous tasks. This time, I use a basic dough recipe from a bag of Type “00” flour. Sure that the inherited versions used all purpose flour, the crust always a bit crackery, un risen, tough. Bimbi, piccolo bambino, wants in. I park the flour and measuring devices, holding back only the yeast and water. She taps flour into the teaspoon then dumps it into the bowl and then pats the pile firm into the porcelain. Where did she learn that? The breakfast eggs are ready at the exact moment things start to unravel, more flour on the floor than the bowl. Lifting her from helper chair to eating chair, she transitions, satisfied, dusty.

The dough rises while the day climbs to a climax, its readiness nags at me from the hazy plastic wrap where its hot breath showcases the bubbling and growing its doing. Soon, soon.

Then somewhere around 3pm, after a hot hour at the park, a bike ride to get ice tea, naps and nap refusals, the moment arrived.

“Lets make the pizza.”

Bambino* and Bimbi* start to get undressed, turning around for me to drape their aprons and tie. It is mostly wordless, like the meditation of cooking can be, opening a can hand over hand with Bambino, poking down dough with Bimbi. Letting them each flood the dough and pan with olive oil, soundless, content. They work squishing tomatoes just as their grandmother did, I discard the tough bits when they aren’t looking. Shaving the cheese with a carrot grater into piles for distribution, de-stemming fresh thyme for scattering on top. Moving slightly behind their pace, creating in unison, abdicating control.

The oven is hot. They each take a handful of salt to finish over their pies, most of it sticking to their fingers and palms. Bambino throws some back over his shoulder, “good luck”. The recipe is easy if you think of them in those terms, hard if one requires specifics, nuanced at its core.

They dismount, wiping red hands, running straight for the couch, the blocks, trucks. Keeping their aprons on they settle into watching Pooh, two heads the same level just clearing the height of the arms on the couch, the dirty souls of their feet capturing the day.

I sweep, block entry to the kitchen, start the mop water. My sister calls. I think how our mother felt just like this, sand castles of presence forming then disintegrating into constant doing, wrapping things with the long cord of the red kitchen phone, bouncing like a jump rope taught on each end. I think about being a stepmom before a birth mom, the dance of never overstepping but not under stepping either. Shooting the gap with precise, sometimes failed timing, no expectation, and uncomplicated love. We talk about work and kids and desire. Doing it all feels crazy and unnatural. Not that it can’t be done, but that having felt nuance, intentional stagnation, living beside not in front, wild open spaces, timeless afternoons, the heavy meals on heavy days, light meals on light days, it feels impossible to live in both worlds. The subtleness cannot be replicated or delegated, like a great grandmothers recipe, it is inhabited. The hardest moments transformed into tools for navigation, to not manage littles but honor them, crawl into bed, read the book again, give in to the inseparable. The earned skill of nuance like living molecules of the mothers dedication, only she can distribute, protect, materialize, pass down. Her delicious skin stretches and feeds, her vibration composes the soul. That is our thirst for them, that is our joy and our depletion of them, that is what no one gets until until until day by day it becomes the baseline, the most righteous gift, everyone’s North Star.

Making Bamma’s pizza, poor man’s lasagna, the brown rice is like a short cut to nuance, heeding the tiny gestures of presence, inhabiting . Tapping in, hearing messages, keeping nuance like a newborn on a chest; a touch more oil, another minute in the oven, slowed steps, pouring eyes into eyes, an arbiters clock, reading the room like particulate matter floating about, with all the delicate directives.

Happy Mothers Day.

*Bimbi= "Bimbi" primarily translates from Italian as "children" or "babies" (plural of bimbo), often used affectionately. It is also used as a name or nickname signifying joy

**Bambino= An Italian noun meaning 'child' or 'little boy. ' It captures innocence and youth and is used affectionately.

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The first true exposure was working in a French classical kitchen with a bunch of English chefs. Proper cuisine undone by constant proper “for fucks sake”. I taught them to add a “man” more pronounced “main” in order to sound more country, Southern country. Their accent bound by a forced twang made for an awkward rendition.

“Chef, that fennel is thin enough?”

“Uh, Chef, is this fennel thin enough for the halibut?”

“No Chef, put it in the bin. For fucks sake ask before you slice a whole bag. Yes chef?”

“Yes, Chef.” Head down.

Then the other sous from the bread line would pipe in, “for Fucks sake, maiiinnn!”

The fennel was shaved so thin it melted, translucent into a quarter pan with lemon juice, olive oil, fennel tops, and salt. It dressed the halibut, the side with the potato puree rubbed on and pan fried. The acid and anise and texture cutting the buttery, decadent fish. Perfect, harmonious. Watching the process over and over again during service, fast, steady, somehow gentle. Head chef picking the filet, laying it on the metal cook plate, seasoning it, inspecting it, slapping its bum, spreading with spatula the potato puree, looking into the restaurant (never trusting the waiters “fire” timing), moving this pan from that burner, adding oil, then that pan to that burner, his thick numb fingers grabbing the shoulders of the filet, laying it gently into the hot oil, tapping the fish spat on the stove, grabbing a ticket, listening for doneness, heating the plate under the line light, looking down at the rest of the orders, telling the sous to “fuck off” when his entree was nearly up, flipping the fish tender like, grabbing a cube of ice out of the Mise-en-place box, tossing what seemed like over his shoulder into the pan with the fish, covering with lid, decorating the plate now, herb oil first, warmed diced potatoes and fennel from the other fry pan, releasing used pan without looking into the wash bin at his feet, motions with fish spat to dishwasher to come get, plates the fish over the head of the dishwasher, shouts “allez” for the other entrees to hit the line, tops with shaved fennel, flicks the bits stuck to his hands on the floor. Seeing from the dessert corner this performance no less than 40 times a night. The same.

It looks a little Dr. Seuss at the market next to the tight clumps of kale and limp herbs.

“What is that mamma?”

“It’s called fennel, want to taste it?” 3 year old shares opinions, 2 year old nibbles and thinks. “Berry crunchy,” he winces and drops the rest.

He moves on, “What about strawberries?”

2 year old does the bouncing fingers off of each other signaling “more” in agreement.

“Yeah, let’s do one of each.”

“Oh, oh I like the black ones.” He means blackberries.

They snack and half dance at the farmers market. Next to the stands there is live music and other kids spinning around their parents, constant glancing, containing, motioning come back across the large closed street. The kids sneak mulberries from a vendor who is not expecting it, their fingers reach up and grab a single stem, they take off through the crowd. He moves them higher up and keeps unpacking avocados.

“What are we gonna do with those things?” He means the fennel.

“I don’t know yet, I am just happy to see them.” As if I am being reunited with an old friend. One that I have traveled with, but then lost touch with, and now is in town.

I wave the guy off trying to give the kids Cara Cara samples, knowing it will lead to them sampling the entire table, then me feeling guilty and buying something. They beat me to him, start fondling the light blue eggs, standing proud amid the boring brown ones. I buy two orange heads of cauliflower for the color and the perkiness of its trees. We load the wagon, Tall guy follows behind, picking up shoes and orange peels, feeding them bits of cheese quesadilla when they are still long enough to bite. I will shave that fennel fresh, nothing like it thin and salty with a touch of bitter lemon. They don’t need to cook it, or to hold it. They can see, from market to counter to salad bowl, each week more Dr Seuss and more blackberries. Stealing tastes, dancing down dinner.

The second time, in Italy. Fennel is not so rare here, a sly staple in the Italian kitchen. It’s hard to say when and where it protrudes a meal, a kitchen, as if it’s specificity elevates it amidst the other roots and herbs, and leaves. Not quite special, but not ordinary. Set at a table covered with plasticey red gingham, stretched taught like the turquoise with yellow flowers of Mexican tables collecting sticky tortilla crumbs and extra lime wedges, appears a long plate with slabs of raw fennel. From two cultures that know how to eat, the background for plates is recognizable, happy, wipeable. The light green crunch of a fennel bulb fills the mouth with tart liquid, umami’s opposite, with the same aftermath. What to do next. Chew and chew and take a sip of wine. Like a clementine peeled into a napkin for eager little hands, the wedges wobble and dwindle. Dinner smells fast approaching, wine helps dampen daylight to evening light, steam rises from strained pasta in the sink. Its footprint, however short and simple, is significant. Oily sauces and strong olives appear, wine drips from bottle to table, bread gets passed, cheese oozes on a wooden block. The clean, strange, deliverance of fennel like the anticipatory curtain opening to the dinner show. Finocchio and the Cavatappi.

The third. From the train windows, heading East from San Francisco for the first time, under the dark, screeching tracks of the Bay. Arriving first at the graffiti filled West Oakland stop. In the blighted lots near the station, broken down buses and tents, someone collecting cans and bottles, there, wild fennel was growing tall above the fences. Is that what I think it is. The doors blast open, urine, fennel, marijuana, fuel, sage. Doors close. I look hard, there again, and again, fields of last year’s fallow golden stalks giving birth to springy green fronds. Stop, open, Eucalyptus sway, oil spilled, salt water, close. The window pictures like old motion picture, rolling and clicking. I’ve been traveling 6 months. Everything is on my back, clothes, camera, notebooks. I’ve seen a lot. Stop, open, orange poppies in the sidewalk cracks, more urine, black people cooking black people food, Asian people cooking Asian people food, fronds and more fronds each block, close. An overgrown playground of food. This must be my place.

Tall man is sick, just enough so that he doesn’t object when we all get in bed at 6 and put on Ratatouille. Sissy points and giggles at the animals talking. Bubba tries to follow the plot in earnest.

“This is my favorite part, watch, watch, watch,” Tall man.

Ego the critic gets transported to childhood via the dish ratatouille. I tear up. I give birth in 8 weeks, it’s all bubbling over.

“Mamma can we make that? I want it with the gweens and the weds.” Greens and reds.

“Yes, bubba, it’s purple eggplant too.”

“Yeah purple too, I want to make that, can we make it please.”

Sometimes feeling is enough.

Basic shaved fennel for sandwiches, salads, or a dinner side.

Fennel on the mandolin or thinly sliced 3-4 bulbs

Juice of one lemon

Chopped fennel tops of 1 bulb

Salt

Couple splashes of Olive Oil

Bang around with some tongs and let sit a bit before serving.

Things it goes with well with in particular:

Fish: put fennel in fish stock, use fresh fennel salad to top fried fish, in a fish stew

Orange: fennel braised in olive oil and orange juice is a great base or side. This is sometimes a dessert combination. Classic cold salad: fennel, orange, olives.

Apples: thinly sliced like fennel, fall salad with nuts both savory and sweet.

Beans: braised or in a fresh salad, they are an opposite texture and flavor profile so they add interest to legumes

Later, in the dust of a city, black and tasting of asphalt, not the ancient brown of country living that tastes of tossed square bales. I kept 3 hens. They mauled Fava beans and chatted to me over coffee most mornings. Until one morning, the eerie quiet of time stopped, and the impossibleness of time marching on. Flesh undone hit my nostrils. Oh girls. All of them guillotined, one night, one animal, still teenagers. I never loved them, or any animal. Whether inherited or observed, respect and curiosity never formed into love. An admission of our parallel existence but nothing more. As if my own communion with death made it all feel possible, any morning, any thing.

I made stock.

As someone who leans vegetarian, I derive great pleasure in butchery. No longer trying to connect with a frantic bird or the emotionless black eyes of a heifer, the dearly departed become the architecture of a meal, their internal lines, foundational bones, becoming. Now I buy whole birds only, starving the memories of air, focused on what can be.

I learned to break down a chicken working for my god mother’s catering company because I got the tedious, shit jobs. The messy, muscly jobs of loading coolers and prepping parts, never cooking. I loved every second. Becoming obsessed with speed, working in restaurants, I could clean a breast from the bone with a few strokes. Now, working for my people, a beyond confident home cook, showing my skills to no one, pleasing myself.

Chefy climbs into the chair to help whack garlic for the marinade. Holding the knife flat on the clove, he hammers the heel of his hand, smashing the skin off each node.

“Take the scissors and go cut some parsley for me.”

At three, this is still a risk. Following a few minutes behind to make sure he has the right plant.

“Try to get these branches right here with a few leaves on them,” snipping almost down to the dirt.

He chops and folds them into a bowl too small. I leave him to it. Coming back later to singular leaves marching down the side of the planter, splayed out, counted, collected.

“I marinated the chicken.”

I say this on the phone to Grill guy. He knows then his role is to get the grill, start the fire, be in the backyard indefinitely. Living with another cook and eater, turns this statement into a plan. The putzing and poking about the yard in unison with my putzing and poking about the kitchen.

Tracing the bird’s anatomy, wings pop off at the upper joints, hips open wide, knifing through skin and in between bigger knuckle bones to extract a leg piece. The best part, using the tip of the blade to carve, ER doctor style along the chest bone of the beast, the left hand getting filled with more flesh each time the knife detaches more with the right. What remains is the main carcass for stock, several bone in extremities, fat breasts with skin extending far beyond the meat like a toddler in a towel.

“I think we should get some chicks. The kids would freak out. They’re at tractor supply plus.” I call the college kid. The excitable one not even the practical one.

“I mean, it sounds cool, but they carry a lot of diseases, and there are a lot to keep up with”

“I know, I mean, especially when they’re small they die easy.”

“Yeah dude they’re like hard to keep alive.”

Line goes quiet. He’s right. I just thought it was part of growing up, the dirt and death and disgust. That accepting it, becoming regardless, was a form of love.

One bird can produce all of this: How to break down a chicken

Stock:

• Carcass and any extra bones (if you want it more gelatinous people say chicken feet but I prefer extra skin and a beef bone or two from the freezer)

• 6-10 Whole peppercorns

• 1 nub Ginger in skin on cut into chunks

• 2-4 nubby middles of garlic, skins on

• Onion — lousiest bits

• One butt end of celery

• 4 Carrot or bodies just their skins

• Bayleaf and/or fresh thyme

Bring to a boil and let simmer 3 to 4 hours. Turn it off when it has reduced by a third. Because that’s strong enough. Stock is like wine. The terroir defined by what’s left gasping for air in a kitchen. The last life for all. Made from the end ups, and still the most valuable piece of a pantry. Adding value and flavor, acting as a base for all iterations to shine.

Grilled chicken: *Must marinate, even just salt, pepper, oil 2-8 hrs ahead.

• Plain yogurt — the looser the better

• Olive oil oil

• Salt and pepper

• Smoked paprika

• Fresh herbs, especially parsley

• Dried herbs, especially oregano

• Lemon zest and juice

***The level of the fire/charcoal is key here and something I believe men are most suited to sort out. It never crosses my mind and I never feel responsible and it always works out.

Chicken grilling is like a hot dog on opening day at the ball park. Like a summer rain storm. Like watermelon juice running down your wrists. Like a cold beer with your toes under water lapping against ankles. Like cider is to fall and hot chocolate is to snow. It is a season of floppy plates with heavy potato salad and sweaty slaw. It is far from a dusty coop, now scorched and juicy, becoming, foundational to memory and love.

This garden, this moment, has brought a lot of chard. Even before that, it had become my favorite green. Tired, so tired of the options, raw curly kale, choky and dry, or fading altogether by being rubbed into itself. Or collards cooked in ham hock, slippery with salt, like gulping a mussel. In between sits a quiet beauty. Best cooked, sautéed with oil and garlic, only that and its diced stems at first. As everything withers and toasts in the oil, adding in the chopped leafy tops, then salt, splash of water, and cover. Keeping the fire at medium, add more oil, cover again for no more than 15 minutes. The liquid and greens make a good quick sauce for pasta, a warming side, a green thing on the plate.

“Is it spicy?”

“No, Little, it’s not spicy, it’s garlicky.”

Sometimes he confuses the two. For littles, I do back off the addition of red chili flakes but never the excessive garlic.

This night, we are having it over coconut rice, with roasted cauliflower and chick peas. A head of garlic toasted with chopped walnuts sprinkled over top. Not my doing, the other adult, Occasional Chef, Capable Chef, Feels Like He’s Visiting Chef. He does not separate the stalks from the greens, just cooks it all rather fast in a fry pan with oil. The weight and heat of the rice and cauliflower do the melting and softening. It works.

Chard is versatile, but loses its color after cooking. Don’t put it in a smoothie. Don’t make a whole salad out of it. Don’t hide it or promote it, she will become in time. Celebrate its steadfastness. Nest it on top of or beside something, let its garlicky oil water ooze into its neighbor, disappearing and distinct. Bite the crunchy stalks, remembering their yellows and pinks and reds. Cook a lot, they melt down, like spinach, but with more body and less metallic aftermath. As if they transform the same soil, the same sun, the same days, into a greater fruit.

Three ways to sing of Chard:

• Cooked up (as mentioned above) it becomes a pan sauce for pasta with lots of Parmesan cheese

• Cooked (like above) then added to eggs with feta

• Italian wedding soup — stalks sautéed with onion in the meatballs, greens finished in the broth to replace traditional spinach

I see the chard in the planter, hustling half dressed heathens out of the back gate into the van. And then again on the way back, with a midday saunter, applying soothing pats cooing bodies into naps. Walking from gate to back door, hi again. As the third act of the day begins around 3pm, I get the kitchen scissors. Two pairs, two Littles.

“Cut it down to the bottom”

“Okay mamma, like this?”

Cuts already mashed stalks off, digging scissor points into browning ends of long ago suppers.

“The ones with the leaves baby.”

The other hacks at the peas and then the cilantro and please please not the baby Zinnias, those we brought up from seed.

Redirect, remove scissors, pull slugs, gather greens, wash later.

Lots of days, I am the static, molting chard. This, motherhood, is a lostness that can drag on endless, flailing through years, compiling bits of hours upon hours of nothingness bits. Abiding, abiding, shift and abide. Sinking down singular, concentrated, unwavering roots. Just try and demarcate a day, get a routine, recall back to before when roots could be shallow, spreading out with no intention at all. Now they only go deep. Dirt to stalks to leaves, not effortless, but with every energy, each day sprouting a bit more sturdy. Inside is mad, well, sad, and so yell-y. Longing to be poised. To use the deep roots to change nothing into color. Unfurling shiny parts growing more steadfast.

The clean air calls to clean house. A shallow exercise when the growing is too much. The kitchen floor, the grout between the tiles, the area behind the trashcan and also the trashcan. The closets, the fridge. Walk past the severed stalks in the garden, sweep, then walk back again. Oh the colors.

Fold a piece of clothing, hold a hand, twirl it in a circle. Feel colors. Bursting out of my same worn soil. The roots down, down. Nothing really exists beyond this, not a thing.

“Too hard,” little Chef. Tasting the pasta.

Wipe up water on the floor, steam veg and cover, move tuna away from finger eaters.

“Is it ready?”

“Too soft,” little Chef. Tasting the pasta.

It is! Dang, especially for a pasta getting a second bake. Okay no second bake just from pot to plate. Kid knows al dente at 3.

“Chef, let’s try the mandolin, remember I told you we would practice. Now remember if you get too close, your whole finger will get chopped off and we will have to call the ambulance.” He loves talking about and hearing ambulances, like a strange messenger of things gone wrong, convinced a hero is the next to arrive, believing out will pop a dog from Paw Patrol or Baloo or Christopher Robin. Sirens mean help, and help looks mighty.

We double up our hands on the mandolin to slice red onion and celery.

“Too close, too close!” little Chef.

I take it a couple swipes further. He winces. We aren’t in danger. It is all exciting.

Little Dishwasher is content mixing bubbles and water in the sink, using the textured sponge to wipe up to her elbows and back down. Our team is pretty strong. Especially considering we spent the night in a casino the night before, ate our weight in pancakes, wrestled cousins on pillowy hotel beds until someone cried, and floated dizzy bat style around the resort’s lazy river. Dishwasher and Chef are more accustomed to being naked in the back yard with dirt and hose water. Finding bugs, picking snap peas, and walking to the beach without shoes. Only to run, roll, and dig some more. Turns out, it can be applied anywhere, two camps, same. The rolling and screaming and playing works in a sad Casino in the tall desert hills of Moreno Valley, the natural world shielded behind colorful light displays and incessant club music at the picturesque day drinking pool. A slimy hot tub, dirty eyeballs on the dirty machines, blinking numbers, faint smoke leaking through the carpet, walls, skin. Food made miles away, packaged and soggy. Even sleep felt fake, a gross chamber of sweat and muffled tv’s. Everyone played so hard at the pool, our eyes are bloodshot when we get in the car to leave. Too much, too weird, kinda good.

Chef takes to the Bechamel sauce intended for the “noodle” portion of the casserole. Confident and deliberate, he heeds the Head Chef orders, and completes a silky, cheesy goo. The pasta cooks in another pot, the tuna de-canned, mayo-ed, with mandolined slivers of onion and celery. The people on the internet who have posted about Tuna Noodle Casserole are not necessarily my kind of cooks. One camp. They open cans, and reheat, and call it a family recipe. Still, enthralled in the anthropological study of food, I consider all ways. Canned mushroom soup as the “binding agent”, potato chips on top for crunch, egg noodles inevitably overcooked, frozen peas or canned mushrooms?

Another camp. A damn good homemade mac and cheese, with a fresh tuna salad, combined with frozen veg, the kind with the carrots and peas and corn. Most things in this kitchen are organic and real. The tuna is high end line caught low mercury Albacore. The cheese is imported white cheddar and parmesan.

“What do you think?”

“It’s weird.”

“It is kind of!”

We both eat, Dishwasher picks out the veg, leaves the noodles. Then the impending hangover, onset by this strange craving, its guttural calling, towards some filthy decadence. The casino is on my skin, the thick white gloop blinds each bite, a hint of red onion almost cuts through. It’s good. It’s not good, but it’s good. The baby inside is thrilled and the Chef finishes his plate. Dishwasher runs away.

The only thing weirder than Tuna Noodle Casserole the first night, is it reheated the next day. The first time the cold tuna hits the cheesy mac it sort of makes sense. But if the first edition feels like a hangover, day two feels like a two day hangover, desperate, gross.

With all the lead up to Easter it only feels right to give an honorable mention, the Pizza Rustica slayed. I ignored the egg portion of the dough, given to me by my godmother, who riffed on it from my great grandmother Bamma’s recipe. I thought it was simply for the top of the crust, but after watching several Jersey looking Italians share their version, I realize the dough is meant to be slightly eggy. And we are Jersey/NY/Baltimore Italians. Same.

When I pulled it out, I Facetimed my Nonna.

“You never put a top on, you just made the sides like a quiche,” head Chef.

With an ear to the camera, she listens and replies. “I don’t think so, I don’t remember a top.”

“I didn’t think so.”

She turns camera to the front of her face and says I look good even though I am massive.

It’s all the same, really.

Another note, my first inclination to pop it all in a spring form pan was correct! But every recipe I got from family said a 9x13 rectangle dish. I removed the wet, flappy dough from the spring form and make a massive rectangular pie with perfect crust all around and an egg wash on top. I almost omitted the ricotta because there were so many other cheeses, but it’s imperative to the texture and taste. The process is laborious but then you’re done. It gets served room temp and can sit around on the sweaty chocolate egg table all day, looking as fine as it did when it left the oven.

On the way to church, the Tug Boat husband who just got off a 48hr trip asks, “What’s in it?”

“Ham…proscuitto...ricotta”

“Ham! You mean that old stuff that’s been here since your mom came.”

Save me God, resurrect me from this moment. This won’t stop my pride. I know its PFG.

“Yep, old ham pie.”

There’s good prosciutto and quality gruyere, herbs from the garden, and the best butter you can find. It has been fondled and loved and studied. Rich and tender. Too decadent. Grossly salty.

All the camps.

“This is good carrot cake!” College Maggot.

“She made it for her brother’s birthday.” Dad Maggot

“Yeah I know, it’s birthday cake.” College Maggot.

“Knees up Maggots! March one two three four and up two three four.”

The kids in their onesie zip ups know this is my not kidding tone, grab their flashlight lanterns, and march to the door to be let out. The Dad Maggot gives me the alright already hand flap even though he loves a mission, unlatching the door into the dark. A warm wind lets itself in with the slapping door. It is quiet.

“Are we making a carrot cake on Saturday?”

“OMG yes, thank you for reminding me.”

Somewhere it was lost. I knew it would happen, someday I would forget. On some unholy week of judgement, and fatigue, and irritation I would miss the celebrating. Sure that the universe was hurdling traffic lights and over scheduled schedules and coughing kids like punishment. The surrender wasn’t surrendering. I forgot to be glad in its suffocating embrace. To wring my hands of this world, pass time like infinity, celebrate.

There are several recipes for Carrot Cake in my small collection, most teetering on annoying. Gluten free this, chia egg that. Even my mother’s calls for too much oil and crushed pineapple, two things I am not convinced of. She got us all addicted long ago, normalized it as both healthy and a treat, exalted it to birthday cake status. The ideal carrot cake is dense. Not too spicy from nutmeg or something, just sweet, with the occasional nut and raisin. Then the icing a buttery whipped cream cheese with fresh lemon juice, or bust. It should not feel cakey, like a pumpkin or banana bread, or be icing-laden. A NYT recipe provides the right ratio, 3 cups carrots to 2 cups flour. Editing the sugar from 2 cups to 1 and replacing the flavorless oil with coconut oil. The coconut shreds are sweetened which also aligns with the last oil and sugar decision. It is not a one bowl moment, we shouldn’t make it such. It is a chunky carrot bowl, a dry ingredients bowl, and sugar and eggs and oil whisked hard bowl … 3 bowls. Not only is it Easter bunny adjacent with the carrots and coconut, it’s how we celebrate.

I thank my dear friend for remembering for me, not just our brother Aaron but how we celebrate. After a morning of scooping and shuffling and tidying, making a Saturday go, I find alone time in the kitchen. Glad. Instead of handing the icing spatula to A Little, I set it aside for myself. Like them, with a childish ache, whiney and wanting. Needing to lick off the spoon like life. Stomping feet to puncture this silly time with more unwieldy moments. Charging into a holy week by knowing all the unholiness, the forgetting, the arrogance. Make glad instead. Gather palms, find quiet, make savory this celebration, over and over and again.

Here’s how to celebrate a birthday, renewal, Spring, Holy week and Easter too. A few recipes, Little’s hands included, that deliver much gladness to the cook and the eater. Because cooking is as much fluid and artistic as it is generational insistence, recipes it seems serve as a foundation. The stones and beams placed long ago, with edits and updates each decade, transitions and exchanges each cook. What I get from my mother and grandmother and aunt when I ask for the Pizza Rustica recipe are scribbled notes, a few non-negotiables, and even fewer measurements.

This method of cooking assumes the gist is already there, talked about, repeated and refined. The index card recipes read more like a letter:

“Hey, I’ve missed you don’t forget the Locatelli. Do that thing with the sausage when you cook it, use that dish, yeah the square one, and for God sake call your mother. ”

It seems like an invitation to a priavte club that I’m not quite in, yet. The simplicity is not intended to teach. It’s intent is to establish the ground rules. From there, make do, try, try again, call somebody.

Pizza Rustica

Double crust for a deep 9” spring form pan

Recipe for quiche crust do x3

Suggested ingredients and amounts are:

1lb Sausage (cooked)

1 lb Ham (good Italian cold cuts or rosemary not thick spiral or country)

8oz Prosciutto (browned a bit)

8-16 oz Locatelli shredded

8-12 Eggs - at least 1 dozen

This year’s changes:

Fresh parsley and basil from garden

No Locatelli — Parmesan and Gruyere

No sausage

Chop ham, shred cheese, and cook up sausage. Combine all all the filling in the bowl. Whip eggs with lots of salt and pepper, stir into filling. Put all of it into a pie crust and bake at least an hour, keep and eye on it, could be longer at 350 degrees.

Kids tasks: get herbs from garden, crack and mix eggs – poured through strainer before adding to the prepped meat and cheese in the bowl, measure flour etc for the crust and cut the butter into the short crust (I usually have to take it from there)

Carrot Cake

This recipe with these updates

1 cup of sugar instead of 2 cups

Coconut oil instead of vegetable

Opted for Sweetened coconut

Icing edit: ¾ cup confectioners sugar NOT 3 cups JESUS

1 whole lemon juiced – 3-4 TBSP not 1 JESUS

Baked in a spring form pan smeared with lots of butter. In hindsight I could have cut the cake in half and put a thin layer of icing between for both look and flavor. For Easter, bake in two smaller pans and follow the bunny rabbit cake template, with ears and bow.

Kid friendly: Measuring chopped ingredients like nuts, raisins, and carrots. Easy and not an exact science if you get all the things shredded and chopped before they help. Decorating with icing and leftover raisins/nuts. Although they just laughed that the raisins were rabbit poop and put them all over the top. They are menaces around the stand up mixer, changing the speed and dropping the bowl. I am sure they are going to get their fingers whisked up too. They have been uninvited to that portion of the baking.

There are more recipes too, more last minute remembering, scrambling ingredients and children toward Sunday. For now, keep writing recipes in letter form like I’ve been shown. Keep finding food that makes a date take shape, mark time, stay sacred. Keep, keeping on.

Still we cook. The loose planning for a week of food includes surprise menu items, testing, and survival. While Easter preparations loom large, the punishing heat and longer days demand immediate adaptation. The week reads something like this, orange cream sickle popsicles, green pasta sauce from leafy garden veg, frozen blueberries, blue lips, blue hands, peanut butter Easter eggs, new coffee maker, vinegar x veggie egg dyes, homies biscuits, too much guacamole.

(heat wave = guacamole for dinner)

Screamer didn’t put on clothes or go to sleep, but also did not refuse any item of food. The only time she was happy was eating, with a sing-songy nasal hum, using three fingers to clean guacamole out of the bowl or stand at the foot of the fridge asking for “booberries” pinching fingers to show their size.

Nonna folded into the plan no plan, open to everything from a last minute search for popsicle forms, transitioning coffee from pour over to classic automatic carafe maker (the process has broken me, I just want a pot ready when I wake up), to trying a new green sauce for pasta. Making lists and texting them when I leave the house, adding other things like toilet paper, taking stock of us, and the pantry, keeping people on task. Like only a seasoned mom can do, making it flow, timing it right, accepting and adapting.

Friday afternoon, when it was even hot in the shade, I made a trip with list:

pool

fan

popsicle molds

The recipe for the popsicles was in my head. Doing a quick search to make sure we were on the right track, I learned that vanilla extract was necessary to creamsicle pops. Adding frozen OJ concentrate to the list because it was one of those moments when execution was more important than process. We drank the blender dregs extras out of cups in the backyard.

Screamer screamed and Nonna cooked. 3 year old helper, helped.

“Is it green,” Helper.

“It is all the greens,” Nonna.

“I shutting window mamma,” Helper.

“Please don’t baby it’s too hot,” Mamma.

“I don’t want them to see our recipes,” Helper.

Stuck to gluten free paparadelle, the blender whipped greens and oil and garlic until they became frothy. Tossed on steaming pasta with a sprinkling of pebbley Romano, tasted more like a healthy alfredo than a pesto.

“I don’t like the ga-ween on the pasta,” Helper.

It was light, like a shy spring garden, understated, not floral, not earthy, just peeky green. Since Nonna made the green sauce every time we spoke of food, Helper asked if it was green.

“Is it green Nonna,” Helper.

“It’s so green, do you want some?” Nonna.

“No, not the green!!!” Helper.

Everyone laughs.

Onward, determined to make some egg dyes from lying around veg and stay “on track”. Not just hardboiled but ones that get a needle in the top and bottom and the guts displaced by blowing one end, catching the discard in a bowl.

“Ewwww, that’s disgusting, oh my god,” Worker Guy.

“Oh whatever, it’s better than hard boiled eggs sitting around for weeks,” Mamma.

“Why are you doing it?” Worker guy.

“Just make something with the eggs already,” Mamma.

He shifts away to toast more bread and scramble the discards.

Sometimes I’m tired after breakfast, 6-9 am has me beat, wondering if I can just rest for a moment at some point, but when, now, oh then maybe, or when all is done, thats it, Ill really chill maybe a bath or a show. Could Worker guy be right, why, why with the eggs? Sit down mamma, it’s enough. These tending hands doing all of the day’s transitions, seasons of emotion storming about, interruptions and screaming, molding and melting the hours. Cleaning and making just to clean and make some more. Becoming like the eggshell, brittle and hollow, colored this way and that by constant frivolous efforts.

Still the boiling of veg and straining and adding vinegar is mindless, relaxing in a way. The mason jars store well in the fridge with a top, great for reusing the whole month probably. The creative making a kind of useful making, repurposing red onion skins, purple cabbage, and frozen blueberries. The first round became deeply colored after one night in the mason jars in the fridge. The egg stabbing and de-yolking is not a kid activity but putting the eggs in the jars and getting them out, pouring out the extra dye was fine with tongs and a towel, a little’s joyful experiment. Placing them in a shallow dish to admire, they look back at me, asking again…For you? For them? For whom? Why mamma why?

Another non-negotiable to muscle through was Mamma Lou’s Easter Eggs. Peanut butter and sugar covered with melted chocolate and peanut butter chips. Having watched her dip and set the oval slabs onto wax paper many Easter’s, is more like nostalgia’s feel, than nostalgia’s taste. They marked a holiday less distinct in food tradition, more abiding to dewy flowers and linen cloths on yard tables, mossy bunny forms, and crinkly paper, fake-y green.

Tasting them didn’t take me back to those times, only wondering, will this be a thing we do, a time marking confection, a notation among Spring notations. Shaping, dipping, making in the cool of the afternoon while we linger towards Easter time.

Last, an unexpected invitation came to bake Nonna’s biscuits for the local coffee shop and cafe. Reminded, as I organized the bits and pieces onto the work table in the back of the shop, why, why there are so many stops and starts to the biscuits. The heat stayed tidy in my shoulder blades and sideburns. But the belly rubbed, right there at the button, reaching and rolling, dusting, loading. Whoof. Still this logo and name needed to get off my desk and into the world. They sold out in one morning, little Homies.

Collecting all the Easter recipes in an upcoming post, hoping to bring the menu to life with real direction, in case you are reading and following and cooking. Thank you for that.