kinds of mania

when at the market remember how fleeting your time will be. especially in the mountains where growing things have merely a moment, and not an age as in the wetter places.
when at the market buy peaches, by the boxful. sometimes you can get 'seconds' which are ugly but lovable. toss them with ginger (ground and fresh) the smallest half of a scotch bonnet pepper, lemon, cinnamon and vanilla and enrobe them in a buttery cloak of dough: call it a pie.

and don't forget that sometimes there's a woman at the market who can't decide if she's a farmer, an herbalist or a potter. and so sells clutches of tiny carrots, fierce knobs of garlic and great armfuls of herbs tucked into pottery she's made during the week. sometimes this woman will sell very small vessels. neither cup nor vase. too small for drinking, too big for gulping. get some of these. they will find their purpose. probably in your kitchen.

don't feel you are too good for the melon-monger either. if he tries to sell you a soft, shy honeydew looking melon with little drags of green brush marks all over its cheeks, let him put it on the wobbling scale and charge you an arm an a leg for it. pay an arm and a leg for it because it is called a snow leopard (!!!) melon and eat a slice of it no matter what you think because you are eating a snow leopard melon slice.

spread your herbs out on the kitchen counter. the ones you bought at the market. also the ones from your parents farmyard. swoon over the herbs, smell your hands, chew the stems and decide it is important to make salsa verde at once.

when you are done look around your kitchen. inspect your crisper and cabinets. eye your empty market bags, look around the kitchen swiftly, grab your keys, dive into the car and carry on. never resting, tirelessly diving into the markets racing against the tipping sun until the frost closes its teeth on the year.

the nightshade problem

tomato season opened a few weeks ago. and then it seemed that tomato panic ensues. as it always does. heirlooms for 4 dollars a pound, three, two, one fifty?? we get up with the sun and stuff all of our canvas sacks into the car and hurtle down into the valley to the markets. any markets. as long as there are tomatoes we can buy. the uglier the better. the more cracked. the more lopsided;  the heavier and more fragile the better. we learn what the tomatoes want in the car. especially when we go to scoop them onto the counter and find we have transported tomato puree in the lower most layers. we evolve. we come prepared with downy pillowcases to swaddle the fruits. we tuck them into tall mason jars and throw them around more bravely. we line them up like pirates with loot and get giddy seeing all the colors, seeing the gold and red shaded light go swimming off their sides and across the kitchen counters.
when you are confronted with many tomatoes you know the time is swiftly on its way out. even as it opens. and so the best thing to do, we decide, is to try to keep them as still as we can. glistening in oil, studded with bruised garlic cloves, showered with basil, sprinkled sparingly with coarse salt and roasted until just before they threaten to collapse. in a cool oven. preferably in tiers. so the smell of summer warms and blooms in a kitchen that may already be threatening to crisp and snap into fall.

razzes

went berry picking here a few weeks ago.
strange and beautiful.
strange to drive for so many hours, out of the crowd, out of one valley and into another, out of density and familiarity, out of the grid. into the rural places of the southern valley. flats ribbed for stretches with rises, fields burnished gold, crispy brown, emerald green, the alive and the recently departed side by side. off the highway, out into roads built to loop pasturelands, the houses seemed to respond to maps already laid out for them. none of them asked for their own place, houses but up against irrigation ditches and manure banks. the fine new faux stucco, the cobbles glued up against plywood framing, stilts of gleaming white cement, and a dirt front yard. sometimes tricyles. sometimes car bodies. the strangest juxtapositions.
the raspberry patch comes up directly to the road in a neighborhood that slants up towards the hills that cup Utah Lake. manicured lawns across the street, speed boats and dirt bikes at tight and rigid rank.
the raspberry patch itself is beginning to succumb to the decent of fall. brown and blown vines drooping. everywhere collapsed fruit, languid wasps, the sticky carpet of leaves and berries and dust between the rows. but! here and there! the gleam. a jewel bright fistful of berries bobbing beneath dead cane. the time we spent looking. it was time spent foraging really. modern day gleaners with milk cartons tied to our waists, seeing what we could pick off of summer and keep greedily while the sun is
still high.

no fine plans for the loot. thirteen pounds of berries, slowly slipping into juice and pulp. but we are undaunted. froze them up flat in the freezer to pull out on a dreary day in February where something bright and alive will stir us all from the deepest places.

clean and light

in which panchakarma is undertaken, well, attempted....

made kitchari again today because the first try was such a let down. boiling it for 10 minutes instead of 45 left the vegetables palatable and with texture and the rice soft, the mung dal was slightly firm but in some ways that was a more appealing way of eating it. the entire dish is meant to be soothing, warming and easy on digestion. read: mushy, bland and without much textural variation. all goals of a luminous clean form aside, and in keeping with the mantra that the cleanse should fulfill and the food should taste good, i thought that tweaking the formula to make it soothing and easy to digest as well as good tasting was not too far a deviation from acceptable.