high summer

Summer is here. It took its time.

We are getting rain and wind all the time, which stuns us. We look up and squint and put our noses into the breezes, we extend our palms upwards, cupped, to feel in disbelief  for the wet weight of thunderstorms. It is gloriously green and unusual. And the markets have fruit. Fruit! Not just the nine dollar a pint raspberries but heaps of apricots and cherries. This is a shock, usually the season for those is a blink and a start and is over.

Of course, when one has fruit to use, one must make cake. One must make cake as if it is one's only purpose in life and one must also eat the cake on shaded patios, with the basil and cornflowers blowing softly and the hummingbirds tangling with one another in the trees.

This cake was adapted from the sprouted kitchen's most recent and lovely idea. The novelty of almond flour has yet to escape me as a replacement for grain flours. While the above recipe was put together to make muffins I knew that, too often, muffins sit swathed in parchment, folded into ziplock bags, and left to fur over with mold in despair. There's something unromantic about fishing a slightly gelatinous-topped muffin from a bag and wishing it had retained its former lofty, somewhat crusty and fragrant glory when first turned from a muffin tin.

So, on the other hand, there is tea cake. Read: muffin batter baked in a loaf pan. Tea cake is seductive, it sits low slung and dark in a loaf pan and beckons knives and fingers to shave it down until only crumbs remain. With coffee or after dinner or in the middle of the day in bare feet at the countertop after one has recovered from miles trekked in the mountains and returned home ravenous. (Or maybe this person goes on treks into the mountains with the sole idea of using the alluring tea cake as a magnet for the return trip, imagining bits toasted with sweet cream butter with every step until the car comes back into view. Just maybe.)


Blueberry, Apricot and Almond Teacake

1/2 cup almond meal (pre-ground or make your own using whole raw almonds whizzed in your food processor)
1/2 cup cornmeal
1 cup 50/50 whole wheat-white flour (or any combination of other grain flours)
1/4 cup oats
1 heaping tablespoon hemp seeds
1 rounded teaspoon flaxseeds
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon ground or grated ginger
3/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/3 cup coconut sugar or other thoughtful sweetener
2 eggs
3 tablespoons coconut or olive oil or butter
1/4 cup plain yogurt

2 tablespoons raw honey

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1 cup fresh or frozen blueberries

2 fresh apricots diced 

(*fancy option: crack one of the apricot stones open, fish out the fragrant soft inner kernel, dice up finely and add to the batter. The inner kernel is faintly reticent of roasted almonds and can impart a mysterious herbal note to recipes that call for apricot. Beware however as too many can overpower anything with a fierce bitterness.)

 

 

Preheat the oven to 350. Combine the dry ingredients (including the sugar) and set aside. Combine the remaining ingredients except for the fruit and whisk vigorously to aerate. This batter is somewhat dense and benefits immensely from a good swish about with a whisk before incorporating the dry ingredients. Add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients and fold until about 75% combined, tip in the fruit and finish folding everything together. Use a gentle hand here now that the grains and the eggs are in the same bowl, an overly thorough mixing is grounds for a touch cake. Smooth into a loaf pan which you've buttered and papered and put into the oven for 35-50 minutes. Test with the blade of a knife for doneness. If the knife comes out with more than a crumb or two give it another 5 minutes and check again. Cool thoroughly before slicing: the cornmeal will remain somewhat firm and will crumble if cut before its had a chance to firm up and cool.

On another note the beginning of July marked some beautiful loops come full circle. It's important to have love move through you, the fierce kind, no matter what kind or where it comes from.

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this guy has serious talent. geography bees, flag identification games, crossword clues, you name it. if it's related to the shape of the earth's continents, their whereabout or weird taxonomies you can bet he can inform the pants off you about it.

the other day, in response to some particularly low morale and seated over the chairs in my little art room whose tiny height do nothing for one's pride, actual art therapy occurred. read: giving a 32 year old man a clutch of homemade playdough and encouraging him to "play it out." below are the impressive results. good god.

living the...

the blessed life is luminous and flourishing over here. spring is Springing, truly. warm winds are rounding the sharp edges of everything. everyone nearby is nourishing and even braving the mud into work has offered up little altars of goodness to take home.

thanks goodness the Waxing part of the year is nearly upon us, all starved for abundance after subsisting on bravery and stoicism for the last long while.

gifts at school...

...and the gifts at home

on the thaw

sometimes a body can be overwhelmed by the bleakness of the mountains in March. not bleak in the visual sense- for the brightest and most glittering part of the year is when the snow loads gleam blindingly  at midday. rather, I mean bleak in terms of the unchanging days, the absence of color and the cold that keeps us bundled and indoors. part of this is because you hear nice things about sprouts occurring in other parts of the world, sweet winds moving across the frozen ground, that sort of thing. sometimes this happens close to home indeed, in a valley not far off...

and of course, this is an inspiring phenomenon. literally, hope pushing sharply upward, a forceful stretch into brilliance. but up high March has never been a herald of spring, indeed sometimes March marks just the beginning of the snow. more frequently though, it is a stubborn, and convincing extension of the cold unchanging whiteness of February. as a result our antennae at this elevation are more finely tuned to the subtleties of spring. what we notice, zipped up in down and wool, is a kind of softening of edges. a warming in the spectrum of the many whites that snow takes on. the shadows seem velvety as they drape the snowfields instead of sharp and cutting.

if we are still enough, turn our noses to the wind, squint towards the sky, we can feel spring. inwardly only, but still there is a stirring! we go climbing about the drifts in thick socks and bare arms. heads uncovered. gum boots.

there is a kind of frivolous delirium, traveling to investigate where else the minute and clandestine thaw is making itself known. sometimes we overdo it and we end up with wet sock consequences...

 

but we find, anyway, that it helps. for early March is the time when we are thirstiest for color and movement. maybe because we are so frequently cold, or because we've catalogued all the kinds of white we can. 

ice rot white

frozen aqueduct white

snow under halogen white

moon on snow white

snow on snow white

the whiteness of deep sleep

thirst

restlessness

white quiet

regardless, to know that spring will in fact spring, as it dependably does is a kind of savior. we strive to bear it gracefully. we go out into the gray in our brightest hats, with our faces turned upwards.

balms

kinds of domesticity evolve and shift in the winter months. at this point the cold, flat days, sometimes drifted over with the threats of snow, other times pierced with the glass shard cold of clear-skied sun become monotonous no matter how dutifully one tries to find divine meaning in examining Light.

little miracles of plain things have kindled little bonfires in our small house and plain though they may be, they have helped immeasurably.

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** training our kefir grains to fizzle and thrive in the cloudy gravenstein juice we so love. turns out, the chalky, sweet juice is never happier than when plunked into a large jar of the stuff. after 24 hours (versus 48 for the water and fruit concoction) the juice is fiercely carbonated from the hard working kefir grains and undeniably boozy. yip yip!

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the good kind.

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         Yo La Tengo's |  more stars than there are in heaven  | from their newest, Popular Songs

down (south) time

 

it has taken some getting used to - this idea that, despite a complete dissolution of plans, buoyancy can still be achieved. or, if not achieved exactly, can still occur when you least expect it. maybe especially so.

given that winter here is indecisive, manic, dogmatic and absolutely enraging, it is always somewhat of a surprise when it passes. although now it's still not clear if that's what It has decided on. where, in the East, water sprung readily from dry ditches to float detritus into a gay clog of gutters, here it is still frozen and resolutely clenched at the mountain saddles. the snowpack that lounges at the peaks of the Oquirrhs, the Henrys, the La Sals, all of it still accounts for our annual sum of snowfall- not counting the bulk that has already run and flooded the basements of the valley towns. a veritable crushing of stillmoving snow.

but we were gifted a surge in temperature, a warm smell- that prickling green waft that lifts your collar and fills your nose. without turning,  we could feel the lilacs stir into heady bloom and dip low into the grass. so we figured the best thing to do was to head to directly into desert country to see what sort of remote places we could take off our clothes and generally get back to feeling like real animals.

to our utter surprise there was water in the most unexpected places. (like, for examples, in the low draws of parched caps of earth whose linear scrawling indicated water had not passed for easily a year since the first snows.)

 

which is not to say there wasn't dust. it poured, it followed all movement. it filled seams and small places, and it had faces of its own.

 

 

but it was restorative. the desert has a way of belittling all the tangles of everyday life and smoothing them into a sandblown mass. manageable, if not slightly blurred. it was, as i sat there and felt a great red pulse in the ground , important to remember that, given enough distance, most things can be seen in their entirety and are thus navigable. it also helps to be surrounded by kindness and love and fur and bone. but profundity and a good dose of bone shaking heat is almost always a cure-all.