Quince on Henry Street

This quince is growing on a small, funny little tree whose fat white blossoms in spring promise sweetly scented globes of fruit in autumn. Except I have never seen any ripe fruit when the time comes. Perhaps I'll write a little label and tie it to a couple of quinces saying Installation Quince: Project Complete in October.

Sour cherries and black currants

Yielded 3 tall pots and 1 tiny jar of jam...

Red currant jam

Currants being washed.

Cat scorning my handiwork. You wouldn't think it took three episodes of As Time Goes By to strip the currants off these stalks, would you? Also some pits there, from the sour cherries - different batch of jam.


1kg / 2 1/4 lbs red currants, stripped off stalks
500g/18oz sugar
In other words...half as much sugar as fruit
Juice of one lemon

Cover the fruit with the sugar and stir gently until mixed in. Set over low at heat at first, stirring from time to time to prevent sticking. As liquid starts to form from the juice, turn heat higher. Stir until sugar is dissolved. Keep at a gentle bubble and skim all the foam that rises. Add lemon juice after about 10 minutes.

Holding a large silver/metal spoon sideways with the upper edge tilted towards you a little, scoop up liquid and allow to drip back into pot. When two slower drips form, from both sides of the spoon, it has reached setting point. Take off heat and cool enough to pour into sterilized jars.

Picture of breakfast tomorrow. After breakfast.

This is Raymond Blanc's recipe, from his book Cooking for Friends, Headline Book Publishing, London, 1994.

Where there's a will...

...there is a way to grow lilies. Bleecker Street.

Potted shrimp

Clean shrimp, but leave the shell on; toss with some sliced garlic, lemon, plenty of salt and black pepper, and thyme leaves. Leave for an hour in fridge. Then broil till cooked. Take out of shells, chop finely and pack into small ramekins. Snip lots of chives over the top. Melt butter and pour till it covers the chives.

Excellent supper or lunch on rough brown bread.

Vancouver the lovely: a personal post.

I started to look at some of the pictures I have taken in and around Vancouver over the last two years, since I met and started to visit Vince. I found some pictures I have not posted before, and I also find myself crying...Vincent, Skyping me from the airport before he took off on Saturday morning for Montreal, where he is now visiting his mother, sister and nephew, had a catch in his voice. He was trying not to look at the mountains.

Vancouver is a city ethereally and preternaturally beautiful. Her mountains, snow-topped and fir-ridged, her glassy inlets and bird-filled bays, her turquoise mountain torrents and moss- clean air, is perhaps the most beautiful city I have seen. Always a dangerous thing to say, as it is so connected to emotion. And this from a Capetonian. And a lover of Istanbul and her dreaming spires, with apologies to Waugh...And so many cities that I have not seen, and do not know...

There is a lot of Cape Town in Vancouver: the proximity of mountains to water, the pristine wild within the urban wrap. The ease of access to natural beauty. The omnipresent green and grey of a Cape winter. Then there is an Interlaken-ness too: Swiss Alp majesty, the brilliance of the sky reflected in the fjords, the rushing mountain water, the flowers at altitude. And her American roots: Northwest wildness, a bear-mountained, salmon-berried wilderness: Lynn Canyon; Grouse Mountain, where he asked and I said yes; Stanley Park; all within a Europe within North America, where strangers greet you and bus drivers, driving buses that arrive and depart on the minute, ask you how you are.

So, some more pictures. To pay tribute to her beauty, to thank her for the beauty she brought me, and to my husband, who loved me enough to leave, in addition to his country, a city that spoke to him daily in pictures and under his feet as he ran miles and miles along the seawall.

I am humbled by his love, and am sensible of the sense of loss that he must feel. Vincent, you are the stuff of dreams. And a real man. And I know what that means.

Mount Baker, in Washington, a couple of hours away.

Van Dusen Gardens, in the middle of the city.




Lynn Canyon.

Grouse Mountain flowers.

False Creek.

Granville Island's duck prosciutto: to live for. Smoky, fatty, sliced like tissue paper. Unforgettable.

Silvia Hotel.

Vince's neighbourhood, the West End, on English Bay.



The blackberries on the seawall. Bliss for a born forager.

The seawall.


The Syringe, below.

The beach, 40 seconds from his flat. Sundowner martinis.


City of glass and lights, from his balcony.

Sidewalk flowers: snow-in-summer.

Stanley Park's flower borders near the aquarium.




..and its wilder side.







Talking to chickadees.

Donna's daylilies

Enter Donna, a reader in Arlington, Massachusetts, who heeded my plea for day lily owners to eat their day lilies. She targeted flowers and tubers, below.

These tubers looked smaller than the ones I've seen - I wonder if the age of the day lily colony makes a difference...Donna said she tried and liked the tubers but the verdict is Too. Much. Work.

Below is her piece de resistance, day lilyful (the long orange slices are the buds, slit) and -garnished salad, all ingredients, bar shrimp, fresh from the garden and the CSA box.

Beautiful!

Thanks for playing Donna! You win a bottle of red currant jam, about to be bottled.

Wilklow Orchards' currants and cherries. And It.

There were yards of red currants when I got to the Wilklow stand today. At 3 punnets for $10 I bought $60 worth. About 9lbs of fruit. No, not cheap, but not expensive either, per punnet, considering how fresh and special they are, and comparing them with Wholefoods, delis and supermarkets.

I think I'll get about 16 -18 jars of jam, judging by how much I made last year. Tomorrow I will make jam. I feel a bit too popped today: got stuck into the terrace and did something drastic. Took out my standard rose. Sick. Chopped it up. Gone. Also moved tall cosmos off the edge of the roof and transplanted them. Too wind-resistant and not safe. So lots of heavy rearranging.

The nice Icelandic lady whose name I should have asked again, remembered that I had planned to take jam to my mother last year...I told her that the jar in my carry-on had been confiscated at JFK, but that the jar in the suitcase reached Cape Town safely.

Black currants! Currants are just so romantic to me. They make me think of Peter Rabbit and Sam Pig and all those wholesome English countryside animals. Peter Rabbit with mustard sauce, roast Sam Pig...shame.

I suddenly remembered that I had told Vince we would make the ill-named Bachelors' Jam. Don't think about it too hard. The French name is better: La Confiture de Vieux Garcon (thingy on the c, please). Layers of red fruit, sugar and cognac. Summer essence, I think. Though we will not use cognac. Maybe a vodka, maybe brandy. My mom and I made some long ago. It sat in a huge glass bowl with a cork stopper and lived in the walk-in safe, where it was dark and cool. You're supposed to let it sit for a few weeks. I think we left it some months. Every time we took the cork out and sniffed, strong chemical fumes would assault us. And it made noises. It hissed, and bubbled. We put the cork back in .

When the hissing and smell stopped we decanted it, straining it into smaller bottles and corking those. We kept them in the fridge, just in case.

It tasted delicious. Like Fortris. Like berries. Like summer. Like nothing alcoholic. It had a kick like a mule. It made my sister-in-law slide under the dining room table one night. It was christened It. Friends would come over and ask if we had any It in the house. It became famous.

Time to introduce It to Brooklyn. Next week. Next Saturday I will shop at the market with Vincent, who landed in Montreal just this last hour...we are in the same time zone now. How very, very strange. I have been a loner for a long time, these two years, and so has he. We will seal the deal with It. Maybe we can break It out at the threatened Communist Party. Ha.

My stash. I bought some black currants too, which are quite different, and sour cherries, for a small batch of black currant and sour cherry jam.

Tomorrow will be sticky.

David Lynch in LA

Image: David Lynch

If you're in LA, please go and see this for me: today is the last day. I just heard about it on NPR:

David Lynch and Danger Mouse collaboration. Dark Night of the Soul.

Listen to the album here.

And here, from the lips of Mr Lynch:

I see a world that is getting better and better, not worse and worse.

Apricots, and other things

Summer in the North East might be weird this year...the whole of June wet, this little bit of July low in humidity and temperature: perfect, in my opinion. But it's slow and difficult for local farmers...and I'm about to see where things stand at the Borough Hall Farmers' market.

These are Californian apricots, and were delicious. I ate almost all of them last night. I'm a fruit bat (and so is my cat, strangely: begs for white peaches, yellow peaches, over-ripe plums, kiwi and mango). For some reason, the long-distance fruit I have bought this year from the New Green Pea is better than ever before:

Often peaches and nectarines will have suffered from being air-chilled for transport to distant markets, and from having their ripening inhibited in their boxes or at harvest by ominous gas-emitting insulation or treatment, and do not ever ripen properly, developing a brown shadow and woolly texture around the pit. A brief investigation on the web will turn you wholesale organic: so if you don't want to know, don't Google it.

The yellow cling and white peaches, and flat peaches and yellow nectarines I have eaten this summer have all been impeccable: they became increasingly aromatic as they sat in their bowls in the kitchen, their skins have peeled off delicately, their flesh has been translucent, juicy and sweet. No woolliness. I must assume that, en masse, they are being treated differently, or not at all. Though I think the latter is a vain hope. It is curious.

I grew up on Paul Roux Street with fig trees, an apricot tree, two wonderful little plum trees, a youngberry bush and Mrs du Toit's mulberry, cherry guava and loquat trees next door. Storming Kotzer's grapes grew on an arbour over his driveway across the street. My brothers would steal them, he would storm out, hence the name. The only time I participated in a heist I was caught, as my brothers made off in their Go Cart. After that, and at Storming Kotzer's beseeching, I walked bravely to the front door and knocked, and was rewarded with a bunch by Mrs Kotzer.

Mrs Newton on Waverley Road had mulberries the size of fat caterpillars on her huge tree with branches as wide as paths for my small feet, and my mother would send me up the tree to pick them into a bowl while she fetched two dozen brown eggs from the bins in the glassed-in stoep on the side of the house. We would eat them for dessert after lunch, with cream.

So fruit is, for me, still the best way to end a meal. My father, after supper, takes out his pocket knife and chooses his fruit, usually first one that has a bruise, so that it is not wasted, and peels it delicately, and eats it noisily. When I peel a fruit with a sharp knife I see his hands in mine.

And now I'm off to market, wee wee wee: this year's jam must be made.

July of the year

This was July 5th, 2008. Red currants. They were not available last week at the farmers' market. It has been a slower year. Things are late. So tomorrow I will hunt again, because I must have that jam. If nothing else, a blog is a wonderful way of knowing what the hell you were doing in the mists of time. I cannot believe I pickled those onions a year ago. They have been eaten, of course. Next time less sugar, more bite.

Huh. I wonder where that string bag is. I miss it.

Below: these are last year's Dunyazades, from the same bulbs, naturally.

Here is the current crop:

(See the sugar drop top right???)

Lilies are especially good from all angles.

Good morning, Sunshine!

An irrepressible flower. An essentially cheerful flower. A simple flower, with no hang-ups...An optimist.

It's a wonder I let it in the house.

Roof garden moving along

Above: 136 Japanese ribbon grasss are waiting for us on the North Fork, to be planted under the water tank at the top of the ladder in the picture... We're coming to get them, I promise, Jim.

Due to hold-ups too complicated and delicate to go into here, we're waiting to finish this garden. Things must be signed. In the meantime, below, an electrician decided to drill into our planters to locate an outlet. WTF?

The divisions between planters will be sanded down and the ipe wood will be oiled to take on keep a darker hue. To be re-applied every year. Engineering considerations dictated that the planters be separate and removable, so the facade is not continuous. In front of the planters here will be lawn. We have 6" of depth.

Bob on the left (I didn't dress him, he dresses himself) talking to Mr Fred. In order to free me up for more design work Bob took over project managing, and it's been very helpful to have another set of eyes and ears on site every day, trouble-shooting and helping direct traffic. Built-in benches will go in a wrap around the covered skylight in the foreground.


I hope to to take a very different picture in a few week's time. With green stuff.

My friends. Don't work like this. This man is unharnessed over a sheer drop of many, many floors. He is buffing the guard rail.

The unprivate garden. I can still see that electrical outlet. Far left.

Below, this building has risen in the last few months, wasn't there before. Three new buildings have climbed up around this roof while the larger project was under construction. Our garden is the tail end.

Wonder if they need a roof garden?

Pan-roast potatoes

This is a good supper, where you feel like you're having the best bits for the whole meal.

Thinly sliced potatoes, layered with some pancetta and herbs. I used sage and thyme from the terrace. Season, and layer with some more potatoes, season some more and drizzle over olive oil. Add enough water to reach just to the top layer of potatoes. Pop into a hot-hot oven: 440'F/220'C.

After about 40 minutes, squeeze over some lemon juice and return to the oven. I like my potatoes crunchy top and bottom and the middle ones soft and creamy. These are the ones that absorb all the herby, lemony deliciousness. Have green salad with it.

A little rough, but very delicious. And cheap! This is recession food, too!

Olifantsbos footprints

My mom sent me some weekend footprint pictures from the early morning beach at Olifantsbos, that magical bay at the tip of the Cape Peninsula. Above, probably mongoose.

Above: Hm: no claws...mongooses have sticking-out claws. Could it be an African Wild Cat? I consulted my Signs of the Wild, by Clive Walker..and I'd say this IS the little cat!!!

Baboon, my favourite. Not. Early teenage memory of shivering in the waves of Buffels Bay while a huge male baboon stared at us from the breaker-line on the beach.

Sea meeus. Seagull feet.