Summer, bottled

Red? Scarlet? Rose? Pink? 

Today, in the luxury of 78°F air-conditioning (Central Park recorded 100°F, JFK 102, La Guardia 104), I strained and bottled two different batches of common milkweed flower vinegar. It is hard to describe, but it helps if you have smelled the heavy, lilac umbels of Asclepias syriaca. Wildly fruity-flowery and bracingly acidic on the edges of the tongue. Also a honeysuckle, multiflora rose, and elderflower vinegar, where the soft fragrance of the honeysuckle still lingers. I gathered the flowers in early June.

The vinegars began in large jars, the flowers mixed with sugar and tap water, stirred and allowed to fizz (these methods are in Forage, Harvest, Feast). At this point they are what I call cordials - sweetly concentrated, and naturally effervescent thanks to the wild yeasts at work. I serve them on picnics, diluted with tonic or chilled seltzer. Or booze, more rarely.

But because I sip and cook with vinegar more often than I drink sweet things, I decided to let them all ferment (much) longer, until acetic acid bacteria had produced the sourness that tells you vinegar has arrived. 

They are nothing like a commercial white wine vinegar, for example. There is acid, yes (their pH hovers around 4 - commercial vinegar may be 2 or 3), but also many layers of fragrance and sweetness and a sense of very ripe fruit. They are quintessential sipping vinegars, more like shrubs, made for quaffing on heat-blasted days like today: a tall glass, filled one quarter with the wild vinegar, ice cubes, and then water. Swirl. Quaff.

To the right (in the image above) is the black currant gin that has been steeping since last Saturday, when I pounced on the first - and not cheap - black currants at the Grand Army Plaza greenmarket. I'm going to use the leftover fruit, still packed with that musky, tart flavor, to make my favorite jam. 

There they are, from the other side. True color. Left to right: black currant gin x 3, the common milkweed vinegars x 6, and the honeysuckle-rose-elderflower. Times four.

Don Kirkwood gave me the bottle with my name etched on its side. I joked that one day his bottles and upcycled lab jars (more etching) would tell me who I was, one day. Maybe they will. I don't know where he found the time to do this. He was a kind, kind man. 

So there it is. Summer, its flowers gathered, their scents and flavors captured, and the sticky, intense heat reminding me of the time we lost Don, in his springtime in the mountains outside Cape Town, hunting for a flower that likes cliffs. Almost a year ago. 

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Forage, Harvest, Feast

Forage kitchen and the politics of information

Picnic prep in the forage kitchen. Two focaccias (focaccie, I suppose) - mugwort and serviceberry - cooling. Tartlet cases flavored with yellow sweet clover (Melilotus officinalis) just out of the oven, also cooling in their pan because they are shatteringly brittle while hot. 

The leaves on the foreground are bayberry, Morella pensylvanica. 

Pickled eggs. The brine is magnolia vinegar softened with some water (too much vinegar and the eggs become very hard) and tinted with some slivers of beetroot. I was tempted to leave them at this pretty, sliced-open stage, but the yolks are destined for deviling. Maybe next time.

Keeping up a blog in the age of AI makes little sense. Bots scrape these posts daily, gleaning, gathering, learning, and then offering it all back to you. In the past I only had to think about unscrupulous content creators appropriating and publishing my images or writing without credit or permission. You know, old school copyright violations. 

AI bots make that kind of theft seem laughably ineffective.

Blogger is a very old blogging platform (this blog is one year shy of its 20th anniversary) and does not have built-in anti-bot measures. You know how, when you open many websites now, you often first see a page that says something to the effect of Security Verification, possibly with a box you need to check? That's an attempt at preventing the scraping. 

Guaranteed original content might become a commodity, like gold. 

Change must come. I mean, for this blog, if I am to keep it. I have been self conscious about its vintage looks and interface for long time, anyhow. Tick, tick.

Boom.

Gathered flowers

This is June. Flowers and shadows. The longest days.

Linden flowers for drying, for later teas and toddies. Earlier in the month I included them in a fermented serviceberry/juneberry (Amelanchier) syrup. 

Daylilies, their bright petals added to salads. Soon, I'll pick the day-old limp ones to dry to add to soups, stews, sautés, and dirty rice dishes. 

And common milkweed in the back, now fermenting, too, in a simple solution of Brooklyn tap water and sugar, tinted deep rose-purple.

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Forage, Harvest, Feast - A Wild-Inspired Cuisine

The name of the rose

 ...is Bolero, reclaiming that word's place in my good graces. Ravel's Boléro, on the other hand, was played to syrupy death for me when it was a favorite song of seduction by men who should have known better, long ago.  

This rose, it could be argued, is syrupy, too. Its scent is powerful. Open a bottle of rose water and that is exactly what you smell when you push you nose into its sumptuously cupped, quartered petals. 

The flowers opened two days ago, just before mid-June's blue sky, dry air perfection was smothered by claustrophobic humidity and bleached heat. So I picked them, kept them for a day on the shadowy windowsill and for a night beside the bed, for pleasure. 

Today I pulled off their petals and stamped them fine with sugar in a Japanese mortar. They are now in a jar, where they will become syrupy and as flavorful as they are fragrant. (I add a quarter cup to a favorite vegan cake that I bake for some of my walks.) 

Ascent

 "What are you doing up there!?"

(Then wonders whether he can grab the tuna mousse before I climb down.)

My story about how the terrace garden woke up this year is on Gardenista.

Downeast

Breakfasts, these days. Or, this week. Above the rising and falling tides of coastal Maine, way up there and over to the east, and not at the cottage that hosted us almost every year since the pandemic roared into our lives in 2020. This time we needed a bigger place so that the Frenchman's mom and sister could join us—Maman-Germaine turned 89 earlier this month and this is a belated celebration. They headed south from Canada, we pointed north from New York City.

Many mornings have begun with the croissants that are baked at Tinder Hearth by people who really, really know what they are doing.

The house is large, old, beautiful, intriguing, has floors that tilt and bedroom windows that shake and rattle in the wind; complicated, interior bug screens that close via a series of hooks, door handles that do not close doors until the seventh, noisy attempt, and a superb layout, sensibility and natural light on the ground floor. This wonderful table. A big blue, enamelled cast iron pot for almost every meal.

There is beautiful glassware, there are many candles with and without shades, and a vast hearth for evening fires. The weather has roared with rain, hooted with fog horns, shone down on us with a summertime blue, and given us time to explore and to be still. 

The favorite activity is beach combing, and my mother-in-law inspires me every day with her capacity for curiosity and her spirit of independent adventure. Also her flexibility. That's 89 in the Versailles family. 

Postscript:

The view is not bad, either. 

Flowers in the house

May means peonies in buckets at bodegas and corner stores, and I dive right in. I don't drink fancy coffee to go (my Caffe Najjar in the morning is unimprovable), we seldom eat out (the food's quite good at home, too!), but we do buy peonies. 

They are luscious, voluptuous, sumptuous. (...ous, ous, ous, -sh -sh -sh, like the swishing of rich satins skirts.)

I choose them in tight bud. Watching them open their cupped and frilled petals over days before they become blowsy and loose—every step is a pleasure. 

                                  Their dropped petals might be even better.

And there will be more.