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.

 

Here we go again

Evenings are edging permanently outdoors again and are loud with surround-sound robins. Our new mockingbirds (what happened to the old ones?) have learned to fetch their blueberries from a small dish while we have drinks outside but before the table is ready for supper. They outrage the cat, who tells us they would be lovely on toast. The birds, not the berries.

Perennials are reappearing in pots, with asters, agastache and calamintha returning as if Arctic temperatures and feet of snow never happened. Ferns have unfurled. Ramps are leafy beneath them, with foam flower and an unidentified, tiny blue violet. Meadow rue's stems are growing tall.

The wraparound laundry roof is still there, for now, but changes are already afoot. The development of a very large building has been approved, so our remaining days here are almost tangibly numbered. 

But, for now, it is spring.