Al fresco

Outdoors. Why does it all taste better under an open sky?

Open sky. Not as open as it once was. But we can pretend. The chimney swifts hunting their in-flight dinners above us convince us everything might be as it should be.

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Swamp milkweed for monarchs

As I arrived home yesterday after a photography expedition (mission: liatris), I saw a butterfly's erratic flight above the tiny patch of garden I cultivate at sidewalk level. Its distinctive flight pattern, like a kite whose freedom is restrained by a string tugged at intervals, quickly identified it as a monarch. It had found the milkweed. I waited in the sun. Humidity 72%. She returned.

Swamp milkweed - Asclepias incarnata - forgives you if you do not plant it in a swamp, and it is ideal for narrow spaces. The monarchs love it. She came back again and again to deposit an egg at a time on the milkweed's leaves. 

This is the first year since 2020 that I did not also plant balloon flower (aka hairy balls, cough), the tall southern African milkweed Gomphocarpus physocarpus, thinking that it, like the annual tropical milkweeds, might do monarchs more harm than good. It's a tough decision because that plant is spectacular visually in tight quarters, and makes passersby very happy.

My monarch sign is now quite obscured by liatris, agastache, snakeroot and the swamp milkweed.

Apart from drought (we water by hand carrying the watering can down two flights), the biggest threat here is dog urine. Bafflingly, many dog walkers let their dogs lift a leg on this tiny garden, despite the sign asking them not to. The repeat applications of dog pee burn the plants' leaves and makes life challenging. It makes me very depressed.

 It's a scrappy garden, but apparently it works.

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Gardenista column: All about slender mountain mint

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.

 

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.

Cherry blossom, indoors and out

Kanzan cherry blossoms, bought in bud from the corner store (Mr. Kiwi, a bustling hub that never closes), and now open at last. Beyond these walls and windows, the city is dripping with them, their petals chilly today after a very strange week that soared into the nineties before thundering on Friday into a storm and dropping to today's high of just below 50 degrees. 

Corner stores. Whenever we think about living somewhere else, we think of the things we don't think about. Like walking around the corner to buy milk at 9pm. Or our favorite bar soap or organic eggs. How is it to get into a car every time you need something? I mean, we have a car, and she is the only thing of value that we own, but she is reserved for Adventure. (Yes, she is a she.)

I posted some of our local ornamental cherry blossoms to Gardenista, photographed over two days. 

She who feeds the pigeons

Spring is arriving, and here I am, clearing my camera's memory stick and filing photos that began in February. 

As I walked out of Prospect Park one dark afternoon, I noticed, in the failing winter light, a flurry of pigeon activity at Grand Army Plaza. They flocked around a woman in blue, who was feeding them. She looked down tenderly at the birds when they perched on her coated arm.

Her electric Citibike rental was provisioned with various containers of seeds, and when one was was empty she'd return to her bag in its basket for more supplies. Soon, all the seed was eaten up.

I don't like to skulk around, stealing pictures of people, so before I left I walked up gently and said, They love you! She smiled shyly, hopped back on the bike, and sped away, zipping south on Prospect Park West.

Ramps bring spring

In leaf-littered deciduous woodlands, and on warm slopes, the ramps are rising. Allium tricoccum, harbinger of a native spring. Often the only green thing on the brown forest floor. 

While they can grow wall-to-wall where they are prolific, commercial over-harvesting of wild populations has threatened ramps in some locations. In the wild, I collect a small handful of bulbs, and focus instead on the leaves, a practise I began...Hm. Maybe six years ago?

And I grow them, too, in pots, where they are remarkably resilient, weathering and surviving the brutal freeze-thaw that turns many bulbs to mush.

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The tiniest garden of all

There is a block of earth in front of our building. I must measure it. I'm guessing about two feet by three feet? So that's six square feet. Neat. Its southern border is the concrete sidewalk. Some dog owners tend to let their pets linger here as they pass, where their stream of pee hits the plants on the frontline. Their leaves burn. Salt residue in winter, especially the icy one just behind us.

I began planting it years ago. It's the first thing that greets us when we come home,  between the townhouse steps and the omnipresent trash, recycling, and compost bins. You need to feel good, arriving at your doorstep.

A tiny agastache from the Gowanus Lowlands Nursery now towers by late summer and is a constant theatre of bees, mostly native. A self-sown white snakeroot (native Ageratina altissima) resembles a shrub, and does its species name proud. I have to cut it back hard to keep the steps to the basement accessible to delivery people who leave parcels there if no one answers the intercoms. It blooms in autumn, for white weeks. The agastache blooms continuously from mid summer to frost.

Sometimes there is fennel, sometimes balloon plant, that southern African milkweed. Tall and skinny, both. There should be native Asclepias verticillata, too, but it hates the dog pee the most.

But this year - last year - I planted bulbs, too. Alliums, liatris, and, in existential panic, tulips. I only plant tulips during Trump presidencies, apparently. The alliums and tulips are up, and I have now removed their sheltering fir branches, remnants of our Christmas tree. 

And I plan to squeeze in more. There is about six inches of soil depth nearest the sidewalk (the pee zone). Less towards the rear. Maybe an African basil, because it blooms constantly and bees adore it. 

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Find my Books

Begone Winter, Welcome Spring!

 It is spring. And here is a gift of quiet hellebores.

And pickled eggs, with a wintercress (Cardamine hirsuta) nest. They are destined for a picnic tomorrow in Prospect Park, and my first plant walk of the year, in the pale sunshine, with the singing of the hundreds of congregating American robins.

Here is our Begone, Winter Menu:

To Eat:

Beet-pickled deviled eggs with field garlic and garlic mustard root

Le grand field garlic aioli - baby carrots, pink chard stems, watermelon radish, Chinese broccoli stems, snap peas and field garlic mayonnaise for dipping

Endive and avocado bites with field garlic

Carrot-spicebush puff pastry vol-au-vents

Cattail pollen garlic biscuits with field garlic butter, juniper ham, and apple-spicebush compôte (from the fizz, below)

Spicebush chocolate truffles

To Drink:

Spicebush apple wild-fermented fizz (no ABV) with forsythia and spicebush ice

Fortified with an optional Calvados shot

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Forage Walks and Picnics

It has begun

Just yesterday I said that our native spring is weeks away. What was I thinking? Today I saw this beautiful silver maple (Acer saccharinum) in bloom. And red maples have just begun, and I'd forgotten about an American elm tree I passed late in the afternoon, it's tenderly thready tassels shimmying in a cold breeze.

So, you see, it is here.

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Spring Walks and Picnics

Inside

On the Monday after the late February blizzard (which was Sunday the 22nd into Monday the 23rd), we walked in the woods of Prospect Park, where all the shrubs, and many trees, were bent into taught bows by the heavy, beautiful, relentless snow. Big trees were down. 

I beat slender spicebush branches free, watching them snap upright. And I noted broken branches, all around. The next day I went back, armed with sharp Felco pruners, and wading through more snow to clip the broken arms of forsythia while life was still in them. That was over two weeks ago. Now the budded branches are in bloom.

Also, weeks ahead of planted daffodils (some now in bud), corner-store flowers - at $5/bunch - add bright courage to our lives.

 Supper for a friend last night meant spring flowers on every surface.

Real, native spring, is weeks away. 

The embroidered napkins - made by a friend - seemed appropriate.

Some of supper was also yellow: a lamb shoulder, slow-cooked with saffron and cardamom and bay leaves form our tree, with turmeric rice and raisins, and an avgolemono sauce. A vegetable adobo on the side. An arugula salad singing with ginger. And baked apples for dessert.

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Spring Walks are Here

Sniff this

 The acquisition of windowsill happiness. 

Daffodils were being sold in bucketsful on 7th Avenue at Carroll Street, a 30-minute neighborhood walk north from where we live. So I bought a fat sheaf, all in tight bud, as Sunday's arriving blizzard picked up strength. They were really meant for a friends birthday, but we we couldn't get there. Non-emergency traffic was banned, and the subway was scrambled. 

So they have been opening, slowly, and are now in peak yellowness. They smell like childhood. 

Winter beach

On a winter whim we drove out to Breezy Point. A summer evening haunt. Quiet water, lots of shorebirds, a wide sky. Stars, as we walk back in the dark. Manhattan to the north, rising above the blocky mass of Sheepshead Bay.

The tide was coming in.

The sun sets much south of west, at this time of year. 

We wore down coats and I packed a hot toddy.

There were big-nosed surf scoters on the calm water. And my favorite loons, hunting in a pack of four.  A pair of nervous grebes. And many, many dead birds at the high water mark. We have never seen this. Probably avian flu. I could only identify a Canada goose and a brant, and a diving duck, maybe a scaup.

Snow on the dunes, where we sat and sipped and watched the watery world go by.

Bluebirds

As we were leaving the Great Swamp National Wildlife Refuge in New Jersey yesterday after a snowy picnic, and a distant owl sighting, and the company of a crowd of very noisy bird photographers (interested only in dramatic owl pictures but not in the other birds around them, apparently), we noticed a small flock of bluebirds beside the road. 

No one else was about, and they were hunting. So we waited, and watched.

Stuff, not much, but enough

Stuff, on a bitterly cold day. It's around minus 10 Celsius. That's the high. The central heating puffs on every hour or so, keeping up. 

Table and chairs: Sold to me as Heywood Wakefield by a couple in Alexandria, Virginia. The table turned out to be a good replica, and the chairs are real. 

Vase on table. Been with me since then, too. Junk shop in Adams Morgan, D.C. 

Jug in window: Wedgwood, a sidewalk find in Windsor Terrace, last year.

Pillows. They come and go. More keep coming.  Skinny la Minx covers. The Turkish embroidered ones are gifts from Bevan and Mustafa in Istanbul. I often pack them in layers beneath me when I work on the daybed. They squoosh down and re-fluff beautifully.

Throws and cover on daybed, both by Mungo in South Africa. Cotton, solid, and indestructible.

Schoolchair beside door, acquired in Harlem. Basket on it from a gift shop on 5th Avenue in Park Slope.

Spring flowers from corner stores nearby.

Roasted pears

I like fruit as dessert, and winter is the best time to roast apples and pears. They fill the house with positive smells. Even better ones, when you add fir sugar and citrus to their cavities.

 The whys and hows are in my story for Gardenista:

Winter Comfort: Roasted Pears with Fir Sugar

Wilderness Search and Rescue SOS Fundraiser

Photo: Donovan O'Neill

In South Africa's beautiful Western Cape Province, home to Cape Town, Table Mountain, hundreds of miles of shoreline and many, many other mountains, Wilderness Search and Rescue will come and get you if you call them. It's your first phone call if something happens to you. 

In their words, WSAR is "a collective effort co-ordinated by the Emergency Medical Services (EMS) in the Western Cape that co-ordinates, manages and executes the search for, the medical treatment of and the rescue (or the recovery of mortal remains), of persons and/or patients whose health and/or safety is threatened or compromised in a Wilderness Environment (Mountains, Shorelines, Rivers, Kloofs, Non-mountainous wilderness areas, Caves, Deserts, Forests)."

That Wilderness Search and Rescue phone number is 021 937 0300

If you are using a foreign SIM it is  +27 21 937 0300

In South Africa, there is no charge for rescue services. Read that again, Americans.

Photo: Adam Griffin

It's summer in Cape Town and WSAR is very, very busy. This is their Instagram account if you'd like to see what they do: 

@wsarwesterncape

Screengrab from video by Chris Jacobs

It doesn't matter who you are or how it happens. Maybe you are visiting from Holland and you twist your ankle on an easy and popular tourist hike, are a local who has a heart attack walking a well known route, or a panic attack on a ledge, or get lost in the mist, or stranded because the cable car shut down due to high winds and you didn't realize that Table Mountains is actually a very big mountain, or very cold because the weather changed suddenly, or your squirrel suit adventure goes tragically wrong, or you become dehydrated, or you crash your paraglider. 

Or maybe you just slip and fall. 

This happened to my friend Don Kirkwood last August when he was on a hike with colleagues to visit a precipitous population of endangered plants. He didn't make it. Wilderness Search and Rescue worked tirelessly in very difficult terrain to locate his him, reach him, assess his condition, inform his wife Rosie, and to get him out, by helicopter.

Last year I made a donation in Don's memory after Rosie, Don's wife and my friend, highlighted their work. I will do that every year on August 26th, the day he fell. 

                               Screengrab from video by Grant Duncan Smith

Right now, WSAR is raising funds for headsets and radios for their chopper pilots. Get this: until recently they have communicated with ground personnel in rescue situations via HAND SIGNALS. 

A modest donation in dollars or Euros or Pounds Sterling will translate well to South African Rands (known as ZAR). And of course if you're in SA, you're donating to a superb local resource.

Your donation will make a tangible difference. 

Here is the link to donate to their SOS for Life Saving Equipment

Resources:

Wilderness Search and Rescue

Be Prepared

Suppertime

Warm baguette, wrapped in a napkin. A hot dish of bubbling olive oil, with garlic and melted anchovies. A bowl of raw vegetables for dipping. Bagna cauda, a favorite. 

And a cat, watching it all.