Men who love cats

The Frenchman and Pirelli sharing some boy-time before the human goes out for a walk. 

Let's hear it for the ...

...boys. Both beloved.

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Goodbye, July

The end of July. How did that happen?

On a warm night with very low humidity, we sank deep into indulgence with a cheese and saucisson supper. With hunks of crusty sourdough baguette, and an Aronia chutney I made last summer. 

The Frenchman had bought roses for me. And a sausage. A dried one, salami-style. To mark a day 15 years ago when I tripped over him on the Internet, in search of a photographic tutorial. Which he gave, using the example of a "backlit saucisson" to illustrate what he was explaining. 

So we sat and ate a very delicious, juniper-flavored saucisson in celebration. It's made in Vermont by Walnut Hill Farm, and we buy one as a treat occasionally from the Grand Army Plaza farmers' market. The round cheese is St. Nuage and is wonderful. Also Vermont. The triangle is a creamy St. Angel. Both triple-cream, each with its own personality. 

The only thing I made from scratch was the tomato salad, with slivers of red onion marinated in mulberry syrup and white wine vinegar, along with some mulberries from that syrup (foraged and preserved in June) and basil from the terrace. Straight from Olia Hercules' book, Mamushka. 

Now August is at the door, and she's impatient.

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Winter night, before the snow

Saturday supper. In cold weather we eat at the kitchen counter. So, all winter. And last night it was covered substantially in the loot we had gathered in a giddy half-day of shopping at the Union Square greenmarket and Eataly (downtown). Inbetween food-buying stops we walked up and down the Arctic length of the winter High Line. The sky was blue, the sun shone, and we felt like visitors in our own city.

My guiltiest pleasure was a potful of New Zealand cockles. I love them. Just some garlic, finely chopped in butter, an overly-generous dash (meaning about one-third of a cup) of dry vermouth, cooked till boiling, and then the shellfish, steamed until open. 

After those we moved on to a smoked trout pâté (made by whipping flaked trout with cream cheese and Meyer lemon juice), unapologetic, oil-cured anchovies, smoked oysters (part of our early pandemic stash), green Italian olives marinated for an hour with blood orange zest in good olive oil, nine-minute eggs topped with bottarga, cucumbers washed in tulip poplar honey (a summer find at the greenmarket) and white wine vinegar and...a couple of rich slices of wild smoked salmon, each. 

The radishes were crunched as palate cleansers.

There is the out-of-focus Frenchman with an in-focus potful of cockles. With last week's tulips, our much-delayed bottle of New Year's Eve Champagne, and hot sourdough toast under the red napkin.

It is snowing, now.

And January has come to an end. We thought it never would. 

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Find me on Instagram @66squarefeet

Gotcha!

[This is a repost from January 24th, 2007 - a very, very good day: 11 years later the Frenchman and I continue as we began, far apart, but very close in spirit.]

We had rather a good day on Thursday...

Ted's opinion? Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz...

Maggie in her finery.

                                            Taittinger was uncorked.

We posed in shifts. With only three guests invited, someone had to hold the camera.

My mom packed us a Champagne (more!) picnic and we set off to Clifton's 3rd Beach. While the wind raged in town, Clifton was serene and suspended in early evening light.


What was the picnic? Crayfish cocktail (in the Cape we call spiny lobster crayfish or kreef), chicken liver pâté, toasts, little pork sausages, dried mango for the Canadian, fresh cherries, and some pretty fine bubbly.

Sipping.

Sunset.

And the last glass of bubbly by candlelight...

Husband: you were worth the wait. You were worth everything.

[That has not changed.]

The good things

This is a new cocktail I shook up with a fermented elderberry syrup (sweet, sour, lightly alcoholic), rum and early summer's honeysuckle cordial. It's not as sweet as it sounds. And elderberries are very interesting.

Name suggestions?

The glass is resting on my friend Stephen Orr's really good and very beautiful book, The New American Herbal (no the drink did not sweat on the book). I love dipping into it when I take a break from my own plants.

The parts of the weekend you do not see are the meltdown, the hair pulling and the gnashing of teeth. I was a little overwhelmed by the work still to do on my book, and then a serious camera glitch pushed me right over the edge.

The Frenchman weathered it, somehow. He also quietly ensured that within 24 hours a brand new camera was not only bought but delivered to the front door (the 21st century is magical in this way). Then he did the laundry, put it away, made the bed, bought two nights of dinners and cleaned the kitchen.

Now that. Is a husband. I feel quite small.

After the meltdown I made black cherry ketchup, elderberry soup and wrote 6,000 words.

Then we ate Trader Joe's pizza, and watched possums.

Backlit Saucisson

Sorry, folks, this is a (not very) secret message. Regular programming will resume shortly.

(And sometimes a saucisson is just a saucisson. No bad puns, here)

The writing on the wall

The changeable giant wall ads beside the 3rd Street Bridge spanning the Gowanus Canal are painted by hand. We have often wondered, the Frenchman insisting theywere painted, but me swearing they were stuck on, in sheets (if I'd visited Colossal Media's website earlier that would have settled the argument).

We see them when we walk back and forth on our way to Whole Foods, where we shop every week or two (mostly for a limited palette of: affordable organic chicken, local greens and those New Jersey tulips - on sale today, three bunches in tight bud for $12).

The picture above was taken with my new phone, a very generous gift from the Frenchman who gives presents on his birthday. I am very happy with it - an Android again, the super-smart Samsung Galaxy S7. There is now minimal difference between it and its iPhone peers (which I always lusted after, but no longer), and now the Samsung's camera is arguably better - so it won the coin toss.

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Book a Spring Forage Walk

An arrival

The jet-lagged Frenchman, fresh from his long-haul flight, was met at No. 9 by pink bubbles, and pink ham.

And one of my mother's beautiful salads, with pink segments of Cara Cara orange from Babylonstoren, and nasturtiums and mint from the garden.

And by a pink-dressed corgi or two.

He brought summer with him. The temperature turned from spring to 30'C/86'F, and a warm wind is blowing.

Summer living

The bean screen is in full swing. New tendrils tilt skywards and every morning I twine them around their wires. The more leaves the fewer windows we see, when sitting outside at night. The purple runner beans have even begun to make tiny-tiny beans.

Suppers are outdoors most nights.

This evening we ate a wild summer herb: American burnweed (Erechtites hieraciifolius, see image below). It is virtually unknown, in the eating world. It grows tall in wasteland and woodland at this time of year.I stumbled across it in 2012 and have been playing with it in moderation every summer since.

It is pungent, the smell reminiscent of lime skin and of cilantro, and of neither. The older leaves are bitter. I like it with the strong flavours of soy, lime, garlic, lemongrass. It would also be good as a foil for sushi, the way shiso is used. This salad was made with terrace herbs: shiso, Thai and purple basil, nasturtium, cilantro - each assertive. The dressing was sesame oil and lime, with a little sugar and black soy sauce. And those are our own favas. One whole handful!

Pine Ridge Chenin blanc-Viognier. Dry but very fruity, perfect for bold food.

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                        Book a Botanical Summer Walk

Contact

We really were unplugged. No laptops, no signal.

The Frenchman and I are back in Cape Town after a few days away near the very, very southern tip of Africa.

There was a lot of sky, there were horizons (whose memory is to be hoarded for the dark and enclosed Harlem days to come). There were fragrant dune plants. There were blue cranes whose rough calls in flight gave us a new thing to remember. There was a wide blue tide whose rising and retreating left exposed and hidden a vast sand canvas where flamingos and terns, salty plants, small fish and hermit crabs made daily new watery pictures. There was the sound of surf, always.

It was good, it was not enough, it was more than many have, it was very beautiful.

Thank you Don, for the suggestion.

Re-establishment

When I looked at my photos from last night's supper on the Harlem terrace, I could tell at a glance that I did not take the one above. The Frenchman had picked up my camera (his old camera). So I give you his.

When friends came to share my wild dinner in the Cape Town winter of two weeks ago, they brought gifts. Rupert Koopman brought this barely-labeled red, and last night we attacked it. It was wonderful. Thank you Rupert. For a bottle that traveled far it fared very well. 

The red Bordeaux blend (Cabernet sauvignon, Cabernet franc, Shiraz, Merlot) accompanied our pretty much annual porterhouse, purchased yesterday not from old, dear Los Paisanos in Brooklyn, but from Harlem Shambles, who source locally-raised meat, and where two butchers seemed about as excited about it as I was. It was trimmed very lovingly, and given a little pat. I grilled it over well-ashed coals, on a bed of oregano flowers, with a galvanized metal (zinc, for non Americans) bath over it to insulate. The neighbors must think I'm gaga. 

...marjoram butter drizzled over at the end, and a side salad of terrace mint, chile, lime and pineapple (bought from a very sweet vendor on Frederick Douglass Boulevard at 116th, who also sells the nicest litchis I've seen out of Chinatown. I'll go back).

I gardened for several hours, in the afternoon, and the terrace is more tamed. I transplanted strawberries smothered by thyme and marjoram, relocated some full size Nicotiana (don't do this at home), cut off all the parsley and dill flowers (see vase above) and tossed the plants, fed the demanding beans and roses, cut the blueberries* back very hard - this is always terrifying - and left a bucketful of herbs at the font door for our upstairs neighbours.

*The blueberries in the freezer are calling me. I think the peach and blueberry cake is in our immediate future.

And now I'm off to Central Park on a reconnaissance mission - I'm leading a private walk for some Peninsula Hotel guests tomorrow and must see what is what.

My next public walk is August 16th, Dead Horse Bay (think sumac, black cherries and bayberry), then August 23rd, Central Park. See the link below for details.

* Summer Botanical Walk Schedule *

Burying elephants in cheese

What is one to do when a Frenchman hates to celebrate his birthday?

Easy!

Buy cheese.

So I zipped down to Zabar's on Broadway and went to town in the cheese department. Maybe I paid the dried sausage department a visit, too. On the way back, goodies stashed in a khaki backback, I stepped onto the wrong train. Of course. And found myself way west and uptown on the darned 1, at 145th Street, with a lot of other angry commuters. Karma for me, as I'd just given a tourist bad directions. Unwittingly. So we all rode downtown together, in order to go uptown again. 

This evening I hoofed it eleven short blocks south and three long blocks west  to The Winery on 116th to get a quick and cold bottle of Champagne, as a birthday treat. Bollinger special cuvée. And it was delicious. Good things birthdays only come once a year. Mostly. And when I got home I was given flowers. Because it was his birthday.

The cheese tasting was fun, the pate and especially the sausage pronounced excellent.

Some small tarts from Le Patisserie des Ambassades on Frederick Douglass Boulevard finished the meal and almost finished us - lemon, coconut and frangipane. Very good, washed down with the last slurp of Champagne.

I think we'll be eating  cheese for a while...

A cup of coffee

Breakfast at an early-morning water hole south of Satara in the Kruger (now part of the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Peace Park). No one else there. Just a sleepy male lion and a submerged hippo.

It may sound odd that some of my happiest memories with the Frenchman have involved driving. Odd because our New York life is almost entirely carless. But these have been the best times. There is nothing better than getting in a car and heading out, away.

A flask of coffee - our espresso pot having perked earlier while I was still sleeping. Milk warmed, sugar added. Rusks packed, or perhaps some potbrood, cooked in the previous night's coals. Getting into the 4 x 4, and seeing where the road will lead us.

And then just sitting there, and looking, and sipping and chewing our breakfast. Nowhere to be.

Day and night

There are poppies in bunches at Pick 'n Pay. Our Limpopo avocados have not ripened yet (R20 - $2 - for eight. In Brooklyn they are $1.50 each). In the greenbelt when I walked the dogs between rain showers this afternoon, a duck sat on the racing brown stream and was swept around a bend. A tree crashed in the pine woods across the way. The rain sweeps over the roof again. It is dark outside at 6pm. I watch Grand Hotel and marvel at how good Joan Crawford is, and how bad Greta Garbo.

Yet she got the best lines.

"The music has stopped."

I had to smile. I felt that way when the Frenchman left. How such a quiet man can leave such silence behind him.

He writes and says: The terrace and roof farm look great [no one has seen the farm for weeks, as neither Amy nor Dinah could manage the heavy hatch]. He says: Blueberries as big as cherries.

My worlds pull apart.

He will take pictures of pots and I will send instructions. Pull this. Leave that. I wonder if the Cape gooseberries survived. They were pinpricks when we left. The cat's grass must be sawgrass by now. How about tomatoes?

Outside, in the wet, frogs click in the reeds.

Back home

Back to green, introspective Cape Town, for a second, interrupting the story of our wide open dusty brown winter trip to the north.

This is the greenbelt on the other side of the garden fence at No. 9. That fence is now completely obscured beneath a tangled hedge of trees, shrubs and climbers, much populated by birdlife.  And on this, public side, these beautiful but exotic poplars crowd the small stream called - optimistically - the Diep River.

This is part of a wide green swathe of grass that runs down several kilometers to the Alphen Hotel (giving what we always called The Bog, the now-grand name of The Alphen Trail). It's really just a glorified dog walking area, filled with invisible heaps of dog merde, so I had to laugh when it featured quite prominently in The Times this year. I was sorry that the author of that article had not been led instead on an indigenous fynbos walk in the mountains just a little higher. This greenbelt is attractive, but stuffed with invasive or exotic plants - loquat, bugweed, morning glory, wild ginger, bamboo, pines and poplars - many of them destructive or obstructive to native plants and their wetland habitat. Sadly, it does not reflect the unique glory that is the Cape's incomparable floral kingdom.

The whole greenbelt underwent some extensive earthworks and native plant habitat restoration many years ago, but it was never maintained. Improvement projects like this, whether in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, or here in Cape Town, amount to nothing unless there is a budget for upkeep.

All of which is my way of saying that Vince is flying back to New York today, and I am very sad.

Chinatown

Photo: Vincent Mounier

Go to Chinatown. Go on, now. There's good food, there.

And the Frenchman's pictures are good. So very much better than mine...

Our tree

Late this afternoon I walked down to the basement laundry before going out to do the circuit of shopping for our supper and weekend breakfasts (Mr Kim's for squash and dill, the wine shop for wine and Stolichnaya, Key Food for milk and eggs). I needed to launder my gym clothes. That's another story. A membership at the nearby New York Health and Racquet Club*. The price tag alone guarantees my attendance.

[Ahem. That should have been New York Sports Club.]

As I passed the basement-level apartment of The Guy Who Has Loud Sex and Spanks his Partner (...I hear it, what can I say?), I smelled Christmas trees. Douglas fir, to be precise. I love this northern scent. Go figure, I thought, Porn Hound got himself a tree.

As I walked down the final flight of stairs the tree smell grew stronger and suddenly I saw not Porn Hound, but my husband, looking up at me guiltily.

I had caught him in the act of decorating a fragrant and apartment-sized Douglas fir.  He'd been hiding there, hoping to install it in my absence.  He was very remorseful at being caught with his tree pants down, but I was very happy. It had been a rare sleepless night, half awake with high winds and ice rain on the skylights, the neighbour's wind chimes hysterical on her terrace, and fretful scenarios in my head regarding books, life, death...and gym memberships. You know, one of those it's-spiraling-out-of-control-it will-never-be-OK  nights of the soul.

I've never had a tree. Ever. In the States, I mean. Usually I am in Cape Town for Christmas. Our six foot tree now presides over the cat's water and food bowls. It twinkles with lights and fragile red and gold and silver globes, and actual tinsel.

It made everything better. Brought to me by the man who dreads Christmas more than a hole in the head.

Rising above it all

Algerian Sahara. Photo: Vincent Mounier

Click the link for a stunning series of aerial images of the Sahara Desert from the Frenchman. Later, I'll post mine.

Our flight in daylight down Africa, from Amsterdam to Cape Town, was unforgettably beautiful. The level of detail and number of topographical mysteries visible in the ancient landscape kept our noses glued to the windows.

What is even more remarkable is that he later found the locations on Google Earth. A massive crater was identified, where a meteor had impacted this planet 100,000 years ago. A sci-fi earth works was revealed to be a uranium mine in Niger.

Mysterious parallel lines and the isolated settlements I photographed still await explanation.

Dislocation

 Manhattan from Pier One. Photo: Vincent Mounier 

Vince's office building is across the water, a giant nesting amongst the other Lower Manhattan giants, and it is still crippled by the flooding of its electrical innards by the salty storm surge of 14 days ago, that would have put the spot where he is standing to take this photo, quite underwater.

Consequently, his whole company has been relocated to temporary digs in Midtown, where their complicated system of telephone and computer interfaces cannot be replicated - the sophistication of before replaced by constant stress and furious activity. The people in charge of organizing the changes have aged, he says, by ten years. The website, the surface, works perfectly. 

No one calling or emailing realizes that nothing is as before. But beneath that surface everyone is scurrying like ants in response to a pungent stream of gas poured into their nest, keeping one ant eye on the small and curious child approaching with lit match.

See more Manhattan images at the Frenchman's blog.