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.) 

Birds, birds, birds

One of our escapes within the city is Breezy Point tip, a spit of sand that is part of a federal park, the National Gateway Recreation Area. We see very few people, mostly fishers, as well as boats and sea fleas (jet skis) and occasional yachts out in the channel, where the Atlantic Ocean flows in and out of Jamaica Bay. This tip faces west, and part of our horizon includes Coney Island, New York Harbor, and Staten Island, far across the water. 

Over these last two weekends of August we have spent a Sunday (the first pictures) and a Friday evening on the sand, sipping our drinks, picnicking quietly, and watching and photographing a collection of shorebirds foraging at the water's edge. It is migration season, and the birds are becoming more diverse. We find their lives riveting, and can watch for hours as willets (the long legs, long beaks) rush in and out along with the little sanderlings.

The calm water here makes for good feeding. Passing boats' wakes send more waves curling onto the sand.

It's good to see seagulls being proper sea birds, and not land vultures snapping up bits of pizza. Bad day for the crab.

Out on the water loons cruise. They should overwinter further north and I'm not sure why they stay. Perhaps there is enough food here.

There is a channel buoy not far offshore that clangs in the swell, a remote and lonely sound on the water.

A black bellied plover stands alone among the sanderlings.

And a ruddy turnstone inspects a slipper snail (I think).

Until this year we have never seen willets here before, but there seems to be a regular group of five at the moment. 

I don't know whom the tracks belong to. I hope rangers, but it's hard to say. I despise vehicles on beaches. Birds breed here and the dunes are fenced off. 

On Friday, seeking solace, we headed out to Breezy Point again. On the way, we passed a tree with not one, not two, but six osprey in it. So they migrate, too. At the beach, we found open skies and sun, a very low tide, and flocks of these plovers outnumbering the sanderlings.
 

This poor bird had only one leg, and he hopped strongly on it, fending for himself.

A visiting merganzer stretched and fluffed its feathers.

The willets were still there, and less skittish than before. 

And out in the channel the big loons still cruised, calling to one another when they reunited after hunting far apart. 

It is the end of summer. And of other things, too. Many things. But I am inexpressibly grateful that we both enjoy watching these other lives, and that we are able to see them right at the edge of the teeming human city.

Goldfinches to the rescue

A hot, dry walk yesterday in search of hummingbirds - we did see one - was rescued at the last minute by a small flock of goldfinches feeding on woodland sunflowers (Helianthus divaricatus) in a meadow atop Lookout Hill, in nearby Prospect Park.

The day before, a different and rather disappointing outing (so dry, so many crisp and dead plants) was also revived by goldfinches doing exactly the same on Governor's Island, their beaks busy with the seeds of spent echinacea flowers.

I hereby co-name the recent full moon (the Sturgeon Moon for Native American fishing tribes) as the Goldfinch Moon.

Food

Our local greenmarket is just a five minute walk away from where we live. On Sundays and Wednesdays trucks arrive early in the day from farms in New Jersey and New York, filled with vegetables and fruit and flowers ripe right now. The farmers or their vendors unpack and set everything up. These harvests were sown months earlier, tended, gathered, cleaned, packed, made beautiful for New York shoppers who've seen it all. At the end of the market day, back it goes, back they go. Long day, New York traffic. 

I don't know what the profit margin is or how real farmers survive. The produce is not cheap - it can't be. It's much more expensive than what you'd pay in a nearby store for similar (looking) and seasonless produce shipped hundreds or thousands of miles, and it's about double to triple what the equivalent quality would cost in markets in Europe. 

I think a lot about food. How it is grown. How to grow it. Who grows it. Who harvests it. Who eats it. How little so many people know about the food they eat. How it is eaten. Who gets to eat it. How much of it there is, in the world. How obscene it is that it is kept from people by other people, who have the power to prevent death by famine. 

This okra and these aubergines were very pretty.

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A nightly netting

 

Our evening suppers are now netted, which is normal for summer. Usually, it's for tiny flying insects (smaller than fruit flies, but what are they?) that are attracted to anything acidic, like salad dressing, or wine, into which they hurl themselves to perish. But these last few evenings we have been joined by a persistent, chunky hornet, who buzzes our dinner relentlessly. I don't really mind it, but the Frenchman feels about hornets the way I feel about spiders. Heebie jeebies. We both know that both are beneficial, yet neither of us can stand being near them. So, net. 

Supper was a tangle of tiny wax beans soused while warm in shoyu with finely ribboned shiso leaves from the terrace, and dropped onto crisp-skinned, curry-powder-dusted roasted chicken thighs. Before adding the steamed beans I deglazed the hot pan with elderflower vinegar and honeysuckle cordial (the methods for these delightful concoctions are in Forage, Harvest, Feast).

It's 99°F as I write, and the African basil continues to persecute me (see previous post). It's been watered twice, today. But the bees are happy. Very, very happy.

Summer's flowers

Summer flowers, wild and weedy, aromatic and opportunistic. Knapweed, Queen Anne's lace, white sweet clover and mugwort are feral fillers for this tangle of two bee balms and rudbeckia. 

Monarda punctata to the right, an underrated cut flower and edible herb. Plant more. 

And on the windowsill, some extras from the terrace: liatris and hyssop, and more obliging mugwort. Aside from being a very useful herb, this super-invader lasts exceptionally well in water. Just strip off the lower leaves and immerse it for 30 minutes to revive it after picking. Florists? Mugwort is everywhere, and it is free.

A vegetable love

When local greenmarkets spill over with produce it's hard not to be vegetarian. Corn is ritually peeled of its outer husks, the tender silk removed (it's very good to eat in a coconut milk soup), and then the inner husks folded back carefully over the kernels so that they are not burned by the fire that cooks them. 

We ate this corn with basil butter (heaps of basil whizzed in a food processor with as much or as little butter as you like), and an anchovy butter. So...not quite vegetarian. A quick cabbage slaw, and broccolini dressed with ramp leaf salt and a Palestinian olive oil made by Al'Ard. 

Late bees still buzzed the hyssop and African basil while we ate. 

Outside

 

Hot days, hot nights, heat advisories. Turning on the oven seems insane, so if we're not eating cool and cold food, we're cooking outside on the tiny terrace. 

The charcoal is always Red Oak's lump charcoal, never briquettes; the firelighters I use (I am the braai mistress!) are the little chunks made by If You Care. The lightweight charcoal lights fast and burns hot, so one doesn't need too much. 

Lillet, seltzer, rosemary, ice. A drink to sip while watching the chimneys swifts on insect patrol above us. Every night there are more and more fireflies, and every night they fly higher, coming right up to the terrace to blink as we eat.

Wax Bean Salad for Summer

The last week of June has resembled the first week of August. Daytime temperatures of 100 degrees. Watering the terrace two, and sometimes three, times a day. (How? A two-gallon watering can, carried from the kitchen - strangely I don't count the trips. But I do know that it take about two minutes to fill the can. I have to view the unavoidable task as a combination of patience and strength training.)

The weekend was better, and suppers returned outside after some evenings of respite in the cool of the air-conditioned indoors. Cooking indoors has been minimal, but the braai on the terrace has been in frequent use. Last night it was boneless short ribs marinated in shoyu with scallion greens - one rib for our supper, one to eat cold, tonight; with a wax bean salad and a farmers market salad of tomato, snap peas and purslane.

You know it's summer when the hyssop is tall and in bloom. It makes the bees very happy.

Wax Bean and Shoyu Salad with Perilla (or Shiso) Pickle

I use frilly shiso or perilla (also called sesame) leaves for this riff on the method for Korean kkaenip jangajji (sesame leaf pickle). They turn limp and soft but their rosewater flavor holds its own. 

Sesame Leaf Pickle:

15 young sesame leaves

1/4 cup shoyu (Ohsawa nama shoyu) or soy sauce

1/4 cup chopped scallion greens

1 teaspoon crushed garlic

1/2 teaspoon sugar 

1/4 teaspoon Korean chile flakes (gochugaru)

Beans:

8 oz wax beans

Toasted sesame oil

For the pickle: Layer the sesame leaves in a small bowl with the scallions. Add all the other ingredients. (Make sure the leaves are submerged.) Allow to marinate for an hour before using.

Cook the beans in boiling water (or steam)until bite-tender. Drain. 

Roll up and thinly slice 6 of your pickled sesame leaves (keep the rest in the fridge) and add them to the still-warm beans. Add two spoons of the marinade. Toss, and add a drizzle of toasted sesame oil and shower of chile flakes. Serve warm or at room temperature

No-Cook Food

 

Too hot. To trot.

So it's Caprese salads all the way, whee, whee, whee. 

We are so very, very lucky to have central air on days like these. That has not always been the case. The feel-like is allegedly 107°F. The crazy (cough, determined) Frenchman went for his five-mile run, regardless. 

I have some other insalata do Caprese ideas over here, at Gardenista.

Where are you? What is the temperature?

Tuna Mousse: Food for a Heatwave

It wobbles, it jiggles, it's straight out of the beginning of the middle of the last century. It's wonderful. It's tuna mousse. Wrong, somehow. But wonderful. And inhalable. I revive the recipe every year when heat threatens and I won't cook indoors. We are in for a possibly unprecedented week.

We  - the Frenchman and I - used to eat it on our rooftop in Cobble Hill, accompanied by Don Estorbo (de la Bodega Dominicana - a bodega cat before bodega cats were cool), with a wide view over New York Harbor. In those days we had a single, room airconditioner, whose roaring was no match for the baking heat. The rooftop was our evening escape.

Tuna...is overfished. Try and find pole-caught tuna: American Tuna, Wild Planet, or Whole Foods 365 brand are better choices. Walk past the Starkist. You are better than Starkist.

Tuna Mousse

The beauty of this decadent, 60's-suggestive mousse is that it goes with all the crunchy, healthy things: celery stalks, crisp cucumber spears, carrot sticks, endive leaves, snap peas (halved lengthwise), long breakfast radishes or round, stout ones, quartered.

Tuna Mixture:

2 cans tuna in olive oil, drained
1/4 cup mayonnaise
1 Tablespoon ketchup
4 cornichons (tiny cucumber pickles) 
1 Tablespoon capers
2 Tablespoons lemon or lime juice
Freshly ground black pepper

Wobble Mixture:

1/3 cup just-boiled water
1 packet (1 Tablespoon) gelatin

For the tuna mixture: Combine the ingredients and whizz in a food processor till smooth. No food processor? Chop the capers and cornichons finely, then mash everything with a fork in a mixing bowl bowl.

Wobble mixture: In a small bowl, combine the gelatin and the extremely hot water and stir until the gelatin has dissolved. 

Add the gelatin mixture to the tuna mixture and whizz/mash again.

Taste. Assess the salt, pepper and lemon juice situation. Adjust.

Transfer the tuna mousse mixture into a small bowl or mold. Chill for at least 2 hours. To unmold, slide a knife dipped in hot water around its edges, cover with the serving plate, and shake until it plops out.

It wobbles. See?

Of course, you can also eat it with a good baguette, or dark brown Scandi bread. Or crackers. Or a spoon. Or on your own, with no one else watching.

Here's a bonus picture of Storbie, aka Estorbo loco, aka The Don. 

Gone, never forgotten. Eeep.

A tea to soothe sleep

 

Standing on the terrace recently I snuffed the air and smelled an unmistakable and welcome scent. Lindens were in city-wide bloom. Some still are.

Feeling besieged by the sense that the world is about to break over our heads?

Sip some linden tea.

Are the trees still in bloom, yet to bloom, soon to bloom, near you?

In New York, lindens are planted very, very widely. Littleleaf, bigleaf, European species, native North American species. 

Their flowers dry easily, and rehydrate gracefully. Linden tea has been used for a long, long time, to calm nerves, and soothe the sleepless. I am a convert.

Find the recipe and some gathering tips in my linden tea story for Gardenista.

Green

It is all very green, where lately it had been brown. Lately is months ago. Lately was March and April, the tentative days of spring. But time compresses. Now, the terrace, the parks, the streets of the city, are very green. 

Raindrops sparkle on jewelweed's leaves. The jewelweed (Impatiens capensis) blooms in late summer, and in fall. It is there for the ruby-throated hummingbirds. It is there for us, to lure the hummingbirds, for us to see.

The jewelweed is self-sown, from seeds detonated last year by spring-loaded capsules. Just two plants share a pot - come their height, they will be extremely thirsty, and the pot might be replenished twice a day. Jewelweed likes damp places. At night, it folds its leaves. 

On the terrace its companion, in another pot, is Thalictrum pubescens, tall meadow rue, a perennial whose shallow roots also relish water. Its parent grows in the Catskills, its feet in deep moss watered by a stream that trickles perennially down a clean mountain.

The raccoons are afoot again in the evenings, on the roof above the Boston ivy.

We wonder where they come from, and where they go.

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Outside

The late summer terrace, under a faintly wildfire-sky. The little bergamot tree has three fattening fruit, and some more small ones to follow. In the windowboxes, the African basil has grown so lush that each box requires twice-daily watering. It is besieged by bees who work through the twilight, while the chimney swifts and giant dragonflies swoop overhead. 

Picnic like you mean it

It has been a picnic-y summer, so far. This one was at Rockefeller State Park Preserve, after a walk I led, hosted by the New York State Department of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation. Our focus was on invasive edible plants, in the ongoing and evolving conversation about how to control them. There is no simple answer. 

Two focaccias (focaccie), featuring apricots and mugwort, a pea and fava bean spread with field garlic, cream cheese drizzled with lilac-infused honey that I made in Maine, tartlets filled with serviceberries, and a very delicious strawberry cordial - my favorite thing this season. It can be made with any soft fruit and a herb; so far, I have used ground ivy (recipe here on Gardenista), mugwort, and bergamot/bee balm.

Muggy, wrap-around humidity has arrived. The only good thing about our tropical summers is...chanterelles. We're going a-hunting.

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Clouds of fleeceflower

On a hill at Green-Wood Cemetery is a monument dedicated to the 148,000 New York soldiers enlisted in the Revolutionary War. Often, when I walk here, I imagine what the ground under my feet looked like, and what the sounds may have been, then, because this is where battles were fought. 

But what drew me to the monument this day was the cloud of giant fleeceflowers in bloom at its base. They are closely related to highly invasive Japanese knotweed, but apparently behave much better. Persicaria polymorpha: statuesque, yet floofy. In peak bloom, now.

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New Summer Walks

The chanterelle stream in the woods

In the middle of the summer-humid woods in the Hudson Valley is a stream where we picnic after hunting for chanterelles. Above: August, 2018 - the first time we saw it, water tumbling. There are crayfish in the water, with blue pincers.

2021 - Baskets of chanterelles collected.

2022 - in a months-long drought. The crayfish were still there. Not a mushroom to be seen. 

2023 - a recent weekend, after some small chanterelles (and lots of other mushrooms) were sighted, and the day before historic flooding in the Hudson Valley. What does it look like, after?

As sticky and physically uncomfortable as these muggy hikes are, they are like a mesmerizing wonderland of interesting pale plants that coexist with the fungal world. The story, and a chanterelle rice recipe, are up on Gardenista.

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25 July - NYBG class: Summer Edible Plants

10 August - Queens County Farm: Wild Edibles Walk

Apocalypse forage

Some likened our apocalyptic skies this week, and the pervasive smell of smoke, to 9/11. But the smell of the Canadian wildfires was misleadingly wholesome and pleasant, like woodsmoke. Even through my N95 mask, from our Covid stash.

9/11 was a terrible smell. Like burned wires and bone. 

I went foraging, masked. 

The air grew progressively worse; it hadn't been too bad when I set out. So the world was sepia. A few days before 9/11 I dreamed that my mother and I were hiding in a bombed-out building in lower Manhattan. This was the light in the dream. In the dream three old WWII-type bombers flew low over us.

9/11 was a beautiful day, crystal clear and blue.

I collected good things in the smoke and have many projects, now, most to fuel future forage picnics. The cones will be blanched, then pickled or/and turned into jam.  The bayberry will be turned into a vivid green oil, to be frozen and scooped when needed. Also poached with summer fruits. The green peaches will be salted and fermented. their leaves will infuse white wine. The sweet clover will be dried for future biscuits, breads, and cakes.

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 Walks and Picnics