(More) Roast Chicken for One

Half a $15 organic chicken, cut down the middle, the other half frozen for Later
2 potatoes, sliced
Your favourite herbs: terrace thyme, savoury and sage in my case
Half a lime's juice
Salt and pepper
Water

Heat oven to 450'F/220'C. Put potatoes in bottom of roasting dish or shallow pan (high sides prevent browning). Place chicken skin side up, over the little pile of herbs you have gathered. Squeeze lime juice over, season liberally, add about half a cup of water to pan, pop in oven. Look at it again in 50 minutes and add a little more water to help make the sticky, creamy sauce that is gathering. Take out about 5 minutes later, carve, eat the crispiest skin ever. You can deglaze the pan once the potatoes are out, with some water, or white wine. Stir up the brown bits.

Have some salad, too.

Summer root vegetables

They don't all belong to winter, you know.

On my way to the copiers, as I was trotting through the wet Union Square Farmers' Market today (the newly-laid paving stones do not.drain.properly), unwittingly flipping black puddle-water spots onto the back of linen pants as I went, grrr, I was stopped in my sodden tracks by these gorgeous radishes, baby turnips and young fennel.

Lust. Pure lust. I wanted them. And I wanted bagna cauda. Four or five sorts of raw vegetable chopped or sliced, dipped into a warm bath of: olive oil, lots of soft, sweet garlic, melted anchovies, and spritz of lemon, perhaps. Bread to sop the last, fond-rich sediment up.

Gin and tonic

...is summer. The antidote to humidity.

Ernest Hemingway taught me to drink pink gin. Islands in the Stream, yearsandyearsandyears ago. He puts a few drops of bitters into the ice-sweating glass on board his boat in the blue Gulf off of Cuba. (I hope that last phrase proves me American.)

So I did, too, then. And now, a terrace can be like a boat. I put some mint in, too.

These G&T pictures are shamelessly inspired by a beautiful post by jvdh...

I wonder if I can read Hemingway again. I was so besotted with him so long ago. At least a Moveable Feast (oysters, wine, Paris). Or The Garden of Eden (boiled eggs for breakfast, and how to order and eat them, the beach). For Whom the Bell Tolls (raw onion in pocket, peeled, sliced into sandwich under pine trees).

The man was the food writer before food writers.

Black raspberries

I remember vividly the first time I saw black raspberries.

It was at a farmers' market in Santa Fe, under a massively purple-green cumulo nimbus-rich thunderstorm in formation. The light was saturated and the air electric with the smell of ozone. My mother and I were oohing over courgette flowers when I saw the little berries, which I mistook for mulberries. The man at the table, selling only the raspberries, was angry, and speechless beyond the basics: these were his last black raspberries. His entire crop, his summer income, had been destroyed by hailstones from these clouds, so beautiful to observers whose livelihood did not depend on their weather.

I discovered to my surprise, that this jam was made last June. Which means I need to hightail it to the market soon - and I can't today - to look for them. Because the jam is eaten, gone. The berries here came from the Borough Hall farmers' market, open Thursdays and Saturdays.

I also know that it needs an addition to the black raspberries, which, while yummy, are less juicy than their red brothers and sisters. This jam, made last year, had a very good flavour but its texure needed more wobble. It was rather stiff. Perfect, would be black currants.

So that will be this weekend's mission.

Torn up sky

The storms of the weekend, unrealized, seemed to gather last night around 6 to deliver the rain that prompted all the exciting flood warnings of days ago.

Clouds gathered, darkened, broke part, massed again. They made for good light but nothing happened.

On the terrace I was surprised to find plants wilting and actually asking for water. I am my only irrigation system. Pots do not benefit from groundwater, so even cloudy days are work days or the Waterers.

Sunset was a broad charcoal smudge over Jersey, but Turner-pink to the east, which my terrace faces.

Sometime deep into the small hours, it rained at last. Heavy footsteps on the roof early this morning makes me think that perhaps the gutter flooded again and was being Monitored.

Eat your daylilies!

Nevermind Doris Day.

Please! Let me dine vicariously on your daylily patch (...um. That sounds...). But I don't have the space for them on my terrace. And some people take them for granted and some think them a pest.

But! The roots are delicious. They are tubers, long and fat, and very crisp when snapped. Raw, they taste like sunchokes (Jerusalem artichokes). Dig up a clump, shake off the soil, wash, and slice. You can cook them, too, obviously. And: the buds. Very nice raw in salad, sliced longways, perhaps. A gentle vinaigrette. Or steamed! The flowers...when they have faded. Are considered a delicious vegetable, sauteed...

I beseech you: eat some dayliles. Take pictures. Send.

8.33pm

A clinking noise draws to me to the terrace just now. It comes from the top floor of the house across the street where, through the open window of their lamplit living room, I can see the neighbourman scraping the bottom of his pudding bowl.