Saturday supper

Before I left the house on Saturday afternoon, I asked the Frenchman whether he would mind laying the table for me. The good friends were coming to dinner and I would not have time. Yes, he said, he would.

When I got home from Brooklyn  a few hours later,  this is what I found: boat napkins!

I was thrilled.

My surprise source of pincushions has not yet dried up, outside a supermarket, all the way down Lenox Avenue, just above Central Park.

And my sumac vodka has not dried up, either - here it was shaken up with some brown sugar and cinnamon syrup.

Mimi had red currant gin with splash of cassis, we'll call it a Harlem Mule, and then we all ate a salad of Honey Crisp apple chunks with kimchi and pickled vegetables: carrot, celery, Japanese knotweed, and a dollop of labneh. Stolen from David Chang, and tweaked. A pork belly curry high with galangal and ginger, black soy, quick-pickled garlic and  fresh turmeric. Sticky rice, my first attempt, and nicely sticky. Let's just skip dessert. Smoke ensued...

I leave for Cape Town, tomorrow and within the matter of 24 hours my life will be transformed. Cold to warm, baring to blooming, small terrace to large garden, cat to dogs, concrete to mountain, noise to...silence. Owls in the night.

And a few more things, besides.

Say a prayer for the cat. I would like to see him when I get back.

Good squirrel, bad squirrel

The good squirrel ate some Thai basil flowers...

...and then fell asleep in the sun.

The bad squirrel...

...did what bad squirrels do.

The Environmentalist and the Politician.

The fleet

What, me? Eccentric?

You do what you have to do to get through the day. If Garbo could have little troll dolls under her sofa, I can have a fleet of yellow cabs on my kitchen island.

They were bought as gifts, but now I want to keep them.

We can have races. We already have cliff-jumping dares.

Red currant gin

Beautiful pink gin, destined for Kaia Wine Bar, in return for the crate of red currants gifted to me in the summer. The result is fruity, in a red way, but not sweet at all. I'll be making chutney with the very ginny fruit that is left behind.

Hawthorn in Harlem

I have never seen hawthorn planted as street trees, before (as medium-sized trees they are perfect targets for tall trucks, which clip them as they drive by).

They line Lenox Avenue and are heavy with fruit, right now.

The bean counter

I was surprised by the pinkness of the scarlet runner beans, popped from their green pods. I saved the pods when I pulled the vines down from the birch pole screen, because I'd like to grow some more, next year. With the purple pole beans and lablabs, they formed a perfectly leafy privacy curtain, during the months when we sat outside to eat dinner.  

They were also the last to bloom in the summer, I discovered, but they fulfilled their hummingbird promise. That Harlem hummer did stop to feed from them.

The small beans in the foreground came from the same pods, but I discarded those, and kept the giant ones for next year's crop (some will be gardeners' gifts, too).

I also shelled some lablabs, fresh (top left, green), as well as ones that had dried on the vines (small black ones with the dramatic white stripe); but most had not had time to to set good, fat seed yet.

The purple pole beans are the blah beige seeds, far right on a plate.

Funny, for a pretty, purple bean.

Plum gin

We broached the plum gin, and the Frenchman is in love (he dislikes my more herbal infusions). A chance purchase has revealed a really good combination: I noticed some over-ripe prunes being sold at our local one-stand farmers market (Lenox Avenue at West 117th Street, every Saturday) a few weeks ago. I bought a bunch, removed their stones, and dropped them into a jar of Gordon's. Three weeks later the result is startlingly good.