Light

An oil lamp in the bathroom at Wolfgat, in Paternoster. It is an evocative thing. Memories of camping trips. Of suppers by its light at home. And a quiet and beautiful symbol of resilience in a country experiencing multiple blackouts a day in a skillfully choreographed load-shedding dance.

_______________-

Give a Gift Walk

Botanizing at the southern tip

Summer. Cape Point. And a small shrub that I have never seen in fruit, before. 

En masse, the crimson berries were strikingly beautiful on the usually anonymous-looking plant - Passerina ericoides. One of its common names is Christmas berry. The fruit is very juicy, and inoffensively tannic. One of the plant's other common names is dronkbossie, which means drunk berry, in Afrikaans. The website Plantzafrica says that the "juicy pulp has a somewhat unpleasant taste, but appears to be harmless..." Well, I'm still here. Perhaps it was used in ferments?

Mighty Diaz Beach. It was one of the first places in Cape Town that I visited regularly as a young teenager, with my parents and some friends, each of us carrying part of a formidable picnic whose menu never varied. Waldorf salad (packed in its own small styrofoam cooler to stay cold), grilled chipolata sausages, smoked salmon sandwiches, and...were there or weren't there scones? I think there were, just-baked. There was sparkling wine, and there was orange juice, for Buck's Fizz (the Mimosa of the US). We sipped it - and yes, I was allowed to drink it - from glass flutes.  

The Frenchman loves this place. The legendary Cape of Good Hope that entranced him as a child. A thunderstorm brooded above us as we walked down recently, and the first crack of lightning sent us right back up those steps at top speed, with rain pelting us so hard that our bare skin stung. It's not supposed to thunder in the Cape. Or rain in summer. But rain seems welcome after the legendary drought of a few years ago (2015 - 2018).

In the old days, we scrambled to the beach down a gully. There was never anyone there. Just cormorants, and pounding surf. Not swimmable. Now, an elegant wooden boardwalk snakes around the top of the cliffs, and endless stairs - not a rail in sight - lower you to the sand. There is still no one there. It is awesome in the real sense of the word.

At another beach at Cape Point, dune celery. And it does taste a little like celery, or lovage. Dasispermum suffruticosum.

 I had not seen this plant in bloom before, either. Beach stinkweed. Poor thing. Oncosiphon sabulosus. In the big Asteraceae family. 

It poured, all the way home.

_____________

Booking for NYC Gift Walks is Open

The last leaves

The last of the autumn leaves, at Green-Wood Cemetery. Fall has stretched out very gently, in this little corner of Brooklyn.

_______________

Find me on Instagram @66squarefeet

Wood ears and winter

A wood ear's point-of-view, during a recent forage class in Prospect Park. The wood ears studied the humans, the humans studied the wood ears.

The texture of fresh wood ears (species of Auricularia mushrooms) is extraordinary. Silky, soft, alive. And to eat? A little like oysters, in terms of slitheriness, but with a snap. They are one of the oldest mushrooms in cultivation. Maybe you've had them in spring rolls, or in a glass noodle salad, or in hot-and-sour soup. 

Medicinally, they work like aspirin, as a blood thinner. 

And they like logs and injured trees, surrounding us even in cities.

Their characteristic, textural snap works beautifully in meatballs (although...possibly anything works well in meatballs?), and I also add whole mushrooms to the pan-sauce because they act as pliant sponges for flavor. The Frenchman adores them. So do I. Neither of us had eaten them fresh until a few years ago. 

And now, in late November, the simmering and the bubbling, the kitchen-sounds of early evening in winter (is it winter, if it's late November? I never know), the scents of slow food returning, include these cool-weather 'shrooms. 

Read more about the mushrooms in my story for Gardenista (and snag my very easy and delicious one-skillet chicken and wood ear dinner).

________________

Private Walk Bookings for 2023 are Open

Outside, now

This is Harris, our resident red-bellied woodpecker.

Harris is apparently the brand name for an ant poison. Their slogan is: Got ants? Get Harris. 

Woodpeckers love ants.

Also, apparently, the suet feeder that we put up in autumn.

Now you know everything.

_______________

Books are Good Holiday Gifts:

66 Square Feet - A Delicious Life

Forage, Harvest, Feast - A Wild-Inspired Cuisine

I am...

Thankful for FDNY firefighters.

For blue New York skies.

For Sun Sai Gai, the best roast-duck spot, that has made it through the pandemic.

For the Tropics, on Mulberry Street in November.

For the fruit of cacti.

For Fuyu on Canal Street, and the vendor carefully handing me her recommendations.

For fresh rambutan.

For fragrant Thai bananas.

 And for tiny Mosco Street.

For a city of immigrants.

________________

Inside and Out

At this end of our apartment, despite a welcome skylight, the afternoon light has become somber. The last roses have been picked, the first ripe yuzu have arrived (these are from Bhumi Growers in New Jersey, whose trees live in pots. They are protected from freezing by greenhouses in winter). And in the shadows is a bunch of mugwort, drying quietly for winter use ins soups, stews, sides...

Outside, the suet feeder has some regular guests. We've named the downy woodpecker Pique, because whenever they land they announce: PIQUE! There is also a much larger woodpecker, which I think is red-bellied. Even though its reddest part is its head... Possibly to be named Harris. (There is a very unfriendly hardware store nearby with a permanent sign outside: Got Ants? Get Harris! And yesterday we received some ant visitors, who had to be discouraged. But now...we got Harris.)

______________

Autumn Walks and Picnics