Fall Food

A vegetable love.

I intended making these fingerling potatoes from the Union Square Farmers' Market a supper on their own, with a side of cauliflower, gratinated. Once I had just-cooked the cauliflower though, and it was draining, it smelled so good that I started to eat it with nothing on or near it, straight from the colander, steaming. End of cauliflower (it was a very SMALL one).

Then the potatoes, cut in half, into the All Clad with lid, some lardons from a slab of Stinky's New York bacon, and some sage from the terrace, and left that lot alone, shaking the pan every now and then, for about half an hour till done. Very good with a poached egg on top, a glass of Shiraz and leaves from Trader Joe's (I've discovered my niche there: organic frisee, mache and wild arugula leaves - all very exciting; and organic butter and milk and half and half for the cat, which are several cents less than elsewhere. And that is all. Its linoleum expanse and politically jovial cashiers give me the jitters).



Below: alone and palely loitering? I love poached eggs. But something is missing. Pepper. For two straight days this house was pepperless. Panic stations. And I tried to pull a Jennifer Hess with this egg, but she has me beat when it comes to capturing the essence of a perfectly poached hen present.

Anemone "Honorine Joubert"

The late-opening anemone, living up to its name of windflower in today's gusts...Here it stood still for a second.

Baked apple

Apple, Jonah Gold: locked and loaded.

Apple: exploded.

The QE2 leaves New York

This evening, just after I had arrived home and was prepping some shortribs for dinner, I heard the deep groan of a ship's horn from the water. I love the sound. Like a train's whistle at night in the country. It means, somehow, that all is right in the world. That something still works. Don't know why. It is reassuring.

I hear the horns of ships often, because these waterways are part of a working system. But tonight I thought, What IF...??? - and grabbed my camera. I charged up through the trapdoor to the roof, and was held breathless for a moment by the site of two ships.

Yes! It was them. The Queen Mary 2 AND the QE2. Beside each other, in a froth of foaming water from a fireboat. The Queen Mary was just allowing the Queen Elizabeth 2 to pass her, and sounding her even deeper horn: No, please, you first...The larger acknowledging the smaller, which was also the greater.

I started to cry.

It is the last time the QE2 will be in these waters.

These are very bad pictures. It is the first time in my life that I have wanted a real camera with a real lense and a tripod. I love my little Canon but it wasn't up to it. If Vince had been here you would have seen some real pictures.

They were far away, the light was low.

And nothing in the pictures can capture what it felt like to stand alone on the roof in the wind, and look out at the water, where these two beautiful, engineered creatures were heading out to sea, down one of the most fabled rivers in history.

And knowing that the QE2 would never be back. That she is going to be a hotel in Dubai, sans seven story smokestack. It is her final voyage, and why that should make me sad is the old mystery of why we love what we do, and what we find beautiful...

The passengers on a couple of Staten Island ferries must have had the view of a lifetime.

Some years ago I met my parents somewhere on a pier on the Upper West Side after they had disembarked from the Queen Mary, on her second voyage, I think. She was like a mountain, at the dock. But I find the older ship's lines, now that I have seen her, more beautiful, more shiplike.

A fireboat was having an apoplectic fit, showering red white and blue jets in arching streams. It followed them as far as I could see, past Governor's Island, over which I could still see the smoke stack of the QE2 and the Queen Mary's upper decks.


There she goes. The fireboat still showering madly. I would have liked to have been on board.

No one else was out on the rooves, and I was sorry. It is one of those things, and feelings, I will never forget.

We got up late, and went after bathings and shavings to the Lounge, where we sat in soft chairs by the glass wall and looked out past people sunning themselves to the blue water. We drank champagne or sometimes beer, slowly, and talked and talked to each other because there was so much to say and so little time to say it.

...

And before dinner we drank more champagne, watching the sun set through the thick glass walls, and after dinner, which we sometimes ordered at noon to please our waiter who was convinced we were starving to death, we drank still more, or sometimes cognac. Then we went to bed again, and two or three times in the night we would start talking, and eat a few of the little sandwiches the worried waiter sent down to us, and drink some hot consomme or more brandy.

Even when New York loomed near us, we felt outward bound. I bit gently at my numb fingers. I seemed beautiful, witty, truly loved...the most fortunate of women, past sea change and with her hungers fed.

MFK Fisher: "Sea Change, 1937-1939", from The Gastronomical Me

Free Compost!

As much as you can handle.

It will be available this weekend at the Fresh Kills (hm hm hm) landfill on Staten Island.

Details here.

Fresh Kills Composting Site
310 West Service Rd.
Staten Island,
10314 (near exit 7 of Rt. 440)

The city is suspending its leaf litter pick ups, but this compost is the fruit of past endeavours...

This is one of the best free things New York has to offer.

Instead of paying anything between $8 - $17 a bag, depending on where and what it is, rent a little truck and go and fetch your own. Pool with friends. This is the last time it will be on offer.

$20 compost bins will also be available on site. For vegetable peelings and scraps, to make your own compost.

Compost is the best thing for your garden.

And let's lobby for more leaf litter pick ups. It kills me to see leaves going out with the trash. Mayor Mike, if you are really going to go all potentate on us, leaf litter pick ups, please? It would soften the blow.


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On fences and gardens

Click here for another NYTimes article in a series of good stories about individual human beings making other lives better, through gardening. I like it especially because it addresses the subject of fences. Good fences make good neighbours. That depends. Good fences in public spaces also separate and classify: on one side is Good, on the other, Bad. The good becomes self-righteous and exclusive. The bad demonized and self-fulfilling.

The garden that heals is a bit of cliche, and seeing the words all strung together, yet again, makes me wince a little...problem is, like many cliches, it's true.

Will Allen's refusal to put up fences around his city farm in Wisconsin illustrates what gardens without fences can do: equalize and include, and inspire.

Then again. Fences have, I grant you, an aesthetic appeal, perhaps because they can accentuate what is on either side. And some of them have that most inviting or intimidating of structures held within them: a gate.

Union Square Farmers' Market in October

Above - the season: Concord grapes, the last raspberries, apple cider.

Rainbow chiles. Beautiful things.

And then I saw these: quinces. I smell them as I write, from the bowl beside my computer.

They stopped me in my tracks. I went to the market to look for flowers for the front of our offices, but I came back with a bag of quinces. I paused a week ago at Pacific Gourmet on Court Street to sniff some quinces and they smelled, sacrilegiously, of nothing. I put them back. These, picked yesterday, smelled like lemons and apples and honey.

If you have a farmers' market near you find quinces and buy enough to fill a bowl. After a few weeks you can eat them, or right now for that matter, but put the bowl where their scent will be noticed, in the bedroom, or where you sit and read, or write.