Hot cross buns

Are cooling off, next door at 66 Square Feet (the Food). My first bun-making attempt, and, surprisingly, very much worth it. They even come a teeny bit close to my beloved Woolworths raisin buns.

Walking in springtime

My new laptop had to be returned to Dell ( I know, I know) because its custom cover - my sop to my pride, having wanted a you-know-what-and-not-being-able-to-afford-it, had a CHIP on its shoulder, a really bright orange cover and a small white chip.  An hour's phonecall to India later and India sent me a box from Texas in which to put my brand new Dell. Which we dropped off at the UPS store. Except the label that India told Texas to send to me to put on the box turned out to be...FedEx. So we carried the box home again. And saw the trees above and below, on the way,

Because! Our objective was really Inwood, woods of. Tip of northern Manhattan, which is a long skinny island, you know, in the middle of quite swift--flowing waters.

 

Zelkova alley, down the road,  looking quite pretty. Now we were headed for the A train.

 

Poor Frenchie. He can't walk more than a few yards at the moment before he's lost me in his wake. Distracted by blossoms. 

 

The A train, and many stops later, we were at 207th Street, last stop in Manhattan.  I always forget to time it. I was reading Steve Brill's impossibly titled but helpful book - Identifying and Harvesting Edible and Medicinal Plants in Wild (and not so Wild) Places. Steve, who was perturbed to hear that I had swallowed a May apple's pulp late summer and who suggested I call a doctor...In the absence of health insurance I elected to throw up, instead. Well, he does write about eating May apples, yes he does! Nothing about not eating the seeds (the search engine jury is till out on the subject). Still, I like his book, the illustrations are good, and it passed a good 40 minutes of subway time.

 

A cold wind was whipping off the Hudson and down the Spuyten Duiwel passage, and the meat-on-a stick man was still MIA. Pity. We had been here one year ago exactly.

I shan't chronicle the foraging here, but in a late-arriving spring it was mildly successful and we ate at least three of the plants we found, for dinner. The field garlic was delicious, and now I must make good on my promise and deliver some to a local restaurant, for tasting. There are few dogs up here and none off the beaten path, and the woods seem pretty clean. No Prospect Park litter, here. The ball fields below are full of Latino baseball fanatics, and only the occasional jogger seems to pass through the trees on the paths high above the water.

 

Back home, a garlicky, rushour-packed subway ride home, a stop at Los Paisanos for some pork to accompany the field garlic and a lamb shoulder for Easter. My Easter is in name only, now, though the St Matthew's Passion, for Good Friday, remains some of the most beautiful music ever written. I think I may have to acquire it.

 

The home stretch, and Bergen Street in late afternoon light.

Turmeric

From the NYtimes article on the Ganges in Queens:

"Ricky Kanhai and his wife, Asha, both 28, visited the beach last Sunday to pray that they would soon have a child. Mr. Kanhai waded into the water and poured jugs of milk, dyed pink with turmeric, into the sea foam."

And that's my last article for this month. I maxed out Vince's computer, then my new one, with a stint on another laptop, so my twenty article limit kind of stretched. Anyhow, that's the last for this month.

Will someone please tell Sam Dolnick that turmeric is yellow?

Not pink. Pink turmeric would be like...I dunno. Green tar. Blue milk. Red snow. Yellow bluebells. Black cherry blossoms.  Purple peas. Grey bourbon. Orange blackbirds.

On the street

 

We walked out today to go and visit our new little friend, Vi ("Vee") who is ten days old.

Outside the apartment-buildings-with-no-name the cherry is in bloom. I have no good pictures of it. The building's bricks don't help and there always seems to be a white sky above. I think the answer might be a7am photocall.

 

On Bergen the short-lived pear blossom is already giving way to green leaves.

 

After our visit we headed back to the subway on West 23rd Street.

And by the time we were back in the hod the light had changed.

 

After picking up some dinner fixins' at Union Market, where the incredibly rude bakery guy was barked at by Vince, who never barks at anyone, we did our usual butcher-baker-candlestick-maker tour of stores for dinner. Here for vegetables, there for coffee, elsewhere for rolls, farther on for South African Shiraz...

 

 

 

On the last stretch the Zelkovas looked positively pretty, in a green, lacy way. Maybe I am beginning to soften up on them, too. 

The first chives

I resist snipping them for as long as I can, but by this time in spring I am very hungry for fresh green herbs, straight from the terrace. The thyme is still sulking, the summer savoury seedlings are profuse but tiny, the sage is recovering, but the chives have erupted. I have waited long enough!

Snipsnip.

The lilies are already tilting eastwards, towards the sun.

The first strawberry flower has opened, plainly revealing the fruit to come.

And the chives joined some warm boiled eggs with sweet butter, salt and fresh-cracked black pepper, for the Patrick Leigh Fermor-inspired Eier im Glas.

Although our New York spring may appear to be broken at the moment, I believe it will be fixed soon. There have been men working in the street all morning and a little sun just came out,so I think they found the problem.

Liquor

Candy is dandy but liquor...

Juneberries from DUMBO, covered in Calvados for...let's see...nine months, make a warm cocktail for chilly evenings on a silver rooftop. Add very cold prosecco.

Housing Works Garden and Cookbook Sale

 Image: Housing Works

This just in from The Housing Works Bookstore.


What:   Spring sale! 30% off all cookbooks and gardening books.

Want to make sushi? Grow flowers? Bake cupcakes? Turn your fire escape into a farm? We’ve got hundreds of new and special stock books for all your food and garden needs, all on sale!

When:   April 22nd - 25th.

Where:   Housing Works Bookstore Café

126 Crosby St. btwn Houston and Prince

Phone: 212-334-3324          


Another reason to attend this sale: Crosby Street happens to be one of my favourite streets in New York. It is beautiful. Despite the uber-expensive apartments poised above it, at ground level it is still cobble stones and delivery entrances and vans offloading and fire escapes. It is long and narrow and empty enough to seem timeless and placeless,  yet it could be nowhere but New York, either. I used to walk down it at 7 in the morning, in sepia light, in my staff-issued Agnes B little black dress, on my way from the Broadway-Lafayette subway to my morning shift at Balthazar. I was fired from the same shift one day when I answered the phone sleepily from bed to have my manager demand irately, Where are you? Did you decide just to not show up?!

I was new to New York, I was working hard, if not effectively, waitressing and singing, I had just overcome my fear of the subway, and my work at Balthazar had made me fall in love with Crosby Street. I had scrambled my schedule. Being fired was a relief.

At Balthazar it was terribly stressful timing customers' eggs in the behemoth machine on the bar counter that boiled multiple eggs at once. Four customers, four or eight different eggs. Meryl Streep's daughters demanded that the chocolate bread be removed from the bread basket and drank a lot of Earl Grey tea. A male customer lingered with an outrageously large tip prominently displayed and was still there by the time my shift ended, asking in an oilsome way whether anyone had ever left me such a huge tip, and how about lunch. The busboys made no money and were cut in on our tips, which we pooled. When I went to fetch the money owed me, it had mysteriously disappeared. But I worked with nice people and many of them are still there.

I went to work at The French Roast on Park Avenue, open 24/7.

At The French Roast I worked lunches and nights and once had to return a plate to the kitchen three times to have the cooks remove the same little black hair. It kept turning up in a different place. It was a goats cheese salad. The customer was very patient. He also asked me out. Months later I collapsed in the bathroom in tears and could not carry on with my shift. That morning, my boyfriend who loved me more than anything else in the world, had at last, in the face of relentless questioning, confessed the extent of his cheating on me. A chorus girl in North Carolina. Her name was Sunshine.

Back in our building after work I sat at the foot of the stairs in the same little black dress which had switched allegiances nicely, and was unable to climb them. Later I heard Nina Simone's song and knew exactly what she meant. Oh stairs, you look so high tonight...Within ten days I had a tickle in my throat, and missed a crucial entrance in a complicated Bach Cantata with the Allentown Symphony. Whooping cough, as it turned out, contracted on the 6 train, uptown. A little boy, coughing his lungs out. A doctor in Cape Town, baffled by my symptoms, asked in exasperation, Well, what do you think you have? Cancer, or TB? Nice bedside manner.

I missed my vaccination booster when I was 15, dodging the session at school.

And that is how I landed up designing gardens! And that is how I found my Frenchman. I already had my cat. He saw it all.

I still love Balthazar. And Crosby Street.

I haven't been sick since. Not really. That was when I realized what our emotions can do to our bodies, if we let them. Change your whole life. Skipping vaccinations doesn't help, either.

About Housing Works:

The bookstore is staffed almost entirely by volunteers and 100% of its profits go to Housing Works, Inc., which provides housing, healthcare, job training, and advocacy for New Yorkers living with HIV/AIDS. As an independent cultural center, it offers patrons a unique opportunity to join the
fight against AIDS and homelessness simply by buying or donating books; eating at our cafe; coming to concerts, readings, and special events; or volunteering on our staff.

You can also read about Crosby Street in Richard Goodman's new book, A New York Memoir.