first snow

We play hooky. Responsible hooky. We are in the process of getting the restaurant ready to reopen which requires several days of cleaning, prepping, inventory. We prepare a day in advance of our usual schedule; we go in on Sunday to wax the restaurant floors, the job we had assigned to Monday. Sunday night, at home, we fill water bottles and buckets and set aside candles in case the electricity goes out. On Monday, we are snowed in for the first snow day of the season. We are without guilt.

The snow starts late at night, or early in the morning depending on how you look at it. It falls steadily and heavily so that when we wake up there are already six inches of snow on the ground, the outside world white. It is one of those idyllic snow days in front of the fire reading, or watching movies, or playing cards. Six inches becomes eight becomes ten. We take a walk bundled up in snow boots and hats and go against the wind, the air and flakes sharp on our faces, then with the wind which buffets us back home. The air is full of sparkle and woodsmoke.

At dusk, we go to check on the neighbors' chickens. They are away for the week and we reap the benefits of fresh eggs. The hens and two roosters are huddled together in the coop under their warming light, leaving the eggs for the taking. We feed and water them, and one of the roosters pecks at Caleb's boot incessantly, following him around the cozy coop. I think this would be a good place to bed down for the night if I was a traveler on snowy night in another century. When we leave, the roosters crow good-bye.

For dinner, we make a potato pancake with red onion and Greek-style yogurt served alongside fried pancetta and an omelet made with our fresh harvest.

Fresh Omelet For One
2 eggs
2 pinches salt and pepper
butter
fresh goat cheese

Use your best skillet with a good fitting lid. Beat the eggs with salt and pepper. Pre-heat the skillet over medium heat. Melt enough butter to season the whole pan well. Pour in the egg mixture. Start teasing up the edges of the egg with a rubber spatula as it cooks, so that the raw egg can run underneath. Make sure the skillet does not keep getting hotter and hotter, but stays at an even medium temperature. As soon as there is not enough raw egg to run under the omelet, sprinkle crushed fresh goat cheese under half of the omelet and gently fold over the half with cheese. Lower the heat and cover the pan. Cook until the omelet is done to your liking. (Caleb likes his a little runny.) Slide out onto a warm plate.

ain't that just like livin'

(originally published on www.thelipstickchronicles.typepad.com/11.26.07

We’re on the road. We do this every November and April, close up our small restaurant in the small village of Woodstock, Vermont and point ourselves North, South, East, or West. In April, we are always East. We land in Italy for a time to eat, to drink, to be inspired. In November, we could be anywhere. We have found ourselves in LA, Buenos Aires, Montreal, New York, Oregon, Paris. This time we are in New Orleans.

We have long wanted to come here. My family lived here years ago, and Caleb’s aunt and uncle still do. We are sad to have missed the New Orleans before The Storm, but we are happy to finally arrive, to see the proud and elegant city as she gets herself back on her pins. The sections of town nearer the river are looking quite fine, houses freshly painted, gardens tended, the remaining live oak looking broad and powerful, thriving. Other sections of town, those farther from the river, especially those in the infamous 9^th ward, are still vacant and ghostly. Windows are boarded up or are filled with jagged broken glass, the water lines still exist on the sides of house, the yards are wild with pink oleander, grasses, and the climbing blue plumbago. The stench of rot and mold lingers. Walls still are marked with signs left from the National Guard. 1 Dead in Attic.

We’ve come to New Orleans on a pilgrimmage: to eat, to taste Cajun, Creole, and Soul food renditions. We compile a list, not of all the usual favorites and “must-eats”, but of smaller places, those who opened as little as ten days after Katrina because they couldn’t stand by and stop cooking for their city. They knew they needed to feed their people and all those who came to volunteer their help in those first harrowing months after the hurricane. We’ve heard stories of Paul Prudhomme setting up in a parking lot with propane burners and cooking kettles of gumbo, or Donald Link opening Herbsaint with only 6 people when usually there is a team of 45. We heard that old favorites opened for business even when it was nearly impossible: Upperline, Dooky Chase, then Brigsten’s. These are the places at which we choose to dine on our first visit.

Dining at Dooky Chase is tops on our list. Open since 1941 in Tréme, the first historical section of town to be inhabited by freed slaves, we are eager to eat their classic dishes: fried chicken, red beans and rice, stewed ocra, green beans with dirty onions. Leah Chase, the daughter of the original Dooky, has been cooking at this restaurant since the Fifties. We have always been awed and inspired by those stalwart cooks who keep at it day after day.

But Dooky Chase is currently closed. The message on their answering machine says they hope to re-open at the beginning of November, and in the meantime they are serving take-out Tuesday-Sundays from 11:30-7:00. We grab at the chance after an “early” lunch of fresh oysters and fried softshell crab at Casamentos (some days we have to eat throughout the day in order to hit every one of our destinations), and pick up a “late” lunch from Dooky Chase.

It is a charmed visit, one full of stories and good cheer, though as with many things in New Orleans these days, there is a melancholy note. We walk in the side door and it’s clear they have been under significant construction. No one is about and we yell, “Hello! Anyone here?” Someone shouts back from the kitchen. We are greeted warmly and given a take-out menu. We order. We are offered a seat in the newly painted bar while we wait. A handsome young man brings us water and iced-t served in glasses and with lemon. We tell him this didn’t seem much like take-out service. He smiles genuinely and says, “Well, I’m hoping you will come back again.”

Like so many others, Dooky Chase has fallen on some hard luck since Katrina. Two feet of water flooded the building, and they have been renovating and restoring ever since. The restaurant is home to an extensive African-American art collection, and fortunately they were able to get the work out and into storage up in Baton Rouge before it was lost to the elements or looting. Mr. Chase, Miss Leah Chase’s husband, takes us on a tour of the refurbished dining rooms. Miss Chase is conducting an interview in a pretty, yellow room with French chairs and pale yellow brocade. She holds our hands in her own upon introduction and is enthusiastic about re-opening, but you can also tell she is flat-out. Finding employees seems to be the biggest problem facing the restaurant these days. There are not enough people left in the city. Too many have moved away because they lost everything, and needed to start somewhere fresh instead of waiting, and waiting, and waiting to pick up somewhere far behind where they left off.

Mr. Chase takes us into the red room, and the private green room, again elegant and old world as if it’s still 1955 and New Orleans might still part of New France. The Empire style would have made Napoleon proud. When our fried chicken, and red beans and rice, and stewed vegetables, and fried shrimp sandwich are all ready, Mr. Chase brings us back to the bar with its bright green walls with black and white trim and a terrific painting of Louis Armstrong. He notices that Caleb is wearing a t-shirt from Brazil and begins to scat a little bossanova number. His voice is pure and tremulous and his smile is true. He encourages Caleb to join in, and he does so, tentatively at first, but then gaining momentum. I keep silent and listen as I can’t sing. When they are done, we all clap and Caleb asks, “Now, what would we have sung if I had been wearing my Italy t-shirt?” And they are off again, an old black man, and a younger white one, dipping and reaching for notes from that old classic “Volare”. To fly, says that song in translation, I fear this dream will never return, my hands and my face are colored in blue, suddenly I was pulled away by the wind and soared into the endless sky…”

We take our carefully packed picnic to Audobon Park and sit under a pergola at a table and lay out our treasure. The dishes are beautiful in their simplicity and spicy, savory aromas; they need no translation as they are perfectly understood. The fried chicken melts on the tongue, and the candied yams have sweet and texture. We look out over the green park in evening, at the people jogging, mothers and fathers teaching children to ride their bikes, two friends walking a dog, the man who comes to feed the ducks. Here’s to the New Orleans of old, and all that will be new. Here’s to the return of the people, and their unfailing spirit because all that wind, and rain, and devastation can’t take that away.

Winter Greens -- So Far, So Good

My parents have these neighbors of long standing who have always grown lots of vegetables. When I was a teenager, I mowed their lawn, and noted the plots the husband, a doctor, had dug into what struck me as a fairly rocky location. Ledge reared up at various points around their property, and I had to be alert while mowing to avoid damaging the mower blade. But the doctor was not only determined to make that rugged property produce, he had a very good hand, good southern exposure, and was diligent and enthusiastic. What made the greatest impression was his late lettuce harvest: he would make the rounds of the neighbors, with bright eyes and a big grin, on Thanksgiving morning, delivering enormous heads of leafy greens.

We are looking ahead to next year’s gardening season, and fantasizing about starting a hoop house -- a greenhouse of plastic stretched over half-circle pipes, or ‘hoops’), so that we could, in theory, harvest hardy greens, spinach, beets, all year.

So this year, I did a test run. I boxed the radicchio bed with 2X8’s and stretched heavy clear plastic over the box and weighted the edges of the plastic down with some old bricks. So here we are at November 29, and I’m still cutting greens for salads: 3 kinds of radicchio, and a mix of escaroles and chicories. I have also used a bale of hay to pack around the outside of the box, and to cover the top at night. But now the weather is really becoming much colder -- 10˚ tonight! – so this will be a real test. If we continue to be blessed with some sun every day, maybe I can squeeze out some fresh greens until Christmas.

-- Caleb

home again

We are home again. After three weeks of travel to New Orleans, Houston, the Eastern Townships, and Montreal, we have arrived back in Vermont to the cold, lean days of late November. This is a beautiful time of year here, but you have to look beyond the wash of browns and grays, and embrace the austere lines of the land, the naked branches and knarled trunks of the trees, the atmospheric low-light of the days and evenings. You have to watch for the magic of shooting stars across the November night sky.

Where to begin to write about this past month? New Orleans and her bright hope and blown-down past, slick, sophisticated Houston—no cow-town here folks, and snow-glad Quebec with wine routes and handmade cheeses, fatted ducks, hard cider. We would like to start chronologically, but somehow our rememberances of these places have situated themselves more like a collage with new narrative threads connecting us from point to point. So the next few weeks, and perhaps the next month, will be peppered with tales of the journey, along with the trials of growing winter greens, the barrel tasting and bottling of the wine, the tasting of the Christmas walnut liquer. In the meantime, fore more information on what's happening in New Orleans go visit the valiant www.neworleansladder.com.





--Deirdre and Caleb

Dear Reader

Dear Reader: Thank you for coming to the blogsite, and apologies for the hiatus. We have been traveling for the month of November and have had difficulty being able to post. We will return to Vermont at the end of month and be posting in the days after November 27th. In the meantime, you can check out our guest blog at www.thelipstickchronicles.typepad.com. We will be posted on Monday, November 26th!

--Deirdre & Caleb

Night Gardening

Tomorrow has arrived. Since those first few days of vacation, a slumber has set in, or the need to do something else. Sunny mornings perfectly good for gardening, still warm enough to laugh at a hard frost, have been spent sleeping late, drinking coffee, and reading. Then the afternoons get eaten by the need to straighten the house, cook a meal for friends visiting, or painting the front door, the bathroom, the staircase.

The week speeds by. Strange how that always happens. When you want time to drag, it always chooses to do otherwise. Now, we are confronted with the day before we leave for a trip down to Delta country, New Orleans and Houston. We’ve had that cold, hard frost already two nights in a row, the landscape in the early mornings covered in a film of diamonds. It almost looks like snow. There are still terra cotta pots full of roses and lavender, and winter gem boxwood waiting to be freed from their bound roots and put into the ground.

It is always like this, the mad rush before leaving home. There is always something that needs to be done, that can’t wait because the loss will be too great. If we don’t plant the roses, the lavender, and the boxwood, they will die. The terra cotta pots will crack. So at 3:00 in the afternoon, we fuel up with hot, dark coffee and begin the Herculean, if not Sisyphean task of emptying the pots with their frozen dirt and root balls. We hack at the concrete-like soil with hand shovels and screwdrivers. We are elated when we realize that if we can get past the initial crust, the earth inside the pots is soft and we can pry the plants out.

We work doggedly together, then separately when we see the sun starting to slide past the mountain ridge. We are not cold, even though the temperature now is below freezing, the worst time to try and transplant. I wonder if any of these prized canes and woody stems will even survive the upheaval. We spend several hours bend over digging and pulling. Our backs and forearms, our hamstrings begin to burn with the fever of too much.

When darkness finally descends, we can still see for quite some time because the sky is so clear. We light tikki torches to keep at the work in the perennial garden, and turn the outdoor house lights on that reflect a warm glow over the stone garden. Finally, most of the plants are all in the ground, one way or the other, and most of the pots are clean of dirt. We lay the pots face down near the gardens so they won’t fill with water if it rains while we are away. Caleb takes the last of the boxwood, ten pots in all, the ones we can’t shake loose from the terracotta and puts them inside. They are lined smartly in front of the French doors in our bedroom. I feel a little like the garden has come to haunt me.

There is still packing to do, a hot shower to take, a warm dinner to eat, some unfinished business to attend to. I collect the red and white striped sling chairs and put them away for the season, stripping them of their fabric to be washed and stored until next spring. These chairs have become our symbol of summer, and our reluctance to fold them up is testament to our reluctance to move on past autumn. By doing so, we are finally putting our season to bed.

I look up at the clear, vast sky littered with stars. At this late hour of the evening, the night sky is the inverse of the morning field, covered in a film of diamonds.

-Deirdre

first days

It always takes a few days for a vacation to kick in. The body and mind continue to race around as if there is something imperative to accomplish, and feels at loose ends because in reality there is nothing pulling you forward. Everyone knows it takes at least a week to unwind, then another week to begin to relax.

On day two of our vacation, a friend leaves a message on the answering machine. “Hi! I hope you have all your projects done now so you can start to enjoy your time off!” We groan and laugh. We haven’t even begun our “projects”, a long list of before-snow-flies duties that hang over our heads like heavy, metal gray snow-clouds. For me, the perennial gardens are at the crux of the list. All month a voice at the back of my mind has been admonishing,“You need to cut down the garden. Dig and divide. Plant. Mulch.” I have been a reluctant listener, avoiding the garden as if it doesn’t even exist.

I love my garden. I have spent nine and half years toiling over the 900 square feet of flower and herb beds, stone paths, and painted gray fence. Those square feet have seen two variations of garden, three tractors to till, and then season after season of hand-tilling, all to keep the grasses at bay. My garden sits in a meadow surrounded on all sides by switch grass, buttercup, madder, and wild chervil. Every year, the grasses threaten to overtake as they thread their roots through the coreopsis and bearded iris. There is also the problem of the mint. Years ago, as a novice gardener impatient for thick borders of vegetation, I planted mint, along with tansy. Now the two run like wildfire through the beds and require constant taming throughout the season. Each season is like starting from scratch.

This summer and fall, I have neglected my garden. Too much time was spent building and planting the new, sunken garden which now has officially become Caleb’s garden. He has taken over all the raised beds for his vegetables, especially his lettuces, chicories, and wild arugula. He still quite can’t believe that he has become a gardener. He always thought it would be my realm. Caleb enjoys looking at gardens, and has often been my help in the structural elements of the garden, but never one to become animated over the winter nursery catalogs that start to arrive in January. His mother is an inveterate gardener, and he used to buck at the gardening chores that he was given as a child. Now, he thinks about his garden all the time, ways in which he can improve the soil, collect more heat, make clever cold frames. Almost as if it is a necessary inverse, I have turned my back on my garden, and the numerous pots of plants requiring my attention before it gets much colder.

Perhaps it’s my reluctance in admitting that it is time for the garden to be put to bed. I am uncomfortable with death. Perhaps it is something I’ve inherited from my mother who wails at autumn. She has always hated the loss of the plants, the onslaught of dead leaves and brown stalks. Her own mother died in the autumn and I am sure that is a large part of her aversion. Just like she hates the scent of lilies because they were the flowers at the funeral.

I look out over the brown stalks in my garden, though the mint is still valiantly green, and the salvia is incredibly still blooming. I look at the stacks of outdoor cushions and red and white striped chairs ready to be put away before the weather really turns. I make a list of all that needs to be planted: 20 roses, 14 box wood, a hedge of black-eyed susan, 4 plum trees, 2 hydrangea, one apple. I have written this all before. I am somehow hopeful that writing it again will help me to actually go in the garden. But, of course, before I can begin planting, there is a host of other things to accomplish: the cutting back, the weeding, the dividing, and amending the soil. Tomorrow.