May 2016 – Salt Sweet Bitter

Homecoming (Short Story)

For the first piece of my fiction writing on this blog, I wanted to choose something that was complete, not long, and gave a good sense of my voice. This one is maybe 1.5 out of 3? It’s complete except for the ending, which needs another line or two, and probably more fiddly edits. It is certainly short. It is rare for me to write in second person and the language in this is a big departure from my usual. Still, I like it a lot for no particular reason; so even though it’s a bit scary to share it, read on.

Homecoming

It is very early in the morning when she takes you away. Sheltered cups of fog in ground-hollows shine fat as oyster bellies. Your mother’s strong arms, smelling of sex and hazelnuts, carry you to your home of the next seven years – the witch-home, the green-home, the home of starving winters and firefly summers, the deep woods far from man.

Seven years of sun brown your round arms. Seven years of pine needles and riverbed shale harden your small feet. Seven years of witch-living, and you learn their morning and midnight prayers, their way of taking birds in the palm, their way of singing to sleeping bears, their way of stealing corn at night from the farmer’s fields that border your forest.

Among the trees one day is a girl smaller than yourself, smelling different than you, fat where you are thin, pale where you are rosy and brown. Even her words are strange to you but you know the word that she holds out to you like a talisman: home, home, home. It is not so hard for you to find it. She will not go the last steps alone and so you take her damp hand and lead her to the door. You dance away from the paws that reach for her and next for you, until you see the gentleness with which they touch her. He gives you frothy sweet milk in a bone cup. All that night you sleep on the ground as you always do. Never before has it felt cold or hard.

At first they tell you you have no father, that witches have only mothers. Then they tell you if you go you can never come back. Then they tell you that when you come back it will never be the same. The mice will not nibble from your hand again. You will not know the names of the red and white stars.

In the end you go alone. To witches, even little girl-witches, long distances are not so long and paths not easily lost. He lives far past the border of the corn. You find him alone in a house whose wood is peeling like burned skin. At table there is no foaming milk but hard bread and silence. Your father stares at you as though to cure his wounded eyes.

Instead of watching spiders weave moonlight silk, you watch your own hands make patterns with coarse wool. Your teeth discover the ache of sugar. You learn to sleep within walls. Sometimes your father crushes you to him so that you can feel the drumbeat of his heart against your own, keeping the same time. His love is the wonder the witches could not teach you.

In five years it is your twelfth birth-day. Twelve are the moons of the year, and it is on her twelfth birth-day that a witch girl is tested by her sisters. The ebb tide of your child life is over. The witches do not come when the mellow sun is burning. At twilight, rich with violets and washes of blue, not yet tinted by but a stage for a gibbous moon ripe on the edge of the world, is when they come.

At first they are a distant rumble. Cracks bloom through dry earth as if it were easy to shatter as spring ice. In your father’s house everything has fallen or broken or shifted.

They are coming like a storm cloud bound with great chains to the earth. The witches, more than you had thought there were in the world, are pounding with their bare feet a clear path through the fields of man.

Long nights brought you dreams of your mother the witch, of her sisters and yours. In the dreams you helped butterflies open their wings; you stood on the shore of a vast dark ocean; you were in the old forest, or on a mountain, washing your hands of hot deer-blood in a cold stream. You were not afraid then as you are afraid now. Your fear is digging iron fingers into your belly. You stand your ground until you can see their bright eyes and the wicked teeth glinting.

The only direction for running is away. You have not forgotten how to run so swiftly the wind sings at your heels. There are fields and more fields, fields stretching away past where you have ever been and beyond that too.

They come closer as the moon crests in the sky. The fields are ending and now before you is a hedge of bramble, a towering cage of thorn. The witches are so close their breath is a second wind warm on your neck. You cannot run forever.

The hedge seems endless. The thorns glint steely in the moonlight. It is unthinkable that the grasping hands should take you so you close your eyes and leap. Great pain. Stillness.

When you open your eyes you see through a filigree of fine points and slender curling branches. You are high up in the thorns; how did you come so high? Your arms, your shoulders, your face, your throat, your tender thighs are sticky with blood. You are weightless among the thorns.

One by one the witches call to you. Their faces shine like a thousand moons over the crashing sea of their welcome.

Fresh Fruit Tart

Tarts seem to be becoming a theme around here–must be the season. This week’s iteration of “probably a bit too ambitious for my skill level but I’m going to try it anyway” is a fresh fruit tart. A few years ago I ordered an enormous fresh fruit tart for a birthday cake from a swanky local baker’s, and I’ve been meaning to try doing one myself ever since. A friend of mine is planning a lunch party a couple of weeks hence and has asked me to provide the dessert, so I thought it a perfect time to try it; this is my practice run, because I’ve never made pastry cream before.

I couldn’t find a full recipe that had everything I was looking for, so I cobbled this together from a Martha Stewart recipe (the pastry) and the America’s Test Kitchen version (the pastry cream). Because this is my practice round, I went for the easy way out on the fruit–just raspberries and blackberries. Next time I’ll go for the fresh kiwi and mandarin orange slices and the works, but this time I just wanted to make sure I could cope with the tempering eggs part of the recipe. I managed to curdle the eggs in such a maneuver once before, and the fear has dogged me ever since.

Similar to the lemon meringue pie, this is one of those recipes done in stages–everything has to be chilled between assembly steps. This experience was less intense than the lemon meringue, though–the only part that requires careful attention is the pastry cream.

The first step is the crust. The birthday fruit tart of memory had a dense, thick crust, so instead of using the ATK recipe I went with Martha Stewart’s pate sucree (I can rarely bear to watch Martha Stewart on television, but she does have some good recipes.)

I am eternally grateful for our Cuisinart. It’s about twenty-five years old, and I hope it never dies–I don’t think I’d have the patience to make pastry crust or shortbread without it. One day I will be organized enough to spend a morning making several batches of sweet and savoury pastry crusts so that I can just pull them out of the freezer…one day. When I’ve made up my mind which specific recipes I like best. The pastry crust was mixed, shaped into a ball, chilled for two hours, rolled out, shaped, and went into the oven. I wanted a relatively thick crust, so I rolled the circle out to about half an inch, and lined the inside edge with the excess dough, which turned out to be unnecessary. The dough was deceptively soft when raw, even when chilled, and I feared it was going to come out puffy and soft. It didn’t; it was firm without being claggy and overwhelming, but the next time I do this I’ll roll it out a little bit more, to leave more room for pastry cream.

After baking, the crust went back into the refrigerator to chill, and I started on the pastry cream. I used the ATK recipe, but halved it as it looked like it would produce a lot more than what I needed; this recipe from The Joy of Cooking is close to what I did. (And as a bonus you can add the liqueur of your choice! Something that did not occur to me until I tasted the final result.)

Making the pastry cream was less fearsome than I expected, and I managed not to curdle the eggs (hurrah!). I added some almond flavouring, as I thought it would go nicely with the raspberries; next time, I’ll use amaretto rather than artificial flavouring. Once complete, it went back in the refrigerator–the instructions required a very specific three hours for this, although I’m sure if you poured it in a shallow pan it would take less time, even for a full recipe.

While the pastry cream was chilling, I added another tweak from the birthday tart of fond memory–I heated about 2/3 of a cup of chocolate chips and painted the inside of the cold shell with melted chocolate. Aside from being delicious, this seems to prevent the softening of the crust by the pastry cream and juice from the topping.

Finally all the elements were cooked and properly chilled. Assembly was easy, particularly as I wasn’t concerned on this occasion with layering everything in a nice pattern, as I will next time. Even with only half the recipe, I had more pastry cream than I could use, so next time the dough will definitely be rolled more thinly. I meant to use apricot jam to make the glaze (half a cup of jam + 1-2 tablespoons boiling water, mixed until the jam thins out), but discovered the jar I’d squirreled away mysteriously absent, so I used seville orange marmalade instead.

tart 4 tart 2

I was concerned that the orange marmalade would be too strong a flavour and overwhelm the berries. If I’d used a different combination of fruit, I think I would have been right; with the blackberries, however, it tasted a lot like I’d added sherry to the mix, an effect I was quite pleased with. I also like the effect of the little shreds of orange peel on the finished product. I think in the future I will stick with the apricot jam, though; the marmalade glaze was still quite thick and made it difficult to cover all the fruit. All that said, I’m quite pleased with the result, and look forward to trying a grander version for company.

last tart

Friday Fave: Dark Hour of Noon

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This is the first novel that changed my life, that shaped a part of who I am. I was nine years old, wandering through my school’s library, looking for longer books with appealing covers because I was still at an age where I liked illustrations–it would be another couple of years before I started to dislike them because I found my imaginings of the characters to be so much more interesting. (This book is also the root of my dislike of the idiom that you can’t judge a book by its cover–I’ve discovered a number of excellent novels because I

was attracted by their covers. I do realize that’s irrelevant to the meaning of the saying, but it still irritates me.)

I knew about World War II–my father was a child in London during the Blitz, and my mother remembers the German POWs who worked for her father and other neighbours when she was very small. Our bookshelves at home are still lined with biographies of Churchill and dozens of histories of the military aspect of the conflict. I was always more interested in the social side of history, though, and beyond watching Hope and Glory every time it came on TV, I didn’t know much about that side of things at that point. I picked the book up because I was intrigued by the illustration, and I loved the title; there was no synopsis on the back of the book, and most of the excerpt on the inside of the front cover is a discussion between two characters about the mythological heroes of Poland. I may have thought it was in part a fantasy story–I’d already discovered fantasy at that age, and was enchanted by all things mythology-related.

Fantasy is is decidedly not, although it is nightmarish in many parts. It follows Trina, seven years old in 1939, as her world is torn up by the Nazi occupation of Poland. She watches what her friends and loved ones endure at the hands of the invading soldiers, and soon decides to fight back in whatever way she can. The novel chronicles Trina’s life during the war, and the ways that she and several like-minded children mounted what resistance they could to the occupation.

It is still my favourite novel about WWII, and my favourite YA novel. I don’t remember how many times I read in the three years between my discovering it and graduating the school whose library owned the only copy I could find. I looked for it in every bookshop I went into, every garage sale. Everyone always thought I was talking about Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon. A few years later I found another copy in the library of the elementary school attached to my high school and seriously considered how to steal it, leaving money in its place, but I never had the chance–it was not a room I routinely had access to, and I could hardly have come and gone unnoticed, as the librarians knew all the children they worked with. Then came the age of online book stores, just after I’d finished university, and Margaret found a pristine first edition for me one Christmas–one of the many reasons she’s an amazing friend. I shrieked like my nine-year-old self when I unwrapped it, much to my parents’ consternation. I spent that Christmas day re-reading the book, and have done so again many times since. It isn’t one of the books I carry around with me from country to country, because I’ve done my best to keep it from damage, but it is always on my favourites shelf.

It grieves me every time I see a list of books for children and teens about the Holocaust and this is not on it. At times I wonder if this is because too many parents and teachers found it too grim–it is grim subject matter, and unsparing in its depictions of the violence committed by the Nazi army and by those who resisted them–but most of the time I’m inclined to think it’s just because it wasn’t advertised successfully. Since the recent success of Elizabeth Wein’s excellent Codename: Verity and Rose Under Fire, as well as other YA novels such as A Northern Light, I keep hoping that it will be republished and get more attention. I’ve seen it mentioned in a few scholarly works on the representation of war in children’s fiction, but it doesn’t have the readership it deserves. I continue to hope it will be rediscovered, and that this will change.

Crispy Chicken with Lemon and Olives

I’ll take savory over sweet any day. I’ll also take simple over complex, luscious over ascetic. This quick dinner of roast chicken thighs with Mediterranean flavors hits all those notes. Also my goodness that skin. This is my usual Frankenstein’s monster of multiple recipes plus my own whim, so I’ll go ahead and take credit for the way it appears here.

*Disclosure: Not only did I only take pictures with my phone, but it was also dark in my kitchen. I’d say “lesson learned,” except this will doubtless continue to happen. Who, when they are actually busy cooking, has time to stop and take photos? Not I.

Ingredients

8 skin-on, bone-in chicken thighs
3 t kosher or sea salt
Black and hot pepper to taste
1/4 c flour (any; I used unbleached all-purpose)
1/3 c olive oil
4-5 sprigs fresh rosemary
8-10 cloves of garlic, peeled (or more! live a little!)
3 lemons, quartered
1 c mild olives, chopped or whole (Cerignolas or Castelvetranos; if you use briny ones, or a mix, adjust your other salt levels accordingly or just use fewer)
1/2-1 c chicken stock, white wine, or water

Method

Preheat oven to 400F.
Season chicken with salt and both peppers to taste.
Dredge the skin-on side of the thighs lightly in flour; tap off excess.
- I absolutely stole this part from the NYT and I’m never going back to those sad, dark, pre-flour-dusted days.
Heat oil in large roasting pan over high heat (or two oven-safe skillets–just don’t crowd the chicken pieces and adjust oil quantity if necessary). When shimmering, add chicken, skin side down. Cook until golden brown, 3-5 minutes.
Flip the chicken so the skin side is up. Scatter olives, lemon pieces, garlic and rosemary over all, and add enough liquid to comfortably cover the bottom of your pan(s). Most of the chicken should be well above the liquid.
- I recommend leaving some of the olives whole, especially if you’re using large firm ones like the Cerignola. I cut an X on each one to help it absorb the cooking liquid. Made the olives incredibly tender and flavorful.
Roast until chicken is done and delightfully crispy on top–25-30 minutes.
- Thigh meat is often dark or even pink (especially if you buy free range chicken) when done. It should read 165F on a meat thermometer or juices should run clear when cut near the bone.

I served with steamed cauliflower tossed in some butter and hot smoked paprika, with bread on the side for all the excellent juicy bits. (Leftovers the next night were excellent with roast broccoli salad and stuffing.) The bread deserves its own post at some point; it’s the King Arthur Flour no-knead bread recipe and it’s taking me some time to figure it out properly, but as you can see it is more than sufficient for excellent-juicy-bits duty.

This method is my favorite for large batches of chicken no matter what the flavor profile. Replace olives and lemon with quartered mushrooms and shallots, and rosemary with thyme. Maybe oranges, broccoli and dried chilis for a play on General Gao’s? (I just thought of this one and now I want to try it.) Or season the thighs with ras el hanout, replace half of the citrus with preserved lemon, and voila–Moroccan profile. So many options, so many easy weeknight dinners.

Adult Beginner

Sticktoitiveness. I first heard this phrase on a radio program. The host was interviewing the author of a long-term study which showed that this was the only attribute that could be positively correlated with a student’s success or failure in school. Not socioeconomic status. Not the involvement of the parents. Not race. Not gender. Sticktoitiveness: An intangible quality that is something like determination, commitment, and brute will combined.

I have historically lacked sticktoitiveness. Breadth has always appealed to me more than depth and I move on to the next thing when the first thing loses its shine. I get bored or overwhelmed and poof! New thing.

My method of grazing through life has worked out just fine. I’m under no particular evolutionary pressure to change. And yet I have found myself, more and more, wanting to. I’ve always thought that sticktoitiveness was something you were born with, like a peanut allergy or freckles. I didn’t think it was a skill one could learn.

I’ve never been good at math. No innate affinity for logic, no pleasure in solving a puzzle. A certain amount of numeric dyslexia. And yet as study after study has now shown, math is not like freckles. You can learn to be good at it. I simply never did. Lurking behind that admission, though, is an escape route: I would have learned if I had had sticktoitiveness! If I had the gift of application even or especially in the face of obstacles. Believing that the art of commitment cannot be learned is a safety net for my ego.

I am trying to disentangle myself from that safety net. There are two things I am doing with my life right now that are making me look at that net with longing, though. One is a methodical, top-down re-write of 200,000 sprawling words of a novel. The other is learning to horseback ride.

Learning to ride is the fulfillment of a lifelong dream. While I worked with horses a great deal in my teens, I never really rode, and even that was close to twenty years ago. It has taken me months of consistent work to get back half the easy confidence I used to have around these intelligent, amusing, lively, and very very large animals.

Prestige Stables, Rowley MA — Me and Mylee at Prestige Stables

At the age of 35 I am old to be starting out. In the grand scheme of things I am still young, of course, but my body does not have the bouncy resilience it did at 12 or 20. I fell off a horse ten days ago and my bruises still look like an impressionist painting of the night sky. It was my first fall from a horse and I fell in the course of learning to jump for the first time. (Well, okay, I jumped twice and then pushed my luck.) Despite some pain which could only be described with a series of four-letter words, I did literally get back on the horse at the time. I’m still waiting to heal enough to go back in earnest and in this space of waiting, I have been doing a lot of thinking.

Do I have what it takes to learn to ride?
Do I have the dedication to build the athleticism necessary for even casual riding?
Can I overcome my fear of injury, of worse?
Can I stick with this when it’s not fun, when it’s not exhilarating, when it’s exhausting and sweaty and frustrating?

These questions lead to one major question: Why am I doing it at all?

With writing, I’ve never questioned my love or need for it. Even when I have only written in scraps of journalling every few months, writing has always felt as much a part of me as my limbs, as my senses. I can choose to pursue publication or to commit myself to finishing a difficult project, but I cannot choose whether or not to write.

I have that choice with riding. Contemplating the choice has made me look at my past with new eyes. Perhaps my historic lack of sticktoitiveness has stemmed from a failure to articulate the goal. Perhaps my little-used muscle of persistence only flexes when I truly desire something, and I have been afraid to or unable to figure out what I desire.

Right now, where I am, looking ahead: I want what riding can give me. Confidence in my body, a deep connection with the horses I have always loved, a bone-deep awareness of the hard work it takes to be a good partner.

Right now I am willing to make the commitment and to accept the risks inherent to both my goals. (Finishing my twenty-year novel might not break any bones, but it comes with its own dizzying risk of failure.)

Can I learn sticktoitiveness?

I’m trying.