marmalade

I once read a succinct account of what jam-making comes down to: ‘Take a bunch of fruit and sugar and boil the hell of it.’  Which is about as accurate as it gets. Although I haven’t yet gotten up the stones to make jam and then to can it because I’m chicken of getting whatever it is you can get if you do it wrong, I have figured out a way around this.

1) Make the jam, put it in a big Tupperware container, and put it in the freezer with a piece of parchment right on top of the fruit so it doesn’t get freezer-burny.

2) Make the jam, put it in a big Tupperware container, put it in the fridge, and eat it unabashedly every day for a week until it’s gone.*

I’ve done jam both ways, but for the following recipe, I typically do the latter.

Rhubarb, once called pieplant, is actually a vegetable, but it pairs so well with fruit that we give it a pass and treat it as such. It’s usually baked with strawberries—an admirable combination, if somewhat trite. Making marmalade out of rhubarb and citrus is a fresh way to enjoy it. And yet…this is a recipe from the turn of the last century. Everything old is new again, the early bird gets the worm, haste makes waste, etc.

I think you’ll dig it.

2 lbs. roughly chopped rhubarb (without the green leafy tops, which would give you a stomachache)

Juice of 1 orange

Juice of 1 lemon

2 cups granulated sugar**

2 oranges peeled, seeded and sectioned

Zest of 1 orange

1 lemon peeled, seeded and sectioned

Zest of 1 lemon

Put your rhubarb and juices into a deep pot.*** Bring to a boil, cover, and go check your email for about 15 minutes or until the rhubarb softens. Stir in your sugar, bring the heat back up, and boil, stirring for 5 minutes. Take the pot off the heat, stir in your citrus, and give it an occasional stir until it cools. That’s it.

This marmalade would work well on toast, or stirred into steel-cut Irish oatmeal, or drizzled warm over vanilla ice cream, or layered with yogurt. It would be killer layered between lemon cake or pound cake. It would glimmer with the collective light of the Milky Way galaxy in a Pavlova, that Australian favorite made of meringue and whipped cream. Or you could be boring like me and eat it right out of the Tupperware with whatever spoon’s clean.

*Oh, also? Stock up on Imodium first.

**For a marmalade that’s more like, well, marmalade—that is to say, stiffer—add more sugar. The sweetness you get from 2 cups of sugar works for me, so my goo ends up with more of an applesaucy consistency.

***My pot above is enamelware and was bought at a horse farm near me, out of a barn that smelled of wood stove smoke. The splatters are from a chicken I roasted once and which insisted on leaving a bit of a grim legacy.

kryptonite

Chino and me. Spring 2012, Count Basie Theatre, Red Bank, NJ.

Last year around this time I worked with an actor who was better motivated than anyone I have ever worked with. And it wasn’t by the director’s powerful encouragement, or by his own ego, or by audience accolades. He was motivated by his very favorite thing to eat.

His name was Pacino, but I called him Chino (or ‘meshuganah’, as apt a nickname for this actor as any), and there he is above. The show was The Wizard of Oz, and I had precisely one job: Him. Specifically, getting him on stage for all of his cues, receiving him when he came off stage, and keeping him safe and happy in the meantime. To do this I armed myself with fattening little dog treats which I sometimes called Scooby snacks*, and which he loved to absolute distraction. Sometimes before a show I’d entertain the humans by holding a treat a foot above his head, moving it in a circle and saying, “Pirouette!’ He would twirl on his furry little back legs and then I’d give him the treat. He could smell them in my jeans pocket and shamelessly scratched at my jeans with both paws to try to unearth more.

Right before a cue I’d have him sniff and lick at the treat I had tightly in my fingers. He’d become 100% focused on it. When I heard the cue, I’d throw the treat across the deck and let him go. He would chase the treat and catch it, Dorothy would pick him up, and we were golden. When he came off to me, I’d give him another one. My goal was to get him used to a routine so he would trust me and so he’d keep doing what I needed him to do. He was always good for it. Always.

When it comes to maintaining a healthy weight, treats obviously have the potential to be our undoing. Given Chino’s undying devotion to his Scooby snacks, it was no different for him. His owner told me I needed to be judicious in giving him snacks because he needed to lose a pound. (When you only weigh nine pounds, every ounce counts.)**

But the other side of Kryptonite is power.*** Wisely harnessed, really incredible treats—including food—can get us from point A to point B. And since by saying that I’ve already dragged political correctness to the curb with the recycling bins, I’m going to emphasize again: It’s okay to use treats, food or otherwise, for motivation as long as they’re administered with care. Here’s how:

1) Treat yourself on a regular basis. You’ll be happier and have fewer cravings this way, I promise. Yes, eat right most of the time; yes, get your body moving; yes, avoid Testarossa shopping if you can’t afford toothpaste. But don’t deprive yourself of good things, in good doses. Life is supposed to be fun. If you’re not having fun, you’re doing it wrong.

2) Reread those last two sentences and put them on sticky notes all over your house, your car and your Burmese cat if necessary.

3) Create a list of extra-special treats that can help you get past a goal. Chino’s job was very physical; he worked hard for those Scooby snacks. He was twirled around while sitting in a basket, handled by eight actors along with me, and worked more than a dozen shows. Think about what you have to hurdle over next Tuesday, and make the treat fit the crime.

4) Give yourself another treat after you’ve slain the witch. And make it good, and don’t apologize. Earn your own trust. Wash, rinse, repeat.

Gratuitous personal story: I’m looking for a full-time salary and wanted to answer an ad yesterday. I knew baking the below would be the stick of firecracker in my back pocket I needed to do it. So I baked it, and it was: hot homemade cornbread topped with my current darling, Irish butter. We have lovely little dalliances a few times a week. Then we give each other a chance to miss each other. I don’t believe in rushing romance.

*Someone at Wizard of Oz told me this was actually a sly drug reference from the mid-1960s TV show. It’s safe to say Chino really was addicted to his Scooby snacks, though, so it turned out to be a pretty accurate choice of words.

**Once I accidentally dropped his Tupperware container of treats right in front of him, and he went after them like a S-400 anti-ballistic missile. Not a shining moment in my backstage career.

***’High levels of green Kryptonite radiation can cause normal humans to mutate and acquire superhuman abilities.’ –Wikipedia FTW, baby.

seasonal cues

The Lilac Law

Lilacs bloom according to this algorithm:

1) Sum the squared mean daily temperatures (in Celsius) since the last frost.

2) Use an average of the past few years’ daily temperatures to predict the date when this sum will reach 4264.

Despite my distaste in math, I find this fascinating—not just that this law was figured out in the 19th century, but that it was figured out at all. But then phenology goes back centuries.

Phenology* is the study of natural cycles—how one influences the other, and how we can take cues from what happens. The first beech leaves that unfurl, the first flight of the swallowtail butterfly—every genesis reflects the fragile interconnectedness of soil, air, sunlight, temperature, and dozens of other natural factors.

Long before spreadsheets and calculators, growers created their own data by carefully watching and waiting for nature’s cues to sow their precious seeds. It was a question of survival, a much more in-your-face reality back then. With no Shop-Rite, and your nearest neighbor often miles away, carelessness meant rolling the dice on starvation.

Some of their data include:

When lilacs are in leaf, sow beets, cabbage and broccoli.

When lilacs are in full bloom, sow beans and squash.

When apple blossom petals fall, sow corn.

Apple blossom.

Or, as Laura Ingalls Wilder writes in Farmer Boy (a biography about her husband Almanzo’s growing-up years on an New York farm in the mid-1800s), when the leaves on the ash tree are as big as a squirrel’s ears, sow corn.**

In the same book, little Almanzo eagerly awaits ‘the dark of the moon’ (new moon) in May so he can sow pumpkins.

Another one. When you see these…

(Bearded irises)

…set out transplants of these.

(Melons. Clearly.)

I read that even Martha Stewart traditionally plants peas on March 17, St. Patrick’s Day.

Laura Ingalls Wilder’s father swore by ‘Plant turnips on the 25th of July, wet or dry.’

(Compelling story: He also went goose hunting one fall day in the 1880s while he and the family were living in Dakota Territory, and, utterly dumbfounded, returned home with nothing. It wasn’t because he was a lousy shot; it was because the birds were flying high above the clouds—he could hear them—but not one came down low enough to shoot. They were getting out of Dodge, and at breakneck speed. In fact, he said the entire prairie was still; every living thing was hidden away. Another day that same fall he said he’d never seen muskrats’ dens built so thickly. He got his family out of their rickety little claim shanty and into a sturdy house in town in a heartbeat. Can you finish this story—have you read The Long Winter? Blizzards slammed the mid west for virtually seven months.)

Do you sow, or act, according to any of these ancient rules? What successes or failures have you had?

Do you swear by any other cues?

Has the fairly recent wacky weather (here in NJ we had snow Halloween 2011, and snowdrops came up right after Christmas that year) affected what you’ve done?

Does anyone work with Project BudBurst, the environmental group that asks people from all over to record when plants start sprouting in the spring?

*Not to be mistaken with ‘phrenology’, a study based on determining one’s character by analyzing the bumps on one’s head. (I’ve had two concussions. For me, the smart money’s on ‘a touch clumsy’.)

**About 1/2″ in diameter. Don’t go chasing us to compare. –A PSA from the Squirrels Are Faster Than You Commission

wrongplanet.net/postt63638.html

budburst.org/

a few trifles–more onstage food

‘A few trifles’ is a quote from the stage drama Little Women, and the food you see here is what I made for the show, which is going on all this month in Holmdel, NJ. As prop goddess, it’s my job to rent, buy or make (not to mention schlep, maintain and track down from actors) everything that’s brought on and off stage. I often have to provide real (what we call ‘practical’) food for shows that call for actors to eat on stage. But the director for this production decided all of the Christmas Day treats that old Mr. Laurence next door sends over to the March family will be impractical—just for looks. I’m a stickler for authenticity on stage, and the theatre space is small, with the audience just feet away from the onstage action, so this took some doing.

The script describes the spread: chocolates, ice cream, fruitcake and cream puffs. I thought about buying most of it and polyurethaning the crap out of it so it would last the run of the show (and so the actors and mice wouldn’t eat it).* But I couldn’t find puffs that weren’t already filled with cream (which would spoil); fruitcake is tough to find in April; and ice cream wouldn’t survive beyond Act I Scene I.

Plan B, which I went with, was to make a bunch of homemade play dough and form it the way I do marzipan. Click on the photos to take a better look. This is my first go with shaping play dough for stage. Everything pictured here, except for the holly sprig on the cake, is made of play dough.

To make it: I combined 3 cups flour, 1.5 cups salt, and 6 teaspoons cream of tartar in one bowl and 3 cups water and 1/3 cup cooking oil in another. You can also add food coloring to the liquid. Then I added dry and liquid together and poured it into a heavy-bottomed pan over medium low heat. I stirred frequently until the mixture got thick and rubbery and lost its sheen. Then I took it off the heat to cool. Once it is, you can shape it into anything you want. Here’s what I did.

For the chocolates in the top tier of the epergne above: I shaped quarter-sized balls, flattened them, and let them dry out for a few days. Then I painted them with brown acrylic** paint and let that dry. I topped them with white acrylic paint in peaks, as if it were buttercream. Once that was dry, I covered them with polyurethane.

For the cream puffs: I shaped balls about 2″ in diameter and topped them with balls about 1″ in diameter, which looks very much the way choux pastry looks when piped, before it’s baked. Then I brushed on acrylic wood polish with a very light hand—just so they’d look slightly browned—and poly’ed them. Since the play dough wasn’t dried out beforehand, when I poly’ed them they cracked a bit. It makes them look like authentic puffs.

For the fruitcake, shown above (sliced) and below: I wanted to model it after Traditional English Fruitcake, which I imagined was a holiday favorite of Mr. Laurence, and one he wanted to share with his neighbors. First I kneaded in edible brown gel paste from my candy supply basket. But once it dried, it turned a disagreeable, asteroidlike shade of brownish green. On went the brown paint and then poly, the latter of which gave the cake an appealing gloss that made it look moist, buttery and alcohol soaked. I sliced it with a serrated knife.

I made a real fruitcake last Christmas, and iced and decorated it in the style of the south of England. For this one, I decorated it in the northern style—very simply, with bits of play dough shaped to suggest sliced almonds, lightly wood stained so they’d look toasted, and I scattered them around the edges. A sprig of holly was inserted into the middle, and I replace it with a fresh one each weekend.

For the ice cream:  The show takes place in New England in the 1860s, before vanilla was the common flavoring it is today. Lemon was common, though. Let’s call the below lemon.

To give it a realistic effect, I used an ice cream scooper to scoop the soft play dough into the bowl. I chose a silver one which had a frosted-over look, suggesting the ice cream was creating condensation on the outside of the bowl. Then, while still soft, I covered it with lots of poly. Like the puffs, this made it crack a bit on top and gave it a subtly iced-over look, and the extra poly made it appear slick and slightly melting.

Good times.

*Bit of an editorial there, especially the choice to put actors before mice; actors show far less discretion. When I propped Chekov’s Three Sisters in college, I had to provide a huge platter of impractical pastries for one scene. I bought real ones, and the actors nibbled at it like stoners until I was forced to shellac it. Even then I still needed to post a sign telling them to keep their sticky paws off it. Though I quite, QUITE relished hearing the occasional ‘Bleah! Goddammit!’ from actors who either weren’t literate or thought the sign was a joke.

**This is latex, or water-based paint—my favorite. Oil-based paint is nice and shiny, but it takes longer to dry, is more of a hassle because you need to buy turpentine, a solvent, to clean your paintbrush, and until it dries your house smells like a Sunoco station.

caribbean/barbecue

The recent warm days are making me think of barbecue season and the best barbecue I ever ate. Is it treason against the U.S. if I said it was on Tortola, in the British Virgin Islands?

Right, we’ll come back to that. First let’s establish setting.

Tortola and Peter Island are two of the delicious Caribbean islands which we visited in early 2008. I was coming out of the throes of a years-long illness which led, at different points, to assorted travel whims. At this point in my recovery, I needed a change of scenery, just for a long weekend. And if it included pale turquoise water sliced with royal blue and had a view of hazy green islands, the kind Peter Pan and Wendy flew across, all the better.

Tortola isn’t really remote, but it feels as if it is. The customs office is the size of a two-car garage. Chickens run around like squirrels everywhere you go; one of our taxi drivers waited to let a mommy and her seven tawny-colored chicks cross the road.* And a rooster was our 5am wake-up call.**

Our hotel, Long Bay Beach, is the kind of place where the cooking staff picks guava off the tree growing outside your window, every suite has its own hammock, and dawn comes up pink over the water. One whole wall of our room, the one that faced the water, was a sliding screen door, some ten feet long. We left it open whenever we were in the room, loving the balmy wind so much that we even put shells and rocks on anything likely to blow away. One morning on our way to breakfast, a blue macaw flew right over our heads.

A very, very shy sand crab taken with a very, very good zoom.

A pelican we watched from our balcony as he dove up and down in the water, looking for fish.

Breakfast at the hotel was just my bag: fresh pineapple, banana, guava juice, cereal, yogurt and perfect homemade lemon poppy seed muffins.

First we took a day trip to Peter Island, population 1, because we planned to kayak from there to Dead Chest. This was the place where folklore says Blackbeard marooned 15 men–that’s a one-way island vacation in the middle of bloody nowhere—with just a bottle of rum between them. Everyone we spoke with on Peter Island told us it was nothing more than a giant rock, and dissuaded us from going.

There it is, across Deadman’s Bay–the appropriately dark island at left.

So we didn’t. Next time. But no worries; instead we hiked the island, which was all at once a glorious tropical Eden…

and the American southwest, featuring spiky vegetation…

…and spikier animals.

He didn’t budge in the 20 minutes we spent admiring him and his comrades on the rocks. Showboat.

The hills along the three-mile path we hiked were also home to mountain goats, skittish things that would tiptoe near you to get a better look, then would scamper away through the trees.

One more detail about the day trip to Peter Island is worth noting, and that’s the ferry ride. No sitting in the lower cabin and looking through the fogged-over windows for me. I only like ferries if they move at a really good clip and if I can stand right on the bow, letting the sea spray wash over my face and hair and dew-dropping the outermost layer of my clothes.*** This one did. And the view of the islands we passed was hypnotic.

On the way back from Peter Island to Tortola we shared the ferry with several locals returning home for the night. And we witnessed something so charming that it has stayed with me. Up on deck one of the gentlemen broke out some Dominoes and set them on a table. I deducted that this game was played on the ferry every night because other men fell in very smoothly, in a loose and easy choreography. Empty five-gallon buckets were upended for seats, and players joined and left from time to time, including a uniformed kid in charge of the ferry and a grizzled older sailor, an American ex-pat who now lived on Tortola. ‘I haven’t played in 25 years, but what the hell,’ he said, and stayed in for the rest of the ride back. What struck me most was how relaxed and comfortable everyone was with each other, and it was a reminder of how much joy is accessible in the simple. I could see why one would want to slide out of an old life, as if out of a jacket worn too thin at the elbows, and sink happily into a life like this.

Time to eat.

We asked our cabbie about the Bomba Shack, which Frommer’s listed as the ticket for barbecue in this part of the Caribbean. And apparently on Wednesdays and Sundays they offered all you can eat for $10/plate. Hello.

He stopped next to a set of shacks that looked as if they’d been decorated by a group of pre-teen surfers after a ten-box Mallomar binge.

How to explain this place? Here’s one way: The owners apparently have created a god of sorts called Bomba whose nature isn’t clear, and Google was no help. But you’re encouraged to offer sacrifices to it (note underwear, above).

Here’s another way: The Bomba Shack serves shroom-spiked tea when the moon is full.****And they give it to you for free because they aren’t allowed to sell it. The menu is scrawled onto plywood out front. Music—emanating from speakers taller than me—is cranked up to levels that could orbit Jupiter, and grill smoke and customers alike float between the shacks. We paid the cabbie right in the middle of the street and went looking for dinner.

The party is on one side of the street. There, to a very friendly American woman behind a counter, we shrieked that we wanted two plates’ worth; she grinned, took our money and gave us tickets. The cook (a single woman) and picnic tables are on the other side of the street.

You have a choice of barbecued chicken or ribs. Both come with corn on the cob and red beans with rice, and I’ll stop here to bring up a concern that I’m sure is swimming through your logic-loving minds: Exactly what kind of lunatics eat at an open-air shack on a dirt road, one whose owners hand out drugs and worship a deity with a preference for women’s panties?

I’m not saying you don’t have a point. But we did it. One bite of that meal and all sense floated out to sea with the grill smoke. The barbecue sauce had a no-BS kick, and the meat from the chicken and the ribs slid off the bone with no embarrassment whatsoever. It was delectable—one of the great meals of our lives. We shared a table with some amiable Australians, licked our fingers and grinned at each other. Lunacy loves company.

Then we crossed the street to watch the surfers cut through waves shimmering from the apricot-colored sunset, soaking even further into a place where the night wind smells like earth and salt water.

*For the obvious reason.

**Click the rooster link. Long Bay Beach is yellow–but a muted yellow. Not a biggie.

***My first name comes from the Latin word for ‘sea’ (mars). The genitive is ‘maris’ (of the sea). Put an ‘a’ on the end and you make it feminine: Girl of the sea. Yes, I’m a mermaid. My parents didn’t do this intentionally, but there it is.

****No, we didn’t. The moon wasn’t full, anyway.

edible wild–early spring

I’ve been fascinated by connection all my life. I love digging into the nature of relationships, whether they’re cultivated or if they’re something handed to us—just by virtue of being born on Planet Earth.

It may be that last part that explains my sort of odd obsession with picking fruit from one wild tree or another (or yet another), or from wild plants. It definitely explains why I wanted to undertake the foraging project I’m on now, and have lately been spending my days walking slowly along the streets of my community, back bent toward the ground, as if looking for a lost glove or perhaps my sanity among the newly sprouting vegetation.

This post represents the first look at the food that’s not hawked by the ad slickies at Madison Avenue but instead is quietly offered by the earth, all year, as the sun waxes and wanes. I’ll be continuing this ‘edible wild’ series from time to time during 2013 and hope you dig it.* Mostly I hope that you’ll get as excited as I am about wild food, that you’ll get jazzed to see what’s growing around you and want to learn about it. Besides the connection we have with our own selves—me to myself and you to yourself—I think the most essential connection on earth is the one we have with the earth; and it’s a connection that, to a great extent, has been broken. That can change.

About my choices above…

My home is the suburban NJ, USA shore, dotted with wide and narrow stretches of lake and consisting of sandy soil. The photo above represents a sampling of the edibles growing wild in my area,** although I’m sure there are many more.

Helpful note 1: Obviously don’t forage too close to roadsides, where dogs might have, ahem, frequented; and be wary of wild edibles growing too near residential properties, as they might have taken on pesticides used there.

Helpful note 2: I am no botanist or horticulturist (to which any of my bio teachers can attest). Among the above foods shown I’ve eaten wild garlic and dandelion only. To learn what else was edible, I sought out online sources for assistance. Above all, before eating it, be sure that what you think is a certain plant is in fact a certain plant.

Please chime in with your additions, clarifications—and recipes, if you’ve got ‘em. And I’d love to hear what grows near you.

Clockwise from top:

Forsythia (Forsythia x intermedia)

Enjoy blossoms raw in salads, cooked, dried or made into a syrup that can be used as a drink mixer.

ediblewildfood.com/blog/2012/04/pruning-forsythia-but-save-the-blossoms/

localkitchenblog.com/2010/04/13/forsythia-syrup/

Clover (Trifolium)

Kind of shadowed; sorry about that. Entirely edible, but seems to benefit from the addition of salt to ease digestion.

northernbushcraft.com/plants/clover/notes.htm

Snowdrop (Galanthus spp.)

Not so much a food as a tonic, purported to soothe stomach and joint pain as well as women’s reproductive problems.

gardenguides.com/92486-snowdrop-flowers.html

Wild Garlic (Allium vineale)

What we kids used to call ‘onion grass’ and pull up just to sniff its assertive fragrance—it should smell strongly of onions or garlic. Chop and enjoy raw or cooked. Eat it now, when it’s tender; once summer hits and it’s about to go to seed, the interior of these cylindrical sprouts becomes woody and dry.

ppws.vt.edu/scott/weed_id/allvi.htm

Dandelion (Taraxacum officinale)***

Roots, blossoms and young leaves edible; any longer than a finger’s length and the leaves become too bitter for me (but you might like them like that). This healthy plant can also be used as a tonic. And since Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine is one of my favorite books, one summer I was inspired to steep a bunch of flowers in vodka and a simple syrup, and made a lovely pale yellow liqueur.

umm.edu/altmed/articles/dandelion-000236.htm

Spring Crocus (Crocus Vernus)

Bulb, blossom and stigma all edible. I tried to dig up a bulb for the photo, but the ground was really resistant, and I didn’t want to damage the other flowers to get it.

arthurleej.com/p-o-m-Feb13.html

*Pun totally intentional. Shocker.

**I know plants from the ocean are missing from this picture. I really wanted to include some, but it’s been a cold month so far. Once it gets warmer I’ll see what I can find there.

***Why aren’t there any dandelion blossoms in this picture, Maris? Because I searched across three towns for some and then gave up and took the shot. Guess how many I saw the next few days? I’m not even kidding: It was as if they hid under the ground, giggling, then exploded like popcorn in a Jiffy Pop pan once I uploaded the picture. I even passed a whole lawn of them and considered coming back with my camera, but I didn’t want to give them the satisfaction.

full circle

The first batch set to rise by my radiator.

I was at it again for the past two days, baking and delivering bread as my family has been doing for close to a century. My Italian grandmother (who died before I was born) made one recipe, my dad made another, and true to the pattern, I make still another. Mine’s Martha Stewart’s chocolate cinnamon babka, which I describe in my last year’s post.

Here’s my photo album of the past two days.

A cool photo, but I’m hoping you’ll be more impressed by the fact that I shot it lefty.

Once the unbaked breads are in their buttered springforms, I put them onto my dining room table, next to a radiator. It’s there that they’ll rise overnight.

When I was growing up, we set the pans between layers of our sleeping bags. Now I use this vintage blanket. It was on my grandmother’s bed at my aunts’ and uncle’s house, and it was the one my sister and I slept beneath whenever we stayed there. Kind of works here.

Waiting to go night-night.

There’s nothing like waking up in the morning and pulling back the covers to find the bread dough puffy and sweetly fragrant.

Woo hoo! Risen breads in the morning light!

Right before they go into the oven, I brush them with egg and a splash of milk (an ‘egg wash’). This makes them brown up to a glossy mahogany color.

Below, the first batch cooling while the second batch is in the oven.

Then they get loosely wrapped in aluminum foil, oozing chocolate and all; schlepped to the car; and delivered around the county. All recipients used to live in Interlaken, where I grew up, but there’s only one there now. I’ve been bringing him bread since I was old enough to walk it to his house without dropping it, since about 1974. He’s in his eighties now and uses a cane, but still stands at the door not just to watch me walk to my car and see that I get in, but stays to watch until I drive away.

One more nice story for this year…

I mentioned in my last post that this was the first year I bought eggs from a local farm. Not just local, but organic; and not just a farm, but growers whom I consider friends—Silverton Farms in Toms River, NJ.

I used almost a dozen of their brown and Araucana eggs*, just under two days old. Next year I’ll try to get them even closer to the time I bake, but the breads still turned out lighter than usual, light as foam. This was the first time since my grandmother’s day—from the 20s or earlier to the 40s or 50s—that a family member used fresh, local eggs to make Easter bread.

Happy Easter, everybody. Now go eat some chocolate. Show some discipline.

*Click the ‘eggs’ link for pretty pictures; they’re sometimes called Easter eggs because of their lovely colors. So it was fitting)