refinement

I have this great recipe for truffle cookies. It includes three kinds of chocolate: unsweetened, semisweet chips, and cocoa powder. I also have migraines from time to time, somewhat less of a bragging point. They can be triggered by too much chocolate, so I’ve figured out how to keep them at bay while still having regular Chocolate Days. That’s what I call them, every third day, and I haven’t missed one in years. I’m crap at math, you guys. I’m never going to the moon. Chocolate Days — this is a thing I’m proud of.

Recently, one Chocolate Eve, I decided I wanted to make truffle cookies, but a gooier version — the kind you could eat with a spoon, and just one serving. After several attempts and increasingly tasty Chocolate Days, I landed upon a balance that gave me tender, cakey edges and a squooshy center.* It’s a little refinement on something that already worked well. Pushing the envelope to create something new and, dare I say, glorious.

What am I getting at here, besides revealing (once again) that I flirt with fanaticism?

I’m inviting you to come along as I head to Substack. I want to write and create and explore and discover with you on a platform devoted to writers.

The blog will still be me clicking away on my laptop about whatever yada yada is in my head that day. It will still be called eve’s apple. I will always have a free option to subscribe, but am curious about content I can offer folks who would want a paid subscription. (Want to throw me some ideas? What would you like to see more of? Lay it on me.)

I started this blog in 2011 with no idea what the blank I’d say that someone else wasn’t already saying. I found out because you’ve been so ridiculously generous and have told me. Many of you have been with me since the blog’s genesis and have become genuine friends. Thank you for reading my cheerful prattling and engaging with me. I love you.

Come along as I refine this thing, whatever it is, further. Okay? Say okay.

SUBSTACK PACKING LIST
Pyrex bowls
Foraging boots
Camera (still have to read the manual)
Art supplies (need new felt tips)
Sass

*If you want to have a go at the gooey, dial back this recipe to 1/3 and bake your little guy in a heatproof dish.

messy

This picture is not even trying to be sharp. It’s embarrassed by the subject matter.

*

When I was a kid, I often used to bake my mom’s incredible sour-cream coffee cake — often enough that one day, I just mindlessly plopped ingredients in a large bowl, without following the instructions and without thinking. I had just about finished filling up the bowl, sandbox-style, when I realized my mistake. But I couldn’t scoop out the ingredients at that point, and could not bear to dump the whole thing out. Instead, I just stirred everything up, stuck it in the Bundt pan as always, put it in the oven, and sweated profusely. When the cake was cool, I cut a slice and took a bite. It tasted exactly as if I had followed the recipe, and have clammed up about it ever since. (Until now. HI EVERYBODY.)

*

The streets in the tiny beach town next to my own are lined with hundred-year-old trees. I love taking walks there, and once I brought a friend along. She kept pausing, and I asked her what was going on. She said the sidewalk was at all different levels and she was afraid she was going to break her neck. Why didn’t the borough fix them? I looked down and saw she was right: In many places, the huge, ancient tree roots had picked the concrete or slate pavement right up. Walking was not a smooth, mindless experience but instead mild mountaineering. Why hadn’t I ever noticed this? Maybe because I’ve walked those streets all my life, and so have the residents. I genuinely never thought about it until that moment, and would wager that the topic has never been brought to the borough for the same reason.

So what’s the takeaway here, on another New Year’s Eve, the door to a new year just creaking open? The world is astonishingly messy right now. 2023 has been (at least for this chick) alternately great and un-great — in other words, messy. What do we do going forward? Do we just plant that cake pan in the oven and hope for the best? Do we navigate the highs and lows by learned instinct and keep walking?

I think I just answered my own question (and spoiler: many, many’s the time I’ve strolled into a blog post with a question and hoped that by the time my fingers stop tapping, I’ll have an answer), and that is, rely on whatever I can to make it through the mess, whether it’s one I created or one I inherited. It doesn’t really matter how I do it, and fully expect to face-plant several times. I don’t care. In either case, I’m going to keep walking.

Wishing you all a solid recipe, a solid pair of walking shoes, and the fortitude to bash on, regardless. Throw me the same wishes, will you?

Peace/love.

two stories

What else does the Reverend Mother say?
That you have to look for your life.
— “The Sound of Music” (1965)

Last week at the beach, I passed a dad and his little two-year-old girl strolling together. He held her by the hand and looked straight ahead. She, on the other hand, was utterly captivated by the footprints she was leaving in the sand. Forget the majesty of sea and sky, not to mention the antics of seagulls. Her only interest, at least in those few moments, was marveling at each little footprint, one by one by one.
*

The other night I couldn’t sleep (I mean, who can — it’s 2023) and wandered into the dark living room to look out at the 4 a.m. sky over the Atlantic. The light of a plane blinked, slowly coming toward the coastline, then swerved north toward our major airports in New York and North Jersey. The passengers had just flown across the ocean. It took all night long, and they were finally at the end of their journey. I had never witnessed something like this and felt privileged. Maybe some were rubbing the sleep from their eyes, pulling the neck pillows from around their stiff shoulders, looking out the window, and wondering if anyone in those twinkling buildings was looking back at them.
*

Examining what we create and the space we occupy on this big blue ball is messy, unpredictable work. These days, I’m teetering on the ball with one of those long, long poles that acrobats on unicycles on tightropes use. But I’m making new somethings to admire and seeing new somethings out the window.

Happy turn of the year, all.

BONUS STORY
I’ve written before about my love of weirdness, and will never tire of how this time of year wraps itself around me like a oak-leaf-damp, moody-sky-paranormal, moon-glow blanket. Off-center feels like home to me. For Halloween, I made a version of Mounds bars using organic dark chocolate and coconut. I didn’t use nearly enough coconut, but I still polished them all off at 8:30 in the morning. Made sense then and always will.

a life made by hand

My mom’s recipe for banana bread. (Actually, it’s Lady Bird Johnson’s recipe. I’m serious.)

Have you heard the expression in the food world that declares unreservedly that baking is an exact science, as opposed to straight-up cooking, where you can add a dash of this and omit that and not worry about the result? The thinking is that each ingredient in the baked recipe—whether it be for blueberry muffins, a five-tiered wedding cake with sugar cages on top, or anything in between—has been the subject of agonizingly strenuous measuring, testing, and tasting, and any fiddling with it will make your jadeite-green KitchenAid standing mixer explode.

I’m here to tell you it’s a sneaky little fib. Not all of it, of course. You can’t add or subtract just anything without there being repercussions. I wouldn’t suggest adding canned shrimp, for example, to the wedding cake above, unless the cake was for your Persian cats on the day of their nuptials. And the shrimp would look cute in those cages. Your Persians have no idea why we’re even discussing it.

But if you have just the tiniest bit of experience in the kitchen, even if you only go in there to open the fridge, you know you can add chocolate chips to a peanut-butter cookie batter (or walnuts to a banana bread recipe, as my mom did above). The more confident you get, you might want to cut the amount of baking soda in half so it doesn’t taste bitter, or add some more salt to make the nuts and chocolate pop.

I don’t think I have a single recipe now that doesn’t have notes. Try it and see if it works for you. There is no baked-good police that will show up at your door at midnight and whomp your dissenting bottom with a wooden spoon.

I can’t help but draw a parallel (and exhale gratefully as I do) between the inaccurate rule about baking being an exact science and just plain living. We can color a hippopotamus hot pink. We can experiment with unorthodox ideas while the world, tucked behind the tidy picket fences of shoulds and why-don’t-yous, tut-tuts. We can think before we jump and still jump (or not). And ultimately, we can conduct any number of do-overs. We’re in charge of what we cook up. Author Clarissa Pinkola Estes describes living this way in the title of this post. As well, there is forever and always this: “When you’re a kid, they tell you it’s all … grow up. Get a job. Get married. Get a house. Have a kid, and that’s it. But the truth is, the world is so much stranger than that. It’s so much darker. And so much madder. And so much better.” — Doctor Who, “Love and Monsters” (2005)

editing

I sometimes ride the fence between cropping down a photo to its essence, and worrying that if I do, I’ll take away too much.

In future years, will I, or my client, wonder what was on the other side of that building? Is it right to play God, or at least a high-ranking seraph, by using Photoshop as an intangible chainsaw to slice off the lower leaves on that beautiful old sycamore?

Right now we’re going through the last of my mom’s belongings, winnowing it down to exactly what to keep and nothing else. Once that’s decided, there won’t be anything left in an odd nightstand drawer or beach bag that could answer all of our questions, nothing left to say This is why it all happened, this is the reason, you’re not wrong, and if that’s the case, how do we know what to edit? Years from now, will I wish we had kept her brown silk kerchief with the fleur de lis pattern, one of the many she used to wear in her hair in the seventies? Is that the piece that would have soothed everything?

The same duel goes on in my brain in the kitchen, to be honest. Many, many’s the night when, surrounded by dishes, tiny snow-capped mountains of flour at my feet, I’ve stared into a Pyrex bowl and wondered if this time I should add the squeeze of lemon juice that Martha Stewart insists is necessary, or whether I can just deem her insane and put it in the oven so I can go to bed sooner.*

In Louise Fitzhugh’s masterpiece Harriet the Spy, the title character’s former nanny writes her, “Gone is gone. I never miss anything or anyone because it all becomes a lovely memory.” Had she been an editor, Ole Golly would have been the baddest of asses. Her words are the Neosporin I apply to my editing worries. I have to trust that I’ll remember what matters. I have to trust that the outcome will work, and as it’s supposed to.

Everything else can go.

*Spoiler: Martha typically loses this one.

lost and found

Tonight I stood under a mulberry tree I happened upon, completely hidden from the bridge above me and the people walking dogs or chatting as they strolled by on it, and I felt my blood pressure go down to a whisper. It always does.

Mulberry trees are becoming an endangered species, at least here in the New Jersey outback.

They — along with sycamore and crab apple trees — are increasingly unloved by suburban municipalities because they drop bark and fruit (respectively). Now, stepping on dry, curled sycamore bark offers a very satisfying crunch. And berries and apples are … you know … edible. But most people in my area don’t see it that way. Mulberries in particular, if they’re along a roadway or near a parking lot, will be either cut back by several feet or cut down entirely if they have the audacity to drop their fruit to hungry animals below (like the deer, or the ducks, or me). They’re deemed ‘messy.’ This means every year I lose trees, either because short me can no longer reach the severely abbreviated branches of a mulberry tree or because it’s been cut down to a splintered nub.

Optimist that I am, I spend every mid-June trying to stay ahead of the chainsaw crowd by checking on all of my mulberry trees, looking out for new ones I hadn’t noticed in the past to make up for those I lose. This year I lost three.

It’s easier to find trees now, when they’re in fruit. This year I found a huge old one and three young ones, right under my nose. One I was surprised to find in my hometown, within walking distance, in a place where I’d never noticed a mulberry tree. There’s no rush like finding a new tree after you’ve lost one (or more). It gives me hope that there will always be an errant mulberry tree that will be overlooked by the myopic hare-brained public works teams.

Thinking we’re all, unconsciously or not, trying to find trees to make up for those we’ve lost, hoping amid the noise of just living that we can find peace under an old tree or find a new tree … whatever our tree happens to be.

*
Not unlike the mulberries, my latest Edible Jersey article has dropped. This one’s on foraging. I got to write in first person! Hope you dig it; let me know what you think.

https://ediblejersey.ediblecommunities.com/things-do/foraging-food-walk-wild-side

all rise

One of my vintage springforms, ring and base.
*

‘If you told me to write a love song tonight, I’d have a lot of trouble. But if you told me to write a love song about a girl with a red dress who goes into a bar and is on her fifth martini and is falling off her chair, that’s a lot easier and it makes me free to say anything I want.’ — Stephen Sondheim

What do you think of when you think of restriction? If you’re anything like me, your heart starts to pound, and not in a good way. Art doesn’t love a leash.

But Steve above has a point, as does Mrs. Whatsit in A Wrinkle in Time (L’Engle, 1962), when she compares the way we live our lives to a sonnet. I’m paraphrasing here, but essentially she says that although life makes us adhere to a certain structure, we have the freedom to live, within its parameters, any way we like.

My weekend baking unexpectedly helped me embrace this. Every Good Friday evening I make up six loaves of Easter bread. Every Holy Saturday morning I bake and deliver them to friends and family. I’m not religious; am in fact agnostic. But it’s enormously rewarding to keep up this family tradition, begun (at minimum) with my paternal grandmother, who baked Easter breads back in Italy over 100 years ago. Besides, food is religion to some of us.

I bake the breads in my dad’s springform pans from the mid-’60s, when he took over bread duty from his mother. Some pans are a bit wonky after years of use. But they all let the rising — and then the baking — bread do their thing admirably, year after year.

The bread filling is made of chocolate, cinnamon, sugar, and sweet butter, spread onto the bread dough and then rolled up, twisted, and coiled. Then the loaves get plopped into buttered pans and are set to rise under a blanket overnight. In the morning, in the oven, they rise again.

If each loaf were set to rise and bake on a cookie sheet, it would spread aimlessly sideways. The sides of the pan support the architecture of the loaf, creating layers of bread and that sticky filling. The pan doesn’t hold it back. It lets the bread achieve height, with the butter there to accommodate the glide onward and upward, building beauty.

*
Bulletin
I finally bought a domain for eve’s apple and am stoked about it. WordPress is stoked as well, if a bit shocked it took me as long as it did. Stay along for the ride: evesapple.blog.

For an IG shot of the finished bread with requisite layers, @marisa.procopio will get you there.

deepening

In Madeleine L’Engle’s 1973 classic ‘The Wind in the Door,’ Meg Murry races to save her brother’s life. She doesn’t take action by rushing him to a hospital, but (in true L’Engle form) must go within his very cells, within his ailing mitochondria … within which his farandolae are insisting on keeping the status quo and thus are susceptible to destruction.

I’m going somewhere with this, honest.

Those little farae have to choose to develop into what they were meant to be, to Deepen, or it’s adios, amigo. Finally, they do.

It’s fitting that right now, as I’m making changing choices in a handful of different capacities, that the local flora and fauna are changing too. These are the last chilly weeks of winter here in New Jersey, just 15 days until the spring equinox. And where I don’t already see crocuses and daffodils blooming, I see slender little branches of forsythia turning yellow, or a soft smear of red across the oak treetops as the tips of their branches get rosier, or — as above — beach rose (Rosa rugosa) twigs deepening from brown to pale green. In late summer, after its lovely flowers fade, this plant produces rose hips, which are full of Vitamin C and are traditionally made into a tart-sweet jelly.

Anything that ceases to grow is dying. If this plant didn’t Deepen, it wouldn’t become what it was meant to become — a shaggy, lush, healthy rose bush. And we wouldn’t have the jelly to enjoy and help us become healthy.

Maybe it’s just a biological chain reaction of warmer soil and brighter sun that shakes the beach roses out of their sleepy winter mood and Deepen, getting ready for another year. But I like to think they choose it.

Sitting here in the sunshine of a bright late-winter day, turning a little yellow like the forsythia, a little rosy like the oak trees, a little green like the beach roses. There’s a lot of adventure ahead.

Bud
Bloom
Fruit.

mode

The smell of homemade play dough — water, flour, salt, oil, and cream of tartar — as I stir it together on the stove and then knead it, always brings me back to when I was very small, though I can’t 100% label why. I was born during the hippie revolution, which sparked a back-to-the-earth and make-it-by-hand revolution as well. Though my parents were very not hippies, I did go to nursery school, where the teachers wore flared jeans and their long hair parted down the middle. My olfactory system is probably remembering what my brain can’t place: all of the handmade crafts we created in that narrow, three-story building on a street thick with trees.

I have always loved molding stuff with my hands. That’s why I never stopped. Play dough still makes a regular appearance when I prop design; the above will be a dog’s bone-shaped cake for Legally Blonde, or I’ll use it to make fake brownies for Evil Dead, or heaps of fake ice cream and fruitcake for Little Women. As far as stuff that’s actually edible, I make fondant or marzipan and shape it to enjoy as is or to top a really special cake. It’s something I love so much I know I’ll never outgrow it.

On the other hand, papier-mâché, that other hippie favorite, is like that co-worker you consider bringing out with you from time to time, knowing full well that if you do it, you’re rolling the dice on how the night will end up. The stuff can fail spectacularly, falling apart in your hands 78 times in a row; deadline swinging over your head like an ax; your dining room table, floor, and lap covered with soaked newspaper and miniscule bits of shredded paper. Then it comes together, and you become religious for the first time in your life, praying it stays together and dries without cracking.

Last fall, I designed a hilt for two small swords and made them of papier-mâché, and the above is a fairly accurate accounting of the experience. Luckily, the result was positive. They looked great, the director was happy, and in my portfolio they are a creepily welcome departure from the norm.

I like the idea of a life made by hand as well, and not by accident or default. It’s something I have always tried to do, with as much ingenuity and resourcefulness as I could muster, with varying degrees of success and bits of paper stuck to the floor of my expectations and plans. I’m shaping a lot right now. Happy new year, continued.

noni new year

Here’s a story for a chilly January day.

Years ago, I traveled through a handful of islands in the Tahitian archipelago, among them, a tiny island called Taha’a. There it is above. I had once read that when you step off the ferry, the air is filled with the fragrance of vanilla. This was entrancing enough to travel halfway around the planet to find out. Alas, the rumor wasn’t true … not quite, that is. The smell is not there at the ferry dock. But it sure is once you arrive at the vanilla plantations.

After we filled our noses with that magnificence, we got in the back of an ancient 4×4 with surprisingly terrible shocks plus a group of Europeans and were driven into the heart of the jungle. Along the way, Edwin, the driver*, periodically stopped the truck and jumped out to teach us how the jungle contributes to Polynesian culture, often using the small saber** he wore in his belt to whack down fruit or sticks. At one point, down came a lumpy-looking fruit. He split it in half and held it out to me to smell, which I did excitedly. Suffice it to say it did not smell like vanilla. In fact, Wikipedia helpfully calls it ‘vomit fruit.’

After Edwin finished laughing, he told us the noni fruit may smell putrid, but that it’s reputed to heal almost anything. It has also been traditionally used to make dye and the trunk of the tree used to carve out canoes. In many parts of the world, people do eat the noni fruit as well, raw or cooked.

Many survived 2020-22. But they’re nonetheless (and understandably) disheartened, cynical, heartbroken, spent. I am grateful all the way to Tahiti and back that for whatever reason, the universe spared me the worst of the above, and I’m approaching 2023 the way I do a noni fruit. I’m ready for it to smell. It might. It might also be useful, nourishing, healing. It might be good for us, no matter how it smells.

I hope it makes us laugh.

*In my travel journal, I describe him as a French-speaking cross between Don Ho and Buddy Hackett.
**Think Crocodile Dundee: ‘That’s not a knife. THAT’S a knife.’