December | 2006 | pull up a chair

December 18, 2006

it’s brisket weather…

borrowing amply from mr. capote, who in his delicious and utterly memorizable 1956 treasure, “a christmas memory,” tells us of his eccentric sixty-something-year-old cousin who presses her nose to the kitchen window, gauges the novemberness of the outside tableau, and exclaims, “oh my, it’s fruitcake weather!…it’s fruitcake weather! fetch our buggy. help me find my hat.”

and at our house this weekend, i woke up, sniffed my nose in the air, and proclaimed, “it’s brisket weather.” with that i trotted off to the butcher who had cleaved and wrapped seven and a half pounds of pure red steer, laced heavily with adipose. he marked it, mahany, and as he handed over the white-paper-wrapped log, he raised one eyebrow and quizzed, “that jewish?” well, no, mister meat man. but my husband is, my boys are half and half, and we do hanukkah.

the thing about being an irish catholic mother in a jewish-catholic family is that you have no long lineage of recipes you call your own. you have, forgive me for braggin’, something far better than that: an amalgam of adopted jewish mothers and the best of their best. i’ve got ina’s matzo balls, aunt joni’s tips on storing, freezing and reheating latkes, liat’s hamantashcen, audrey’s “tzimmes with potato kugel topping,” that one cut from the los angeles times, now yellowed and long ago scribbled with audrey’s thoughts on how to improve it.

brisket i’ve got in triplicate: susan’s famed brisket, one boasts; sandra’s working-woman’s brisket; and the one i now call my own, brisket from harlene ellin’s mom. now, mind you, i have met harlene ellin’s mom once–at the side of a pool at a 7-year-old’s birthday long long ago, where the meeting was doused liberally in chlorinated pool water. but harlene’s mama and i, once or twice a year, we make brisket together. listening closely as she insists it must be heinz chili sauce, nobody’s else’s. following carefully as she guides me through the rinsing and patting dry of the beef slab.

last night, i leaned heavily on mama ellin. she swears you need 50 to 55 minutes per pound in a 325-degree oven. do the math: that was 6 and a quarter hours. being a good catholic girl, i did what i was told. even though after a while i started doubting the wisdom of all this baking and baking. was i en route to the leatheriest brisket ever served at a hanukkah dinner? as i unearthed said brisket from the oven, well past bedtime, and noted the bayleaves had started to blacken, my knees how they trembled, my calm how it shattered.

quick, i grabbed mark bittman. he tells me how to cook everything. he said nothing about brisket being cooked for a full quarter of a day. i googled brisket. the longest stretch there was five hours, for a five-pound brisket. but i had the motherlode of all briskets. my meat man set me up with 7.5 pounds, for cryin’ out loud. i had no option last night but to stay the course with mama ellin. i did as i was told, vaulted it from roasting pan to refrigerator pan, tucked it in under a taut aluminum blanket, turned out the kitchen lights and hoped for the best.

frankly, my brisket dreams did little to soothe me.

called the butcher first thing this morn. he swears i did the right thing; only he cautions a low long oven is the best route to brisket heaven. he goes overnight at 200 degrees. has brisket by the mound for breakfast, he does. maybe i should have turned down the heat.

all i know now is it smelled a bit like heaven around here for six-plus hours on sunday, all chili sauce, red wine, cloves and those bay leaves. i wasn’t about to lower the burn on that celestial scent.

we had 12 coming for brisket tonight, but little tedd has a fever of 103. so, for now, me and my brisket we are on hold. we are whispering prayers, jewish and catholic, for fork-tender, melt-in-your-mouth, mind-if-i-help-myself-to-more. dinner is rescheduled for wednesday. we’ll let you know if our brisket prayers they are answered.

here’s how harlene ellin’s mama and i go at it, year after year:

Brisket
3 pounds first-cut brisket (these things a Catholic girl must learn, who knew from first-, second- or even third-cut?)
1 C. Heinz chili sauce
½ C. brown sugar
¼ C. dry red wine
¼ C. water
1 small or medium onion, sliced
3 cloves, whole
6 black peppercorns, whole
3 bay leaves

Rinse brisket and pat dry with paper towels. In a small bowl combine chili sauce, brown sugar, wine and water. Mix well. Pour ¼ of chili sauce mixture into a roasting pan. Place brisket on sauce, fat side up. Place onions, cloves, peppercorns and bay leaves evenly over brisket. Top with remaining chili sauce mixture.

Cover roasting pan tightly. Bake brisket in preheated 325 degree oven for 50 to 55 minutes per pound, or until meat is fork tender. Remove meat from pan and place it in a container. Remove bay leaves, peppercorns and cloves from gravy, and put gravy in a container. Refrigerate meat and gravy for several hours or overnight.

To reheat brisket, slice against grain to desired thickness and place in covered casserole dish sprayed with cooking oil spray. Remove and discard any congealed fat from gravy. Pour the gravy over meat. Cover and reheat in a 375 degree oven for 30 minutes or until heated through. (Brisket can be reheated in microwave.)

Serves 6

feel free to add your brisket thoughts to this melt-in-your-mouth conversation….

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December 15, 2006

every time i turn a knob…

which, as you might imagine, is a hundred times a day in a working kitchen, with two boys, a fat cat, a hungry husband and me. and every single time, since i found out, i think of danny. danny screwed in every one of those ice box catches, as they are called in hardware speak. there are 17 of them in the farmhouse kitchen, and another 23 drawer pulls.

danny, who is no longer, sweated over every last one of all of them.

on a july day so hot he was licking away sweat from his upper lip before the third catch was on, danny and his power driver had at it. during a chapter in the kitchen construction that was nearly a stand-still, they called in danny. to come to our rescue. danny was the kind of guy who comes to your rescue: solid, quiet, get-the-job-done.

danny killed himself exactly three weeks ago today. leaving behind a wife he loved, and three kids, 5, 3, and newborn.
hung himself, danny did.

despondent over lord knows how many things. but one of the things was that he’d been rehabbing his own house, trying to make it stretch for his stretching family. he’d dug a new foundation, right up against the old one. and the rains came one september spell. literally washed his foundation out. the house caved in. danny, 38, wore the weight of it on his taut, slim shoulders.

and every time i turn a knob, i see danny. see a hundred frames of danny getting the job done.

a house, a house lived in by souls who love it, who honor it, who keep an ear open to its many whisperings, is, as any archeologist would tell you, an artifact layered with history and meaning, heartbreak and miracle.

the knobs for me will forever be danny, danny’s heartbreaking story.

besides the fact that we were finally getting knobs on cabinets that had hung naked for weeks, the drama of the week that danny came was that danny had a baby coming any minute. his third baby.

see, danny had grown up on our watch. back at our old house, he was the smart, young kid on the job. the carpenter with the degree in economics from lawrence university, one of those really fine midwest liberal arts schools that pull in really smart kids who might not look toward the coasts. danny could push a pencil, but he thrilled at banging a hammer.

they were a team of four, the builders, our builders, jim&friends. and we loved them. i don’t know how you have a house filled with men hammering and sawing and building your dreams and not love them. each one had a role, a schtick, a something you could count on. characters on the stage of your life for however long the job takes, you await their coming in from the wings each morning, you stand and applaud when they have just sung their hearts out–even when they sing with a hand plane or a power driver.

not long after wrapping up our job in the city, danny decided he needed to hang up his tool belt and become something of which his wife would be proud: an accountant. he took the tests, passed on his first try. danny was always a smart kid. he tried crunching numbers for awhile. but he just didn’t get the buzz that comes from building houses for a living. so he went out on his own, his little family growing right along with his business.

but we needed him this summer. the building had, for a number of reasons, gotten way behind.

the day he showed up, everyone knew we were back on track. he stayed late the night he put the knobs on. we came home to a dark house, but a house with polished-nickel knobs shining.

danny kept coming all week, getting the job done. his wife had the baby the next tuesday. he didn’t come to our house that day. but he came back soon after. he was beaming. he talked about kathy, the kids, he was beaming.

i never talked to him after his house caved in in september. i should have. i was dreaming up some kind of benefit concert, something that would get some cash in his hands. i never got past dreaming.

then jim called one dreary november morn, right before thanksgiving. jim who had worked beside danny since danny was a 15-year-old kid looking to make money during summers in high school. jim who said he cried like a baby when he got the call.

“you remember danny,” he started, oddly. as if. as if i wouldn’t remember.

“he took his life.”

it’s been three weeks. and every time i reach for the knob….i think of those kids, this christmas. i run my fingers slowly over the polished-nickel knob. bless you, danny. bless you.

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December 14, 2006

honey, what’s that growing in the fridge?

tucked back between the leftover roast-chicken hash, the spaghetti, and the cranberry relish, there squats a hyacinth bulb in a bidet of cold water in my otherwise innocent fridge. what we’re aiming for here is to get the ol’ bulb’s private parts, the basal plate, if you prefer, to delight in sucking up that cold drink, thus sending down roots that will gulp mightily while the green stem starts shooting up toward the cottage-cheese shelf. this is how you grow a garden in winter, how you turn upside down the whole planet and the slant of the sun, really, tricking the poor globes of potential into thinking it’s spring we are entering, not the deep depths of winter.
i am something of a paperwhite nut. like gretel scattering her bread crumbs through the woods, i scatter paperwhites everywhere i go in december. if i’m coming to your house, you can bet i’ll have paperwhites somewhere on my person–stuffed in a pocket, tucked in a big fat cereal bowl, planted in a gravely mound–and i’ll leave them behind for you to take in their december dance. i can do paperwhites with my eyes closed.
apparently, i can’t do hyacinths. not even with eyes wide open.
i am a hyacinth virgin, and i am definitely doing this with training wheels on.
feeling frisky and full of risk a few weeks back, i decided it was high time i moved up the horticultural ladder: a hyacinth would be mine. with all the tremble of a true go-get-’em girl, i reached out my fist at the garden shop that i love, and i grabbed the biggest, fattest purple-skinned bulb from the bin. because they do gardening for dummies there at the nursery, they had a healthy stash of cheat sheets nearby. “forcing hyacinth bulbs,” it read. “hyacinths are one of the easiest bulbs to force,” it promised.
that was two weeks ago. i did everything they told me. i plopped the fat bottom of the bulb in my special hyacinth forcing jar. i studied the cheat-sheet diagram, determined from their careful line drawing that the water was not supposed to touch the frilly underparts of the bulb. i tucked the whole contraption at the back of a storage closet in my shivery basement. (if you want beauty in winter, you must simulate the deep dark frozen underground of your garden.) i checked every morning for days. nothing. nothing. then, as if some subterranean plot to foil my hope, a spot of mold. egad. a green, furry threat to do in my bulb. but nothing, still, from the frilly underparts.
no more waiting around. it was time to put in a call to jennifer brennan, horticultural wizard and bulb lady supreme at the chalet nursery in wilmette, where this recalcitrant bulb had found its way to my basket in the first place.
get that thing in the fridge, and be sure the water is tickling its under-frills, she insisted. the 50-degree basement, while too cold for a little boy and his legos, is not cold enough for a hyacinth bulb itching to burst out of its oniony skin. it needs 38 to 40 degrees. and, while we’re at it, it does not like the gases emitted by ripening fruits or veggies, so the persnickety thing needed a see-through sealable coat, the bulb lady advised. thus, the gallon-sized zip-lock bag in which the whole kitten caboodle now sits, shivering. i need to keep an eye on the water level; make sure it’s touching the basal plate now, and once they start their winter’s descent, the tips of the roots must be dangling in water. then, when the whole forcing-vase bottom is a thicket of roots, i can unearth the whole deal, exhuming my experiment-in-risk from its place at the sorry back of the fridge. today it twiddles its rootlets alongside soggy spaghetti, by the middle of january, god and basal plate willing, it shall be a proud cobalt-blue garden of one, abloom by my sink, knocking me silly with its heavenly scent. stay tuned…

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December 13, 2006

lest you think it’s all sugarplums…

this is the after picture, a mid-morning proof that even the best-smeared jams do not do the trick. see how he licked off the raspberries, from the gingerboy only, left all the rest? ah yes. didn’t want you thinking it was all pure perfection over here. nope. no way. we can haul out the cookie cutters, slather on the jam, but a boy will be a boy will be a boy. he was full, he said. notice the lick marks on the plate? sort of like a tongue skidding through raspberry tar…..
never think that confectionary delusions will creep in here. a good dose of reality is what we serve best…

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December 13, 2006

of gingerbread boys and jam

i think it’s the darkness of a december morning that i especially love. darkness on the other side of the panes. a blanket of black. inside, so many little lights. especially on this, the feast of santa lucia, yet another miracle of light here in the passage of deepest darkness. it is especially enchanted here on maple lane because we have our own home-grown lucia, a beauty of a now-16-year-old, golden-haired girl. with the trail of swedish princesses and tomten behind her, she dons the candle-lit wreath and breaks open the darkness with her swanlike promenade, sidewalk to street to sidewalk, icicles some years practically dripping from her nose. she is undeterred by anything. if the calendar reads “13 december,” she is under the wreath, she is walking, white robe flowing. and so, as my little tedd awoke this morn, i exclaimed, “it’s santa lucia day.” ever trying to delight him into eating, i offered bread and jam and cheese; “swedish,” i said, spinning. and without skipping a beat, he darted toward the cookie cutter cupboard and insisted, “cut in gingerbread shapes.” but of course. and so, with the blanket of darkness just beyond the panes, we cut out oat bread into gingerbread boys, and dressed them thickly with raspberry pants and raspberry sweaters. to keep the cold away.

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December 11, 2006

a way of being is born

tuesday’s child is full of grace. and so it is tuesday. and so i begin. labor makes you cranky, birthing labor that is. so maybe that’s why i’ve been so cranky these past few days. i was birthing an idea, a virtual universe, and only now, when the baby is making its way out of me, gestating for months, many many months, will the fog lift, the crankiness melt, the darkness give way to light. like all births, i have no idea what’s coming. no idea how all this might unfold. only i have hope and an idea. i hope that this place becomes a touchstone for a whole circle of us, that we will drop in, pull up a chair, share some thinks, as my beloved friend and dula of this site, sandra sweetpea, so perfectly always puts it. as every conversation worth diving into is one that wends and winds, turning this way and that, this too will be a stew. we might marvel at a new children’s book. we might have to swap recipes for that pumpkin bread on my table. i might share a prayer, or a snippet of poetry. i might tell you the very cool thing i just read about pouring a good stiff drink for your paperwhite bulbs so they won’t grow so floppy, and bang against the glass, up there on the sill. if i stumble into a magical shop where handmade or one-of-a-kind things will delight you, you can bet i’ll let you know where and how to get there. the mighty mississippi of all these tributaries, the force flowing ever onward, will be this: we are looking for everyday grace. i believe that in quietly choosing a way of being, a way of consciously stitching grace and Beauty into the whole cloth of our days, we can sew love where before there was only one moment passing into another. making the moment count, that’s what it’s about here. inhaling, and filling your lungs and your soul with possibility. learning to breathe again. learning to listen to the quiet, blessed tick and the tock of your heart. filling your soul with great light so that, together, we can shoosh away the darkness that tries always to seep in through the cracks, wherever they might be. please, pull up a chair….

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Month: December, 2006