She came home last week. She saw Holly’s lemons on the table: not Meyers like our tree but the classic Eureka type. Cool! She called dibs. With a great big pretty please.

We had enough sweets around…

She really really wanted that lemon chiffon cake that had so many good memories wrapped around the thought.

Tonight we squinted through the copy of the copy of the copy that had the instructions part mostly cut off–she knew I would just know because I was such a baker all her childhood. I cheated: I compared it to my 1952 Betty Crocker to find out how long I should have it in the oven. And I substituted some of the water with the extra tablespoon of juice the lemon offered up.

I finally baked it for her. And I would brag and tell you how good it was except that we’re not cutting into it till breakfast, so all we’re doing right now is admiring its pretty face.

Call it a fruit omelet, yeah, that’s it.

I try to always have some small snack in my purse. You never know.

I was coming out of CVS on a beautiful 72 degree day. A little ways down the sidewalk from the door there was fabric on the ground, but there was so little depth to it that it took me a moment to realize that there was in fact a person under there.

Sometimes instinct screams Stay AWAY! but this time it felt like the opposite.

I sat down in my car a moment and went looking and hoping, but I could only find one of these.

Sir?

His face suddenly appeared as I was held the raspberry oatmeal fig bar pack out to him.

It’s not much, I told him, but it’s what I could find.

The radiance in his face! He loved me for it in that moment as if I were his own mother. I was a little staggered. And yet not a further word was said.

I glanced back as I walked towards my car: he was back fully underneath. The bright pink package was lying on the drab concrete against the outer wall of the store just past his head, where he could reach for it at any time but so could anyone else if they happened to be hungry and needed a bite to eat.

Her plane is in the air, I can’t wait!

One of the things Whole Foods is good for is allergy-friendly food. I picked up a number of her favorites.

I found it. Yes! They had a dairy-free chocolate hazelnut spread. I debated on various cream substitutes for the rest of the ice cream batch I was plotting but realized I’d better let her tell me her preferences first.

You have to read every ingredient every time. Manufacturers make changes all the time.

The tired clerk looked like he was just counting the minutes till his shift was over and he could get out of there as he rang my stuff up.

I looked at the conveyer belt as he started to bag it up and told him, My daughter’s flying in from Boston tonight. So: all the chocolate!

He laughed and he looked at me with joy for my joy that I was going to get to see her. He was young but old enough to really know comings-home. It made his day, and that made mine: it was one of those moments that takes you by surprise and almost takes your breath away because all the sudden the love is right there, totally out in the open, we were strangers no more.

I told him Thank you! as I headed out of the store.

We finished off the second batch tonight.

I am not a big Nutella person: it’s too sweet and too much sugar and fat before nuts. I like to roast and skin hazelnuts, Cuisinart them into a paste, add a little hazelnut oil and chocolate and call it good. I mean, go straight to the source of the flavors you want, right?

And then Nutella made its first try at ice cream and Costco was carrying their cones and I tried a box.

The cones stayed crunchy in the freezer. This is rare. The ice cream: as Sandra Boynton wrote in her Chocolate: the Consuming Passion, chocolate is everybody’s favorite but not in ice cream, where vanilla reigns by far. Therefore the fault is not in the chocolate, but in ice cream’s rendition of it. Truth!

Until now, when hazelnuts got in on the act. The Nutella cones were too sweet, and I’m not into too sweet–except those. They totally got to me.

But like so much at Costco, it was a temporary thing and then they were gone.

So I went looking. You guys, this was bad: I had to have that ice cream available. I’m not used to being a junk food junkie.

I found this. The amount of salt it called for was startling, though; I used half and it still came out like a salty caramel effect. So let me praise and borrow so I never lose this and link and sing this person’s praises and let me tell you the ice cream recipe we’ve made twice in ten days now and need to stay away from for awhile because I could eat way way way too much of it. And it’s not too sweet. One batch takes half a large Costco jar of Nutella. (Richard: “I’m not sure I needed to know that.”) Yes I’m already fantasizing about trying to create a homemade-nutella version, but in this, the commercial stuff justifies itself at last.

So here goes.

Nutella ice cream

Put two cups of heavy cream in a large bowl and put a strainer over it. (It will help cool your mixture in a few minutes.)

Whip 4 egg yolks with 1/2 c sugar till it’s light yellow.

Over the stove, whisk 3/4 c Nutella with 1 c. whole milk (I did a half cup nonfat with a half cup cream, gotta use up that Costco half gallon, right?) and heat till almost simmering. With the Kitchenaid beating away, ladle a bunch into the egg mixture to bring up its temperature, then pour that all back into the pan whisking away and cook the whole thing but don’t let it get to a boil at all. 177F, she says. Yeah something like that, said me.

Next, pour it into the cream with the sieve straining out any egg bits and add 2 tsp vanilla (Madagascar Bourbon vanilla goes best with chocolate) and 1/2 tsp salt.

Let it cool, and then there’s your ice cream mixture.

For our 45th anniversary Richard gave me an ice cream machine that freezes as well as churns and this amount is its limit. I can pour it in straight from room temperature and 30-40 minutes later we’re good.

This is what Nutella has been waiting to come to be all this time.

Richard’s reaction to the New York Times article about Andy’s farm turning into housing was the same as my initial one: Go. Go now. Everybody will want to.

I said, But I’m going tomorrow with Holly, but he and I both still felt it–Go! The place will be cleaned out.

I hopped right in the car and went.

She loves figs like I love peaches and the figs were on, along with the last of the nectarines and plums; from her house we are more than halfway to Andy’s and she wanted to see the place while it was still there. Her husband had a meeting in our town today. What’s an extra ninety minutes on the road at that point?

Cool, we’ll have a great time!

You never know though how plans will actually work out and they had a long drive ahead of them. I was standing in Andy’s farm store thinking about roasting figs and saving them in the freezer as an ingredient in winter, ready to go, and how good those have been to have. You never know. The figs will still be on next week, I’ll still be making my weekly trek. I don’t need a lot of them right now, I started to brush it away. One should be plenty for now. I’ll be right back tomorrow.

The thought persisted, hard, you never know.

So I brought home not one box for us but three: Exel, Tiger aka Panachee aka Panache depending on who’s doing the spelling, and Black Madeira. The descriptions of Black Madeira on the Fig Forum were so good that I actually bought a scion once but did not succeed at rooting it. I got a bit of leaf out of it before it died.

It was ten bucks. If I’d been serious about it I’d have bought a started tree but I knew I had no room for that.

So what actually happened: traffic was horrible and they were stuck in it for an extra hour and by the time she’d dropped him off across town, the idea of getting back in the car for another ninety, when we could just sit and talk and for me to be able to hear with no traffic noise…

And there were her figs all ready and waiting. Or mostly. One each of the Black Madeira and the Tiger had been sampled by then, because hey, we were going to go to Andy’s together the next afternoon. The one Delicioso plum she let me add to them hoped to make up for it.

I was so glad to see a new sign up at the beginning of the summer that said Mariani Orchards. A new name? A new generation is taking it over?

That sign is gone now. I was hoping it was a teen prank or something.

This article. Andy Mariani made the business section of the New York Times today on who he is and the selling of his land for a housing development. His home will be torn down with the trees.

My one last thread of hope is in the aside that the county has to approve it first… They will, though.

I had so hoped that the farm conservancy folks had stepped up and given him a different outcome. He will continue farming 20 leased acres because that’s who he is and what he does. He currently owns 60 and leases more from his neighbor.

But how do you get the next generation to take it on during the year he lost 95% of his cherry crop and all of his most popular peach to a severe heat wave in March? Climate change. It’s real.

He has one of if not the largest collection of stone fruits in the country, quite a few of which he created.

I’ve never joined the California Rare Fruit Growers Association because I would feel like a pretender and the whole lupus/sun time thing anyway and I don’t know how to do grafting, but if ever there were a time to hurry up and get to it that would be now because he is sharing scions freely to try to keep those varieties alive.

It staggers me that those with the means to preserve this piece of posterity did not do so.

P.S. The dishwasher? New repair guy. He came three hours after I called and let me watch him and now I know how to do what he did, the equivalent of snaking the outtake valve. He charged me $70 which is what the base price of house calls cost 25 years ago here, and we were good to go. I definitely lucked out when I found him.

For the first month I figured, let them be. New moms are so tired and toddlers can act out when there’s a new sibling upstaging them and you want your kids to be seen at their best–I remember the days. Give them some time to adjust.

But you know those peaches I got extras of at Andy’s on Friday weren’t going to eat themselves: they were meant to be shared.

Was it a good time, I texted.

Yes! she wrote back.

And so I brought the neighbors some Cal Reds and some Kiaweas, perfectly ripe.

She came out with the baby in a front pack sleeping blissfully all snuggled up in there. It was such a gift to let me get to see him. So much love. We caught up a moment, grateful for it, and then let each other go back to our evening.

Went out tonight, and turns out another couple was celebrating at the table next to us. Great food, good times, Flea Street Cafe has served us more of our anniversary dinners than anywhere else for a reason.

Till he got out of the car at home and went, in complete bewilderment, Wait–where’s…(checks inside car, checks under the car) my shoe??

We called. I headed back there and found myself following another car most of the way. Walked in.

They saw my returning face and went, Oh good, here it is.

And tried to hand me a credit card that I had never seen before. That’s not mine. I’d called because my husband has neuropathy and can’t feel his feet and he had somehow lost his shoe.

The woman who’d checked us in just a little earlier ran to retrieve the well-worn singleton for me–and laughed and laughed when I thanked her but added with a grin/shrug, I was kind of hoping it was lost forever and I could finally get him to wear a new pair, he loves these. Thank you!

Meantime, the driver of the car I’d followed had come in. It was her credit card. She was also the woman who’d been sitting at the next table and was delighted to see me again. She looked at the shoe in my hands and said she and her husband had been mystified why they’d seen a shoe sitting in the parking lot near the door on their way out–well, there you go!

We chatted like old friends, the way women tend to do.

It was their anniversary, too.

Forty-six.

Fifty-six!

Alright!

Took some of Andy’s fruit to the neighbors with the new baby.

And found out that the mom’s birthday is our anniversary. How cool is that?!

Costco was a zoo. Oh right, Father’s Day is Sunday.

So I offered him something nobody could buy: to make him a batch of fresh chocolate in the melanger for the first time since Christmas.

That certainly got me an emphatic YES.

I didn’t even notice that the name of the variety was Kisinga till it was going. Cute. It’s time to go start adding the sugar.

Got to the hospital ugly-early, they recommended I go home because I wasn’t going to see him at all for the next several hours anyway, he told me to go take a nap, so I did. Which helped a lot.

Immediately after the doctor messaged a few hours later to say the ablation had gone well and he had tested negative for other problems, yay…

…I heard someone trying the front door. What?! Like he’d skipped out on the whole shebang and Ubered home? I don’t think so!

Next, the doorbell rang. I saw the young man, I don’t think he saw me, and I don’t open my door to unexpected strange men. Especially not one who tried to get in before he tried to ask to.

He jimmied the doorknob again.

I picked up the phone and called the cops and AT&T committed the hell of killing my landline dead just as the 911 operator picked up:  from working to “Check tel line.”  I grabbed my cellphone. The cop was at my door within two minutes.

I told her that after that, I saw him going up to the door of the house across the street but the angle is such that I can’t see if he went in and I didn’t see him after that.

The neighbor next door came out and said he’d come up to their door too.

Just then, there was the neighbor across the street.

She said he was her pest control guy. She was horrified that he’d tried to walk in unannounced, but since she’d vouched for who he was and he hadn’t actually gotten into my house, the cop decided we were good and left.

Went back to the hospital to keep my sweetie company for several more hours of observation on their part and found he’d gotten a message that someone dear to us got hard news today–but it could still be benign.

Bleep all of that that needed to be bleeped. We headed to a local ice cream shop that makes all their own from scratch and now has Indian immigrant owners and got (oh look what they have now!) Alphonso mango milkshakes. Two. Size large, and I never order large, but I did.

So good. Totally rescued us. That, and having him home, safe and sound.

I made my first trek of the year to Andy’s Orchard today. (A bit of history on him here.) Red nectarines, several varieties of peaches, coral cherries went into my basket, you know that if he’s growing it he considers it the best tasting there is–

–but there was no sign of the iconic Anya apricots. A few other good ones, yes, but I was afraid I’d missed them for a second year in a row and there might not be a next year. So I asked.

Her: There might be some in the back–I’ll go check. She came back out with two boxes, saying that was all there were.

Me: Would it be greedy of me to take both?

Her: No, go ahead!

They are small and the color is uneven and that bit of mottling is from sugar spots inside the fruit. Give them a day to ripen perfectly and they’ll be ready to help our apricot-loving neighbors celebrate their baby.

There were two new signs near the farm: saying, not Andy’s Orchard, but Mariani Orchard. I have never seen that before.

I wonder (I so hope!) whether a younger member of the family decided to take it over and continue it on after all.

I picked the first pound of the sour cherries. The best part of having a rare (for here) tree is inviting friends over to come help themselves, but I’m not seeing much gleaning possibilities this year; the unusual rain in May wiped out a lot of the fruit set. I’m thinking we’ll get about three pies for the entire year.

But the cherries there are are the bigger for it, so, less work to process.

The sweet cherry tree had only just opened its flowers when that storm hit. We got one single cherry from it and it had five peck marks but I finally found one and it was mine and I brought it inside. Just…I tried to get myself to…don’t ask me to eat that–they wouldn’t…

The faster I get the white afghan done the faster I can go play with colorwork again. Twelve rows. Ice packs. The cabled rocks are deliberately random but it works because I said so and I would tell you how many there were but then I’d have to pull it out of the protecting zipped tote where I’ve stashed it for the night.

Besides, then I’d knit some more on it and it’s getting late.

It rained again last night. So odd.

At the sound of it, I am just not that adventuresome. And yet if you put some in front of me, most likely life and being a good example to my grandkids of being unafraid of something new would require that I gamely give it a try.

Maybe.

In a NY Times article called “13 Dishes You Should Eat to Understand Food,” the first thing mentioned is Rommegrot.

Sour cream porridge with smoked reindeer heart.

…Say what now?

Can you just hear my Swedish ancestors laughing and going, C’monnn, you can do it!

I’m picturing those reindeer we met on a farm in Palmer, Alaska, gently eating little bits of dry reindeer chow out of our hands (reindeer are surprisingly small.) The guide told us to be careful not to touch their antlers, because the soft velvet stage while they grow out caused, as a matter of protection to the animal, a great deal of pain if you did. Once the antlers were fully grown and hardened and much less vulnerable to damage and no longer full of blood they could lose, then they were fine.

They were gentle and trusting and happy to be fed.

On a cool day after we got home from our trip, I put on a sweater–and felt something in the pocket.

A single small piece of reindeer kibble had fallen in and followed me home.

Eat their hearts? But they’ve won mine.

The big Costco-box strawberries were good but had been in there since Thursday. Cooking them would definitely extend their shelf life.

So I blenderized them with a quarter cup sugar and about 2/3 a teaspoon of King Arthur Instant Clearjel, ie very processed (corn?) starch for, y’know, sour cherry pies and the like. Nuked it twelve minutes and poured it over sliced mangoes with leftover sauce for tomorrow.

And that was going to be the end of that.

Until he looked at the ice cream maker.

Can you put corn anything in ice cream? I asked, knowing that of course you can if you want to, it just sounded so strange.

Why don’t we try it?

So: 3/4 c. strawberry sauce, cream to fill it to two cups, two more tablespoons of sugar after a taste test and into the machine it went.

A few minutes later while doing a puzzle.

Him: I think we should check it to see if it’s done.

Me: It just started!

Him: I think we should check.

Me: If we check every three minutes we’ll run out before it’s done!

Him with a grin: Is this a problem?

Turns out the machine wasn’t turning so it’s a good thing we did check. Fixed that. We let it finish its business in peace.

And the verdict is, next time I think I’ll go half sauce/half cream because that was super rich. The sweetness level was not too much, just right.

It was very very good. Ten stars.