Took some friends some homegrown yellow cherry tomatoes after dinner, a pretty perfect little snack, and we all chatted for three hours.

Speaking of which.

The squirrels occasionally get past my attempts at barriers and raid those, sucking the juices and spitting out the rest because they don’t actually like tomatoes. There’s not been much loss because they don’t seem to go for seconds and the things were pretty small to begin with.

And plentiful. The Sungold is super-productive, so losing one or two of them a day isn’t a big deal. I also planted a big red type but as the Sungold branches spread out all around the other much slower plant, the one in the center grew a grand total of three fruits. Almost no blossoming.

But so I really want those three tomatoes once they’re ripe: all that water and anticipation for such a small payoff. They’d gone from green to greenish-white and clearly the red was coming soon and I was keeping a wary eye on the critters when I happened to mention this to my friend Robin at the beginning of the week. She told me to do something I’d never heard of before: take some white paper towels, soak them, and wrap one around each tomato. They will dry as white husks encasing and hiding them.

And they did! So far so good! (Do NOT peek during the daylight. They do watch and learn fast. But I’ve learned too.)

Paper towels. Wet white (no dyes seems a good idea) paper towels. I don’t know who thought of this, but clearly they were a (desperate) gardener. And a genius!

Batteries, sun-dried tomato sauce, shrimp, blueberries and raspberries. (Phew!)

Oh wait no that was mine.

He always did have a sense of humor.

And so. I was heading down the milk aisle when I did a double take and stopped to say hi. Totally out of context (and did he even know I was about as tall as him when we’re both standing?) he was lost for a split second (it’s been a year, but it’s been 25 years) and then he stopped, too. Richard was coming right up behind me just then after looking for something else, his wife was right behind him, and so we got to introduce each other all around.

But the funny part was right off the bat when he put on this fake-panic voice and exclaimed, “Don’t look in my cart!”

Laughing, I assured him I hadn’t, and actually the only thing I did see over his shoulder was baby spinach which reminded me we needed baby spinach so I sent Richard to get some after that little meet-up.

But as we got to the far end of the aisle with them out of sight going the opposite direction, Richard turned to me, not quite remembering, wondering, it having been twenty years since he’d seen the guy, “C’est qui?” (Who was that?)

“My cardiologist.”

My dad is someone who loves a good meal. He loves that Mom loves to cook a great meal.

And if you ever wanted to find that place where you discovered at sixteen what gumbo was, he’d be able to tell you not only the name of the restaurant you ordered it in but he would find the place forty years later. The seafood joint with the wavy floors on the wharf in Seattle, the barbecue joint in Florida where they’d sanded down picnic tables till they felt like velvet (and then trusted people with kids with barbecue sauce to sit at them!) I’ve seen him do it.

This one was somewhere in the deep South, a humble spot with fabulous food (there was an old jukebox, too, right, Dad? Or was that a different spot?) I remember blinking when he said traditional gumbo was made with squirrel meat as I looked at the chicken in mine, shrimp having been the other choice.

I confess to the occasional moment when my fruit has been stolen off my trees where I’ve thought at the bushytails, Just don’t you tempt me. I’ve always been curious to know.

My CSA delivered straight-off-the-farm okra today.

Now there are two responses to okra: there’s my Mom, serving it battered and fried and telling her squeamish kids, “It tastes just like” (or as my older sister would tease her later with a grin, Just! Like!) “popcorn!”

Maybe a better take on it might have been, This imposter thinks it’s just like popcorn but we know better–popcorn doesn’t taste better with ketchup, here, pass the Heinz, wouldja? (Then she would have had six kids asking for maple syrup instead and who knows, it might have won us over.)

Actually, my daughter reminded me that we had an okra dish in an Indian restaurant we took her to in Ann Arbor when she graduated with her Master’s there, and that it was very good. Alright, then, three.

So. Okra. It came. And me somehow fresh out of file’ (fee-LAY) powder. But all week I’d been remembering marveling over that gumbo soup of long ago, so I went over to Penzey’s spices where I absolutely knew I could find file’ powder. Gumbo File’, said the label for those not from the South; their Seafood Base, I already had that.

And I have finally, after all these years, actually made a gumbo. Bacon drippings, andouille sausage–there are a lot of variations out there; this one’s mine.

Gumbo:

8 oz fresh okra, chopped

1 large chopped bell pepper (mine was orange)

1 small head of celery, chopped

1 large onion, chopped (mine was purple)

the corn from one fresh cob but more would have been fine

32 oz chicken broth and 1 c water

1 tsp file’ (sassafras) powder (yes they make root beer out of sassafras. No this doesn’t taste like root beer.)

1 tbl Penzeys Seafood Base

chopped chicken and/or shrimp

about 1/3 c flour, and

about 1/3 c California organic extra virgin olive oil.

Note that all other types of EVOO are suspect: Federal law allows lesser varieties to be so named and even other oils to be in the bottle without their being labeled. Yes it’s a scandal. California’s law precedes the Federal one, has been challenged and has stood, so, only by buying EVOO labeled California organic EVOO can you know that it actually is extra virgin olive oil. Which is great if you’re a California grower, and I buy from these guys. Good stuff.

So. You put the flour and olive oil in your pot, stir hard, get it up to bubbling and keep bubbling stirring hard for fifteen minutes: you want it to turn brown, really brown, without letting it burn. Then the recipe I started from said to cook the veggies a few minutes in that but at that point my arms said no, so, I just threw everything in all at once–except for the chicken or shrimp.

Simmer for at least an hour, stirring often. Add whichever meat you want till it’s cooked. Serve.

It doesn’t taste like popcorn. But maybe kids would eat more bites if they were still looking for that root beer flavor in there somewhere.

A family get-together over the mountains in Santa Cruz this evening. There are millions of people in the Bay Area on the other side of the coastal range from the beach areas and three narrow, windy routes through those mountains and it was the longest Saturday of the year. So we gave ourselves an extra two hours to be on the safe side because we didn’t want to miss the cousin’s son’s celebration.

By taking some back routes somehow we found ourselves right there with those two hours to kill.

I pointed out San Lorenzo Nursery to Michelle as we drove past, where our fig, sour cherry, mandarin and the last peach tree had come from, making me very fond of the place.

She got to show off her favorite spot in town, named, simply, Chocolate.

Hammered copper around the truffle display, really, really good hot chocolate that came with a cookie to hold the cream to stir in as you desire, a mermare, that antique register with the sea star–quirky, fun, and very Santa Cruz.

And the food! A chicken bacon sandwich sounds humble but even the refrigerated leftovers were achingly good hours later. Those people know how to cook.

The family time: the young man we were celebrating had just turned eight, a big deal when you’re a Mormon, the age when you’re considered beginning to be able to understand right or wrong and to actively make choices as to how you’re going to respond to what life brings you.

And when we humans make choices we sometimes make wrong ones, and so the need for faith, repentance and renewal, with baptism to start the process. And he had chosen to be baptized.

He’s also a fairly shy kid. When we got there, he was seated by himself a moment so I sat down on the floor so as to be looking up at him. This was his day and I wanted him to have that viewpoint of being the tall one–a rare thing when you’re a kid.

Just then his three-year-old cousin and her parents came in at the other end of the long room, and as her daddy told me later, she cried in delight, “That’s my FRIEND!” as she bolted towards me, jumped into my lap and flung herself into my arms and wrapped her own as far around me as she could reach in the biggest hug you could ever hope for.

I felt about ten feet tall. That moment will carry me through a whole lot to come.

It’s all about being there for each another.

And a little child led the way.

Post-it note in the most strategic spot: it worked. That and all I have to do is reach for the supersoaker and the scrub jay scrams.

Clerk at Trader Joe’s: “So–you making pies?”

“Got one in the oven right now. Cherry. Cherry with almond.”

He was clearly so wishing for a slice of that as he rang up the box of two pie crusts. I like making pies but I’m lazy when it comes to that part of the process–and theirs are good, only, I fingerpress each of them to cover two pie tins because really, to me a crust at its best is a bit of crunch on the side and just enough there to hold it all in long enough to get it onto your plate.

So if you ever need to know, one of those big bags of tart cherries from Costco makes two cherry pies. Mix 2/3 c flour, 1 to 1 1/2 c sugar depending on your sweet tooth, a tsp cinnamon, a tsp almond extract and 2 or 3 tbl butter, whirled till butter is cut in finely; mix in the cherries and fill the two pies. Bake till done. (425, 350, 35 min, 45 min, recipes vary all over the map, still working that part out. Some say start high and turn lower.)

On the drive home it hit me that the first pie I’d made this afternoon I’d used a glass pie pan with an oven that, per my 1952 Better Crocker, was at 425. I don’t think you’re supposed to use glass above 375. Oh well, it hasn’t broken yet.

And I was home again with a dozen minutes to spare. Bzzzzzzz!

(p.s. A hatchling rescue, a chipping sparrow–photo essay here.)

Remember the crockpot and the signup for soup and cookies for the Ronald McDonald House near Children’s Hospital? That’s tomorrow.

And given a thousand different experiences, I said the usual, If I can do it today do it today and Richard echoed the thought. Besides, split pea tastes better the next day anyway. Michelle happened to drop by and then rescued me while I was stirring by dashing off to Milk Pail for the missing celery for me.

The cookies: last time I did this someone else made the cookies and I didn’t remember how many were going to be needed. Well so let’s make a lot, and I pulled out the–does anyone else remember the fake Mrs. Fields recipe that went the rounds twenty-five years ago? It seemed to be a pretty good reverse-engineering and definitely healthier than the standard chocolate chip. But in case you missed out, here goes:

———

Concussion Cookies

2 c butter

2 c sugar

2 c brown sugar (okay, forget the two different kinds, I just did 3 3/4 c white sugar and topped off that last cup with dark molasses and it was very good.)

Cut up the butter and cream thoroughly with the sugar. Add 4 eggs and 2 tsp good vanilla.

Meantime, put 5 c oats in a cuisinart and whirr till it’s as fine a flour as you can get. Add 1 tsp salt, whirr, 2 tsp baking powder, whirr, and the recipe said to also add 2 tsp baking soda. I didn’t. I don’t care for the taste of baking soda and the cookies don’t need it. Then mix in 4 c flour, but I find I like that last cup well on the scant side.

Mix into creamed mixture. Work in 24 oz chocolate chips, plus, if you want, toasted nuts,  raisins, craisins, whatever all else you want to throw in there. Bake at 350 for 8-10 min or till it smells and looks done to you. Let cool before removing from the cookie sheet.

———

Now, the name. This stuff is really good to have on hand when you want to be able to bake only as many cookies as you won’t feel guilty for eating: you freeze it, and the nubbliness in the oats makes it easy to dig a cookie’s worth out of the frozen batter.

I found out the recipe made five pounds’ worth the day I had a new batch at the top of the freezer and happened to stoop down to pull something out at the bottom of the freezer. Guess what shook loose in the process. And yes, I really did.

Klutz.

“We’re going to have to have a do-over on dinner,” as I came back in from mulching some more fruit trees.

Say what? He looked up, questioning.

I had only ever seen sprawling plants and flowers and somehow I had missed that the sugar snap peas were not only there but needed to be picked, like, now. So at 8:30, nine of them got stir-fried and I probably should have picked the smallest ones too but I was trying not to be greedy.

I’d bought a packet of seeds to maybe do nothing with; a half dozen went into the dirt below the cherry tree to catch any runoff and try to make it useful rather than just having the water go to the prickly plants with the tall flower stalks that I’m forever thinking of simply ripping out and being done with. I didn’t plant more peas because I didn’t want to commit to having to water them for their own sake.

They did grow, though, even when the ground was cracked and dry-looking, hidden well enough that you had to look for them to find them, and eventually the pea tendrils tried to grab onto those stalks that blocked a lot of their sunlight–but mostly the plants just flopped around on the ground. I figured they were putting nitrogen in the soil for next year’s tomatoes and that that was reason enough for them.

I saw a squirrel nosing around back there yesterday and thought, well, if there was anything there there isn’t now.

Today, marveling: How did it not devour these?

I dunno, but we sure did!

I’d been curious for awhile and I happened to look at 9:30 this morning, so I set the timer on my phone to go off at half past each hour all day to remind me to check and write it down: what was our UV rating now? I wanted to know the arc of the sun in real time in terms of my lupus.

The 11 rating out of a possible 12, the highest of today, was at 1:30 and 2:30. Who knew noon was safer?

Richard got home from work to find me on the phone with my childhood friend Karen. Michelle had stopped by and joined in for awhile, now it was his turn. It was great. She so belongs to us all. I’m not a big phone person and he knew it and he knew it had been a long time since we’d chatted and here we were.

Near 8 pm our time we and she finally, reluctantly let each other go. We ate a three-minute Trader Joe’s meal with fruit on the side–dinnertime and all that, we were famished, the last slice of homemade berry pie divvied up to top it off.

And then he went to pick up the phone.

The battery was almost dead. He looked at me, marveling: “How long were you ON this?”

I’d silenced that alarm three times. Maybe four, but I think three. Wasn’t paying attention to any sense of time (and that phone was a surprise several times), just one of belonging.

(p.s. This is for all the young moms out there. Reporters will be interviewing that toddler for her tantrum at the President’s feet for decades to come. And the baby who looks on as if to say, Dude. What are you DOING.)

I didn’t take its picture. Bad blogger. Just let me say it was a perfect cherry red with a faint, deeper stripe running down the center: big, plump, a work of art.

Written descriptions of Stella cherries that I’d seen call them almost black, and that was going to take at least another week. The battle with the critters had been ongoing and we’d been losing and looking at that pretty color I decided on the spot that, forget waiting for it to put on a little black dress: if it’s too underripe we’ll leave the other one a little longer. (Yup. We were down to two.)

Note that we had eaten grocery store cherries a few hours earlier.

I took my homegrown prize in the kitchen and sliced it down that stripe. The pit came out easily. I popped a half in my mouth…

…That would do. Wow. That would definitely do. For three years I’d wondered if I should have bought one of the varieties that had won the taste tests at Dave Wilson rather than the impulse-purchase tree at Costco. Did Costco get the unpopular leftovers? Had I, after all that work and water, deprived us of what we could have had?

As if.

I came around the corner and offered my sweetie the other half. I watched his face marvel as mine had. Wow that was good. “That’s definitely better than the ones at lunch.”

My thought, too, there was just no comparison. Next year we will definitely do the bird netting, in metal if need be, now that we know what we’ll get so much more of if we do.

In great self-restraint I left the other cherry in its clamshell on the tree for tomorrow.

We are savoring the anticipation.

Our Stella had a single cherry growing in a spot where a clamshell wouldn’t easily snap over it, so I doused it in grape Koolaid and hoped. It certainly wasn’t going to rain–they say you have to reapply the stuff after rain.

It rained. Not that I’m complaining. At all.

Given that the first branches of cherries had been stripped while still tiny and green and I would have thought far from tasty, it amazed me to get to watch this one fruit gradually turn big and yellow in anticipation of turning red and openly taunting the wildlife. (The rest are in clamshells, and the critters have still managed to reach in at a few of those so I reinforced them with Koolaid, too.)

And then of course yesterday’s .63″ happened. I still had that same mug of fake-grape in the kitchen and when the skies let up a moment I took it outside to reapply to the otherwise-unprotected cherry.

Of course it was long gone.

Topped off the day–church, phone calls, Skyping–with an invitation to dessert chez Michelle: a homemade lemon bundt cake with three cups of berries and cherries, and as we waited for it to come out of the oven she cooked and pureed a sauce made out of that much more of the berry mixture and strained the seeds out.

So, so good.

Michelle flies out for a wedding tomorrow.

I finished the project for the bride at 9:30 tonight. We just met up with her–and she sent us home with the blueberry crisp she doesn’t have time to finish off. Twist our arms.

I cornered the person in charge of the sign-up for taking soup and cookies to the Ronald McDonald House at church this morning and asked when the next time around was going to be.

I didn’t say that the last time I took a pot of soup there I’d made it in my stewpot, which spilled all over the car. I did say what I now had to cook the stuff in. It makes it a lot easier.

Heather (yesterday’s post) was delighted when I told her what I immediately planned to do with her old crockpot. And it was so much better than my old one…

…Which, when I described it to her, the bright orange and brown and flaking teflon interior, she grinned in recognition, Oh! My mom has one like that!

I had to laugh at my inner surprise–of course she did. From the ’70’s. Hadn’t I noticed I was getting older?

We’re selling everything, she said, we’re not taking anything with us. We’ll start over after we get there.

When she told me their travel plans, that made more sense. Her husband’s about to start his medical residency in Boston. They aren’t going straight there, though; they’re going to Massachusetts from California by way of Alaska, driving, so as to let the grandparents see their little ones. Road trip!

She sent out a note last night of a few things that hadn’t sold at their garage sale, saying, please, come, take, free now, it’s all going to charity in the morning, if you want it it’s yours.

I told her I’d bought my crockpot at eighteen–nineteen, though, come to think of it, it was after I’d moved out of the dorms. Crockpots were a new thing and a huge fad and not cheap and given that I was paying my college tuition for the year out of my summer job money, it was quite the splurge.

It has, though, one can definitely say at this point, seen better days. It had a teflon surface and if you ever want to see what those look like this many years later, well, as Richard finalized it this morning, “We’re not cooking in that” (this would not be a change) and I said it needs to no longer be taking up space in our house. An easy agreement.

Sentimental value object upstaged by actually useful sentimental value object: I am badly going to miss Heather and Jared when they’re gone and I will think of them when I slow-cook apple butter. Or take a pot of soup to the Ronald McDonald House at Children’s Hospital (and not have to borrow a safe crockpot for it. They then have you transfer the food from yours to theirs when you get there.)

Heather’s little cooker will help take care of patients and their families here while Jared’s taking care of patients there. I like that.

She almost didn’t tell me what the price tag had been at the yard sale and she almost didn’t let me pay it but she relented.

And so I finally have a big crockpot again that I would actually be willing to put food into. My late ’70’s sunflower-orange-and-brown one (I kid you not) is hereby utterly evicted.

I love most that I now have a memento of a young couple I adore and whose kids I hope someday will go to Stanford so I can get to see who they grow up to be. Because I know they’ll be adults to look forward to.

Meantime, got any favorite recipes?

I think, actually, there was one in the room the whole time but at 4 am one does not remember details.

And so I stumbled across the house to where I knew my rescue inhaler was, next to the weather station that said it was 38 outside. Brrr. The mango monitor? Forty-nine. Good. I finally fell back asleep about when it was time to wake up. Richard was trying to let me get some rest.

Late, I had to eat and drink in a very few minutes, when I am not someone who likes breakfast early, because they required a four-hour fast before the CT scan and X-rays. Remember that drink 8 oz every two hours or my kidneys fail thing? You simply get through what you have to get through, but I knew I would be in no shape to drive.

Richard dropped me off, the techs there were wonderful, and Michelle picked me up when it was over. I knew worrying before I get any results back is a complete waste of emotional space but it’s easy to do–I didn’t even pull out my knitting, I read a Time mazine to keep my brain busy, and then there was my sweet daughter asking if I’d like to go check out that Penzey’s spice store?

She knew I’d never been but that I’d been wanting to. When there wasn’t a parking space close enough, she dropped me right at the door so I wouldn’t have to do a minute’s time in the sun before she hurried in herself.

My spices were generally old as dirt and about as useful as. Michelle thoroughly enjoyed my delight. Four different types of cinnamon. Indian spices. Vanillas. Mixes of their own making. The cream of tartar I was out of that I needed to make a certain someone’s angel food birthday cake coming up.

There was a pretty jar with a lift top at each display so that you can inhale, imagine the dishes to be made of it and then on to the next. Tandoori, Sate, Northwoods Fire seasonings, Parisienne Fines Herbes, really good Chinese Five Spice, a seafood soup base with clams, crab, shrimp, and lobster as the first ingredients, those all went into the basket. The pizza seasoning or the version specifically designed to doctor frozen ones?

Michelle reminisced longingly over the pizzas on homemade bread I used to make (before her dairy allergy set in), rolled up and sliced cinnamon roll style to try to contain the kids’ messes–and so we agreed it had to be the real-thing bottle.

I finally sneezed after I got back in the car. Once.

And then she whisked me away to Timothy Adams for hot chocolate just because. Adams was there, cheerful as always and glad to see us. Totally unfazed by my slumping down over there–I’d needed that.

They all totally rescued my day. I didn’t make it to knit night–I was just too tired to even think of it–but I made it through what I needed to and had a good time after, topped off by Skype time with the grandsons.

I did, however, manage to spot and pull this nasty little specimen out by the roots after dinner. (For scale, the lid of that big bin is half again the size of our trash can’s.) This one weed, at least, is gone from us and it can never come back. It was deeply, deeply gratifying.