Ambrosia salad what you need. Trust me. I’m a professional.
When I lived in the south I had a friend who was a little bit crazy. Actually, really, very crazy. But she was my friend and she was fun until she wasn’t, and she hated ambrosia salad.
Growing up sugar-free, I never knew there was such a thing as ambrosia salad until I got much older, and then the combination of canned fruit and whipped topping was not really something that appealed to me sober, so I never really investigated it. I liked the idea of a salad that was ambrosial, though, and I never quite forgot about it.
But then I met Nancy (name changed to protect her, and me, for she really is crazy), and she challenged me to make an ambrosia salad she liked for a potluck she was having. I did, and it was truly ambrosial. None of this canned, tin-tasting fruit and plastic whipped cream. The secret was fresh ingredients, toasted coconut, and toasted pecans, plus a little pinch of salt at the end.
Could we all use some sweetness and light right now? Yes, I believe we could. Here it is.
Ingredients
1/4 cup unsweetened coconut, toasted
½ cup chopped pecans, toasted
2 oranges, suprémed and cut into ½” pieces
1 large grapefruit, suprémed and cut into ½” pieces
1/2 fresh pineapple, peeled, cored, and cut into ½” pieces
1 cup mini marshmallows
1 cup of heavy whipping cream
3 T confectioner’s sugar
1 tsp vanilla
½ tsp salt
Method
Preheat oven to 350⁰. Line a baking sheet with aluminum foil and place pecans and coconut on the baking sheet. Toast until both begin to brown or darken in color, shaking to prevent burning. This happens fast, so watch closely.
Remove from oven and allow to cool completely.
Place fruit in a large bowl with mini marshmallows.
In a medium bowl, beat whipping cream to soft peaks. Add vanilla and sugar and continue beating until the cream just stands up when the beaters are removed (not too stiff).
Fold whipping cream into fruit. Chill completely.
Before serving, add toasted coconut, toasted pecans, and salt and stir to combine.
Recipe notes
Maraschino cherries often make an appearance here, but I cannot stomach all of that artificial color. If you must add cherries, add ½ cup of fresh Bing cherries or go completely over the top and add the same amount of Luxardo cherries. Truly heavenly.
The Child graduates tomorrow. Specifically, this child:
Baby Sis, couldn’t be more than three here.
She was born two weeks late, big blue eyes wide open. She had a full mop of black hair that she never lost, and from the moment she was born I was utterly in love. I had no idea.
She is a badass, a sensitive soul with an iron will. She is funny and gorgeous and loving and kind and sometimes a total PITA.
A whole lifetime ago as Yogi, with a pop-to-pop ofless than three seconds at the end of her career. She knows what that means.
She procrastinates like her mother and is stubborn like her father. She is loyal and compassionate and a very good friend to her friends.
Their last Father’s Day in 2012. She had $12, so she paid for three $1 tickets to take the family to see the Orioles beat the Atlanta Braves in Atlanta, with enough left over to buy her dad a beer.
She loved her father and was devoted to him. This is the first major milestone he will miss, and I can’t say too much about that because it’s too hard already and I have to finish this very important post.
Sicily and I have been joking about it, though, saying she is a first-generation high school graduate, which is technically true because both her father and I could not quite make it across the stage. This ridiculous joke lightens things up a bit.
Because this child loves to laugh. She is a joyful human being.
France, avec le chien.
So on this, the week of her high school graduation, I have compiled some advice. Sicily and I have an odd relationship in that when I offer her advice, sometimes she takes it.
Shocking, but true. #SmartGirl
I don’t expect this trend to continue; I fully expect her to blaze a path of her own mistakes, hopefully learning as she goes.
Some of this advice is practical; some is philosophical.
(side note: much of this applies to adults who have been out of high school for a long time. #TheMoreYouKnow)
You deserve to be here. Don’t hide your light under a bushel. Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine. You have been humble about your achievements, quietly going about building a tiny house, giving two TEDTalks, and living abroad in your junior year. These are the experiences that make you who you are. Own them.
Also, own your shit.
You will mess many, many things up for the whole of your life. Take responsibility. Don’t make excuses about why you fucked it up – apologize, see if you can make it right, do what you can, and try hard not to make the same mistake again. Be humble and truly apologetic, then make amends and move on.
Allow yourself to be vulnerable
You have already experienced breathtaking, devastating pain with the death of your father. It will not be the last time. This is just how things go in this one life we know about. It is a raging cliché to say that the pain is worth it, but my goodness. It totally is. Show your true self to the people who deserve to see it to get at the equally achingly beautiful parts of life.
Work hard
It’s not enough to envision your life. Go get it. Work for what you want. Yeah, sometimes it’s nice to get things handed to you, but there is value in hard, effort-filled, productive work. One of the best times of my life was working for a tree service in Colorado in August. I spent eight hours a day in 95+-degree weather, bucking downed trees and shoving them into the chipper. Every day I left the job with a salt ring at my hairline, and every night I left the bathtub with a dirt ring around the rim. Some days you have to put your head down and do it. Be grateful in your work – that you have it, and that you have the body and will to do it.
Design your own life
There is no rule that you have to buy a house, get married, have a dog, have babies, keep a full-time office job. This fits for a lot of people, but it’s not the law. You do not have to squeeze yourself into anyone’s idea of your life, not even mine. Life is crazy in that you have all the time in the world and none at all, concurrently, so make every effort to figure out what it is you want this journey to be like, then move towards that as you can. It will probably not be a straight line, and it certainly won’t be easy, but it will, in the end, be all yours. Enjoy the search – the terror, the joy, the struggle, the triumph, the failure – just as much as the finding.
Brush your goddamn teeth.
You will regret it if you don’t.
Know your worth
You deserve people who appreciate you and understand your value. I know you have that little voice in your head that sometimes says you aren’t worth it or you’re not good enough or who cares what you think. That voice has no idea what it’s talking about. Remind it, and yourself, that you are worthy, as many times as you need to, to get that voice to STFU.
Always have some cash
Speaking of worth, make sure you always have a little cash. It needn’t be much. Twenty bucks in various bills is usually good for most anything – tipping, helping someone out, getting yourself out of a place you don’t want to be, buying a meal for someone who needs it, buying a cup of lemonade from a sidewalk stand.
ALWAYS buy a cup of lemonade from a sidewalk stand
No matter how much it costs.
Get sweaty every day
I can’t believe I actually agree with Matthew McConaughey. He advocates breaking a sweat every day. Not a nervous poodle type of way, but as a move-your-body-daily type of way. This is rock solid advice from someone who may be a little more than slightly off his rocker (#Shirtless Bongos). Exercise also falls into the excellent advice provided by another slightly crazy creative person:
“The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears or the sea. – Isak Dinesen”
Movement helps nearly everything that hurts.
Don’t be The Giving Tree
You know that book about the tree that gives everything to that selfish little boy who just takes and takes and never gives anything back? Yeah, don’t be that tree. That tree is loving and gives every scrap of itself to a person who has no respect and no boundaries for the tree and its basic needs for survival. Every time I read it I keep hoping in the end that the little boy/old man has some revelation about what a selfish jackass he has been, but it never happens. Giving selflessly is a beautiful thing – giving foolishly is not. Learn the difference.
Stay in touch with the people you love, even if they don’t stay in touch with you
Letters are a lost art. Send one every now and then, even if you know you won’t get one in return. Get a small pack of blank notes, and send one out to someone when the urge strikes. You would be surprised at how good this makes people feel.
Send thank you notes
Even to people who interview you for a job. Really. Take five minutes to acknowledge a gift, a small effort, someone’s time. Emails and texts don’t cut it. Just use the blank cards you bought and be sincere. We don’t express gratitude nearly enough. Make this the hill you die on – being grateful.
Have one impressive meal you can serve in a pinch
Well, it is a food blog, after all, so there has to be at least one food-related piece of advice. Feeding people should not be crazy-making. Sometimes you want to make something effortless that every single person will love, something that is so delicious that people request it when they visit. This week Aunt Karlene is in town for graduation, and she has requested “that tomato pasta” for the night they arrive.
I wish this was my recipe, but it totally is not. “That tomato pasta” comes from the original Silver Palate Cookbook, and it is my rock-solid, company’s-coming summer go-to. You mix basil, brie, olive oil, and tomatoes in a big serving bowl in the morning, and then when it’s dinner time you boil up a mess of linguine and mix them in with the basil, brie, olive oil, and tomatoes. The cheese melts, the tomatoes warm, and the basil releases its beautiful fragrance over the whole table. I use gluten-free noodles for myself, and if I am feeling ambitious I might make a gluten-free baguette. Add a huge green salad and dinner is served.
My sweetest girl, on this Monday before you move into the next phase of life: I love you. I am proud of you. Congratulations.
Linguine With Tomatoes And Basil
Ingredients
4 large ripe tomatoes, cut into 1/2 inch cubes
1 pound Brie, rind removed, torn into irregular pieces
1 cup fresh basil leaves, rinsed, patted dry, and cut into strips
3 garlic cloves, peeled and finely minced
1 cup plus 1 tablespoon best-quality olive oil
1/2 teaspoon salt, plus additional to taste
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1 1/2 pounds linguine
Method
1. At least 2 hours before serving, combine the tomatoes, Brie, basil, garlic, the 1 cup olive oil, and 1/2 teaspoon each salt and pepper in a large bowl.
2. Bring 6 quarts salted water to a boil in a large pot. Add 1 tablespoon olive oil and the linguine, and boil until tender but still firm, 8-10 minutes.
3. Drain the pasta and immediately toss with the tomato sauce. Serve at once, passing the pepper mill, and the grated Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese if you like.
What advice do you wish you had received as a high school graduate?
“Life doesn’t stand up to thinking. Smell the air out there; there are wonders.”
Are You Here with Owen Wilson and Zach Galifianakis is an unexpectedly serious movie that tricked me into thinking it would be a light-hearted bromance when really it was a meditation on the uselessness of life.
Welcome to blog, first-time readers. #KeepComingBack
Galifianakis’s character is a bipolar paranoid schizophrenic who inherits everything after his father’s death but is too crazy to know what to do with it. When a troubled Amish boy who hears voices from God tells Galifianakis that God wants him to take his medicine, Galifianakis does. He realizes, quickly, that life is filled with no purpose and is pointless. His stepmother consoles him:
“Life doesn’t stand up to thinking. Smell the air out there; there are wonders.”
And that’s just how things go, right? There is really no point. Anyone who says they have figured out life isn’t thinking too hard. Mostly they are going along with what everyone else is doing and are reasonably satisfied with their life and just sort of sink into the idea that their life is what The Purpose of Life is.
Except that’s kind of bullshit.
There is no purpose. There are diversions, to be sure, and good things to get into, just like there are tragedies and overwhelming sadness and horrible people in the world.
There is no point. Life doesn’t just stand up to thinking.
If you can get from birth to death without hurting people on purpose while also voting every two years (and in special elections) and loving some people real good and maybe making something beautiful once or twice, then that’s pretty much it.
But still, this gives you no license to waste it. When the biology of schizophrenia begins to clear, Galifianakis says of his approach to life, “I wasted so much. I gobbled it all down without tasting it.”
It’s hard to know what “wasting” your life means, really. If you choose to not pursue money or status too lustily and to instead count the grains of sand on a beach or write or paint or work temp jobs or travel your whole life, many in the U.S. would call that “wasting your life.”
Add to the list of life-wasting things (at least in the culture of the U.S.):
Not going to college
Not having children
Not paying into retirement
Not buying a house
Not having a “career”
Not donating money or volunteering regularly
I am sure you can add some of your own. Anything that doesn’t fit the mold is often considered by someone as a “wasted” life. But consider, as one always should, Mary Oliver:
Who made the world? Who made the swan, and the black bear? Who made the grasshopper? This grasshopper, I mean– the one who has flung herself out of the grass, the one who is eating sugar out of my hand, who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down — who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes. Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face. Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away. I don’t know exactly what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel in the grass, how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields which is what I have been doing all day. Tell me, what else should I have done? Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do With your one wild and precious life?
~The Summer Day~’
Indeed. Everything dies at last, and too soon.
Everything, from the bees to the flowers to the humans, will wilt, wither, and die in the sunshine or the snow. We are all of us just passing through.
This is, to me, a horribly debilitating and incredibly liberating understanding, all at once. We only get the one life that we know of, so there’s a ton of pressure to NOT FUCK IT UP.
But what the hell does that mean? And truly, who is keeping score? Who is the person who gets to tell us we are fucking it all up?
So there’s this idea, the liberated side of the Pointlessness of Life: do what you like.
Seriously.
Of course, not to the exclusion of caring for the children you foolishly brought into the world or hurting other people or otherwise being a douche.
But otherwise, why the hell not? Why not do what you like? You can’t take anything with you – even the memory of you will fade.
Spoiler alert: NO ONE WILL REMEMBER YOU, EVENTUALLY. And really? That’s just fine. Whatever mark we think we make will be erased in the unrelenting pressure of geologic time.
Life doesn’t stand up to thinking or reason, so just get out into the world and see what there is to see. And actually spend some time paying attention. It’s not about ticking boxes off a bucket list. It’s more about being present wherever you happen to be, placing yourself in the way of beauty and discovering what it feels like to experience awe.
Give it a shot. What the hell. We are all on our way out anyway.
You will, of course, need snacks.
This summer I am committed to the idea of what Sicily refers to as a “French Nibbler.” (TM) I have no idea where this name came from but it’s hilarious so I am using it and since this blog is in no way monetized and I have just given her credit I think we are all okay.
French Nibblers consist of finger-foodish things for dinner, set out on an appropriately beautiful, bespoke, foraged wooden board with period-authentic utensils for spreads and such.
That’s the Instagram bullshit. I am thinking more along the lines of whatever comes in the CSA, some homemade crackers, a few dips, some cured meats for the carnivores, and a couple cheeses. Serve with canned wine from Old Westminster Winery and snack on dinner as the sun goes down. Nothing to clean up, really, and no need to turn on the stove. You could pack all of it up and take it on a picnic, too. Something simple that doesn’t really require a ton of thought and satisfies all different types of people.
As with life, don’t gobble this down without tasting it.
Roasted Beet Dip With Feta And Aleppo Pepper Crackers
This recipe is the first of a series of dips. Adding this luscious, earthy, subtle, and complex spread to any French Nibbler gets you a double-plus Life Bonus. #SpendYourPointsWisely
Beet Dip Ingredients
4 beets (about the size of baseballs)
Pickling liquid: 1 cup water, 2/3 cup sugar, 1/3 cup vinegar
Peppercorns, a smattering (that’s a measurement)
4-6 sprigs thyme
2 whole cloves garlic, smashed to peel and left that way
Okay, I lied. You do need to turn the oven on and use the stove, but just once. Preheat oven to 400 degrees.
Place two beets (washed but unpeeled), two smashed garlic cloves, and one sprig of thyme in aluminum foil. Drizzle with olive oil. Loosely close foil and place on baking sheet. Roast in oven until a fork easily pierces the beets (about 60 minutes). Remove from oven and cool.
Toast pecans using the residual heat from the oven. Place pecans on a baking sheet and place in hot, turned off oven. Check periodically and remove when they taste delicious (this time will vary, but it’s not rocket science. If they taste good, they are done).
While beets are roasting, peel remaining two beets and cut into matchsticks.
For god’s sake, use gloves. #YouWereWarned
Pack beets, peppercorns, and one sprig of thyme into a Mason jar.
In a saucepan over medium heat, bring pickling liquid ingredients to a boil. Pour over beets and let beets cool on the counter. Refrigerate.
Once roasted beets are cool, use a paper towel to rub the skin off the beet. Give up after a while and use a paring knife to peel the rest of the skin off. Cut into large chunks and place into a food processor. Add one (or both) cloves of roasted garlic, roasted pecans, 1 teaspoon of fresh thyme, 4 ounces of feta, and champagne vinegar. Process until smooth-ish. Add some best-quality olive oil to help it along. It need not be baby-food smooth.
Add salt and fresh cracked black pepper to taste, and adjust to your taste. Beets are not all the same, so they may need more or less sweetness or acid, a pinch or two more or less salt.
Remember your quick-pickled beets? Grab a handful of those and chop them roughly. Stir into your beet dip and also serve on the side. Top with more feta and maybe some chopped pecans if you have any left.
Make a batch of Everyday Crackers, using the Aleppo pepper and sumac as add-ins, or just buy some damn crackers. It’s not a contest. You will be fine.
Recipe notes
Substitutions: yellow beets or carrots even would work here. Rough carrots may benefit from the addition of honey.
You will be able to taste the olive oil, so really, use the best you can find/afford/have in your cabinet.
Whip up a batch of Toasted Cashew Hummus and be done with it (and really, the hero to all of your friends or whoever is joining you for dinner).
Use your leftover pickled beets as part of the French Nibbler or drape over burgers with goat cheese or in salads with chickpeas.
Tell me: what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
My particular friend and I have Brady-bunched our households recently, in a much less dramatic fashion than the TV show (he brings a near-teenager part-time, D, and I have a teenager, Sicily, who is full-time but who is also a working stiff with lots of friends and is not around as often as she used to be).
It has been challenging, which is an understatement along the lines of “That iceberg looks pretty big,” and “Is it dangerous that this zeppelin is filled with extremely explosive gas?”
It is hard to know whether the best way to do this is to rip the Band-Aid off and just shove everyone together with family-type events or to let things just happen.
If you have teenagers, you know both are loaded propositions. Trying to manufacture a new type of family can be saccharin and artificial, and teenagers tend to mostly want to hibernate in their own rooms. So if we force everyone to a nightly family dinner it might feel fake and super awkward, but when left to their own devices, the two teenagers tend to disappear to their respective rooms, emerging like hibernating bears for food and occasionally to wash a huge load of laundry and shower. This makes getting to know everyone in this new way difficult.
And then there is the challenge of nurturing and growing our own relationship in the face of surly teenagers, differing parenting styles, and the shit that is cohabitating with others (how are there so many freaking bobby pins and single socks in this house?!). How do you manage an adult relationship with children that is not based on those children?
If you are a parent who is still partnered with the other half of your offspring’s DNA, you have exactly zero idea of what I am talking about. That’s totally amazing, and I am truly happy for you in your relationship. DON’T WASTE IT.
If you have lost a spouse to divorce or death, and you have managed to pull your soggy, mangled heart off the wasteland of the floor that is your life and actually get out into the world and meet another person, you are in for a challenge that goes far beyond being vulnerable, confronting loss, and worrying about showing your naked self to someone new for the first time in ______ years.
Turns out, those things are easy when compared to navigating the treacherous waters of parenting someone else’s kid.
For the record, I will never be D’s mom. She has a mom who loves her fiercely, exactly the way a mother should. I don’t share the birth experience with D, and that in and of itself is a powerful connection that only a biological mother can feel.
Side note: I have an adopted brother. Adoptive parents can feel just as powerful a connection in a different way that is no less valid and potent. Don’t get mad and send me hate mail. I mean no disrespect.
But there is no way around it: I am an adult in D’s life, and she is a child in my house. Khristian is looking down the barrel of a 17-year-old teenager (my daughter) who lost a dad of her own and isn’t really looking for a replacement.
Do you see how things can become/have become/are becoming more complex?
Parenting is the worst best job when the kid is your own. I never wanted to be a parent. If I am being honest (which I always try to be), I am not a huge fan of kids in general (which is pretty funny since one of my callings in life has been as a teacher, both in a classroom and now on a yoga mat. But I digress.) So what do you call parenting when the worst best job applies to someone else’s kid?
How do you not be an asshole to a 12-year-old, or, at the very least, not feel like an asshole when you correct said 12-year-old in the same way you would correct your own child but when the 12-year-old is not, in fact, your 12-year-old?
It is complex. Add to this a biological mother who is struggling – understandably so – with this reconfiguration, and the layers begin to look geologic. I started this blog post a couple weeks ago, and as time passed things got more heated. For all intents and purposes, and even though D has moved in, I am an outsider to one of the main struggles in her former-family, looking in on a parental relationship that failed and continues to be problematic for the parents (and increasingly, for the child). The first sentence of this blog in its first draft asked which was harder: death or divorce.
When it comes to parenting the answer is very, very simple: divorce.
Divorced people who want nothing to do with each other are forced to interact when they share a child. That interaction will only get worse as the kid gets older and decisions get more complicated and more expensive. In contrast with Sicily, whose dead father is a keen and deeply felt knife-like absence on (increasingly predictable) occasions, Khristian’s former spouse is a keen and deeply felt knife-like presence in even the most mundane of daily decisions. These are the fogs of a former dynamic that don’t quite seem to be dissipating.
So in essence, as of now, it seems that the house is just not big enough for everyone who is here.
I talked to my therapist about this today (and I don’t care who knows). My particular friend, my sweet love – he is struggling. And so am I. I am angry, explosively so but with no proper target and no real right to be angry. I can see from the outside what I think should be done, but it’s not mine to do. And yet the center, as it is, cannot hold.
My therapist is pretty much right on with most things. Previous examples of her brilliance include the acronym SET when dealing with teenagers (Support, Empathy, Truth), an approach that revolutionized the way I dealt with The Kid when her teenager was hanging out. True to form, today she proposed that I approach the situation with this thing called “radical acceptance.”
Whereas depression says, “Nothing matters, so it’s pointless,” radical acceptance realizes that there is nothing to be done one way or the other; things just are the way they are.
In other words, there is nothing for me to do about the hovering presence of a former spouse.
Getting involved doesn’t help.
Having an opinion doesn’t help.
Getting angry/sad/bitchy about it doesn’t help.
I can listen. That’s about it.
And when I can’t listen anymore, I can even say, “Hey, man. I can’t hear this right now.”
Therapy is a fucking miracle sometimes.
In the meantime, there is always food. That constant thread.
The above-referenced 12-year-old is a big fan of ice cream (and the 17-year-old works at The Charmery in Hampden, bringing home samples after each shift). D is a talented maker of ice cream herself, but she has a palate that is, to be frank, picky, very selective , and difficult to please (it’s hard to compete with grilled cheese and tater tots). I made this sweet and spicy ice cream using corn harvested from a friend’s father’s garden on a whim, not wanting to waste either the corn (which I made into relish) or the cobs (which found their way into this recipe). D loves it, cayenne pepper and all.
I am not naive enough to think that ice cream – however delicious – will make this transition pain-free. As I write this, the adults in D’s life are still trying to get their shit together. All I can do, all any of us can do, is try to recognize that all of the conflict really has nothing to do with me and everything to do with a past that is still present for D and her father. Divorce is its own particular kind of hell, I think, a hell that expands and contracts with each passing year. This particular divorce comes with a morass of painful feelings that sit on our doorstep as we combine families. After supporting the people in my household through this, I figure the very least I can do is give them something sweet.
Spicy Sweet Corn Ice Cream
The first thing you taste is sweet corn, followed by a hint of vanilla and the scratchy burn of just a touch of cayenne. This is pretty much the best summer dessert ever.
Ingredients
4 corn cobs, corn removed (but don’t be too precious about it; you can leave some on there)
2 cups heavy cream
2 cups milk
1 vanilla bean (or 1 teaspoon vanilla extract)
3/4 cup sugar, divided
6 egg yolks (make meringue with the whites, or give your dogs a treat)
1/8 teaspoon salt
1/8 teaspoon cayenne pepper
Method
Place heavy corn cobs, heavy cream, and milk in heavy saucepan and heat until bubbles form on the edges of the milk. Remove from heat and allow to cool completely.
Remove the corn cobs from the cream/milk mixture, scraping all of the delicious bits off the cob with a spoon before pouring the milk through a fine mesh sieve. Return the milk to the heat. Scrape the paste from the inside of the vanilla bean and add to the milk (or add vanilla extract, if using) and add 1/2 cup of the sugar. Heat until bubbles begin to form on the sides of the pan, stirring occasionally.
Combine egg yolks, salt, remaining 1/4 cup sugar, and cayenne in a bowl. Use a whisk to combine completely.
This next part is where you might completely ruin your custard, so go slowly. If you have no experience with this sort of thing, go at half the speed you might normally go.
Using a whisk and whisking constantly, pour a thin stream of the hot milk into the eggs. You can pour a little and whisk, or pour a thin stream constantly; you are bringing the cold eggs up to the temperature of the hot milk (or close) so that you don’t make sweet scrambled eggs (BARF).
Once you have poured and whisked about a cup of the hot milk into the eggs, add the egg mixture back into the pan and return to medium-low heat. This is the second part where you might screw it up, so go slow and keep the heat low. Cook gently, stirring constantly, for about ten minutes or until the custard thickens enough to coat the back of a spoon.
Remove from heat and once again pass the custard through a fine-mesh strainer. You need to chill this mixture before processing, but it’s important to bring the temperature down quickly as you have just created the perfect petri dish for bacteria (eggs and sugar and milk that’s warm). To do this, fill a large bowl (bigger than the bowl you have the custard in) with ice cubes and water, and place the custard bowl inside. Stir custard occasionally. When it has cooled enough to touch, remove from ice bath, cover with plastic wrap, and chill until completely cool (at least four hours but overnight is good, too, making this a great make-ahead dessert).
Chill according to manufacturer’s directions on your ice cream maker.
Court’s indulgence. This picture is blurry. It was a long day.
It’s not often that things on TV are pretty much exactly the same in real life.
Last week I sat on a jury for a five-day trial. The defendant was accused of 24 counts of crime, including first-degree rape and possessing a weapon when he wasn’t allowed to possess a weapon.
(Fun fact: the defendant’s last crime was prosecuted by Ruth Bader Ginsberg in 1993. Federal drug charge.)
I have never sat on an actual jury; I have been called for jury duty three times in my life, and mostly it’s just lots of sitting around and watching movies like How To Lose a Guy In 10 Days and Avatar. This time was different, and I was quickly seated as Juror #4 by noon on my first day of reporting, then sent home until Monday when the trial would begin.
Everything about the trial was pretty much what it looks like on TV: the dramatic opening and closing statements, the cross examination, the witnesses getting testy with the defense attorney, and, finally, conflict (and resolution) in the deliberation room.
Time seemed strangely fluid as well; hours would pass in the courtroom in what seemed like minutes, but in the deliberation room, every minute was an agony of waiting. At the end of the day we would emerge from our windowless room, cram ourselves into the elevator, and then emerge at the corner of St. Paul and Lexington, blinking against the too-bright sunshine of the late afternoon, at the height of rush hour to crawl our way home.
Of all the things that stuck in my mind that week, one in particular stands out. Whenever the lawyers had to gather something or find something that meant the action had to pause briefly, they would say, “Court’s indulgence,” and the judge would nod, indicating that she was cool with the wait.
“Court’s indulgence.”
I don’t know why, but I love this saying. It’s a respectful request for permission to pause while you gather your thoughts, something we could all use every now and then.
One day when I came home it was stuck in my head like a mantra, playing over and over as I fed the dogs and made dinner. On that night, it was hot outside and the back door was open, letting in a feeble breeze (and lots of flies, which drives The Black Dog crazy, an admittedly short trip). It had been an especially long day, nine to five listening to a case about rape and gun violations, and I wasn’t particularly interested in making something complicated for dinner or turning on the stove.
Court’s indulgence: I remembered my preserved lemons, which were ready and waiting.
Court’s indulgence: There were some small, sweet yellow, red, and orange peppers in the crisper, along with half a red onion and some arugula that I wouldn’t even need to wash.
Court’s indulgence: A bomb shelter’s worth of canned beans in the coolness of the basement.
Et voila. Dinner, eaten with the court’s indulgence, on the balcony in the back of the house as the evening wore on and the sun sank low.
White Bean, Sweet Pepper, And Arugula Salad With Preserved Lemon Vinaigrette
Ingredients
2 tablespoons minced preserved lemon (rinse to remove salt and also strip away the squishy flesh)
2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
1/4 cup best-quality olive oil (it matters)
1 heaping teaspoon minced garlic
1/2 to 1 teaspoon black pepper (I like a lot of pepper)
1 15-ounce can cannellini beans, drained and rinsed
One large red pepper, chopped, or five small multi-color pepper, chopped
1/2 large red onion, sliced
Handful of arugula per salad
Method
Make things easy on yourself and mix this all in the same bowl. I used a medium-sized round white Corningware bowl.
Place first five ingredients in bowl and mix together. Add beans, peppers, and onions and stir to combine.
To serve, place a large handful of arugula in a bowl, then top with beans. If you feel the need, you can drizzle with more olive oil and a squeeze of lemon, but mix it all around and taste before you do that.
Beans are even better the next day, chilled and then brought to room temp before serving.
