Saturday Shopping in NYC

Posted on March 29, 2012 by susanmsink@gmail.com

We’ve been in New York City for about a week on our “winter” vacation. All three of Steve’s daughters live in Brooklyn within one square mile of each other, in the Clinton Hill/Prospect Heights neighborhood. Not surprisingly, our interests this vacation were food (me) and furniture (Steve) with a healthy bit of art thrown in.

Among the highlights– and really, it was all good– was accompanying Marjorie Steinweiss on her Saturday shopping. Every Saturday she leaves early and spends about 5-6 hours doing the shopping for the week. She takes the same route and hits the same stores in Manhattan and Brooklyn. There are others on the route she knows from these years of shopping, including a man who turned out to be a second or third cousin, who now lives in Paris. They knew each other on the route for years before they figured out this connection.

This is a story best told in photos, so I’ll just post them with some captions.

Marjorie picked us up at 7 a.m. We skipped the farmer’s market in Prospect Park because it’s really too early in the season for the vendors she likes. We made a quick stop at Murray’s Bagels in the Village for bagels and coffee and then hit the farmer’s market in Union Square, the Union Square Greenmarket. Greens had arrived! Many farmers from Rockland County, NY, and from New Jersey were there for the first week of the season.

That included the last remaining mushroom grower in New York State (or so she claimed). Marjorie greeted shoppers and some of her favorite vendors with kisses. I talked to a woman about how to cook kale and learned the benefits of burdock root.

 Next stop: Grandaisy Bakery. Really, really good bread.

Gigantic wheels of Parmesan.

We waited with the others on the route for Di Palo’s in Little Italy to open. We were there an hour, tasting and buying cheese. I bought my one and only souvenir, a salami, to bring home. The place was filled with these foil-wrapped chocolates from Italy for Easter.The owner, Lou, also had some fine bottles of olive oil he hadn’t even taken out of the box, that he sold to the people on the route (and presumably, later, anyone who wanted one). The name was the Italian word for a little mountain refuge, which sounded a lot like a hunting cabin. He told of hiking in the Alps and coming to one of these, where any traveler could make a fire, eat and sleep.

The final stop for us was Sahadi’s back in Brooklyn. (Marjorie still had the fish and meat markets to get to.)

Sahadi’s had nuts and Mediteranean food. We had a light lunch of spinach spanikopita and headed up Atlantic Avenue to look in some vintage furniture shops. Then we met up with Steve’s daughters for a real lunch at Pies and Thighs, where Marjorie’s son, (Catherine’s boyfriend) Homer used to bake pastries and make the donuts.

By evening, after a long walk through the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens, we were back in the Village for dinner with friends at Alta, a tapas place on 10th street, that was fantastic. (But what is it with restaurants being cash only? Every restaurant we went to, including two nice ones, were cash only!)

We headed back to Brooklyn after dinner (for a quick stop in at a birthday party in Williamsburg for Homer).

Walking to the subway, we passed Murray’s Bagels, the place where we’d begun that morning.

The next night, we were lucky enough to be invited to the Steinweiss home in Brooklyn for dinner, where we feasted on fresh greens and bruchetta made with stracciatella cheese and sun-dried tomatoes on bread from Grandaisy.

Posted in garden, recipe | 1 Comment

Fact and Fiction, part two: The Anxious Artist

Posted on March 19, 2012 by susanmsink@gmail.com

Two weeks ago I had a major anxiety attack. It happened while I was in the shower in the morning, which is where I usually have anxiety attacks. It had been a couple years since I had one, so it took me by surprise. But it was clear to me what triggered the attack. I had opened an e-mail first thing in the morning from the subject of something I wrote.

In the past few months, I’ve been writing a lot of short fiction. I particularly want to write something longer about nuns, and so have been writing a lot of short pieces (100 words, 250 words, 300 words tops) based on anecdotes I have read or heard or pieces I’ve made up based on information I know. I’ve been trying to imagine my way into the character of a nun. Alongside those short pieces, I’ve been writing notes and “scenes” to what I hope will become a novel. I have a basic story in mind, and it takes place in three time periods: an event in 2004 that causes my nun character to look back on her life in 1970 in the context of entering the convent in 1956. It allows me to write and think about the current day, the time of Vatican II and also the pre-Vatican II days.

As part of my research for the novel, I’ve spent a few afternoons reading oral histories in the archives at Saint Benedict’s Monastery in St. Joseph, Minnesota. Mostly what I’m looking for is context: what was it like to take summer classes at the University of Minnesota in the 1960s? What was it like to teach at a “mission” school in a small town in Minnesota? I’m looking for facts, but also of course for stories and anecdotes and what might be called “color.” After all, I have no idea what it was like to be a nun in the past 50 years. But my desire to understand what it was like, and to figure out for myself what it says about being American, being Catholic, and being alive in this time and place, is what is driving me to find out. I’m learning a lot about terminology and logistics.

Occasionally, I discover information in an oral history that is beautiful and rich and about which I feel compelled to construct one of these 100-word-or-more stories. Whenever I do, I am very conscious of using the facts and words of someone else’s life. I’m not in the world of fiction anymore. I’m not sure what they thought would become of these oral histories, but I’m sure they didn’t think some writer would come along and exploit them for material.

I’ve posted two of these stories on http://cowbird.com.  In both cases I identified my source.

Sister Remberta Westkaemper

In the case of “Flora,” a story about Sister Remberta Westkaemper, I identified her by name and even found a wonderful photo of her with some of her plants to accompany the story. I even posted a link to the story on the College of Saint Benedict (CSB) Facebook page. S. Remberta taught at CSB and they are always interested in stories about these foremothers.

In the case of “New York,”  I didn’t identify the Sister by name. She is still alive and she might not like what I’ve constructed of her story. I used a random photo for the piece, not something from the Sisters’ archives.

Working on another piece, about a gorgeously rich German Catholic childhood, I was very aware of the Sister I was writing about. I know her– she works and lives at the monastery still. I adore her; she has the most wonderful laugh and is just a delightful person to be around, generous and wise and what you might call “salt of the earth.”

Before I did anything with the story, and actually hoping to get from her a photo, I sent it to someone to show to her (she doesn’t have e-mail) and asked if it was OK. I had made no effort to disguise this person, had kept the names of figures in the story the same and accredited it to her, saying I assembled it from her oral history. It is a type of appropriation, of course, and I want to be clear about where it came from, whose words these (mostly) are.

The e-mail from my messenger brought a message from this Sister: she would prefer not to have any personal material on the internet or made public.

Fair enough. Now I know, thinking rationally, which I was able to do as soon as I stumbled out of the shower, that I did everything right here. The oral histories are accessible. I lovingly and honestly approached and crafted the piece. I also took the extra step of asking permission. And I will not publish the story. I should not see her request as a rejection or a scold.

But I am always conscious that there is a line. In writing the novel, I’m trampling all over that line, incorporating pieces of what I know from real people with stuff I’m making up. But even when writing a memoir, which I did several years ago, I knew I was trampling all over the line. Every time I put fingers to keyboard I’m faced with the complex world of fact and fiction and the spaces in between.

Which is not to say it’s hard to tell which is which. Mike Daisey knows what happened and what didn’t happen to him, and what he made up to make a better theater piece. (However, I think in some ways he may have become deluded about some of the facts in his desire for what he’s saying to be true.) But he wasn’t careful. And when he says to Ira Glass, “I was terrified the whole thing would unravel,” I know exactly what he means. It is the same space as my anxiety attack. What I know and what I know, what I own and what I invent, make for a complex literary reality as well as a complex reality in which I live. As writers, however, it’s very important to keep these things clear. It’s equally important to honor all of them: the reporting and the theater, the fiction and the oral history. There’s room in the world for all these stories and all their truths.

Posted in poetry, politics, writing | 4 Comments

Fact and Fiction

Posted on March 18, 2012 by susanmsink@gmail.com

Today on the NPR radio program This American Life, they devoted an entire hour to a retraction of a story they aired in January about working conditions in Apple factories in China.  It wasn’t that the claims made on the original program were false. The claims– of overcrowding in dorms, long working hours, the Hexane poisoning of some workers, some underage workers– have all been documented even by Apple in public reports.

However, it didn’t happen as presented on the radio program. The program, based on a theater performance by writer/artist Mike Daisey in which he told a story about visiting factories that make ipods and iphones in China, was more a combination of activism, theater and reporting than it was straight up reporting. Mike Daisey took great liberties with what he actually experienced in China, in order to write a very moving stage monologue.

At first I wondered why TAL felt the need to do such a retraction. I have always thought that this radio program presents a variety of types of stories, not all of them what I would consider straight reportage. Early pieces by Scott Carrier that were among my favorites on the show verged on magical realism.

Which reminds me of a time I heard Rick Bass read a story at an Environmental Literature conference once that was “about” the desecration of the wilderness where he lives in Montana and that was completely surreal. And yet, as he read it, he started to cry. People in the audience cried. We were caught up in how it felt for him, a witness to logging and clearcutting. What he was reading had happened to him in the deepest sense, but it was not factually, literally true.

Mike Daisey had an anecdote in his piece about a man with a mangled hand that was injured while making ipod. In the anecdote, Daisey gives him an ipod and he uses the hand to flip through the menus on the screen. The story moves people in his audience to tears. It turns out, this incident didn’t actually happen. But there is a truth to it that cannot be ignored.

For me the most interesting moments of theTALretraction was listening to host Ira Glass tell Mike Daisey that his piece “wasn’t true” and to Daisey dispute the meaning of truth– literary truth is not the same as literal accuracy. Ira Glass says something like: “But I think I have the normal worldview of what truth is. When you stand up on stage and say ‘this happened to me,’ I think it actually happened to you.”

Ira has a point. But so does Mike Daisey. In the end, there’s no disputing that Daisey deceived TAL and misrepresented himself and his story. He knew they were treating his story as actual, literal fact. He was being fact-checked in detail. Certain factual information like the populations of towns and numbers of employees were being altered and he was being sent long lists of queries. He hid the name and contact information of his translator because, he says, he was “terrified” his story would start to unravel. (This, Glass says, is when the story should have been killed. This was the red flag that all was not right and they couldn’t actually check the facts as they wanted to and get confirmation about the story’s veracity in detail.) He says he regrets putting the story on TAL because it destroyed the context. Out of the theatrical context, he says, it somehow didn’t work. It became lie, because the conventions and expectations of the audience had changed.

Why did Mike Daisey not come clean? Why didn’t he just say that he had taken poetic license, that his story was more testimony than an actual story of what happened to him? Wouldn’t there be room for that kind of story on TAL? Even the translator doesn’t begrudge him changing his story for dramatic effect. She says she knew he was a writer from the beginning, not a businessman, and expected him to lie– that was his right as a writer, no?

This probelm is not new. I first became engaged by the issue in the case of Rigoberta Menchu, author of I, Rigoberta Menchu and winner of the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize for this testimonio that told stories of the revolution in Guatemala and stood up for the rights of indigenous people. A Stanford academic challenged the veracity of her account of events. It turns out she herself, and a brother in her story, were not heroic. The experiences she recounted were not her own. But Latin American testimonio is a specific genre. It is not the same as the American memoir. It is political witness, activist writing, the memory of a people, particularly an oppressed or fighting people. In that case it was a cultural misunderstanding. But Americans do seem unusually obsessed with the literal in a way that does not make sense.

Theater aside, Mike Daisey is also a political activist. His theater piece is meant to raise awareness about human rights issues related to American production and consumption of electronics. It is probably not fair to single out Apple in his critique, and by the end of the TAL retraction, it seems clear that Apple is aware and working on problems in their factories probably more diligently than other corporations. The political issues in his piece, however, are worth drawing attention to and are real.

I didn’t hear the original piece and I have not been to his theatrical show. I think he was wrong to mislead TAL and its listeners and misrepresent his story as reportage. I hope that he did it for reasons other than wanting to be on a major national radio program and the personal attention this has brought him. Unfortunately, in interviews since the show he’s repeated his stories as fact, as personal experience, and represented himself as witness to things he did not witness.

But does that make them less true? Does that make his testimonio less powerful? On whose behalf is he making his plea– to bring attention to himself or to Chinese workers? That I don’t know. Only Mike Daisey knows that. I suspect it’s a bit of both.

It was telling to me that Daisey put the script of his show online and allowed people to download it for free and perform it as a one-man show. The actors portraying him are not him, obviously, and they are not speaking of their own experience. But did that make their performance less moving and affecting?

And is the truth only affecting if we believe it happened exactly as he said it did?

Posted in poetry, politics, reviews, writing | 3 Comments

Food Anxiety

Posted on March 16, 2012 by susanmsink@gmail.com

One of my favorite stories about food comes from the 1950s. When a company first decided to put cake mixes on the market, they did some research first. They gave women two lists of items one might find in a grocery cart with only one difference. In one there was a cake mix. In the other there was a carton of eggs.

Then they asked the women to assess what kind of woman might be in possession of Cart A and Cart B. Well, it was clear to everyone that the woman with the cake mix was nothing but a tramp. She didn’t care about her family. She probably had a disorganized house and its cleanliness was definitely in question.

The first cake mixes had dried eggs in them. All you had to add was water. They found that women would accept them only if they could put in their own eggs and oil. At that point they could convince themselves that they were still making a cake, just in a more convenient fashion.

When I think about the 1960s and 1970s, I think it’s possible that people wanted to eat food out of boxes and cans. In truth, they’d always had canned foods. The ready-made meals that came out of boxes were so full of salt it must have been like a flavor explosion. SO much better than homemade. That’s what I’m thinking. And of course, it was frozen vegetables that convinced people they didn’t need to grow food anymore.

When I think about it, I feel so cheated! How could people have seemingly forgotten how to grow and make food? How did they convince themselves that it was HARD?

Then I open a copy of Organic Gardening and realize that we’re still convincing ourselves it is hard. My mother, whose yard is regularly featured on the garden walk and who has been a member of a garden club for decades, decided last spring to try to grow some lettuce. She always grows herbs (even keeps her Trader Joe’s rosemary tree alive all winter to put it out again in spring!), but has not been one for vegetables.

Seedlings March 15, 2012

She had some questions for me, mostly about soil. What kind of soil should she have? What should the pH be? What did I add to make my lettuce grow well? What exposure did she need?

To tell the truth, I just wait until the ground thaws and then turn over the soil in my beds. I pick one where I didn’t grow lettuce last year and sprinkle some seeds on top. I mix them in with my hands because they should be planted shallow. In a couple of weeks, all kinds of greens come up. I thin the plants as necessary, but always leave the bed pretty crowded, because I eat the leaves when they’re about half-grown, not baby but not a real head either. As long as I can bear to wait.

In Organic Gardening this month there is detailed information on what is meant by “as soon as the soil can be worked.” It does not mean, as I thought, that it is simply thawed out and you can turn it over with a shovel. It means if you hold it in your hand and squeeze it, then open your hand and poke it with your other hand, it crumbles easily. Hmmm. There are photos of soil that is too wet, too dry, and just right. There are warnings about the trouble you will have if you plant in soil that, though thawed, is not ready “to be worked.”

Well, I think this is just another form of food anxiety, really. The crops you put in this early– radishes and lettuce and spinach and beets– are not fussy. They mostly come up. If they don’t, well, it’s early, seed is cheap, so plant some more.

I grew up in a quintessentially suburban environment. The fenced backyard of our quarter-acre lot was particularly nice because there were garden beds along two sides, edged with railroad ties (toxic, I know). My mother mostly grew flowers, but there was also a strawberry bed, and those early June strawberries we ate on our breakfast cereal at the picnic table the last few weeks of school are possibly my favorite childhood food memory.

We also planted carrots one year. Then my mother noticed that the ground was heaving and that a mother rabbit and her babies were nesting in the middle of our yard. We pulled up the baby carrots and arranged them around the rabbit hole so the mother wouldn’t have to leave her babies to get them. (I don’t want to tell you how my mother feels about rabbits these days. As for me, well, the coyotes seem to take care of them.)

It’s nothing short of miraculous that you can put seeds into any old dirt and get food. But you can. It doesn’t even have to be very good dirt or very expensive seed. And if you do it, even just a little bit, only one year, it will change the contents of your grocery cart in no time. Fewer boxes and cans. Without even trying.

Posted in garden, the Farm | 2 Comments

Winter Drought

Posted on March 14, 2012 by susanmsink@gmail.com

Today, yes, March 14, 2012, not EVEN the Ides of March yet, and it’s going to easily top 70 degrees in St. Cloud. The one snowcover we had (coming in March) is completely gone, last night we saw about 12 robins in the yard, and the sand hill cranes have even arrived. This is grounds for rejoicing, but it’s also just too unusual not to cause a little angst.

Steve and I are going on our “winter trip” next week to New York City. We try to take one trip when it’s not landscaping season. I pushed to get it into April, because then Storm King Art Center and Sculpture Park would be open and I’d love for him to see that place. But he said it would make him too anxious, as certainly it would be time to work on machinery and plant trees in the nursery and get going by April. Well,here it is March 14 and his truck is in the shop to get serviced, inspected and a new logo painted on it, and he’s already had a couple of calls about tree transplanting.

The most alarming thing this thaw is the evidence of the drought. With virtually no precipitation this winter, the pond is shrinking as the ice melts. It’s quite alarming to see the dock’s moorings.

On the upside, I found the grill cover (unusable) that blew off the grill during a storm and a flowerpot. It’s easier to clean things up given the “new” shoreline.

I will be sowing some radishes, lettuce, spinach, peas and kale today– and hopefully seeing some sprouting by the time we return from New York!

Posted in garden, the Farm, Uncategorized | 2 Comments

Mildred Pierce (2011) Review, part 1

Posted on March 7, 2012 by susanmsink@gmail.com

We’re finishing up the winter movie viewing season with the HBO miniseries Mildred Pierce starring Kate Winslet. So far we’ve watched disc 1, the first three episodes, with two more to go. But I am spending today on a bus, so thought I’d get my thoughts down about why this series, and particularly the character of Mildred Pierce, is so interesting.

So far, I’m impressed. This version, unlike the 1945 film that won Joan Crawford an Oscar and is her signature role, sticks closely to the book. It’s a complex look at gender and class and it’s hard to tell where one is supposed to stand on the issue of Mildred Pierce.

From what I’ve seen so far, she is heroic. She starts out at the beginning of the Depression with a filandering husband who has no work (he was a successful residential developer before the Depression). After she kicks him out, she has to find a way to support herself and her two daughters. This is a novel idea for a woman of her class and very difficult given the times.

Her own class prejudice shows as she learns she has no qualifications for work except her domestic skills (the very sign of her privilege now keeps her from office work) and she even throws up at the thought of being a waitress.

However, she dedicates herself to being a successful waitress and ends up winning the respect of those who are good at it, all the while observing the business and making plans to start her own restaurant. She’s ambitious and hard-working, and a very good cook, and she makes a go of it.

She’s also, well, loose. Her husband is barely out the door when she takes up with a humorous and unlikely lover, his business partner. This scene, however, also shows the precariousness of her position. As soon as this man, Wally, learns her husband is gone, he starts putting the moves on her. I mean immediately. It’s humorous, but her equally privileged friend, who is not a good cook, suggests that “being kept” is a perfectly good solution to her financial problems. To pull it off, she’s going to need liquor, an investment in the business of taking lovers.

Mildred meets Monty Baragon in the diner on her last day before heading off into business for herself and runs off for a weekend with him in Santa Barbara. One can’t help but think this is a deep character flaw that will lead to her downfall. But when her ex-husband and Wally first meet Baragon, well, they’re impressed that she’s landed him. She didn’t even know how wealthy and famous he was. Rather than promiscuity, it seems a coup.

She and her ex-husband remain on good terms. Even in the midst of tragedy, they come together, and he’s there to celebrate opening night of her restaurant. Wally becomes her business partner.

Monty Baragon soon loses his money and now Mildred’s keeping him: buying his clothes, paying his polo club fees, etc. The men seem to blame her for emasculating them, but they also seem unable to muster any resources to care for themselves and get back on their feet. Her ex-husband is still living with his mistress, “Mrs. Biederhoff,” and Monty seems happy to take her money. But he accuses her of being “a certain kind of woman,” not having class, for making him feel guilty about the money and for enlisting him to help out with her daughter, Vida, as if to get her “money’s worth.”

Vida. Ah, Vida. My first encounter with Mildred Pierce was definitely the Carol Burnett parody, and so in my mind it is about stormy cliffs, an arch Joan Crawford, and the evil, spoiled monster of a child who is Vida. Vida has the class prejudice her mother seems to have had in the beginning of the film, but on her it seems purely ugly and destructive. She is insolent and impertinent, yet for some reason her parents want to see her as talented and of a higher order than other people. They want to spare Vida the Depression, shield her from any loss in status.

As many of the characters say, in language that is familiar today, the economy will eventually turn around and life will be good again—for the rich. The men maybe aren’t being lazy so much as they’re just waiting out the economic downturn. That Mildred is a fan of Roosevelt while the others see him as wanting to tax the rich to support those who supposedly don’t want to work not only has resonance with today’s politics, it puts Mildred on the right side of history.

Vida is, then, a rather Gothic creature. She is the ills of her class and gender on display. The false ideas of privilege and beauty are distorted into her slatternly attitude and appearance. As an adolescent on Christmas morning with a big bow in her hair and make-up, smoking a cigarette as she confronts her mother for not buying her a grand piano (the money her mother was saving for it went to help Monty), Vida is a caricature in an otherwise complex set of characters. She has none of our sympathy.

Her mother even seems to see the problem. Her father supports Mildred, saying Vida is completely unreasonable for expecting a piano and not being grateful for the watch she gets instead. When pushed, Mildred slaps Vida yet again, but in the end she seems unable to let go of the ideology that fuels Vida, that somehow wealth and privilege are her birthright and others are just messing things up or letting her down.

This is where we have paused.

A review I read described Kate Winslet’s portrayal of Mildred Pierce as “one-note and miserable,” but I don’t see that at all. Winslet could be stronger, maybe, but she does an excellent job of showing how conflicted this woman is, and also how smart and brave. What could be a critique of her nurturing falls flat, since it is clear she is the only one keeping things going for everyone else!  What is needed here is money—for food, schooling, piano lessons, the roof over their head. She manages to work hard and be creative about it, not just surviving but prospering. I can’t see how that is miserable.

That she slaps Vida one moment and embraces her the next (something I vaguely remember from the Burnett parody as well) is a sign of her conflicted nature. She wants “the best” for her daughter, but can’t seem to see that this idealized “best” is twisted and destructive. What she is in reality is actually the best—but maybe this is too contemporary a notion.

The example of a competent, independent, hard-working and successful woman who is nonetheless still sexy and desirable, well, that’s really something, is it not? Her work doesn’t turn her into a drudge—she can rock a satin gown like nobody’s business. Her morality (mixed as it is) does not make her either irresponsible (despite a misguided attempt in episode two to show her as such) or a bad mother.

In the end, it seems that breaking out of the mold cast for her, while at the same time espousing the values of the mold that could only have led her to destitution or putting up with a playboy husband, is what does Mildred in. If she could only embrace and somehow commit to the values of the life she is forced to lead by circumstance, instead of longing for the old way—at least in terms of what she wants for her daughter—she could escape the fate that surely awaits her.

I know the series doesn’t go the way of the original movie, which added a murder that wasn’t in the book and turned it into a noir mystery told in flashbacks. Maybe Mildred will wind up better in this version, and maybe Vida will get her come-uppance. But even not knowing what will happen next, I am utterly taken by the complexity and conflict of this character, who has wiped away images of Crawford and Burnett entirely from view.

Posted in politics, reviews | Comments Off on Mildred Pierce (2011) Review, part 1

Epic Dinner Party

Posted on March 4, 2012 by susanmsink@gmail.com

This can be a difficult time of year. Now when we’re really anxious for spring to begin, we got our first snow. There are times I just don’t know what to do with myself. Also, we’re coming to an end to our major entertaining season, which is winter. Soon landscaping season will begin and Steve will work late and arrive home exhausted. We will eat lovely dinners on the porch but slow down on inviting guests.

It was time for an epic dinner party. I was especially excited because I had ordered a cavatelli maker, which was scheduled to arrive on Friday. I couldn’t wait to make pasta. This is all part of my continued adventures with Frankies Spuntino, a Brooklyn (and Manhattan) restaurant that issued a cookbook I got for Christmas. It is full of amazing Italian dishes, including the braciole I wrote about earlier.

A pasta dinner would also take care of some final products of the summer garden. I have pesto in the freezer, a couple of jars of tomato sauce and two butternut squashes. With the addition of three kinds of local mushrooms (oyster, shiitake and crimini) from the local market and Italian sausage from the meat market, I was set!

First I made a batch of my soft cheese with herbs de Provence. The day before I also diced up the squash. I tested the cavatelli machine with a simple dough made from flour, salt and hot water. Seriously. That’s it. The resulting, dense shell-like tubes were so delicious I couldn’t believe it. They are more like gnocchi than ordinary pasta, and the grooves hold the sauce.

Saturday morning I made the bean dip, also from Frankies Spuntino. It is simply a can of white beans, parsley, an anchovy and capers, lemon juice and olive oil. Steve made a batch of dinner rolls. I also decided then to make the ricotta from scratch for the ricotta cavatelli. It just takes an hour (it actually took me two) and the only ingredients are milk and citric acid.

The resulting ricotta was gorgeous. That afternoon I dumped it into the mixer with an egg, salt and flour (half semolina and half all-purpose) and mixed it with the dough hook. While it sat I chopped up an onion and the mushrooms, combined them with the squash and some oil and the last of the garden rosemary and oregano for roasting.

It was the most beautiful dough ever, springy and moist enough to work with. If anything, it was too nice, and was hard to roll into ropes because it kept springing back! I ended up rolling most of it out and cutting it in strips.

The key is to not roll it too thin. The machine likes the dough about 3/8 inch thick, and squeezes, rolls and cuts it in a single motion. Macaroni!!

An hour before the guests arrived, I put in the veggies and set out the wine and hors d’oeuvre. They brought olives, which was a great addition, and flan for dessert (it was an ovo-lactarian dream!)

We invited Annie and Tim from the farm and our friends Susan and Alex and Susan’s brother Scott. They have their own “family compound” not too far away and have gotten more into farming than we have. Recently they had major trauma with their four female goats, all of whom gave birth a couple of weeks ago. I saw Scott at the “Life in the Avon Hills” conference and he told me the horrors of it– only two kids lived, one mother died (never dilated) and the other two mothers wouldn’t feed their kids and without the first milk they died even with attempts to bottle feed them. They will be giving up on this breed of goats.

They do still have chickens, and Scott was as excited to talk seeds as I was. They brought a beautiful gift of multi-colored eggs, which will last us until Easter.

All the food was delicious and the company was great. We moved from room to room sitting on all the chairs Steve has made this winter and talking about gardens, children, food and projects.

Come Spring!

Posted in garden, recipe, St. Joseph, the Farm | 1 Comment

Upholstery Field Trip

Posted on March 2, 2012 by susanmsink@gmail.com

There’s a mysterious place known to everyone around here who has gone to Quarry Park; it looks like a castle and big glass building up on a gigantic pile of granite. We had heard that it was a school, and indeed it is. It’s way up on a hill strewn with granite blocks, as you can see from these photos taken from the parking lot below.

I took the photos after our visit to Sis, a group of nondescript warehouse buildings that no one would guess was a furniture upholstery shop. The owner, Chris Sis, lives on the property and his wife works in the office. Kenny, who went to the school on the hill from K-12, is an apprentice at the shop. Today he went with Chris to pull an engine that someone needed removed from a vehicle, and then he was upstairs sewing some leather. When I took his photo he laughed and said, “I just made a mistake, actually, and am ripping it out.”

Because Chris had to go pull the motor, among other tasks, his father Robert took us upstairs to get the backing Steve was looking for. First, at Steve’s request, he took us through the main space and out into an enormous warehouse filled from floor to ceiling, on three floors built into the space, with stuff. Most of it is old padding and piles of foam, stacks of chairs, bundles of springs and metal, and tons of wood.

But there is also an old flour mill and, along one wall, something that made me literally gasp. I mean, I was already impressed by a couple of galvanized tubs lying around, but then I saw them.

 

 

I’m sad the photo didn’t turn out very well, but this is a picture of a gigantic bookshelf filled with old quart and (I do believe) gallon Ball jars. Old, blue and green Ball jars. They’re worth a mint, and they’re worth it because they’re really beautiful and rare. This guy keeps everything. You never know when something will be useful.

The space was at one time a granite warehouse, with two giant cranes that moved slabs around the space. Then it was bought by Sealy, the mattress company, as some kind of investment growing soybeans (the property is 23 acres). Mr. Sis bought the place from Sealy after, he says, the three executives sent to run it had squandered away the money and not done anything. That was 1961.

In 1968, Robert was upset that the area Catholic schools had decided to start teaching sex education. He and his wife went to see the movies that would be shown to their children and they didn’t like what they saw. They appealed to the bishop but didn’t get anywhere. So, he decided to build his own school to educate his 11 children (Chris is the youngest) and the children of other like-minded folks. They began with an old country school they bought at auction for $900.

Eventually they built and moved into the school on the hill. There is a turret and two silos cut to look like castle towers. It’s still being operated as an alternative school for very conservative Catholics. Every hour on the hour, he said, a bird clock “chimes” with birdsong in every room. The children put down their pencils and say a prayer that Robert’s wife taught them. Then they pick up their pencils and continue their work. They begin every day with the rosary at 8 a.m.

Every Friday the children put on a play and he goes up and assesses it. He missed the play, which was on Thursday this week, but it was so good the children invited him up to see it this morning and performed it again.

His main goal these days is independence and self-sufficiency (perhaps that has always been his goal).

He would like to build a greenhouse for the school, because the kids need to learn how to grow their own food. We were talking about cold frames and he said he had some great crank windows for that, including an octoganal one. He had devised a set-up whereby an old woman could have the garden with the window attached to her home. She would just need to open the window and could plant and harvest without leaving her house. She could keep growing her own food right through the winter. “There are thousands of ways to stay alive,” he said.

He lives in a second floor room in this same building. It’s over the furnace but has no additional heat. He says it never gets below 50 degrees. He uses the bath and shower downstairs in the office and eats with his son’s family. It’s a spare room, unlike the warehouse. We said he lives like a monk and he agreed, then told us how he’d traveled in Europe after being in the army, back in the 1950s, and stayed primarily in monasteries.

He’s a lot like our neighbor Maurice Palmersheim, who works every day in his shop fixing old mowers and motors so they won’t go into the landfill. He spends his days still in making things, like Rita Palmersheim using pieces of scrap wood to make painted lawn art: St. Francis and birds and deer with grass in their mouths.

He has developed and run this separatist, conservative school, but he was critical of Catholics who form their own churches. He told us about a diocesan priest who broke away and formed his own church in nearby Rockville. Robert said, “When they changed from the Latin to English Mass, that was hard for my wife and I to accept. But we would never break away and form our own church. We built our own school, but not our own church.”

Robert and Chris appreciate what Steve is doing, and especially that Steve so appreciates what they have put together in their shop. Steve bought some fabric backing, and got some advice about reinforcing seats and pads. For me, as with the visit to the fishhouse, I feel privileged to be welcomed into people’s spaces and told their stories.

Life is full of extraordinary spaces and extraordinary lives. Sometimes they’re hidden in a back bay or behind a nondescript warehouse front. All you have to do is knock on the door.

Posted in art, St. Joseph, the Farm | 2 Comments

6:35, February 29, 2012

Posted on March 1, 2012 by susanmsink@gmail.com

Today was like a bonus, a free gift, extra in every way. It was the Leap Year, that gift of a 29th of February that comes every four years. I was born in 1964, a leap year, and Joey Borter was born on that day. I was invited to his 8th birthday, the first one he could remember on the actual day. I bought him a box kite, which was the most magical thing I could think of.

Last night and into late morning we had our first snowstorm of the year in Central Minnesota. When it snows hard in December, we force our way through because we don’t want to use up a precious snow day so early. But when it comes this close to March, we cancel everything and hunker down, saying “What took you so long! We were waiting for you!”

The reason we put up with winter at all is for the blessed downtime it gives us, the pause, the peaceful breaks when everything grinds to a halt.

So work was cancelled and I got a free day. The house was flooded with white light from the snow. I lay in bed with my tea and watched Youtube videos about how to make cavatelli, thinking of the machine I’ve ordered that will arrive on Friday and planning the dinner party for Saturday.   I cleaned my desk and did a good workout and prepared all my forms and receipts for my taxes. I cleared the kitchen counters and then really cleaned them.

My husband came in from his wood shop for lunch and I visited with him.

Then, since it had finished snowing, I went into town. I bought semolina and vegetables for the dinner party. I walked to the post office and dropped some mail through the slot. I stopped at the meat market for the good, local Gruyere cheese.

The snow was piled down the center of the street. A big truck trying to turn left was stuck and waiting for a tow. An old man was shoveling his narrow walk and I stopped to talk with him. I asked if it was too hard– the snow is wet and heavy. He said he is taking it easy. His neighbor “blew the snow” from his driveway, as he has the past few years. “He said he does it because I used to shovel for his mother-in-law years ago.” There were young men on four-wheelers with small plows and on snowmobiles and even a Bobcat moving snow.

At 3 p.m. I did something I never, ever do. I watched a romantic movie I had rented. It was not very good. Then I made dinner for my husband, who came in from his furniture-making shop. He and I were supposed to sew a cover for one of the chairs this afternoon, but he got distracted on a new project (so I watched the movie rather than get frustrated with him).

We had pasta with homemade sauce from last summer’s garden and Brussel’s sprouts and mushrooms from the mushroom farm up the road.

All day I thought about participating in Sara Nics’ experiment on cowbird.com. I had forgotten to take a photo– but it is only 6:37, not quite 7 p.m., so I took this one out our front door with the glow of St. Cloud in the background over the small pond by the house. It is blurry because I had to hold still for a long time to capture enough light.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on 6:35, February 29, 2012

What I Now Know About Heirloom Tomatoes

Posted on February 28, 2012 by susanmsink@gmail.com
Sunsugar: “incomparably wonderful” and taste test winner

On Saturday I went to a conference called “Life in the Avon Hills” at Saint John’s University, the campus where I work. It’s about 5 miles from my house and I was feeling the community at this event. Between the university, the monastery, the farmer’s market and the co-op, I know a lot of folks around here! And it’s heartening to see all the people interested in sustainable living.

Most days, the last thing I want to do is go to a series of lectures. This was true on Saturday as well, so I decided to attend just three. I ended up just going to two, though I probably should have gone to the beekeeping workshop and the one on making a bluebird trail. There’s always next year, and right now my focus is on gardening. (I happen to know the bluebird trail person and so can get a personal consultation if I want one!)

The first talk I attended was on heirloom tomatoes. I discovered some people I know are really serious tomato growers. And we all have the same problem: blight. The guy leading the workshop is an ob/gyn who has become completely obsessed with tomatoes. It’s taken over his family life (at lunch I heard he has 9 children, though this might be an exaggeration). He now has greenhouses, hoop houses, and sells seeds and seedlings. He grows 25-30 new types each year to test against his favorites. He offers 64 types on his order form, as well as tomatillos, 36 types of peppers, eggplants and basil. He also has a tomato tasting dinner party at the end of August at his house, with 50 varieties of tomatoes to taste, pizza from their brick oven, crepes and apple juice pressed from their orchard.

If you order seedlings, you pick them up on an afternoon in mid-May between 11-2 at the medical center.

Red Velvet Tomato

I didn’t think this presentation would have much of an effect on me, but it’s actually completely changed the tomatoes I’m going to grow. I learned that blight is caused by humidity and there’s not much you can do about it, especially in July in Minnesota, and I heard how widespread a problem it is for my more experienced gardening neighbors.

I also learned I should be proud and delighted to have gotten two Cherokee Purple tomatoes off the plant I grew last summer, as they are not high yield plants and were very stressed by last summer’s weather. All the taste tests he reported on, and many of the varieties he showed as winners in terms of taste and blight resistance and beauty, were cherry tomatoes. For larger tomatoes, he recommended Boxcar Willie or Cosmonaut Volkov tomatoes. Russians and Poles have a lot to offer in the way of heirloom tomato varieties.

Black Cherry Tomato

I am going to grow only cherry tomatoes and canning (paste) tomatoes this year. I can grow yellow, red, purple and orange heirloom cherry type tomatoes and expect them to be productive a long time and relatively blight free. Every year so far my cherry tomatoes have been first and last to produce and not suffered from blight while my other plants died a painful-looking death. They are also the only tomato plants I’ve successfully grown from seed.

I also learned about a new paste tomato I can’t wait to try called a Polish Linguisa. They are heavy yielders, grow big tomatoes (up to 8 oz), but are a little later in the season. I’ll throw in a few San Marzano plants as well.

With any luck, I’ll have gorgeous, colorful tomato salads all summer and into the fall, make lots of great salsa and save viable seeds from each kind so I can grow all my own tomato plants next year.

And May 18, I’ll definitely be in the surgical center parking lot picking up my plants, and August 28 I hope to be tasting tomatoes at the party. I’ll take my camera so I can share the event with you, of course!

While there, I also heard some great stories. I adapted one and posted it on cowbird.com: Click here for “Wolves.” 

Posted in garden, St. Joseph, the Farm | 2 Comments