I need my ruby slippers!

Jaipur, the pink city, was a bit damp.

We're back in Delhi waiting for our flight home. . . in 28 hours. I would start walking right now, barefoot, if it would speed our return. Tomorrow we're going to see more of Delhi, but I really just want to eat some butter chicken at Karim's and get on that midnight plane. I'm going to buckle the seatbelt, open a tiny bottle of Delta's finest red, toast the accomplishment of a lifelong goal, put on the headphones, and fall into a stupor watching Prometheus.

Do I make it sound like we haven't had fun in India? We've had lots of fun. But I didn't expect to relax and haven't. I feel braced for disaster even when sleeping. I'm a hyper-vigilant Western princess! Between terrifying road conditions (camels, tractors, speeding trucks, overturned buses, sleeping cows, naked toddlers), ignoring sad beggar children, avoiding belligerent cows, avoiding noisome bathrooms, remembering to take the malaria pills, scrutinizing every morsel that goes in Owen's mouth, wondering if a cap-sleeve dress is modest enough for rural Rajasthan . . .

It's a lot harder than pricing peaches at Whole Foods.

Tourist miscellany:

From a buffalo? Cow? Goat? Definitely unchilled.

-In Jaipur, we saw farmers pedaling around with giant cans of milk that they deliver from the countryside every morning. According to our Jaipur guide, most Indians prefer their milk "fresh and raw." (They heat it upon delivery, so it is not technically raw when consumed.) He added that much local milk these days is watered down and then doctored with additives to give it a thicker mouthfeel. I blame bad milk in hot chocolate for Owen's upset stomach, which has come and gone and come and gone the entire trip and was last seen at noon today. Tomorrow, he is not allowed to drink hot chocolate. And I may rethink the butter chicken. (I have been fine. Probably gained weight. NOT COMPLAINING.)

-People make the yogurt, buy the paneer. Or so said our Jaipur guide. If I ever come back to India, I need better culinary sources.

-Diet is tightly linked to caste. Very low caste Hindus eat the pigs that you see rooting around in the garbage. Brahmins aren't supposed to eat meat at all. When you order "mutton" at a restaurant you are probably eating goat. We ate "mutton" on one occasion and it was delicious. I am truly sorry, Natalie.

-After I swore off shopping in India altogether, we ended up in one last textile shop. Walking toward the front door, I steeled myself for the onslaught of the salesmen. I told Kumar, no thanks, I absolutely didn't want to try on a sari.

And it was the ugliest sari there.

But suddenly I was wearing a sari. I also said no to the block-print tablecloth, but somehow it is now in our suitcase.

  I still like that kid.

-Gunpowder chutney. I mixed it with ghee and drizzled it on masala dosa this morning and am definitely making this fabulous condiment when I get home. Ditto lemon pickle.

-The Taj Mahal. So perfect, I almost cried.

I wrote a report on this in 4th grade.

No, this trip has been fantastic. 

Like a horse heading back to the barn

I think this is a bhakri (buck).

Friends, I have never been more puzzled and exhausted and overwhelmed and overheated and overexcited than I have been on this India vacation and what blog posts I mentally compose during the day are lost because there is rarely internet in our hotel rooms. I'm currently sitting outside in the soupy 8:45 a.m. heat to bring you this, whatever this is.

Other than "thank-you," I have learned three Hindi words on this trip. Bhakra, which means goat. Gai, which means cow. And bhens, which means water buffalo. Don't laugh if you know how to spell in Hindi. I'm just trying to get my dairy animals straight so I can figure out what kind of milk they are using in the chai. This morning it was gai milk. The other day: bhens. Sometimes it is made with bhakra milk, which one waiter told me is excellent, although the waiter this morning told me bhakra milk it is far too salty. People are funny about milk. The chai made with bhens milk was extremely rich and fattening -- check out the calories. Whoa. I think some of the really amazing and velvety paneer we've eaten has been made with bhens milk. Does anyone raise bhens in the United States? Someone should. All you need is a big muddy pond where they can wallow.

I'm not going to lie, I'm ready to go home. I woke up this morning and thought, only four more mornings in India! It is wearisome, navigating in this crazy heat, ignoring the relentless salesmen, and making Owen wash his hands every five minutes. Did you see Best Exotic Marigold Hotel? Mostly I feel like Tom Wilkinson, but I regret to say that I can identify with Maggie Smith.

Would my husband be upset if I brought one home?

I will never, ever admit to a Penelope Wilton moment.

Everything I can write in 20 minutes

unavoidable camel ride

Amusing fact: The term shampoo is derived from an old Indian word, and yet in hotels that cater to Westerners today the little bottle in the shower is labeled hair cleanser.

Tedious: analyzing every single item we eat for potential contamination with droplets of tap water. Very insulting to certain waiters when you won't touch the complimentary fruit plate. I can see why, but I'm still not going to eat those pears.

Exhausting: oh, the hateful sales pitches. I've realized at great expense that the only way I'm going to come home financially solvent is to not walk into another Indian store. At the textiles co-op yesterday Owen kept whispering to me, "Please stop Mom. Dad is going to be so mad."

unavoidable shopping

He is right.

Strangely comforting: watching The Walking Dead with Owen at night makes me homesick!

Interesting: You never see an Indian woman's shoulders, but it is considered perfectly ok for women of advanced years to reveal their bellies. And they are clearly not doing a lot of crunches.

Jaisalmer street scene

 I think they look beautiful. Time's up.

If it's Tuesday, this must be Jaisalmer

It's true about the cows in India.

I was going to post earlier about our trip, but before we left I was too busy buying mosquito repellent with DEET and trying to figure out what to pack that was both extremely modest and extremely lightweight (failed! wearing jeans and long-sleeved shirts day after day in mighty heat), and once we got to India my head started spinning and hasn't stopped. This is our sixth day and I am even less certain of what to write than I was on the first when I had a few "clever" observations that now seem completely fatuous.

one of our hotels

A short list of what we have seen: dead cows, live cows, New Delhi, Hindu temples, crumbling mosques, torrential rains, desert sands, magical palaces, sandstone forts, muddy towns, goats, an active outdoor crematorium complete with bone shards, carts pulled by camels, flies, dogs, lovely saris, flooding, donkeys, pilgrims walking barefoot along the highway, bats, peacocks, and bread baking in a tandoor oven.

How hard to build one? 

Of course, that made us think of our cob oven-in-progress back home, as did an old cob house.

The house had a mortar dug right into the floor for grinding spices.

While touring this house, we were photographed by a tour bus group from rural India, all men, who treated us like Brad and Angelina, a surreal experience that I will not allow to be repeated. People stare at us wherever we go. Despite my long sleeves, jeans, and chubby middle age, they stare mostly at me, which feels the opposite of flattering.

The food is amazing except when it is warmed over and mediocre in a steam tray at a hotel buffet. We are eating strictly vegetarian because someone told me it was easier to avoid getting sick that way. I don't miss meat. I have drunk no alcohol or coffee since I got here and, to my surprise, don't miss them either. I drink chai in the mornings. Owen drank some chai, but then felt sick for 36 hours and says he is done with chai forever. Every other conversation starts, "Mom, you know in that game Marvel Avengers Alliance. . . ?" Or, "Who's your favorite superhero?"

Other than that, I couldn't hope for a better, sweeter, more spirited companion.

I miss Mark and Isabel, though. They didn't want to come. I get that and I get that even more now that we are here. India is a challenging place to visit and you really need to be up for it. That said, this trip is a strange, beautiful adventure I wish we were sharing with them.

Just a couple of dishes

The crust on the blueberry almond tart from Chocolate and Zucchini is like a shortbread cookie. The filling has intense blueberry flavor without being at all gloppy, which is sometimes the case with pie. It is tidy to eat; you can pick up a slice with your fingers. The recipe is here and you should make it before the end of blueberry season because it is very delicious.

My meatball gold standard is still the meatball from Nancy Silverton's Mozza, but the Chocolate and Zucchini lamb-and-prune meatballs are also lovely -- sweet, delicate, and Middle Eastern, as opposed to brawny, zesty, and Italian. They're also easy. (Silverton's meatballs are a production.) Recipe is here.

zucchini with olives at left

Interesting that while I'm indifferent to both chocolate and zucchini, I like Chocolate and Zucchini so much. I look at almost every recipe and think, I could make that tonight. And I might not even have to to go to the supermarket! And I can start 30 minutes before we want to eat! The recipes are simple and reasonable and they all work, perfect for this weird phase in my cooking life when I'm more interested in masonry than pastry.

The state of the oven:

People keep thinking the brick base is the oven itself, but it's not. It's just the platform that will hold the oven. The opening in the brick is for wood storage and later we'll bolt molding on so it doesn't look so raggedy. I was hoping to be further along with this by now, but I don't think we'll be baking pizza until September.

I have real kitchen swagger!

pan bagnat

I've now made all the sandwiches from Clotilde Dusoulier's Chocolate and Zucchini cookbook, and it gets an A+ for sandwiches. In my view, any book that reminds me how good homemade sandwiches are, how you can get protein, starch, vegetable, and salad in a single easy, cheap package and call it dinner deserves a gold star.

pan bagnat. Classic Provencal sandwich featuring tuna, tomato, olives, olive oil, and greens on baguette. (Or focaccia.) Wet, zesty, refreshing. Much loved by all. I'll make this again for sure.

curried turkey sandwich. Turkey chopped and mixed with curry powder, goat cheese, and raisins. Yellow and softly spicy. Much loved by my husband and me, but not Owen, who objected to the raisins. He is silly. I'll make this again after Thanksgiving.

cantal cheese sandwich with mushrooms. My personal favorite. You cook cremini mushrooms until soft and broil them on bread with cheese. (She calls for cantal, which I've never encountered, so I used tomme.) Much loved by all. Owen apparently didn't notice he was eating mushrooms. I'll make this again.

And last night I served her sardine club sandwich. You spread toast with tomato jam (she offers a recipe, but I used the leftover jam from last month's Mourad dinner), goat cheese, and mashed sardines. Add some greenery. She calls for an extra slice of bread in the middle of all this, but I skipped that. Very tasty, though I probably won't make it again as Isabel wanted to eat neither sardines nor tomato jam. 

I also baked an excellent ricotta poundcake from Dolce Italiano last week. Ricotta is strange. It's so bland on its own, and yet baked in this cake you could taste it clearly through the sugar, butter, vanilla and eggs. This is a wonderful cake. You should make it. The recipe is here.

It looked like this on the first day:

And like this on the second:

And I hardly ate any! As you can see, I baked it in a bundt pan rather than a loaf pan. I also omitted the vanilla bean and used 1 tablespoon of vanilla, and as I didn't have cake flour,  I used all-purpose.

I also reviewed a book for the first time in ages.

On another subject -- perhaps more exciting than sandwiches and poundcake? you think? --  I cooked in front of TV cameras all day Thursday and Friday. The Food Network was making a so-called "sizzle tape" to see if my eccentric cooking life and mild personality have any TV potential.

Whatever! It was fun. I made Nancy Silverton's pizza dough (the best), pizza, marinara sauce, goat's milk mozzarella (not my best; Natalie's milk was off), chevre, pesto, graham crackers, frozen yogurt, flour tortillas, pork-apple sausage patties, croutons, salad. I also milked the goat, talked incessantly, pretended to collect eggs, applied and reapplied lipstick, ate, opined, served a big dinner to my extended family, wished I weighed 12 pounds less.

 One of the cameramen said I had "real kitchen swagger." That made my week.

Then everyone left. Yesterday morning, Owen and I returned to work on the oven. Props to friends Melanie, Tom, and Isaiah for helping mix disgusting, squelching cob with their feet. Twas no walk in the park.

75% of my crew

I'm thinking everyone is bored hearing about my oven. Well, it will stop soon. We've put down the clay sub-floor, built a cob wall around it for insulation, and today we'll put down the actual oven floor, construct a brick arch for the door, and, if we're energetic, build the sand dome and cover it with cob. Then it's a sprint to the finish line.

I mean, really, what does Nigella have that I don't?

 Oh, be quiet.

I am rushing, rushing, rushing

Owen is master of the level.

I have to walk out the door in ten minutes -- Isabel is coming home! -- so forgive breathlessness and/or grammatical errors.

Lots of progress on the oven this past weekend. We made some mistakes along the way, but fixed them, and fixing the mistakes was extremely satisfying. I will have to say more later about how much I'm loving this project. It's been revelatory, a word I do not use casually.

where we left it

Back at it tomorrow, once I turn in my last work project of the summer.

As I've mentioned, we have a LOT of goat's milk these days. I've been turning it into chevre because cheese takes up less space than milk, But then we end up with these massive logs of cheese in the fridge --  4 or 5 pounds at a time -- and it weighs on my mind. I can not throw away chevre. But how to use up chevre before it molds?

Yesterday, I looked in my cookbooks and baked two chevre cheesecakes. I took them to Sunday dinner at my sister's. It was a showdown. I love showdowns.

Mario Batali's lemon goat cheesecake from The Babbo Cookbook vs. Kate Zuckerman's goat cheese cake from The Sweet Life. 

Both recipes had embellishments (glazes, a brittle to top the cake), but I omitted those. I just wanted to focus on the cakes themselves.

And?

Kate Zuckerman won. It was unaninmous. Mario's cake involved lots of lemon and had a dry, coarse texture. We would have probably loved it on its own, but Kate's cake was so silky and suave, with no lemon to interfere with the more subtle tang of goat cheese. I love tasting dishes side by side. It's the only way to truly determine which is better.

I can't remember which is which.

Neither was quite perfect, though. I resent a cheesecake that does not have a graham cracker crust. I will be perfecting my chevre cheesecake in the near future, and this will be my first fix. Now I really have to leave.

what Sunday dinner looks like

And I did not lose a single pound

You'll want to keep your distance when you see this.

I was meaning to post a lot sooner, but became busy with work and then got sick. I still don't feel like talking about food, so I'm going to save recent cooking experiences for a subsequent post when I can do them justice.

However, I will happily talk about ovens.

Last weekend, Owen and I chose our oven site. It is the correct distance from the fence as dictated by the county. We put down cement pavers to create a level surface.

You have no idea how hard this was.

It looks like it would be about as complex as setting the table, but took us almost an entire day. Getting cement pavers to sit level on a sloping piece of rocky ground when you have no upper body strength or geometry skillz? Humbling. We ended up using a carpenter's level, which I'd never done before. I assure you, those mothers are now level.

After we were through for the day, Owen and I ended up watching Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ. No comment. I bring it up only because I was preoccupied throughout by all the perfectly flat stone surfaces in the ancient world. Humans are so smart.

2. The next day, we mixed mortar, inhaled mortar powder, and started laying the brick platform for the oven.

That is not the vessel in which you want to mix mortar.

What a mess. What a learning curve

A few times I got my hands coated in mortar. If I rub them together five days later it still feels like they underwent some expensive and brutal dermabrasion. We worked hard for a few hours and I ruined my favorite pair of jeans and then it was time to drive Owen to sleep-away camp.

where we left it

Not exactly tearing through this project, are we? It looks good from a distance, very bad close up. But I have kicked it as hard as I could and the structure is solid, so that's what really matters.

We will resume on Saturday, after Owen returns. Isabel comes home on Monday. We have missed her. I'm ready for us all to be under one roof again.

Look what the chickens have done to our rhubarb.

Supposedly poisonous, but I see no signs of illness among the hens.

 I am trying to decide whether to construct more barriers, or clip wings.

In case you missed it, I wrote a review of ice cream books for Slate that you can read here.

It's GOING to take a village

The wrong day to wear the Anthropologie tank top.

On Saturday as Owen and I were leaving for the cob oven-building workshop, my husband said, "I hope it isn't too much fun. I really don't want you to build an oven in our yard." 

He said it kindly. I think he knows he's playing a thankless but necessary role in the sitcom of our marriage. I think he deserves an Emmy. 

The workshop was held in a mysterious new art/garden/sustainable living center a mile from our house. I don't understand the business plan at all, but they now have a fabulous new oven courtesy of our workshop. Is that the business plan? People pay for workshops in which they build the center's infrastructure? Shrewd! In a few days the clay will be dry, they'll scoop out the sand, coat it with plaster, fire up the oven to 800 degrees F, and start baking phenomenal pizzas.

The plank-topped platform in back is what we started with.

The workshop was fascinating on many levels, starting with the people who teach and take cob oven building works. Let me assure you, the dream of the '60s is alive in cob oven-building workshops. Two beverage stories to illustrate my point. 1. A gentle young man was drinking a "smoothie"(his word) that consisted of crushed blackberries and plums he'd foraged from around town. That was it: mashed up fruit he'd picked on the side of the road. In a Mason jar. 2. Midafternoon when an older man in the class asked whether there was anywhere around he might buy a cappuccino, there fell an awkward silence. It dawned on me that the coordinator didn't want to mention that there's a Starbucks right across the street. Finally, after saying there wasn't really any place around to get coffee, he almost apologetically mentioned the Starbucks. The older man -- maybe the only participant there who was older than I -- happily went off to to procure his cappuccino.

As to the oven, "cob" is the old English word for durable, sustainable earthen material that was once widely used in construction. I dislike the word "cob." I don't know why. What to call a cob oven if you dislike the word "cob?" "Earth" sounds sanctimonious. "Mud" sounds dumpy. Clay?

In any case, we mixed a lot of cob, stomping to a Pandora station that played folksy songs in Spanish.

Owen and some other cats mixing cob.

The teacher sort of danced on his tiptoes in the cob, but everyone else just shuffled.

We made a round, hollow base for the oven that we filled with empty Jim Beam and kombucha bottles.

I dutifully opened a bottle of wine last night to use in our oven.

It was subsequently packed full of a perlite-earth mixture, topped with a smooth layer of sand, and then the brick floor went down. Sorry for the scant photos; I had to wash my hands every time I took out the camera.

Over the brick floor, we mounded a dome of damp sand.

We smoothed it out a lot after this photo was taken.

Then we shaped the oven itself out of cob, over the sand. No photos of this process whatsoever. I should be fired. But I was living in the moment!

Somehow, by the end of the day, we had this.

Just like my mother, Owen has a passion for clay.

As I mentioned, when the cob is dry all the sand will be scooped out and you will see just a domed oven. It needs some prettification and plaster and I personally favor a brick arch to define the door (the teacher showed us how to do this.) Also, I don't love the beehive coils; I prefer a smooth dome. But I do think it's a beautiful little oven.

There are many, many details I couldn't write down because my hands were covered with cob and just a day later I can't remember them. What ratio of sand to clay for the base? For the dome?  How much? Mix it until its the texture of oatmeal? Or a milkshake? Etc. I wish I had a recipe, but I guess I'll figure it out as we go along. I have a lot of regular work this week, but Owen and I are going to forge ahead, try to get something done on the oven, however small, every day. 

It took a village

I have a talented friend.

A couple of months ago my friend Hilary (an artist, see pretty montage above) and I preserved some lemons using the recipe from Mourad,  the large, handsome and daunting book by Mourad Lalou, owner of Aziza, a Moroccan restaurant in San Francisco. It is the kind of book in which every recipe seems to include a seasoning mix that incorporates 15 spices, including one obscure, essential peppercorn that you need to mail order. To finish the recipe, you might require a tablespoon of chicken jus which starts with a chicken and ten pounds of onion and involves cooking them down all night under a parchment lid. Or something like that.

We decided to do a Mourad dinner and divide up the dishes. I don't want to speak for her, but I had my doubts, especially late Thursday afternoon when the dishes were stacked three feet high in the sink. I came around to thinking the book is well worth struggling with. If you have any interest at all in the book after reading this post, go to the library and check it out. I'm not copying any recipes because they are all very long and, as I said, many of the fold in equally long sub-recipes. Also, I've only made these recipes once.

I'll go dish by dish.

French 75s. Not from the book, but essential. Made by Hilary's husband's John using my cheap brandy rather than cognac. Even so, excellent.

fresh cheese. Made with goat's milk, but you could use storebought cow's milk. This requires no special starters or cultures, just acid, time, and biscuit cutters to shape the cheese into cute hockey pucks. They were bright and fresh and delicious. Excellent.

tomato jam. Served with the cheese. Made a lot. You cook down cherry tomatoes with sugar, spices, champagne vinegar, lemons, and butter, then puree. Excellent.

The cherry tomatoes really do look like cherries.

grilled flatbreads. Make dough, let rise, shape into balls, let rise again, flatten a bit, top with sumac, sesame seeds, oregano, and salt, grill. Topping: essential. The ones you don't burn will be excellent.

squid salad with Thai-style harissa sauce. Hilary made this refreshing starter of calamari and Napa cabbage and it was definitely more Thai than Moroccan. But not quite 100% Thai. I loved this. Excellent.

short rib tangia with aged butter and preserved lemons. Unlike anything I've ever cooked before. You brine bone-in short ribs then braise for four hours. The meat fell off the bone, which I don't think it was supposed to given the way the dish looks in Mourad's picture (mahogany beef on beautiful frenched bones), but who cares. You boil down the sauce and rub the meat with "aged butter" which is actually just ordinary butter beaten with some blue cheese. I thought this dish was incredible, like pot roast but with the texture of pulled pork and the zesty spice of pastrami. It was a bit salty and next time I'd only brine for 6 hours, not overnight. I will definitely make this again, with adjustments. Excellent. Possibly worth the price of the book.

chard with preserved lemons. What it sounds like, but much prettier because of the finely chopped colorful stems. Jewel-like. Hilary's contribution. Excellent.

orange-and-olive salad. Hilary's contribution from Arabesque by Claudia Roden. Super-refreshing. Excellent and necessary with the rich meat.

That meat does not look pretty.

fig leaf ice cream. While I have never harvested figs from the five trees I planted over the last decade, I have now proudly harvested leaves. Stupid fig trees. You grind the leaves with sugar and use them to flavor a very sumptuous, velvety ice cream, pale celadon green and with the flavor of coconut. Excellent.

almond cookies. Like amaretto cookies you buy wrapped in tissuey paper at Italian delis. Excellent.

chocolate-ginger cookies. Dark, chocolatey, intense, spicy. Confused. Not excellent.

Our one lingering question was why very little of this tasted Moroccan. Maybe if we'd made the basteeya? It will be a while until I'm ready to tackle Mourad's basteeya, but I want to revisit this book sooner rather than later. I probably need a week or two more of Clotilde's Dusoulier's salads, though.  Yesterday morning I couldn't get my rings off. Today I stepped on the scale. Fortunately, I will be spending the day at an oven-building workshop, far, far away from leftover fig leaf ice cream.

Baby, I'm a firework

rustic beauty

I'm cooking from Clotilde Dusoulier's Chocolate and Zucchini. It's the right book for right now with lots of sandwiches and salads and small, simple meals, exactly the kinds of things I want to cook for the three of us this summer. (Isabel stays in New England until August.) I already know I love this book and have baked the yogurt cake a half dozen times. I'm not planning on critiquing, just exploring and enjoying for the rest of July.

Sunday night my father and sister and her family came over for dinner and I made Dusoulier's tuna mousse for an appetizer. My mother was famous for her tuna mousse, which was a silky, putty-colored melange of tuna, mayonnaise, and gelatin that you chilled in a mold and then presented on a platter surrounded by Club crackers. Very theatrical. She used a big copper fish mold and put pimento olives where the eyes would be and it was sort of kitschy but it was hard to make fun of the kitschy tuna mousse when your mouth was full of tuna mousse and Club crackers. That tuna mousse was delicious.

So is Dusoulier's, but in a totally different way. Hers is a puree of tuna, green apple, shallot, ricotta, cilantro and cayenne and it's fresher and brighter, earthier and easier (no need for a mold). It's a bit homely; it would be hard for even a professional to style that mousse. I'd definitely make it again, but I think I have to revisit my mother's recipe first.

For dessert, I baked Dusoulier's ricotta cake with apricots and pistachios. What a robust and beautiful dessert! Make it before apricots go out of season; the recipe is here. (If you don't have a 10-inch pan, 9-inch works fine.)  Unfortunately, it was over cake that I shared with the guests my plans to build a cob oven in the backyard over the next few weeks. Certain members of the party let me know they found this very foolish and naive. Tempers briefly flared.

After cake/conflict, I tried to teach little children how to milk a goat.

futility

Then everyone went home and my husband and I watched the season premiere of Breaking Bad and I told him about the cob oven conflict. I suspect he secretly agrees with the naysayers.

To prove everyone wrong, Monday morning I signed up for this.

Monday night I made Dusoulier's spinach and chicken salad with peaches and toasted hazelnuts. It took about five minutes, which I loved. I also loved the salad and you can find the recipe here. (In case you don't know, which until recently I did not, this is the only way you should ever skin hazelnuts.)

I was going to make Dusoulier's curried turkey sandwiches last night, but for lunch Owen and I went to Cafe Colucci in Oakland on a nominally work-related excursion and gorged ourselves. It was a dinner-obliterating lunch. We consumed several pounds of kitfo, lentils, greens, Ethiopian cheese, and injera and then waddled off to see the Katy Perry movie, which was not even nominally work-related.

a very lucky indentured servant

Apparently, I'm still on vacation from grown-up life, if not blogging.

My indentured servant is back

My mom made that mushroom. 

Without meaning to, I took a vacation from the blog. I wasn't doing any cooking or cookbook reading and I got involved in a bunch of other projects and weeks slipped by.

I have not cooked since mid-June, when my kids went to New England to visit their grandparents. One night I put steaks in a skillet and turned on the stove to produce dinner for my husband and me. My husband looked at the steak on the plate and said, "No salad!"

No. Salad would have meant washing lettuce.

Here's what I've been doing instead of cooking:

Milking Natalie twice a day. Six quarts daily since her babies left. 

Making cheese with that milk. Have made camembert, taleggio, ricotta, chevre, a tomme that used up 16 quarts, St. Maure, and Neufchatel.

That gray matter isn't mold, it's ash, and the cheese is great.

I'm getting more confident, getting better, becoming less fearful about experimenting, less fearful about eating the cheese, although there have been a couple of cheeses so monstrous I wouldn't even feed them to the chickens.

Speaking of chickens, a raccoon killed Sally, the sole survivor from our first batch of Buff Orpington chicks. That was sad. A few nights later, the raccoon came back and tried to kill another chicken, but we ran outside with a flashlight and scared it off. The raccoon slithered over the fence and I went down into the muck and found the mangled bird.

sickbed

I nursed Sprite back to health, although she now staggers when she walks. Sprite used to lay eggs in our kitchen window box.

I don't ordinarily like impatiens, but these look like little roses.

Which has never looked better!

I've revived the garden in a big way. There are now tomatoes and squash, but mostly I just planted or transplanted perennials and citrus trees and vines. The irrigation is finally all in place so maybe this time everything won't die. I want some of the things I do around here to actually stick so I can be living in a functional and adult house by the time I qualify for AARP. No more overambitious plans and half-assed false starts.

With that in mind, I finally gave in and bought an Oriental rug. This sounds mundane, but it was a huge move for me. In buying this dirt-camouflaging Turkish carpet, I gave up once and for all the dream that I will ever live in an airy and darling home full of florals and charming vintage white furniture from the flea market. I wasted a lot of years on that pretty dream and it was a relief to let it go. I wish I'd never heard of you, Rachel Ashwell.

Now I just need to repaint.

The dark, complicated, quietly vibrant carpet replaces an insipid, totally filthy pink cotton rug which I had come to hate. I am so happy with this rug. I plan to die with this rug.

Owen came home a few days ago. It is good to have him back to help with the animals and also because he is nice. Not sure what or from what book, but tonight I am going to cook.