YUM

Sometimes very good things come in surprising packages, don't they?

I had the lovely shock recently of finding that perhaps the simplest recipe I've ever come across is also an absolute keeper. I had a big plan last week to make homemade pasta. The truth is I have a soft spot for it since it was something of an entertaining staple in my house growing up, something we did as a family when guests came over. And I do believe I even had a few birthday parties where making noodles was the main event. Cranking the floury, salty dough through the Atlas pasta machine was a fun, exciting thing to me at eleven, and it turns out it still is! Jaren and I bought our own shiny metal Atlas machine years ago, but we haven't busted it out a single time since we became parents. I thought the kids would get a kick out of watching their pasta noodles "born", but like so many of my expectations about what my kids will think is fun, they were absolutely indifferent to the pasta making process and were just ready to eat.

Lucky for us, the best part of the night was the secret tomato sauce recipe I had read about on Smitten Kitchen awhile back. The simple trio of ingredients (peeled tomatoes, butter, and onion) had made me avoid jumping to make it because it just sounded too simple to be very good. But since I really trust Smitten Kitchen on these matters, I figured it was worth a go. Its been a week and I've wanted to make the sauce pretty much every day since. YUM! The sauce is delicate and subtle and seriously good. I would recommend you make it with the high quality San Marzano canned tomatoes, though, since the tomato flavor is the main event. I can't say it is the most amazing thing you'll ever eat but I can say that the flavor in its simplicity will refresh you and get under your skin. And let's not forget that this puppy costs next to nothing to make and is ready in 45 minutes with minimal stirring required. Like I said, keeper!

Tomato Sauce with Butter and Onions

Adapted from Marcela Hazan’s Essentials of Italian Cooking

Serves 4

28 ounces (800 grams) whole peeled tomatoes from a can (San Marzano, if you can find them)*
5 tablespoons (70 grams) unsalted butter
1 medium-sized yellow onion, peeled and halved
Salt to taste

Put the tomatoes, onion and butter in a heavy saucepan (it fit just right in a 3-quart) over medium heat. Bring the sauce to a simmer then lower the heat to keep the sauce at a slow, steady simmer for about 45 minutes, or until droplets of fat float free of the tomatoes. Stir occasionally, crushing the tomatoes against the side of the pot with a wooden spoon. Remove from heat, discard the onion, add salt to taste (you might find, as I did, that your tomatoes came salted and that you didn’t need to add more) and keep warm while you prepare your pasta.

Serve with spaghetti, with or without grated parmesan cheese to pass.

The gift of attention

Thank you Spring for entering my life at just the perfect moment! I really needed your clear skies and soft light and the gentle nudge nudge nudging of tiny green life reaching up around me. I've waxed on and on (see here or here) about my love of this faire season, but seriously, what is not to love about spring? It is an insta-cure for the funk and blahs of winter and it is giving me a much needed energy boost. I've been mired in what feels like a complex life recently, and I feel so reassured watching Nature unfold and gain momentum all around me, doing it without question and in such small, subtle increments. Maybe I've just been on some sort of hibernation/auto pilot winter mode myself, pushing up in my own tiny increments toward the warmth and sun again?

As I was out turning the soil in the garden today, I stood and watched a hawk doing concentric circles in the sky; going ever higher then gliding back down. It was mesmorizing watching its wings beat and realizing that the motion requires so much effort, a constant jumpity flap flap. I'd never sat and stared like this at a bird in flight, allowing myself to be transfixed until the hawk flew out of view up the canyon. What a gift attention is and what a gift it feels like when I can capture it in my own cluttered mind. It is such a big, fast paced world out there. And in the mania of screens and tech and rushing around, it is so easy to just fail to notice the small details and even harder to just stay in the moment at hand. But taking the time to really look is such a wonderful source of relaxation and awe. I think that is why I work hard (perhaps even subconsciously) to cultivate hobbies and habits that actually take time instead of save it. I have learned to love the 10 minutes it takes me to knead my bread dough because in those 10 minutes there is nothing else I can be doing. I stand in the kitchen and mellow. I think gardening is a great hobby for these modern days because it forces patience--there is no short cut or fast forward button. You just have to wait and see, water and hope. My Dad and my little family are raising bees for honey this summer and I'm hoping this hobby will turn out to be much the same, a delightful waiting game and an opportunity for all of us to unwrap more little gifts of attention.

I'm not a religious person so I've never truly observed a Sabbath day, but I really love the idea of having a set day in your week to rest and encourage a change of pace, whether it be to worship or just to avoid doing what you normally do. I was intrigued to learn that Sabbath comes form the word shabbat which in Hebrew means "to cease". I learned this nifty little tidbit from a very cool web initiative called Sabbath Manifesto, which aims to help people slow down and unplug every week. I love the ten principles they came up with to help encourage a weekly time out:

Avoid Technology

Connect with Loved Ones

Nurture your Health

Get outside

Avoid commerce

Light candles

Drink Wine

Eat Bread

Find Silence

Give Back

I think I would like a day each week that had me following that gospel. Between sabbath and spring, I think I'm saved! Hallelujah.

cures for the kitchen

A few weeks ago I signed up for a genius thing called the Kitchen Cure on the lovely site the Kitchn, which has provided me with so many good recipes and tidbits in the last couple of years. The cure is basically a challenge to purge, organize, clean, and spruce up your kitchen in four weeks. As my primary "workspace" these days, and the center of our home, my kitchen takes so much abuse. There are smoothie splatters on the blender and goldfish cracker smashes under the stove and all my equipment feels like it is covered in gooey film of kid-ness and cooking grease. Its not that I don't clean my kitchen. I do. I just don't normally go deep. I maintain and never force myself to face the toaster crumbs on the lazy susan or the goop by the waste basket or tossing out the package of rice flour from 2004.

These past fews weeks I've been following along with the cure assignments: cleaning out the fridge, freezer, and pantry of old and under used food, de-cluttering drawers and shelves and finding all those random kitchen tools and appliances that I never use or are not in good working order, and then deep cleaning everything including the appliances. It has felt so good! I think every room in my house probably needs a monthly cure every so often. Breaking big tasks (like undoing and then redoing your whole kitchen) down into weekly assignments is such a smart way to efficiently and effectively tackle them. I haven't felt overwhelmed even once and I easily complete each assignment because I have a whole week to finish. And frankly, being the pleaser that I am, I really like being "assigned" tasks because I love to relish in the glory of completing them. I'm a list maker at heart and take freakish amounts of satisfication in those little checks and x's.

The cure did make me appreciate two things that I have started doing in my kitchen this past year that allow for easy maintainence and order. Awhile back I started labeling all the left overs in my fridge. I have a thin roll of masking tape I keep in my utensil drawer and whenever I put leftovers in a container I write the contents on a strip of tape with a sharpie and stick it to the side or the lid. It is nice to open the fridge and know what's in it at a glance. Things don't get lost in the shuffle and mold anymore! And I've found that I now eat pretty much all of our left overs because if I read on a label that there is chicken tortilla soup, I am way more likely to eat it, especially when I'm starving and feeling the "we don't have anything to eat" dilemma which seems to strike me at lunch when I'm very vulnerable to the pull of the Oreos or chips.

The freezer inventory is the other trick I'm really keen on. I started it back when I was living on the $15/week budget and needed to know exactly what food I already had to work with. Basically all I do is keep an active log of what I put in the freezer (meat, berries, butter, dino nuggets, phyllo dough, ice cream etc.) and I cross things off when the items are gone and I add them back when I've repurchased. It may seem silly to inventory your freezer but between my small freezer capacity which forces everything to be crammed in disorderly piles, and places like Costco that encourage buying big portions of things at once, I find it is a pretty useful way to make sure you aren't wasting completely useable food. I also find the inventory to be an amazing meal planning tool. If I see I'm heavy on ground beef and pork then I know meatball time has come. After all, ingredients I have on hand can and should direct the meals I decide to make. Its budget conscious but its also waste conscious.

Part of this week's cure assignment is to beautify the kitchen space through a special project like fresh paint, hanging art, or keeping a vase of fresh flowers. I haven't decided on mine yet, but honestly just going into the kitchen and opening the ordered, clean drawer has made it feel more beautiful to me. Good stewardship clearly has a beauty all its own.

Love affair with tangibility

Thank you all for the sympathetic well wishes! It has been a tough week bouncing back from my Grandma's death and still having Jaren gone and my Cleo sick in bed. But I'm attempting to persevere, and have a lot to look forward to in the coming weeks, not least of which are the nearly spring-like temperatures outside. Our snow is all but melted and I got out in the yard today with Flynn and raked the tired old leaves and mangy mess of winter out of the garden beds. It was cathartic, and reminded me how life just moves us forward, whether we are ready or not.

Having someone close to me die seems to be making me have a love affair with tangibility. Its like I want to fight life's ephemeral nature and capture it any way I can. I have been interested all week in the idea of documentation. I have taken so many photos of my kids and have been relishing even the smallest gesture: the wrinkling of a nose, the dirt caked under fingernails, a wiggly front tooth. I've been mindful to write down the funny little things they say, the ones I know I will one day forget. How can I hold on to these little beings when they change daily? How can I capture what it feels like to be a mother to two young children? How will I remember this day, this moment in time?

I have always been drawn to collecting things, especially vintage stuff, because I love the story encased in every object. Old stuff, in particular, conveys a sense of the life lived around it: the creases, the yellowed pages, the cracks, the dents. For me, this patina is what turns mere things into precious somethings. Collecting is so expressive of personality. It explains materially what one finds beautiful, unique, or captivating. And a collection is a tangible legacy to leave behind. The "you can't take it with you" adage is definitely true, but precious objects sure can step in and inform and continue your story for you.

I feel so grateful that Mere was someone who hung on to stuff. She didn't collect per se, she was just loathe to part with anything. It has been a wonderful gift to inherit some of her treasures, as well as every day objects, and get to put them into rotation in my own household. I now have her metal measuring cups and measuring spoons and some simple pyrex dishes. In my quest for tangibility, I found myself cooking and baking Mere's recipes all week (recipes being another great example of documentation of a life and memories) and loved the fact that I was doing it with some of her ordinary things she must have used for the very same purpose. It felt comforting to me to know that even though the players have changed, the game remains the same. Her things are now my things, her story is now my story, and it will hopefully one day be told in a voice never known to me.

**The gorgeous photos above are from an amazing photo blog called A Collection A Day by artist Lisa Congdon, which is a project to document a different collection of objects each day for a year. I love the fact that some of the collections are real and some are imagined...things you would wish to have and collect. The project inspires me, the objects inspire me, and it reminds me to think about the things that surround me and how best to honor them and let them tell my story. Hope you enjoy it too......