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I was lucky enough to work with Dulcet Creative to make these fig galettes. Head over to their blog to see the recipe! Tomorrow, I'll have a follow-up recipe involving some of the leftover peach jam from these guys.
My parents' house in Pennsylvania is close to the road, maybe thirty feet between the front door an old road named after a soldier who died in some war or another. Between the stretch of patchy grass that's dotted with limestone and silica lies a flagpole. Its verdigris mixed with mud thats been caked on from Mid-Atlantic summer rains and bird shit, the pole within buzzing distance to a nearby bird feeder.
The flagpole was made from a swingset that was never cemented into our backyard. It had come with the house and if we pumped our legs too hard, it would tilt precariously forward and backward. One time it toppled to the ground, my sister landing on her knees as she jumped away from it. My parents had it melted down and three weeks later, it was erected in our front yard as a flagpole. I remember being embarrassed of it; how, within that 30 foot stretch of yard where my mother tried to make some semblance of a garden, we would waste the precious land on a show of patriotism. I was eight, but I was confused.
The garden never grew, the roses always came out deformed, small. My dad said it was from car exhaust, I think my mother just wasn't good at gardening. We once buried a mouse that had died underneath the flagpole. We once buried a blind finch who had fell from its nest there, too. The flagpole was sort of a tombstone then, small burials took place for the pets I had made throughout the years. One small duckling, a butterfly whose wing I had ripped in a net. I figured that's what the flag represented, all those red stripes for blood, punctuating the white of innocence.
The flagpole was also the landmark for our back country road. If you followed the loops of the countryside, you'd come across the lone flag that billowed in the pre-thunderstorm silence of a humid summer. Sometimes it would hang at half-mast, but always it was visible as a midway point between the small towns of Imler and New Paris. Small towns with foreign names to anyone outside of the Chesapeake Bay Watershed.
I wonder how many people are driving by that old country house with its flag in the front yard today. How many children are sitting backseat with their water wings on in anticipation of some aunt and uncle's swimming pool. How the creek is so filled with glass bottles, no one can swim in it anymore. I wonder how many years I spent resenting any appreciation for patriotism and family, I stayed in doors and read.
But I did celebrate, I remember the year I left for California I spent the Fourth of July tie-dying shirts with my mother and catching lightning bugs in a jar. I remember that night I snuck out to smoke the last cigarette in a pack and found my dad on the porch with a beer. I tucked the cigarette into the waistband of my underwear and sat with him in silence. He handed me a beer. I was 19 then, but I tipped the can to him and sipped it while the stars turned dark as the clouds rolled in. One year, I sat on that same porch and started a fire with matches and nail polish remover. One year, I dangled my feet off my friend's boat and ate hummus out of a red solo cup. I found ways to keep up the tradition I didn't even know I was a part of. I kept my sunglasses on and drank deeply from the cups that were proffered to me.
And I will do the same this year. Thursday, I bought a six-pack of beer and more hot dog buns from 7-Eleven. It will be just the two of us this year, relaxing, boring, quiet as that may be. The grill is hot and the dogs will sit anxiously at my feet. I'm going to look back on today and think it's been the best Fourth of July of them all. No artifice, no conversation, just the steady stream of languid stretching and a movie in playing in the background. I'll enjoy it all with a plateful of hot dogs, potato chips, an open beer, and a side of homemade mustard.
Homemade Spicy Beer Mustard
Adapted from Molly's recipe on Food52. Yields 1 1/2 cups, ish
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Sometimes there are tumbleweeds between us and sometimes there is only a layer of clothing. Sometimes words can go unspoken for days and sometimes they erupt too soon, premature, when the wound is fresh and the words are full of piss and vinegar. I'm too fragile to be alone a lot of the times, too weak to ever admit it. I'm used to being alone, though. I'm resilient in that way. Behind books, in photos, I walk with my head down. I make my own dinner and leave the dishes in the sink. I don't think of other people when I make the food in our house. I make it for myself, for others far away. For the folk stories I've created. In the pseudo-mythology of suffering and redemption, built from sandcastles in the salt of the earth.
But this week, I made a cake for someone else. A cake I knew he'd like. A cake baked while he worked, he came home to the house smelling of it. I made it as a thank you for always cleaning the kitchen. A thank you for taking care of Murphy and Elsa when I was in Texas. I made it as a thank you for letting me pretend I could ever be alone and for thinking space is anything more than a place for stars.
Basic Peanut Butter Cake with Chocolate-Peanut Butter Buttercream
Make this for someone you love, make it for when you have a craving for summer break days and dipping a spoon into a can of frosting and a jar of peanut butter and calling it lunch. Top it with flowers.
For the cake:
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For the buttercream: I used my go-to Wilton's recipe here, but substituted 1/4 cup butter, 1/4 cup peanut butter, and substitute 2/3 of one of the cups of confectioner's sugar with cocoa powder.
To assemble: Allow cakes to cool completely. Put one cake on a plate, smother top with buttercream. Place second cake on top, smooth side down. Sift confectioner's sugar on top and add flowers, if you're feeling fancy.
We create our own mythology and my sabbath is the morning. Ritual has become important for me, no matter how undeniably boring it may seem. I like the simple beginnings to the day, the power to breathe without feeling stifled. The power to slowly shake the dust of sleep from my hair and curl up on the couch while I hit snooze over and over again. Milo wakes up first and the rest of the house follows. I measure out 8 cups of water, 4 scoops of coffee. While it percolates, I lay on the couch, under a tattered Navajo blanket and try to stay warm. We keep the air on all night, it makes us lazy in the morning. We tuck our feet into anything warm, pillowcases and warm puppy bellies. Elsa's sleepy eyes stare at me until I crack my back and start my day. Put the clothes in the dryer, wash my face, duck my hair under the faucet. I drink two cups of coffee and walk out the door. I don't eat until dinner.
But when the summer comes, I sleep longer. I break my own dogma. I'm a little hungrier than the day before. I woke up this morning and wanted oatmeal, peasant food. Warm food. The air conditioning was cold and I needed to be warm, to feel like home. The way my mother used to make it, sweet and buttery. I kneaded it into a bread dough and made these rolls. I'll eat them all week, warmed up and enjoyed with my coffee. With the dogs at my feet, waiting for a ripped morsel. With a boy breathing in my bedroom, his head chasing the daylight, avoiding it at all costs.
Honey Oat Rolls
oft and delicate, these rolls remind me of home. Add a little smoked salt for a savory kick, or keep them sweet and light with your coffee and cream. Makes 12-14 rolls.
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I waste everything. I waste the breath it takes to say, "Thank you" on small talk, inconsistent storylines about how my day was, how my weekend was. I waste the moments between sleep and reality to think about my day ahead, never looking back to be grateful of the day I just finished. I work in a linear fashion, one foot marches in front of the other and everything that is not the current vogue of my tastes and ambitions gets thrown out.
I looked in my fridge the other day and saw cheese spotted with mold. I saw a small, plastic jug with a sliver of milk swirling at the bottom. I looked at the side door and saw the quart-sized mason jar of murky balsamic-pickled strawberries sitting untouched from last week. Sometimes for me, in my linear mentality, the baking is done for the creation, not the ingestion. I find more beauty in the in-between than any kind of final product. Between the cooling and the icing periods. Between the hulling and the pickling. Between the rising and the falling of the yeasted dough and the Roman Empire. It's all the same pleasure of the ephemeral and the sickening feeling of realizing you're stuck with things you never wanted, creations you let decay while your brain is thinking about tomorrow.
I wish I could be like my mother when it comes to waste. I remember the summer before I moved to California, I quit my job to spend those last three months with her. Yogurts were on sale at a discount grocery called "The Food Barn" and so we had a yogurt every morning, with coffee and an episode of "I Love Lucy". I think about that now and how simple it all was, so simple to share those moments with my mother and how I wasted them on talking about the future, the big dreams of being a lawyer and the palm trees that would line my drive-way. I should have taken that time to say, "I love you" more. Instead, we would sit in silence and tan by the pool, yogurt cups blown by the wind and tipped underneath the patio furniture.
I thought about this when I opened a bag of matcha that I hadn't touched in two months. I know my history with waste and this product was good, so pure and farm-grown in Japan. When I received it from Lauren over at Mizuba Tea Co., I tucked it in my little pantry in Texas, then tucked it in a box on its trip to San Diego with me, and now I finally used it to make a dish I wasted going to waste. I repurposed the pickled strawberries into a jam and made my own version of those yogurt cups with a matcha panna cotta with "fruit at the bottom". And it was wholesome, and it was light, and it was good. And it was one of many lessons this week to not trudge ahead and collect the detritus of what we want, holding on until we feel suffocated by our surroundings, but to buy consciously, live in those simple moments, and to not waste if you can help it.
Matcha "Fruit at the Bottom" Panna Cotta
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