Studio visit

I am part of a creative collaboration of sorts that involves a number of my favorite things. It started with soup delivered to my door each wednesday and now involves beautiful cottons, great design and traditional, sustainable ways to take plastic out of our lives.

The soup began as a side project by a chef passionate about local, sustainable and seasonable food. His soups are incredible and a complete treat to find waiting for us each week. Last week Soup2U and I visited the studio of Ambatalia to see what they were up to.

The studio is a dream of a space in the way that all artists studios are -  the chaos of the creative process mixed up with the simple aesthetic of their designs and products. Around us were the raw materials (beautiful natural fabrics), some finished products (aprons, bags, Furoshikis) and in between were sources of inspiration. It was a treat to enter someone else's creative space and find myself inspired by it.

First Rains

Yesterday saw our first big rains after many months of dry and brought an end to our languid summer. I am always amused to hear people say that those if us living without blizzards and snow "don't have seasons".  What they don't know, is that we have very clear seasons and they are all about water. Our summers don't bring rain. Where I live we have months of intense dry, followed by heavy and equally intense rains.

There is something amazing about rain when ones air has been dry for as long as ours has been. The air is sweet with moisture, dust clouds settle and the grass turns a shade greener almost instantaneously. Layers of dust gets washed off of everything, even stones on the trails reveal the greens and deep reds no longer covered by the orange of our dust. Once the rain gets going, it can rain for days and weeks without end. Basements flood, rivers threaten to burst their banks and mountain bikers ride down my street a uniform mud-brown from head to spoke. Reservoirs fill and overflow to the sea and the snow-pack in the Sierra Mountains rises, as rain for us means snow up there. Rain ensures our survival come summer and there is something deeply ingrained in us to respond to it's arrival with joy, so we do.

Yesterday evening, I ran outside with my iphone to try and record something of the falling rain's sweetness. Rain drops nestled in Rose petals on the pathway and Anemones glowed in the increasing darkness, small droplets weighing down their petals.

Fall is here and with is has come the rain, at last.

bikkies and tea

Afternoon tea in our home is a pretty sacred ritual and happens in some form without fail. It involves a cup of Earl Grey Tea (me), builders tea (my husband), juice for the kids and always a bikkie. Yesterday the bikkie options were fairly minimalist (McVities Digestives). That was fine for me, but it wasn't going to fly with the most junior member of the family.

His solution in these moments is pretty inspired - take 2 Digestive bikkies, spread Nutella on one and then sandwich them together. A most excellent afternoon tea.

Magic Bean

This evening while picking green beans for dinner, I was transported in an instant and without warning, to a long forgotten moment. All it took was for me to bite into a bean - something I have done many times this summer without any moment of magic. Suddenly I was in the kitchen of my Grandparent's beach house, biting in to a bean. I could see, hear and feel what it had felt like to stand there decades ago. In that moment my heart swelled with the fullness of that place. I was there.

The beach house was more of a large cottage. It had thick, whitewashed walls and a thatch roof. It was on an estuary that shared tides with a world famous surf break and had the most magnificent beach. There were many years that we pretty much had the place to ourselves, a bunch of cousins roaming barefoot from dawn until dusk. By the time the house was sold 12 years ago, our white-washed walls were being surrounded by McMansions and attempts to create Miami in Africa. On a recent visit the natural beauty was all still there, just obscured at times by boats and houses.

My family has gathered there since my mother was a teenager and the 21 summers I spent there before moving to NYC, were a paradise of cousins, long summer days and family meals. There was always large volumes of fresh fruit and vegetables on our plates.

Who knows how and why a bean took me back there tonight, maybe it was the balmy evening after a sweltering afternoon, maybe it was some nuance of flavor and scent that triggered the deeply lodged memory. Whatever it was, I was for an unexpected instant in a different decade of my life and it was as real to me as the present. My heart was full. Amazing.

beauty by chance

There is something about the salt water worn beauty of a rounded stone, a bleached and broken shell, sun-dried seaweed or maybe a salty seagull feather. When found, just as a wave left the behind, they are beautiful in a way that a hand could never replicate. Waking up recently on a wild and remote beach, we walked down to the shore in a thick fog that lit everything with a soft but saturated intensity. Receding waves had left trails around single stones and a light rain was dotting rocks with wet polka dots. All around was the simplest, wildest and most temporary array of beauty.

To A Cabin

In a different time, Dorothea Lange used to spend months of her year, amidst extraordinary simplicity, beauty and wildness, living in small cabins overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Her book "To a Cabin" captures a time and place I long for in our fast-paced lives. The cabins are now owned by the Parks Dept, they are simpler (pretty much camping without a tent), but are rentable. I spotted them from a beach last summer, drawn by their starkness, camouflage, remoteness and views. I decided to learn more about them and stay there if we could. We have been twice this summer for short stays, each time we have stepped into the bliss of a wide and wild ocean in every direction. Rocks to climb, a driftwood and flotsam filled beach to explore and virtually no one else there.  A wood burning fire to warm the cabin at night and always a view of the sea.

From farm to table

Yesterday we were guests at the Devil's Gulch Ranch open house, where our children had spent a feral and wonderous week as summer campers back in July. We grabbed the opportunity to get a glimpse into the life of a local, family-owned farm. Pigs lolled under live oaks, sheep wandered around in a stream and gave true meaning to the term free ranging. After swimming our hearts out their reservoir we made sure to purchase some meat before heading home. Sausages and bacon were frozen, so are in the freezer for another day. The pork chops were fresh and were grilled this evening. As an omnivore who believes deeply in leaving a light footprint and supporting the work of small farms that produce high quality and humane food, tonights dinner was the purest of pleasures. The pork chops needed no flavoring or marinading, they were perfect with just a little salt and olive oil as they went on to the grill. The meat was succulent, flavorful, fresh, lean (with all important fatty bits too!), tender and fragrant. Yes, farmers market meat may cost more to buy, but my answer to that is - eat less meat and eat better when you do, it is worth it.

In case you are inspired to cook your own - our favorite accompaniment to a pork chop is "hot apple sauce". I cooked a batch for our freezer today (using Gravenstein apples and Serrano chillis from our garden) so the recipe is pretty fresh in my mind and goes something like this:

2 tbsp butter
1/2 red onion
2-4 serrano peppers (or more/ less depending how fiery they are/ you want it)
4-6 apples (preferably tart)
apple juice

finely chop and saute onion and peppers in butter for 10 minutes or so, don't let them brown too much. Add the apples (peeled, cored, chopped), adding a little apple juice to the bottom of the pan to prevent the apples from sticking while they soften. Add a sprinkling of ginger if you wish as well as salt and pepper to taste. Cook until mushy. Freezes well.

Kudos to West Elm (with one gripe...)

I have on my desk a favorite piece of South African art, it is a papier-mache bowl made by the Wolani Nani collective. Wolani Nani, like many such groups in South Africa forges an intersection between art, craft and social upliftment.

To my delight, I was recently handed a West Elm Catalog, heavily featuring the work of South African Artists and Craftsmen/women.  Even better, it included work by Wolani Nani. I truly hand it to West Elm for stepping out of their usual comfort zone and not only selling the works, but also celebrating the artists who created them. There are so many great things to buy, the John Vogel Chairs  being a personal favorite, along with Shirley Fintz's Stoneware and Gemma Orkin's pillows.

Now comes my gripe. As far as I can tell, all but the Wolani Nani pieces were made by "artisans in China" and possibly elsewhere too. The South African artists were compensated for their designs, but West Elm turned to China for its cheap labor and factories ready to reproduce homegrown South African designs.

It makes me so happy to see the vibrant work that fills South African shops and homes given its due by a major American retailer. It thrills me to see South Africa represented by more than safari-based curios. I just wish they could have been made by African hands.

Despite my gripe, go and buy something, bring a little African design or whimsy in to your home and be happy to know that even if in a small part, someone in the Southern Hemisphere has a few more coins in their pocket as a result.

Lip puckering Lime Cordial

Last week, a bag of limes I bought to use as July 4th decor was ripening too fast. It bothers me to waste food (even though a healthy compost pile means nothing really goes to waste),  so I tossed up between making marmalade or cordial with them. Our temperatures were hitting the 100s,  so lime cordial won hands down.

I made my first cordials earlier this year, after being inspired by a sublime granadilla (aka passion fruit) cordial I tasted in Cape Town. I came home to Marin and made an orange-passion fruit one that was amazing.  That was followed by a cordial using the Rangpur Limes we grow (see earlier post!). Both times I winged it and wrote nothing down. This time around I decided to make some notes, so that I have something to work with next time.

Uses? Many:

non alcoholic, refreshing - diluted with seltzer, on ice, a wedge of lime
a little bit of mexico - over ice, with tequila, a squeeze of fresh lime, a dash of seltzer


There are many ways to make a cordial, the nice thing about a citrus cordial is that you don't have to add any preserving agents. The natural acidity of the fruit keeps things fresh, so you don't need any fancy ingredients. This version is sour and limey, use fewer limes if you like it sweeter and more if you like it even more lip-puckering:

750g sugar
750ml water
20 limes

Heat the water and sugar in a pan until the sugar melts. Squeeze the limes and include thin slivers of peel (from maybe 4- 6 of them - you decide!) while the sugar melts. Once the sugar mix has cooled a little, add the lime mix to it. Use liberally. Store in the refrigerator.

My cordial looks orange  because I used a few late season Rangpur limes and an organic sugar which had a goldenish hue. My guess is using only bright green limes and pure white sugar will produce a greener cordial but who cares, since the color may be orange but the taste is pure limey goodness!

Not quite lost but still found.

I was about to clear a CF card yesterday when I found tucked in to the very end of it, a few photos that I had forgotten all about. The images brought the sweet surprise that photos of forgotten moments always bring. The one I loved most was taken in a hurry, in the midst of a day of hard, garden-work. I stopped to pick Favas and Artichokes for dinner and took them in to the kitchen. I placed them next to the Robin's egg we had found earlier and was struck by the shapes, textures and  intensity of colours in front of me.

Today, the garden has already moved on to it's warmer, summer crops. Fava beans and Artichokes are a sweet memory of spring, but the Robin's egg still sits on my kitchen counter.

Robin's Egg Blue

Blue has been my favorite colour of mine for a very long time (yes I am wearing 3 blue items of clothing as I type). The love affair began very young and continues with blues ranging from brilliant to grey finding their way into my painting, home, clothes, photos.

A perfect, blue, Robin's egg has landed in our lives. We found it sitting in the middle of one of our vegetable beds one recent morning. Its brilliant blue was off-set by the rich brown of the damp soil on which it rested. It was too cool and too long gone from it's nest to be viable any longer; the lost booty from a night-time nest-raid.

It is one of the most beautiful things I have ever encountered. Not only in it's brilliant blue, but also the perfection of it's small egg-shape and the weight it carries when it rests in one's hand. There is the possibility of the life once held inside it and maybe a small baby bird embalmed within an insanely blue shell.

What keeps amazing me, is that something so utterly beautiful is freely given, costing not a cent. It is purely functional, yet brings such joy.

Fava Bean Central

Late 2012, one of my last gardening acts before boarding a plane for a southern hemsiphere Christmas, was to plant my first ever Fava Bean cover crop. One of the pleasures of winter gardening in Marin County is the free garden-watering-rain, but this wasn't the year for that. After 5 weeks away we got home to a decidedly brown lawn and barely surviving vegetables. Thankfully the Favas survived and then the rains began. They grew tall and lush and filled the vegetable garden with abundance. I used some Favas for their nitrogen fixing properties and so cut down a small forest of them shortly after they bloomed. (Prior to producing fruit the plant returns nitrogen to the soil, rebalancing nitrogen lost after a summer's worth of growth.) I left other plants growing and have been picking a steady supply for salads and soups. The favorite so far was a super simple salad inspired by Alice Waters (who else!) which goes something like this:

FRESH FAVA SALAD

Freshly picked Fava beans, preferably younger (ie not too huge and still bright green)
Olive Oil
Lemon juice
Salt
Parmesan cheese

Shell the Favas and boil for about 5 minutes to loosen the skin on the beans, remove from heat and drain the water off.
Once the beans are cool enough to handle, pop them out of their outer skin (dont let them cool too much, warmer means easier skin removal).
Toss them in olive oil with a squeeze of fresh lemon juice, a sprinkle of salt and a generous amount of parmesan cheese.

The only 2 problems with the salad are (1) the two times shelling of the beans to get the sweet green nugget from the center, but it is worth it and only happens once a year (2) there will be none left over

Thanks to my lovely husband and garden helper for the photo.

A Perfect Egg

Breakfast required more then the unusual rushed bowl of granola or slice of toast. On my kitchen counter was a bowl of freshly laid eggs (handed to me by a neighbor) and a loaf of home baked bread. (My biweekly attempt at a Tartine Country Loaf.) Thus inspired I poached the egg with a little vinegar in the water to keep its shape  while I toasted a slice of bread. Toast was buttered, the egg was dropped on to the toast with a sprinkle of fresh pepper and sea salt. A cup of tea was brewed. As I sliced in to the egg, its deep golden free-ranging yolk revealed itself still runny inside. It was so perfectly beautiful, I had to record it (very quickly before anything cooled)! 

Thank you Trader Joes's

A common trait of blogs like mine, is that we write about those fantastic moments when we transcend the mundane with some fabulous creation that we hope will inspire and maybe even inspire awe. The truth is, is that most or all of us have many days when we are too busy to cook from scratch. Tonight was such a night. It was a beautiful day today, with an afternoon spent in the garden and pool. Dinner was simple, quickly prepared and amazing. The star was Trader Joe's Korean Short Ribs cooked on the grill with T.J's organic basmati rice cooked on the stove. Both pretty instant and perfect. A salad of beautiful fresh lettuce, sliced baby red peppers, fresh shelled english peas, cubes of roasted butternut (South African style - roasted with cinnamon, brown sugar and butter and left over from Friday night's dinner), cherry tomatoes, crutons and all tossed in a vinagarette. We ate outside, with the 6 & 7 year olds in their pj's and the glow of a beautiful, slow, Sunday hovering. Plates were emptied at high, lip-smacking speed, everyone was happy and no one had to slave away to make it happen. Pretty perfect in my estimation.

Hot Cross Buns

In some parts of the world, Hot Cross Buns are as important to March/ April/ Easter eating as a Turkey is to Thanksgiving, in the USA. Hot Cross Buns are not restricted to Easter meals, but traditionally are only sold around that time of year. What I love is they are cinnamony,  raisiny and slightly doughy; the longing for them makes the pleasure even sweeter when the season rolls around each year. This year I decided to try my hand at them. I consulted a recipe sent by a friend, made some changes (extra cinnamon and cloves, smaller buns) and in my second attempt, I sort of pulled off a close facsimile to the Hot Cross Bun of every grocery store of my childhood. I am finally getting around to adding recipes to my blog, this will be the first. Don't be daunted, the pleasure of eating a warm, fragrant, slightly sweet roll that you have baked yourself is more than worth the effort.

Ingredients:

1.5 cups warm milk
7g/ 1 sachet dried yeast
1/4 cup sugar
60g melted butter
1 egg, whisked
4.5 cups/ 675g bread flour *
1 tsp salt
3tsp mixed spice **
2tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp cloves
1 cup sultanas/ golden raisins
1/4 cup currants
1/4 cup mixed peel
1/3 cup cold water
1/4 cup apricot jam

1. Combine milk, yeast and 1Tbsp sugar, set aside in a warm spot until frothy - 10 minutes or so.
2. Combine 4 cups/ 600g flour with salt, spices, peel, raisins, currants in a bowl.
3. Whisk together milk mix, butter and egg.
4. Make a well in the center of the flour mix and pour the milk mix into the center, stirring with a wooden spoon until just mixed. Use your hands to bring the dough together. Knead the dough on a lightly floured surface for 10-15 minutes until smooth and elastic feeling. (Don't flour the surface too heavily, you will want the dough to stay sticky and moist.)
5. Place the dough in a bowl, covered with a damp tea towel, in a warm spot to rise (I like to dust it the ball of dough with a little flour as I place it in to the bowl). Let the dough rise until it has almost doubled in size, anything from 30 minutes to a couple of hours, depending how warm it is.***
6. Heat your oven to 390 and grease a 9inch (23cm) pan. Mix the remaining dough and water to form a smooth paste (I prefer it a bit runny so add extra water if thick). Put the paste mix in a piping bag or ziplock baggie which you can snip a corner off of to use a piping bag.
7. Punch the dough down, knead on a floured surface for 2-3 minutes until smooth and elastic. Divide evenly into 24 balls and arrange in your pan. Pipe lines across the buns, going lengthways and then widthways to form crosses.
8. Bake at 390 for 5 minutes and then at 350 for 25 minutes or until baked through and golden on top.
9. Turn out on to a wire rack, warm the jam and sieve it if lumpy (or just avoid the lumps in the next step!). Brush the hot jam over the buns, pull apart when cooled a little but still warm. Eat them ASAP!




* Using bread flour is worth a trip to the baking aisle, it is higher in gluten and is what gives bread it's chewy texture. Believe it or not, most grocery stores stock it.

** For readers who may struggle to find mixed spice in their local store , it is a blend of spices you can mix up yourself and store in an airtight jar. It turns up in my cooking quite often.

• 1 Tbs ground allspice
• 1 Tbs ground cinnamon
• 1 Tbs ground nutmeg
• 2 tsp ground mace
• 1 tsp ground cloves
• 1 tsp ground coriander
• 1 tsp ground Ginger

***On my second and most successful attempt at this recipe, I had time constraints in that I wanted to serve the HCBs in the morning but knew my house wouldn't be warm enough for the dough to rise as quickly as I needed it to. I did steps 1-5 the night before and let the dough rise overnight. It didn't rise any higher than before but the raisins and currants had more time to absorb liquid producing very moist Hot Cross Buns. I will plan to do this again!

Easter Egg Nest

Easter has always meant a magical, transitional time of year. Growing up, Easter meant the cooling of our days as Autumn approached and a hot African summer receded. In my  New York City days, Easter became Spring and fresh green shoots; with winter-white skin welcoming the sun after months of bitter cold and grey. In Marin, springtime brings warmer days, which combined with still-falling rain produces an almost startling rate of growth. The beauty around us is euphoric, with emerald green grass, deep hued lilacs and the first brilliant California Poppies opening to the sun. The question this weekend was - how does one decorate an outdoor Easter brunch table when the garden is almost humming with beauty and life? How does one compete? (Added complexity - not much time for this project and no planning whatsoever!) The solution was simple and a gift from nature - an intricately woven bird's nest that fell from a tree in our garden was filled with eggs decorated by my 6 & 7 year old sons. We dipped eggs in stain and then added marks with easter egg decorating pens (Paas brand - bought in Target).  The end result was a total that far outweighed the sum of the parts, a magic of sorts.

Rainy Day Rusks

When you live in a country and culture different to that in which you grew up, there are many things that are new and exciting, but there are also those things that one never stops missing. When it comes to food, biggies around here are english style marmalade (see previous post!), marmite, rooibos tea (south african style - unembellished and every day) and rusks. We love rusks, our kids love rusks and our friends now love rusks too. Today was a day for rusk making.

A rusk is like a biscotti in that it is a bready-mix that one bakes, cuts up and then dries in the oven. The similarity ends there. A rusk is a un-precious, un-fancy everyday pleasure that is dunked in tea/ coffee/ hot chocolate. Flour, buttermilk, eggs, sugar (not  lot of it) are the basics and then any combination of nuts, bran flakes, granola and dried fruit gets added, according to whim, taste or what is in the cupboard. Rusks stem from the Afrikaans food tradition ("beskuit") and are easy to make but also time consuming since the drying part can take most of a day or more and it involves a few steps. I channel my inner Karoo farmers wife as I mix, bake, cut and dry. The whole house smells of buttermilky, baked goodness as the rusks dry. Quite often one gets snagged and eaten while warm and semi-crisp, since the waiting can be tough!

Rusks are drying in the oven as I type, saturday night beckons (Terrapin Croassroads! http://terrapincrossroads.net/), tomorrow will be a rusks for breakfast day and I will add a recipe.

3 Marmalades

I have been making marmalade with various degrees of success for about 13 years. My recipes have been guessed, written by friends on napkins and interpreted to achieve flavors reminiscent of my Grandmothers fabled "Fairacres Three Fruit Marmalade". Her marmalade was made with mineola oranges, grapefruits and lemons grown in her garden in Natal, South Africa. My Grandfather liked a darker marmalade, so she cooked it until the sugars started to caramelize, giving her marmalade a hint of caramel along with the bitter citrus flavors. My canning/ jamming/ marmalade making has been a bit hit and miss, until I recently conscripted the help of Rachel Saunders and her "The Blue Chair Jam Cookbook" (http://bluechairfruit.com/blue-chair-jam-cookbook/). Her recipes are useful, but what has been the most helpful is her explanation of what happens when sugars and fruit turn to jam and what these changes look like. Thanks to her I was recently able to make a batch of plum jam on the fly, without scale, recipe book or proper canning equipment simply because a tree dripping with plums begged for it.

On to the Marmalade part - 3 jars of Rangpur Lime marmalade are in the attached photo - each tells a different story. On the left is the most recent, on the right the oldest, from last winter. The greenish hue in the right hand one, is due to the fact that we still thought we had to pick the limes when green, it is a super tart marmalade, made pre-Rachael Saunders and after not having made marmalade for a few years. It is densely fruity, but without all the jammy stickiness we love around here. The middle jar is my first with-Rachel's-help batch from earlier this winter. It cooked a little too long due to the child emergency mentioned in a previous post, but it did gain that caramel touch that I love. The left hand, 2/3 full jar is my most recent attempt, where I tried to stick very close to Rachel's instructions. What amazes me always is how much fruit goes in to 1 jar. I used about 25 limes, which cooked down into 2/3s of  a jar of limey goodness. Quite an amazing thing to spread on a slice of hot, buttered toast with a wedge of sharp cheddar on top.

Ranpur Limes

We discovered a few months ago that we are the proud owners of  Rangpur Lime tree. Up until then we were pretty sure we had a lime tree but the small green fruits kept producing brilliant orange flesh and then after a while, orange skins too. The Rangpur Lime  is a cross between a Mandarin and a Lime, with orangey looks but a super limey taste. I recently picked the last of this year's crop and took photos - believe what you see, it is indeed a lime! Our tree was until 2 years ago trapped between the garage and a garden shed which was butting up against it the garage. Our crops aren't huge, but good enough for now and growing each year as the tree revives. It still grows next to the garage but the shed has moved away a little and we now walk under the arching branches of it as we walk in to our vegetable garden.

Rineke Djikstra

A guest in the casita this week gave me the perfect excuse on tuesday to avoid doing the taxes in order to see the SFMOMA Rineke Dijkstra show. What a treat to immerse myself in the work of someone whose work I have tracked and been inspired by for 20 years. Her portraits range from single images to series, to video. People are in all their beautiful and messy human-ness and somewhere along the way we find that we are looking in a mirror.

Pizza night

Its a busy weekend with lots of things going on and not much time to record it. One quick photo of a tray carried over to our neighbors for back yard pizzas last night. Sauteed swiss chard (fresh picked), oven roasted onions, rangpur lime cordial from our tree, toasted pignolis, fresh chilli sauce (that turned out to be not hot at all - bland jalapenos make me sad in the way of fragranceless roses!). We added our offerings to the mix of good things next door. We ate outside, gazed at the moon , heard our resident owl doing a few fly overs and enjoyed the seasonal return one of our favorite things - food from our gardens eaten under the stars with friends.

Hello world!

Here I am at last, my very first blog post and wondering what auspicious things I should be saying, but then I realize that this is no fancy blog, it is just me, recording what I am up to, since a lot seems to happen around here.  Its a rainy day, I am not going to get in to my studio today and have yet to figure out what I will make for dinner tonight, so no grand entry, just a mellow slide of sorts.

What is on my mind are the Rangpur Limes growing on my tree and the marmalade I want to make with them. My first batch was great but got a little gummy as a result of a medical moment (child with fever and husband not able to find the thermometer) right at the sweet spot when I should not have left it to keep on boiling. Tastes good but is a bit gooey. Or maybe I will make more lime cordial, the bottle in the fridge will not doubt be finished off after cocktails and homemade pizza with the cooking-gardening-too neighbors this saturday.