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.