and many more...

So comes another month. A new calendar page! Sure, there are July leftovers everywhere -- leftover worries, leftover Covid issues, leftover this, leftover that, but still, we're in the thick of a glorious summer! How fantastic! 

But with the coming of August, I am done with counting lilies. I still snip -- there's lots to clean up out there -- but I also look down and start working on clearing the ground around the flower base. That's a neglected chore that I put off once the flowers bloom because, well, there's only so much I can do in a day.

But on this August first, I get back to growling at all the weeds that manage to insert themselves everywhere when my back was turned. Still, the weather is grand, even though there is a light cloud cover, so I don't know that my sour cherry sun drying project is getting much of good run right now. To my friend who lived in Denmark -- how did you manage to get those cherries dry in a country that rarely has several sunny days in a row??

Let's focus on the flowers:

I have other thoughts running through my head as I work my way through the flower fields, many of them related to daughters and specifically to the one who is celebrating her birthday today. As it happens, her family is a bit dispersed so that the celebratory plan is quite unusual: after time with friends on the Union Terrace, she'll come here with Snowdrop for a farmhouse cake and sleepover. All this mean that I should be baking a cake right now. Nothing complicated -- just the Maida Heatter FBI cake. I've been baking it for some forty years and it never fails to make people happy.

It's what you want for your kids, no? To be happy. To teach them how to find contentment, how to feel gratitude, how to seek the benefit of a forest walk or an evening exhale. How to do productive work, how to help others when you can and sometimes even if you dont especially want to. How to listen, how to calm the inner turmoil. 

I thought about the hike Ed I took in Blue Mounds State Park this weekend. It was Saturday and there weren't many others on the trails, but we did pass some small groups. One spoke a language I could not place, and another was a two person team. I'll guess that it was a father and daughter. She was close to my age, he was maybe in his mid eighties, maybe older. He walked with a cane and I thought he looked a little wobbly. It's a bumpy trail, with roots, rocks and many ascents and descents. Both Ed and I felt such admiration for him and we wanted to ask about his age, about his reason for being here that afternoon, but we were shy and thought perhaps we might insult him by appearing to question his ability to navigate the trails. Still, I doubt I'll ever forget him: his age did not stand in the way of that forest walk and I'm sure that the forest incorporated all its magic to help him move through in peace. 

Breakfast.

And the chocolate cake, baked. 

Now I have to pick up Snowdrop at Theater Camp. A new one! But not the last of the new ones!

At the farmette, she's in her tree again...

But we can't be idle today! I have another cake to bake -- a breakfast loaf with sour cherries. You know, I have all these sour cherries... Snowdrop, how about a fun book to read?

... while I bake my second cake.

And now we head for the Union Terrace. If you've been to Madison, chances are you've been to the Terrace. Technically, it's for those who work or study at the university, or, like me, are lifetime Union members, but anyone can get a day pass and in truth, most people aren't asked to show their cards. The iconic chairs spill out from the terrace onto the lake and it is one beautiful place to hang out with friends, especially on a summer eve. How many chairs? About two thousand! Here's one glance at a piece of it tonight:

Some of my daughter's friends brought their kids and one thing that's pretty cool about the place is that by the time kids are school-aged, you can trust them to have the run of the place, so that they go off and do their thing, while you visit with your friends.

(Sandpiper is too young to take advantage of such freedom!)

There is also an ice cream stand, selling our delicious University Babcock ice cream. Wisconsin is the dairy state. You know that, right?

(Sunset hugs...)

And now we are all back at the farmette. Snowdrop goes off to help Ed put away the chickens and feed the cats.

It's very, very late by the time we have the birthday cake...

Happy Birthday, sweet and precious child of mine! From all of us, to you.

With so much love...

food, flowers and the last day of July

In your typical southern Wisconsin summer, the lilies in our flower fields slow down precipitously by the end of the month. Yes, there will be August bloomers. Yes there will even be September bloomers. But the vast bulk will be done for the season. August is for phloxes andSeptember is for asters. And honestly, much of the color will continue, but in the tubs, where annuals never stop until the night of the first frost.

But we no longer have typical summers. We haven't had the mosquitoes, we had a late spring and a dry summer. And it looks to me like the lilies have a good week still ahead of them. I never count snipped lilies beyond July, but as this is still July, I did my final counting today: 605 snipped flower heads. That's more than yesterday!

My morning work and meditative indulgence in the fields:

It's another beautiful day here. Perfect weather of gentle breezes, partly sunny skies. I mean, I would like some rain. My flowers would like some rain. But if you're just trying to judge what's out there on this day -- well, it's splendid. 

Breakfast, of course, on the porch. 

And even before I finished my leftover half croissant half pain au chocolat, I set to work on the sour cherries. 

What's the game plan? Well, my friend who had lived in Denmark for a bunch of years emailed me this note (in response to yesterday's post):

In Denmark we pitted a whole bunch of cherries, laid them out on a baking sheet, put a piece of glass over the baking sheet and set them out in the sun until we had dried cherries to put on our oats for weeks.

What a splendid idea! I dont really have a clean piece of glass, but the Internet tells me I can use cheese cloth. And so I start in on pitting the cherries.

(about half done...)

And I am reminded again of preparing food at the restaurant. I rarely had to do the real grunt work there. I worked from 5 (after I'd be done teaching at the Law School) until closing (around 11 or even later on the weekend) and since service began at 6:30, someone else had to prepare most of my ingredients. I would just cook and plate from a nearly ready mise en place. That means I would never have to pit cherries. 

But someone else did. Carefully, because if a diner would crack a tooth on a missed pit, you'd hear about it.

It is, in fact, a boring job. And I'd say the same holds true for much of ingredient preparation. Sure, if you're cooking for your family, pulling off thyme leaves and chopping them into fine bits is not big deal. But for an evening service? It's tediously dull. Typically, the dullest tasks were passed on to the dish washing crew. Peeling potatoes, chopping onions -- that kind of thing. Probably they were the guys who also pitted the cherries. I was thinking this morning as I sat there with that heaping full bucket, that no one ever thanks those who pit the cherries in a local foodie restaurant where everything is fresh and honest. Maybe you will next time you get served some exquisite dish with cherries swimming in their own juices. Thank you for doing this so that I can enjoy the chef's creative ideas!

I put out a tray of the cherries for drying.

What are the chances that the cheepers wont notice the fruits on the picnic table? Hmm... Out comes the cheesecloth, secured with heavy objects.

In the afternoon, I drop by the young family's home. They're back from a Michigan beach vacation and I spend a few minutes catching up with them.

Our schedule isn't yet regular and I'm not sure it will ever return to a set pattern for the rest of the summer, so I'm not cooking Sunday dinners just yet. With a free late afternoon, I drag Ed out for another walk. Nothing ambitious, but it did feel so good to be out in the forest yesterday that I was itching for doing it again.

In the evening I was going to roast the chicken Ed and I bought from One Seed farmers up the road, but it is still frozen as can be so instead we order pizza. Of course, there is also corn.

And the evening is beautiful and I understood why so many poets have, over the centuries felt compelled to write about times like this: fading light, sweet smells of meadow flowers, cherries drying on a tray. Summer magic.

With love.

food and views

Saturday is the day when I most often return to a former life: that of a food person. If I devote endless hours now to growing things on farmette lands, it used to be that I would devote the same number of hours, year round, to preparing food. My garden then was small, my kids were at the age where school work and friends filled their hours and so I turned my attention, all my post-work hours, obsessively you might say, to food. 

Those were the years where I moon-lighted at a restaurant, first as an appetizer and dessert line cook, then as a baker in preparation for their Saturday market sales, and finally as a forager at the market, picking up the items on the long produce list left for me by the chef de cuisine. I'd be at the market at 6 a.m., when the farmers were just setting up their stalls. Getting there before the crowds hit the Capitol Square was essential. The restaurant wanted the best of the best. It was my job to find it.

That was then. These days, though I cook dinner every day for us and I think about foods that may (or may not) please Ed (as well as satisfying my own cravings), I don't obsess about it. I no longer fuss, nor do I introduce complexity into the game. But, on summer Saturdays, it all comes back to me as I stock up for the week with a run to Madison's Farmers Market.

Many of the farmers have been selling at the market for decades. They're in their same spot, selling mostly the same foods and when I head out, I make a mental note of who to visit first and what can stand a prolonged carry. Honey -- yes, flowers -- not so much. Today, I parked the car in a 25 minute spot which was unfortunate since it is impossible to do a full circle of the market in just 25 minutes. But, I mapped out how I could accomplish everything in just half an orbit and I set out, determined to get back before the meter ran out.

My mind is full of food thoughts. The stalls are piled high with incredible stuff and I have to marvel at how we have evolved to feed ourselves so well. Ed will say -- at the cost of plowing down fields and radically reducing animal and insect diversity as we plant our soy and corn, and he is of course correct, but still, this is not the way small farmers grow their crops. Theirs are not the fields of corn and soy. And judging by what's in the stalls, many of them have added flowers to their mix, which has to be a good thing! 

I go first to Mary, the Bee Charmer's stall because I'm low on honey. Too, she has great corn and I need to supplement what we picked up yesterday in Oregon. 

I'm all out of corn -- she tells me.

No! Really? 

It went in the first hour. Well, you know, Tory buys a lot.

Ah yes. The chef at my former place of employment. Darn those restaurant foragers who come out with their wagon at 6 in the morning! 

Not to worry -- it's always like this early in the season. Ambrosia takes a while to get going -- Mary reassures me.

And this is where my food loving side kicks in: it's not enough to love just corn: you have to have a favorite variety! Yesterday I wrote about Stoneman's Honey 'n Pearl. Well, the Bee Charmer's Ambrosia is another singularly wonderful variety. It's more delicate, but the taste is also sweet and, well, heavenly. 

They do have copious amounts of corn at a stand that sells nothing but corn and it's good, and it's freshly picked, but I'm looking for something even better. And I find it here:

This guy, like Mary, will be selling Ambrosia in the coming weeks, but today he has Trinity. This variety precedes Ambrosia and he says it's also singularly good.

Some people are really sorry to see it go when Ambrosia comes in! -- he tells me. So I buy a half dozen ears. I cannot wait to gently (and ever so briefly) cook it for dinner.

I need tomatoes too for the week. Here's a beautiful bunch:

And believe it or not, I need eggs. Yep, we had an incident last night that just goes to show you how complicated farm life can be. Very very late last evening, so late that I was all ready to retire upstairs,  Ed said -- oh, I forgot to bring in the eggs from the roosting box. (This box, placed on top of his table saw, is where our girls have been going to lay their eggs. Dont ask me why. I do not understand chicken logic.)

I'll get them -- I offered. We need to retrieve them so that predators wont raid the box.

And what should I find in the box? Henny, one of our older hens. Sleepy, woozy, comfortably settled for the night. Apparently she has gone broody (where she sits for hours on end hoping to hatch her eggs) and Ed did not notice that she was not in the coop when he locked it up for the night. Luckily, the raccoon that has been coming to visit us every single night this summer, had not yet made his rounds or she would have been his supper for sure. But, even though we saved Henny, we do now have a broody chicken who refuses to budge and so the other hens are laying their eggs -- well, who knows where. We can't find them. And I need eggs!

And of course I need flowers for the week. Picking the best bunch is tough, especially when you are on a 25 minute meter and you're giving yourself only half the market and one navigation through it for the day. I go back to a stand where I often find wonderful stuff:

And from the market, I go to Madison Sourdough for bread and breakfast pastries.

Not done yet! I still have my weekly order from Farmers Unite to pick up. It includes sweet and sour Door County cherries. Not thinking deeply about what I was doing, I had placed an order for a "basket" of the sour ones. It turned out to be this much:

So you're going to take out the stones from all those cherries? -- this from an amused Ed, over breakfast.

Uh huh...

And do what?

Bake maybe...

Yes, it's a very food centered day. But food thoughts do not replace outdoor work. Even before going to the market, I snipped lily heads. And I did count today -- I picked off an even 500. I'm sure if I poked around, I'd find one more, but I liked the way 500 felt so I did not look hard for others. Oh, and I took photos because, well, it was so very beautiful out there. Dry again and yes, I'll have to water if this continues (and it looks like it will continue), but still -- so very, very beautiful.

(The four Bresse hens, sunbathing together)

One last flower photo for the day:

In the afternoon, I get this idea that we should hike at Blue Mound State Park. A friend described a recent trek there and I get tempted.

We rarely have gone there over the years. It's a half hour drive and that kind of a commitment is reserved for the best of the best. Still, this one sentence was enough to convince me: 

Perched atop the highest point in southern Wisconsin, Blue Mound State Park offers spectacular views and unique geological features.

I love a place with a view!

There are two lookout towers -- one to the west and one to the east and in-between and all around, there are the trails. (Since it's on a hill, there's quite a bit of up and down which is a good thing!)

We spend a beautiful stretch of time there. Tower to the West:

(It almost looks like we live in a very hilly region, instead of just a somewhat hilly region!)

Tower to the east:

And the trails in-between!

It's a gorgeous place. Well worth the drive. (Yes, I know -- how dare I gripe about a 30 minute trip! You do get spoiled living in Madison!) 

We toss around ideas for supper and finally settle for a very home grown meal: the last of the cheeper eggs with market tomatoes and mushrooms, pan friend new potatoes with onion, a solid salad with farmette cucumbers, and of course corn. Fantastic, memorable corn. 

Are we ever sleepy tonight! Totally zonked, in the best of ways.

With love...