ravensword's Open Salon Blog

45 Years Ago Today

Sun, 18 Mar 2012 21:03:12 -0400

45 years ago today I got married. Just before my father walked me across Barbara Simon’s living room to the waiting pastor, my father asked me if I knew what I was doing? I looked him straight in the eye and said, “Yes.”

I was 20 years old, and I knew exactly what I was doing, escaping my parents’ problems. I had gone away to college at 17 to escape my mother’s schizophrenia. She followed me up San Francisco and took an apartment across the street from the school. A month before I turned 19 I committed her, because my father couldn’t bring himself to do it again. Ten months later I was on a date with a nice, rather handsome young man, who turned to me at the end of the date and said, “I’m going to marry you.” I laughed. He said, “I mean it. I want the responsibility of you.”

Magic words. I had a boatload of responsibility I’d be happy for someone else to carry for a while. So I married him three months later. He became a buffer between my mother and me. Two months before our fourth anniversary, our daughter was born. She is 41 now and has two teenage children of her own. I am a beloved mother and grandmother. I thank God every day for the gift of my daughter and these two grandchildren.

The marriage lasted eight years. It failed for all the usual reasons early marriages fail. Did I know what I was doing that day 45 years ago? Yes and no. I knew I was escaping, but what I didn’t know, is that I was opening a door to three people I had yet to meet and might not ever have met except for that walk across the Barbara’s living room so long ago.

Mallomars and Pinwheels

Sat, 21 Jan 2012 19:01:07 -0500

The day after New Years, I was planning to have two friends over for a lunch to celibate the new year. So on New Years Day, I was going up and down the aisle of my favorite grocery store, list in hand, getting the items for my lunch menu.

Rule number one, never shop when you are hungry, for seduction waits lurking among those innocuous looking shelves. I needed crackers. The crackers are on the same aisle as the cookies. I am more or less immune to most store-bought cookies save a certain brand of ginger snaps. So I was heading for the crackers at the end of the aisle when out of the corner of my eye I caught something both familiar and forgotten. I stopped and glanced up: mallomars, now according to the packaging called Pinwheels by Nabisco.

For those of you who have never succumbed to these old fashion delights, they are a combination of a shortbread cookie with a layer of marshmallows on top and then the whole is covered with a dark chocolate hard shell. The old style, called mallomars, look like a bowler hat with a tiny rim. This modern version comes in the shape of a pinwheel. The Danish claim to have invented the original two hundred years ago. At that time the cookie was layered with meringue instead of marshmallows. It was call flødebolle (cream bun). In 1913 the first mallomars were sold in the U.S. in Hoboken, New Jersey. Today New York City consumes 70% of the mallomars sold in the States.

When I was a kid, which was a millennium ago in the 1950’s, mallomars frequently made their way into my family’s grocery bag for our eight o’clock evening treat of ice cream and cookies in front of the TV. Eventually, as a teenager watching my weight, I drifted away from this treat. Once or twice after I married and had my daughter I bought them. But they weren’t the same as I remembered, the cookie tasted like cardboard and the chocolate was cheap and without depth.

So desire faded until that fateful glance at the Pinwheel cookie package on the first day of 2012. The packaging is clear so you can feast your eyes on the temptation within. I stood there looking at them, twelve perfect cookies, trying to imagine what they would taste like. They were bigger than the old fashion mallomars. Their shinning chocolate coating glistened in the store lights, enticing me. Would they taste like they did when my parents and I sat in front of the TV, I wondered? Or would they taste like cardboard as they had when my daughter was young? Finally I put the cookies back on the shelf. I didn’t need them. They would only disappoint me. I pushed my cart to the end of aisle and selected my crackers.

But I could not turn the corner and leave the aisle. The thought of chocolate and marshmallow melting on my tongue made me turnaround and go back for that package of pinwheels. I set them into my basket careful not to crack any of the chocolate.

After I got home and put away my groceries, I poured a glass of cold milk and opened the package of Pinwheels. The scent of dark chocolate greeted me, inviting me to try this new version of a once loved indulgence. I selected one and put it on a plate. I carried the plate and milk into the living room. I set them on the table in front of the sofa. I sat down and turned on the TV.

I picked up the pinwheel, hesitated, and then bit into it. The chocolate shell, marshmallow, and chocolate cookie combined in my mouth. Taste and memory blended. A smile spread across my face.

I took a second bite.

Ode to the San Marzano Tomato

Sun, 18 Sep 2011 16:09:59 -0400

I have been making the same spaghetti recipe since 1963 when I made it for Larry, my first real boyfriend. Though my parents made spaghetti, theirs was a hit and miss operation. I needed a foolproof recipe that included the most sophisticated of ingredients: wine. I found what I was looking for at the Smiley Library in Redlands, California, Gastronomique by Ida Bailey Allen, who was the Martha Stewart of her day (I bought the book a year later when I moved to San Francisco for college). Page 221 held the gem I was looking for, Spaghetti Italian with Wine Sauce. Larry really liked it. I was too nervous to appreciate it, however my parents stood over the stove in the kitchen and inhaled the leftovers.

I have made this recipe over and over through the years. Page 221 is covered with tomato spatters. There was not one fresh ingredient in this recipe. That was until D’s organic San Marzano tomatoes.

D is a gardener by profession and he has the most wonderful organic vegetable garden at his place up in Sonoma County, here in California. A friend and I had gone up for a weekend of antiquing and eating. D said his San Marzano tomatoes were ripe and he as going to make spaghetti for our dinner. I had no idea what the difference was between a San Marzano and any other tomato. So my friend and I went out and picked a bucket full of these deep orange-red oblong tomatoes, along with fresh basil, oregano and parsley.

After I washed the tomatoes for D, he dropped them in a pot of boiling water to blanche until the skins split. Then he whipped out a contraption from the last century, his mother’s 1940’s food mill. Its wooden handle that still bore traces of its original blue paint. He set it on top of a pot and scooped a small batch of tomatoes out of the water and dropped them into the food mill. This magic contraption peeled and pureed the tomatoes!

Once he was finished, I couldn’t wait I picked up a spoon and slide it into the lovely red-orange mass in the pot. Pure sweetness spread across my tongue. There was no sharpness, no note of bitterness that would need a tablespoon of sugar to silence. Just the purest, sweetest tomato flavor caressed my taste buds.

On the way home, I stopped and bought my own food mill (It doesn’t have the character of D’s but it does the job just fine.). Shortly thereafter, I went to the farmer’s market near me and sure enough they had organic San Marzanos, which I immediately bought along with fresh herbs.

Once home, I took my old spaghetti recipe (after almost 50 years of making it I consider it as much mine as Mrs. Allen’s), blanched and pureed the tomatoes, chopped the fresh basil, oregano, and parsley, and poured in a cup of good zinfandel along with a pinch of chili pepper. I simmered it all together for an hour.

Later, I sat down at the dining room table. The most lovely scent of tomato and basil rose from the plate in front of me. Holding a large soupspoon in my left hand, I sunk the fork in my right hand into the lovely spaghetti. I twirled the fork in the spoon then lifted pasta and sauce to my lips…

The Bread Bowl

Sat, 27 Aug 2011 17:08:07 -0400

Recently I decided to bake bread. Not in bread machine but the old way, in a bowl for mixing, kneading and rising. I wanted to do something slow that took patience and time. The very opposite of my life these days. The last time I baked bread was 37 year ago, two years before I got divorced.

In those days, I was a young stay-at-home San Jose, California housewife and mother trying to figure out what my wifely role was, so I decided to bake bread. Nothing was more basic than baking bread. Perhaps if I could learn how to bake bread I could learn how to be a happy wife. So I went out and bought the Tassajara Bread Book, the 1970s edition. I read through it and realized I didn’t have a bowl large enough to let the dough rise and double its size.

In those days, there was a very good cooking store in Los Gatos, California near where I lived. So I went there to buy a bread bowl. When I explained what I wanted to the nice white haired sales lady, she led me to a tall rack at the back of the store. Bowls of every size and material filled the shelves to the ceiling: modern stainless, colorful plastic, bright orange and green pottery bowls with flowers painted on their sides, but it was the ones on the bottom rack, plain pottery bowls the color of caramel, that lured me.

The sales lady followed my gaze. “Ah, these are the old fashion style ones.” She pulled out a medium sized bowl and started to hand it to me. I shook my head and pointed to the biggest one on the shelf.

“Oh, my dear, (sales ladies said things like that in those days), you could make three loaves worth of dough in that one at the same time. And it weighs a ton. This smaller one is the correct size for you.”

Without a word, I bent down and picked up the big thick walled bowl instead. She was right, it was heavy. Its curved walls were solid in my arms. It was easily 20 inches in diameter at the top, and would hold way more than one loaf of bread’s worth of dough. Its interior beckoned. I could easily mix stuffing for a 25 pound turkey in this. Or a triple recipe of chocolate chip cookies. I could make enough bread dough to bake several loaves to give to the neighbors as Christmas gifts.

“I’ll take this one,” I said.

“Really dear, you don’t need one that big,” she said firmly. “And it’s very expensive.”

I looked into the broad and deep expanse of the bowl’s interior. Endless possibilities opened up in front of me. “No. This is the right one. This will hold anything I want to do.”

Today thirty years later, I have mixed and kneaded the dough in my big bowl and have laid a linen cloth across its top. Now I’ll go pour myself a cup of tea and wait for the dough to rise.

Endings

Sat, 23 Jul 2011 03:07:32 -0400

Today was filled with both the bitter and the sweet. Two endings today. This morning I had to put down the second of my three seal point Siamese cats. I knew the signs very well: the weight loss, the lack of appetite, sleeping all day. Beansie was a tiny but feisty cat. He was a runt. Since birth he had fought for his life. He lost that fight today to cancer. 8 months ago, I lost his brother, Tommy, to the same miserable disease. Tommy went quietly, slowly. I let him linger too long because I did not want to let him go. This cat had seen me through my own bout with cancer almost 9 years ago. This funny extrovert, who stole underwear and socks out of drawers, baskets, and luggage; who allowed my granddaughter to hold him in the wagon while her brother pulled them around my back yard; who demanded you pay proper homage the king of the house, I could not write about him until now because the pain of his leaving still runs too deep. Now they are both gone. Only, shy sweet Toby, the 17-pound Siamese mix I rescued from the SPCA six years ago, and I are left tonight.

My granddaughter went with me to vet today. Just like she had with Tommy. I was out of town when Tommy took a turn for the worse. When the pet sitter called me, I called my daughter and she and my granddaughter took him to the vet and stayed with him until he passed away. Beansie did not go so quietly. He hissed and snarled against the giant tumor in his chest, the doctors poking at him, and me petting him at the end. For a moment he calmed and looked at me with those sapphire blue of his as I stroked his little head and whispered, “I’m so sorry.”

This evening my grandson, who is 17, and my granddaughter, who is 15, and I went to see the final Harry Potter film. We had planned this last week and despite the sorrow of the morning we decided this would be a good way to end the day. I always feel privileged that these two teenagers want to spend time with me. We went to the first Harry Potter movie together and all the subsequent ones except the Deathly Hallows, Part 1. So last night, we watched that on DVD because my grandson had not seen it. We have all the firms. These tales strung out over ten years have defined and bookended their childhoods. These tales have offered them escape from the traumas of school, parents' divorce, lives split between two homes, a parent’s remarriage and the challenges of living between two families. Today, the enchanted world of Harry Potter was shared by just the three of us, no parents allowed. I was very touched when both kids called me and said we three had to go together to see this final film. And today turned out to be the perfect day.

I bought the tickets online. We went at suppertime so we had hot dogs, Coke, pretzels with cheese. Dessert was Raisinets. All while watching the previews of coming attractions. Then we settled down into the enchanted magic world we had come to know so well. For the next two hours and fifteen minutes we watched Harry, Hermione and Ron fight for their own lives and the survival of their world. Finally when all challenges were met amid great loss there was a happy but bittersweet ending. The three of them had come through together.

Applause echoed through the theater. My grandson turned to his sister and said quietly, “That’s the end of our childhood. Our childhood is over now.”