Wild Blackberries

After the bug was in bed one evening recently I went up the road to the blackberry bramble and got as many as I could before I realized it wasn't worth the effort. It was too hot, even at dusk, too thorny, and I got too many fire ant bites to justify another round of picking. I didn't get that many, but made a sort of tart with them anyway, like I did a year ago. I think this year the berries were more bitter ("toxic," Mr. Chalmers called them, not inaccurately), but I like blackberries so much it didn't matter to me.

A few days later, I picked several handfuls of plump, very sweet wild blackberries that were growing next to the front porch, and the bug and I sat right down in the yard and ate them all, two or three at a time.

Here she is, postblackberries. I didn't look much less messy myself.

Mr. Chalmers's newly retired mom came down from New York to visit for a week, and we somehow managed to convince her to move to Athens! We took her to see houses, we kept the a/c cranked up, we kept her away from people with thick Southern accents, we gave her wine with dinner . . . But of course the real hero is the bug. This is big, since we don't have any other family nearby. Fun for the kid, fun for us, fun for her.

Grandma's last full day here was spent in the ER with the bug, who had gotten her finger crushed in the hinge side of the front door. I'd set her down on the porch while I closed the door and pushed the dogs back inside, and didn't even notice she was sticking her hand in the door until it was too late. She lost her whole fingernail, and she may or may not grow another one. (In the latter case, says Mr. Chalmers, she'll just have to stay in rural Georgia.) She was unbelieveably brave through it all, even though she was in terrible pain for a good long while. I read her stories as her grandma drove us to the hospital, and the little sweetie was trying so hard to pay attention to the story and ignore how much her finger hurt. She was also very patient as they took X-ray after X-ray, taping her hand down each time. (By the fourth or fifth one, though, she'd had about enough.) And she did really well with the hours of waiting in small rooms full of things that aren't toys. We can't keep a bandage on her finger, so we're just trying to keep it clean and Neosporined.

For the Fourth of July, Mr. Chalmers smoked brisket, chicken legs and thighs, and tofu, and I made a couple vegetables and a very good blueberry pudding cake. I tried to make a sweet potato pone from the Ebony cookbook, but something went horribly wrong. Anybody know of a better pone recipe? It should be like a sweet potato pudding, right, like in The Yearling?

We also blew up a huge "kiddie" pool and stuck it in the front yard and filled it up with ice-cold water. The bug was fascinated by it until we plunked her in it and she realized the water was ice-cold. A little while ago, though, I dragged a lawn chair up to the edge of the pool, and rolled her (new!) stroller next to the chair, and we both sat and splashed our feet in the water and she liked it. I did too.

"Happy"

The bug and Mr. Chalmers and I spread out on the front walkway and did fingerpainting yesterday. Here's a painting the bug made—with lots of help—as a card for me:

"Birthday" didn't fit.

That's a Father's Day card she's working on. The bathwater afterwards was dark brown.

She and I had played with sidewalk chalk the night before. She was up unusually late, and she saw fireflies for the first time and pointed at them and laughed. She tried to catch them. I handed her one, and she carried it around for a while.

Fun Foods

We had another fun trip to Your Dekalb Farmer's Market last weekend, spending most of our time in the fish section—Mr. Chalmers showed the bug the big tanks of live catfish and carp, and they watched the workers catch them in nets for customers. We came home with a couple of Florida mullet and a bunch of butterfish. Mr. Chalmers smoked the mullet that day, with cherry wood chunks. So far it's the bug's favorite food, smoked mullet. The next day I took one of the mullets and made a spread, like they do in the bug's home state.

Smoked mullet spread: Mince 1/2 small Vidalia onion in a mini food processor. Add flesh from 1 medium-sized smoked mullet and process until finely chopped but not pureed. Stir in some mayonnaise and hot pepper sauce (a vinegary cayenne one is good, like Crystal), and season with salt to taste. Add black pepper, too, if you like. There are other, more complex recipes out there, but this one really let the smoked mullet come through.

The bug licks the spread off the cracker, then waits, thinking it'll be refilled, then finally breaks down and eats the cracker.

We also got some neat vegetables. One was tindora, which I'd never seen before—they look like finger-sized cucumbers. I just got a few, then came home and looked up what to do with them.

Tindora.

Curry leaves I got here in Athens, at the place on Baxter Street, Taj Mahal. So wonderfully fragrant!

Here's what I did, very approximately, with no amounts; it's a combination of several recipes I found online:

Sautéed tindora: Cut tindora in half lengthwise. Heat a little ghee in a saucepan or sauté pan over high heat and add some black mustard seeds, cumin seeds, and plenty of fresh curry leaves; cook, stirring, until the seeds are fragrant and start to pop out of the pan. Add a little thinly sliced onion, some minced garlic and ginger, the tindora, and a few good pinches of salt and cook over medium heat, stirring frequently, until the onion is soft but the tindora is still crunchy and crisp. Add a very small dash of asafoetida, if you have it, at the end. Try not to burn the spices or the garlic and ginger; cover the pan during part of the cooking to keep the vegetables from scorching.

In progress.

Also that day for supper I for some reason decided to make stuffed brinjal, or Thai eggplant, based loosely on a couple recipes, including one I can't link to for some reason on Mahanandi. I toasted a bunch of stuff:

Salted pistachios, dried chiles, sesame seeds, a few peanuts, coriander seeds, and cumin seeds. Cinnamon sticks also went in after I took this picture.

Then I ground it all up, adding a few curry leaves just because, and some ground cloves; it didn't seem like a "paste" to me, so I added a tablespoon of peanut butter (whatever . . . turns out I'd forgotton to add the tamarind, which would've made it more pastelike).

Tiny Thai eggplant or brinjal.

I cut a cross shape in the bottom of each eggplant, leaving the stem ends intact, and stuffed the paste inside.

Then I heated some ghee and a little vegetable oil in a skillet with the usual mustard seeds and cumin seeds, added the rest of the paste (a bit less than half of what I used for stuffing) and a couple cups of water, a glob of tamarind concentrate, having remembered it, and about a tablespoon of palm sugar. Then just set the stuffed eggplant in the sauce, covered the skillet, and let them cook, turning them over about halfway through.

The sauce gets much darker and thicker once it's cooked for a while.

It was a good supper, with some leftover dal (with lentils, bulghur, yellow split peas, and wheatberries, plus cauliflower), paratha (frozen ones from the Indian market), and broiled chicken tikka masala skewers.

Addendum: Not only did Stringer Bell die in the "Wire" episode we watched last night (sniff), but a neighbor dog running loose through our yard got our chicken, also running loose but not as fast. Our own dogs were going nuts, and I went to see what was happening, and just caught a glimpse of the big black dog sprinting away with the bird in its mouth. As Mr. Chalmers said, chicken had a better, longer life than most of his kind here in Madison County in the heart (or maybe just at the edge) of the poultry belt. I don't know if I'll ever get over it—"The Wire" without Stringer Bell, that is.

Slick Pig Wings

I was just reminded that way back when I'd promised more details about Mr. Chalmers's version of the smoked chicken wings he had at the Slick Pig in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. He was told how to do this by the pit master himself a few years ago.

Here's Mr. Chalmers's recipe, verbatim, and I hope he doesn't mind me posting it here:

Chicken wings [Cut the tips off and cut each wing into two parts—ed.]
5 parts cheap soy sauce
1 part molasses
A couple of dashes of Worcestershire sauce

Soak wings at least three hours [I think he usually tries to marinate them overnight—ed.]. Smoke wings at about 175° for 3–4 hours, until the meat slides easily off the bone. I use about 8 parts charcoal to 1 part hickory.

That's it.

Coq

Yesterday Mr. Chalmers called from work and asked if he could bring a rooster home. Of course I said of course. We'd told a coworker of his a while back that we'd take one off her hands (she had about half a dozen too many, especially since she lives right in town), figuring we'd feed it for a while and then make coq au vin or something, and to my surprise she remembered. So the bug and I got started setting up a little place for the bird that will remain nameless. Amazingly, it was still there this morning when I went out to check on it. It can sort of flop-fly out of the enclosure—which I plan to move around the yard a bit if I can figure out an easy way to raise the crate up off the ground with each move—but I think it'll basically stick close to the food and water.

I'd sort of been picturing a full-grown rooster, but this is still just a little chick. I honestly don't know if I'll have the heart to kill it. Maybe if it's crowing a lot in the mornings—although it's not like it could possibly wake us up any earlier than the bug does . . . In fact I think I woke it up when I went out there this morning in the dark. But what kind of (law-abiding) person keeps just a rooster around? I suppose if it survives the chopping block we'll have to get a couple of hens, too. Mr. Chalmers is the best. He brings home animals for us.

The set-up is hard to see in this picture (taken from the dining room through a dog-nose-smudged window), but it's just a dog crate with some straw in the bottom and a smaller cardboard box inside, set up on a thick block of granite, with a piece of wood for a roof/roost, a ramp, and a part-circle of 1-by-1 wire fencing. The fencing is attached to the ground with long, sturdy steel staples. I'll be surprised if our bird manages to stay out of reach of hawks, neighbor dogs (ours, of course, are fenced in themselves, away from the coop), and racoons. If it does, it's sure to be tough and flavorful.

Cajeta et Cetera

I made the chocolate-Kaluha flans from the Rick Bayless book the other day, and while the flavor was nice (of course I made an extra one for tasting) the texture was a little gritty and the caramel that kind of makes flan flan didn't soften and come out of the mold. And I didn't like how the top—the bottom when it's unmolded—stiffened, like an extreme verison of pudding film (which Mr. Chalmers loves, cutely but inexplicably). So this gave me the excuse I didn't really need to make cajeta, goat's milk caramel, which I've been wanting to do forever. I used about half goat's milk (the evaporated canned stuff you can find in grocery stores, diluted 1:1 with water) and half whole cow's milk. (My mom said she made cajeta a week or so ago using nonfat dry milk powder, which is clearly a sign of insanity.) The following is basically the recipe from the Bayless book, which is basically the recipe you'd find in three dozen places online, but here it is anyway:

Cajeta: Combine 1 quart goat's milk or cow's milk or a combination, 1 cup sugar, 1 tablespoon light corn syrup, and a 1 1/2-inch length of canela (the crumbly Mexican "cinnamon") in a heavy medium-sized saucepan. Bring to a boil, then move the pot from the heat and stir in 1/4 teaspoon baking soda dissolved in 1 tablespoon water; the mixture will bubble up a lot: stir it down, then return the pot to medium-high heat. Cook at a low boil, stirring more frequently as the mixture thickens, until the caramel is caramel-colored (natch) and the consistency of maple syrup—this'll take about an hour, not the 25 minutes RB claims. Pour through a sieve into a bowl, discarding the bits of canela, and let cool. Cover and refrigerate. It thickens quite a bit after it's been in the fridge awhile. I microwaved it for a few seconds before drizzling it over the tarts.

Yes, I've had more than one spoonful of it straight in the last twenty-four hours.

I happened to have a bunch of apples, so I made little individual rustic tarts to go under drizzles of cajeta. To sweeten the apple filling, I used mostly regular sugar, plus some grated piloncillo, the Mexican unrefined brown sugar that comes in cones—this gave it a deep, kind of subtropical rummy flavor. And I topped the tarts with some chopped pecans mixed with butter and a little more grated piloncillo.

Here they are before they went in the oven and got even more rustic-looking.

Since the debate started later than the Democratic one last week, and because the bug's bedtime comes early these days (let's not talk about her wakeup times right now), we and our guests were able to sit down at the new dining room table at dusk and have a regular supper, with candles and everything. It felt very adult—that is, pre-kid adult.

These are the stuffed anchos in escabeche (I could eat the latter straight too). I used fresh bay leaves from the bush in the front yard.

Here's the picadillo taco filling as it simmers and thickens. This was pretty easy to make over the course of several days, and I hope to do it again someday after the bug's in kindergarten.

Not that she wasn't a big help in the kitchen. She kept grabbing onto the bowl when I was cutting in butter and shortening for the tart dough and pulling it to her to look closer. She got to taste everything, and she seemed to like the escabeche best, which makes sense given her love of all things pickled and sour. Cajeta made her smile. Fork-smashed rice and black beans for lunch made her pretty happy too.

And we took lots of breaks to play outside—or in my case sit and read the Atlantic while the dogs watched over her.

Carlton Henry Days

Last Saturday was the much-anticipated (in the Chalmers household) annual Carlton Spring Festival or, as we referred to it, Carlton Days. It was fun! Locals should definitely come out here for it next spring. (Carlton's the third C-town on highway 72, after Colbert and Comer.) The town fathers set up tents in a big field, and there were people selling the usual junk—potholders and church-shaped birdhouses and such—but also two beautiful, delicate alpacas and their yarn (I didn't buy any, but I probably should have), a full-scale bluegrass band, and lots of summery foods. We all went on a wagon ride behind an enormous steer named Buck and listened to this old farmer tell us about what I assume were country things. The bug had more chance of knowing what he was saying than I did; I'll never crack Southern.

We had two meals in a row: first a couple of homemade tamales, which were good because they were tamales, but really rubbery and bland when considered objectively; then some barbecued pork ribs, beans, and a great potato salad.

Ever since she was very small the bug has enjoyed a good pork bone. Her other hand is buried in the potato salad, of course.

Later that afternoon, Mr. Chalmers took the bug to the grocery store and they came home with watermelon! I weeded the asparagus rows while they were gone, and it was a perfect spring Saturday.

She likes to stand on the window seat in the kitchen and try to reach whatever's on the counter. (Often there are knives and cutting boards piled with raw meat, but we usually manage to scoot them out of the way just in time.) She very quickly figured out how to eat watermelon—she ate a fair amount of rind on her first slice, but her second through—what, eighth?—went better.

In case you're wondering where the bug's bib is, this is why I don't bother much anymore unless she's eating strawberries or something else that stains and is wearing good clothes that haven't already been hopelessly stained:

While we're here, I'd like to express my love for the Safety 1st booster chair, the cheapest booster chair available and probably the best, too. I almost immediately hated the fancy and expensive Chicco Energy Polly high chair I ordered online, for so many reasons: basically it's just a ridiculously complicated design that was hard to get the bug in and out of and impossible to clean—truly impossible. As soon as the dining room table arrived and we got some normal chairs, we switched to this booster chair. If you're shopping for something like this, there's one thing to consider that will help you decide which way to go: the fewer parts there are, the fewer spaces for gunk to accumulate and the fewer things that can break; also, the fewer parts there are, the cheaper it will be. So just buy the cheapest.

I'm getting excited about making a big Mexican supper on Thursday for the Republican debate. Right now it's looking like there'll be chocolate-Kaluha flan (using some of the luscious-smelling homemade liqueur that Courtney gave us for Christmas and that I've been saving for a special occasion—um, the debate?), preceded by shredded pork picadillo tacos (featuring raisins and almonds and a roasted tomato and chipotle sauce) and black beans (with epazote) and rice, preceded by one of my all-time favorite foods, ancho chiles stuffed with chorizo and potato in escabeche.

Good times here in Carlton.

Day Three of Three

I spent much of Saturday, Sunday, and Monday making mole. I'd never even attempted it before, but I've been craving the cheap, good Mexican food I used to get in Hell's Kitchen (at La Paloma, a little burrito shop at Ninth Avenue and 45th Street, and at two taquerias over on Tenth Avenue in the 40s, if anyone's keeping track), much of which featured surprisingly decent mole rojo, so I thought I'd give it a shot. I picked a recipe from Rick Bayless's Mexican Kitchen, guajalote en mole teloloapense, braised turkey in Teloloapan red mole (use Amazon's search feature to find the recipe if you too would like to wear out your blender and sieve and permanently stain a few utensils bright orange).

I love making Mexican food like this because there are so many weird cooking techniques I'm not used to. For example, most of the ingredients for the mole were fried in a half inch of lard before being ground up and strained: you fry the dried chiles (after first taking out and saving the seeds to grind with the other spices), nuts, pepitas, garlic, onion, tomatoes, tomatillos, bread, corn tortillas, even the raisins were fried (the raisins puffed up and turned golden brown as they cooked, then reverted to normal raisin shape and color as they cooled). The spice mixture I started out with (Saturday) smelled like nothing I'd ever smelled before: sesame seeds, avocado leaf, bay leaves, cinnamon, black pepper, thyme, oregano, cloves, and grated avocado pit, which indeed turned bright fluorescent orange when it oxidized.

Sunday: Here are all the fried nuts, seeds, bread, and spices before they were pulverized in a blender.

Monday: I made classic white rice from the Bayless book, which was great too: you sauté the rice in oil with onion, then add salt and water, bring to a boil, cover and bake until it's done, then fluff it up and fold in cilantro.

The recipe specifies anchos and guajillos, but I just used all the chiles I had (a few chiles de arbol for heat, a bag of pasilla, and a bag of New Mexico chiles—if I'm remembering correctly), plus another half-pound of unidentified ones from Kroger (I think they were anchos and guajillos, actually). Monday morning the sauce was seeming a little bitter, but it had mellowed and become more subtle by suppertime. Before I stuck the turkey in the sauce in a large Dutch oven, I scooped out about six cups of mole and put it in containers to freeze; it'll be nice to have it on hand to braise chicken or whatever, or make enchiladas. So all the work—I mean, play—yielded a nice huge Monday-night supper, plus the main part of a few more meals. Not so bad.

Invisible Zipper

The elder Chalmerses are going out tomorrow night; that is, we'll be out in public after dark. I kind of want to wear something nice, so this morning I started making a skirt. I'd finished it—hand-sewn hem and all—by the time the bug woke up from her morning nap at 10:30. (I'll probably redo the hem so it isn't so obvious, and maybe shorten it an inch or so, but for now it's basically done.) I used McCall's 3341, a very simple A-line pattern I'd used many times before—it's easy to change the shape of the bottom, add flounces or ruffles, make it longer or shorter, add a waistband, add vent(s), whatever. This one is in a charcoal two-way knit; it fits snugly at the top and kind of swings at the bottom.

One time I went to buy a zipper in the Garment District in New York and could only find invisible ones, not the regular ones. I asked the old Russian guy if he had any regular ones, and he said nobody uses them anymore and told me I should ask the girls in my sewing circle to show me how to insert an invisible zipper. I said I wasn't in a sewing circle and I didn't have an invisible-zipper presser foot anyway. He sighed loudly, then proceeded to teach me how to do it with a regular presser foot. I've now done this a dozen times or so, and though I don't claim to be an expert zipper installer I thought I'd give a little tutorial here, because nine times out of ten the zipper comes out looking great—that is, you can't see it. So here we go. (I hope you can make out what's going on in the pictures. I tried to get them as clear as possible, but it was difficult with black on charcoal, and the moiré effect I kept getting with the wrong side of the knit material.)

Do not sew the garment opening closed as you would when inserting a regular zipper; leave it open. Open the zipper, lay it out face down, and press the teeth flat (toward the center) with a warm iron. You should be able to see two rows of stitching right next to the edge of the teeth.

Pin the right side of the zipper to the right side of the garment opening, with the top of the tape at the top of the opening and the teeth at the 5/8-inch seam line.

Using a regular presser foot, sew the zipper to the garment, stitching as close to the teeth as you can without piercing them.

Stop when the foot rams into the slider. Backtack and cut the thread.

Pin the other side of the zipper to the other side of the garment opening, right sides together.

Sew it just like you sewed the first side (this time it'll be going under the presser foot backwards, but that's okay).

Stop when the foot hits the slider, backtack, cut thread.

Close the zipper. Pin the rest of the garment seam, right sides together, below the zipper, letting the bottoms of the zipper tape stick out the seam so they don't get caught.

Here's where it gets a little tricky. Place the presser foot as close as possible to the backtacking at the end of where you sewed the zipper onto the lefthand (when it's inside out) garment piece. Set the needle to the farthest position to the right. Sew the seam.

Press the seam open and the zipper flat. I didn't have to do it this time, but you may have to take a few stitches by hand to close up the space between where you sewed the zipper on and where you started the rest of the seam.

Turn the garment right side out and press. Invisible zipper installed.

Wisteria

The woods behind our house are full of wisteria, tangled in the giant privet bushes and climbing all the way up to the tops of the trees. It smells wonderful, especially in the evening. We weren't living here last year at this time, so we didn't know there would be so much wisteria (the vines themselves get sort of lost in the underbrush after the blossoms are gone). Wild, crazy wisteria like this isn't at all uncommon around here, but it's a special treat for me because it reminds me of my folks' old house in Virginia, where the wisteria completely covered the front porch and the arbor over the back deck in spring.




The bug and I saw Mr. Chalmers off this morning—he'll be gone until Sunday, so us girls are going to occupy ourselves doing girl stuff like maybe going to the Georgia Museum of Art and planting the herbs I started from seed a month or so ago. Sorry about the lack of knitting and cooking content. I haven't made anything that great lately, or at least haven't been up to taking pictures and whatnot. I am reading a novel (!) that I'm very much enjoying, if only because it's fiction and I'm actually managing to read it: Then We Came to the End, by Joshua Ferris, which is basically about office life, something I sometimes, occasionally, rarely miss.

Happy Birthday, Bug!

The bug turned one year old on Wednesday. Here she is on her birthday, helping me sand down some old chairs:

The next day we spent a lot of time outside digging trenches for the fifty asparagus crowns I ordered in a moment of optimism and high energy. Two twenty-five-foot-long, twelve-inch-deep trenches down, one to go. The bug enjoyed crawling around in the Georgia clay. When we took a break and retired to the quilt I'd set out on the ground for lounging, she took her first steps, two or three at a time! I was so excited I took her inside to try it on a more solid, level surface, and she would walk up to six steps at a time before diving into my lap. So she's walking, in spurts. March 22. I'm a little bit sad about it.

This was taken about fifteen minutes before her first steps.

That evening we had cake, a dense, rich carrot cake, with—in a nod to the bug's Florida beginnings—orange juice and zest in the cake and cream cheese frosting. For the cake I used this recipe. I made up the frosting as I went along; it was a bit soft, but nice and tangy with the orange and sour cream and just a little butter and powdered sugar.

We let her have at it, and she just went to town. She looked like she could not believe her good fortune. Cake!

We tried to put party hats on the dogs, but they were having none of it.

Thalia

The bug had her first haircut on March 9. We sat her in a chair outside while some meat was smoking and cut her some bangs. It was hard to get them straight, but I think it looks cute a little uneven. And I think she can see better now. She'll be one year old on Wednesday, March 21, the first day of spring.

She loves the walker wagon her grandma in New York gave her for Christmas. She's not walking unassisted yet, but she's close!

The bug signed "train" for the first time a few days ago when she heard one going by, and she does it pretty much every time we hear a train now. And I swear she said, out loud, "dog" the same day when she spotted the neighbor's dog roaming around nearby.

Even though they came up early and I was worried they'd freeze off, the Narcissus "Thalia" I planted in the front yard are blooming. They have a mild nutty fragrance. I cut some and put them on the fireplace mantel in the bug's room.

There are lots more blooming since I took this picture a week ago.

And finally, finally, believe it or not, yesterday we got our dining room table and bench! They were made, very slowly, by Jimmy Poss in Carlton. I think he did a nice job and it was worth the wait. He'll have to come back in a few weeks to attach the table top after it's had time to warp and shrink or expand or whatever wood does. It's a bit wider than I'd expected, but we have a large room to fill up, so what the hell.

In context, from the kitchen door.

In this picture you can just barely see the three holes in the top, which are where the ceiling beams were attached to the wall boards with large bolts. The skirt pieces are made of floorboards supposedly from the Crawford Long family house in Banks County.