by Kate Christensen | Aug 12, 2012
It rained all weekend, perfect weather for long, all-afternoon games of Spite & Malice played on the uneven narrow coffee table with small green glasses of red wine at our elbows, using two ancient, soft, weatherbeaten card decks we found in the summer barn. It’s an aptly named, vicious game, not necessarily recommended for happy couples, especially hermit couples, unless they want to spice up their humdrum everyday adoring contentment with insults, curses, snarls, and threats.
“You bastard,” I hissed at Brendan when he insouciantly screwed me out of yet another move. “I may never have sex with you again.”
Evidently this was not a deterrent, or else he didn’t believe me.
Our friend Madeleine, a doctor I went to Reed College with way back when, stayed with us for three nights last week. She and Brendan are collaborating on a project together, so much of her visit was devoted to work, but the rest of the time, we tried to entertain her, or rather, we made her entertain us. She has led, and is leading, an unusually adventurous, colorful, interesting life, and it’s possible to convince her to talk about it, which she does hilariously, with matter-of-fact, brilliantly articulate frankness.
In return, we cooked for her. One night, I made broiled lamb chops (rubbed first with a paste of garlic, paprika, cumin, salt, pepper, and olive oil) and farmstand gazpacho. The next night, Brendan made his sublime spaghetti with pesto. One morning, I made custardy, fluffy French toast with wild blueberry compote and maple syrup.
Brendan’s aunt’s dog Bandito has also been with us for the past week. He’s a sort of small schnauzer-pinscher combo (he looks like a spider monkey) who grew up running freely around the hills and forests in Italy. Now he races through the woods here, flushing turkeys and deer, driving them out just yards ahead of wherever we happen to be on the road or path while he yips madly behind them. If we carried guns with us on our daily walks, we would have a huge storeroom full of game by now.
He and Dingo are fellow former stray-rescue mutts; maybe because of this implied kinship, the two of them are fast, easygoing pals. They prowl around outside together, side by side, sniffing and idling and lying in the sun. Bandito watches Dingo eat various unfamiliar things — watermelon, cucumber, red pepper, apple — and then he tries them himself. The two of them line up for treats, sitting and looking up at me with identical expressions, cocked heads and open mouths and very bright eyes.
Because Madeleine, like Bandito, is avidly outdoorsy, we decided to forego our usual 4-mile morning tramp for something more ambitious, namely, a hike up a mountain. First, I made a breakfast to fuel the ascent: grilled Andouille sausages and eggs scrambled gently in butter to make big, tender curds, served in a toasted gluten-free baguette. Then the five of us, humans and dogs, plus two backpacks, climbed Mt. Chocurua, whose trail is steep and very rocky, and whose bald, boulder-strewn summit gives a wild, breathtaking view all around of the peaks of the Presidential mountain range, its forested slopes and valleys and shining lakes, under an enormous sky.
We ate our picnic near the top, sprawling on huge boulders. Dingo and Bandito scored plenty of apple, cucumber, and goat cheese. They lay at our feet, looking up at us rather than at the view, which seemed to leave them cold.
“Remember the first time we did this hike?” Brendan asked me.
“There was a foot of snow and ice, and I wore sneakers with no treads,” I said. “It was early April. More than 3 years ago. We had just fallen in love.”
“So you were dizzy with hormones,” said Madeleine.
“We brought a pack of cigarettes and two bottles of hard cider,” said Brendan.
“And a baggie of cashews,” I said. “Nothing else.”
“God, I wish I had a cigarette,” said Brendan, who quit smoking almost 2 years ago.
“Me too,” I said. “And some booze.”
“I would kill for some booze right now.”
“You guys are so weird,” said Madeleine, offering us the bag of craisins.
Spite & Malice Pizza
We made pizza last night, with amiable cooperation, between deadly rounds of cards. On gluten-free crust from the health food store in town, we spread Pomi strained tomatoes with basil, salt, black pepper, oregano, red pepper flakes, and a little olive oil added. Then came a generous layer of shredded mozzarella, and then a heap of roasted vegetables: red and green Bell peppers, red onion, whole garlic cloves, and baby bella mushrooms, all sliced and coated in olive oil and baked in a hot oven on a cookie sheet for 20 minutes or so.
On top of that went the piece de resistance: tiny turkey meatballs made with farmstand ground turkey, minced white onion and garlic, hot red pepper flakes, an egg, cream, ketchup, gluten-free bread crumbs, salt and pepper, lightly mixed then dropped from a spoon into hot olive oil in our biggest skillet and fried in batches. They were fantastic on the pizza, but next time, I might add a minced jalapeno, grated Parmesan, pine nuts, and maybe a small dash of cumin.
When the pizza was hot and bubbling and starting to brown on top, we pulled it out and sliced it and ate it with more hot red pepper flakes and grated Parmesan.
We both had a touch of indigestion in the night, but somehow I don’t think it was from the pizza.
by Kate Christensen | Aug 6, 2012
All my life, I’ve done a lot of daydreaming, otherwise known as woolgathering, fantasizing, and spacing out. It’s one of my favorite hobbies, along with eating. It’s free and portable and available to anyone, anytime. You don’t need any equipment or training. All you have to do is ignore whatever’s right in front of you and let your mind go wherever it wants. There are no rules, no one is watching, and nothing is off-limits. It’s one of the few absolute, eternal freedoms we possess.
The best daydreams are the ones that erase the present and feel so real it’s almost as if they’ve become true through sheer force of the imagination: the transporting ones, the ones that give the daydreamer something like a temporary parallel existence.
In mid-morning today, staring at a blank computer screen with a sense of dread, feeling the stresses of adult life and unwilling to contend with any of it, I rowed off in my mind across a vast, quiet lake in a canoe with a huge picnic basket, a canvas tarp, and an old-fashioned zippered sleeping bag.
I was 11, with my imaginary childhood best friend. Simultaneously, I was 14, with my imaginary summer boyfriend, sneaking away from our families for an afternoon. Also at the same time. Brendan was paddling in synch with me, Dingo sitting between us, his big bat ears peaked in the lake breeze. But really, I was alone in the absolute quiet.
After a long time, I came to a piney, rocky island in the center of the lake, isolated and far from any sign of people. I landed the canoe and carried everything ashore. I strung a rope between two trees and slung the tarp over it and weighted it with rocks, and then I unrolled my sleeping bag inside.
After I wedged the picnic basket in the roots and shade of a huge tree, I stripped and dove into the clean, cold water. And then, ravenous after a long, hard swim, I sat on the edge of the island, looking out over the water, and opened my picnic basket.
This was the best part of the daydream, the high point, and the purpose. In the hamper was a carefully curated picnic, one that took me a while to come up with as I stared into space, choosing, rejecting, and adding. In the end, I brought with me half a juicy, cold roast rosemary-and-lemon chicken, a container of vinegary, creamy German potato salad, a large, chewy sourdough roll, dusty with fine flour – I can eat all the gluten I want in my daydreams – and a mild, buttery brie, a hard, aged Gouda, herbed mixed olives, a hard salami, and cornichons. I also had a container of cold raw vegetables: sliced cucumber, red pepper, radishes, and celery. And a bottle of chilled red Cotes du Rhone, which is my favorite thing to drink this summer.
For dessert, I had a sack of fresh-picked wild blueberries, a bar of hazelnut bittersweet chocolate, and a big Thermos of tart, fresh lemonade, crackling with little ice cubes.
After I’d glutted myself, I sacked out in my canvas lean-to on my sleeping bag with the shadows of pine branches making patterns on my eyelids. A sweet-smelling breeze lifted the tarp gently and let it go again, without making a sound, as if I were inside a healthy lung. Dragonflies helicoptered through the air with a soporific buzz. The pine needles gave off their perfume. The pine boughs lifted and sank with a hushing sound.
I got chilly after a while and burrowed into my bag without waking up. The soft flannel inside smelled of long-ago campfires and past summers. The taste of the chicken and cheese and salami stayed on my tongue while I slept. When I woke up from this epic nap, I drank a bellyful of lemonade and dove into the lake again, and then, while the shadows got longer and the air cooled, I packed everything into the canoe and paddled for a long, calm, quiet hour back home.
When I got back, my computer screen was there in front of me, still empty, along with every damned thing I was worried about. Also, I was hungry. From the fridge, I fetched the rest of the purple cabbage, three carrots, and a head of greenleaf lettuce. With a red onion and a can of smoked kippers, I made a lunch so simple but good, it almost made me forget the imagined one.
Kipper Salad
Wash and tear into small bits 10 tender, fresh leaves of greenleaf lettuce. Thinly slice ½ red onion. Open a can of Bar Harbor peppered smoked kippers. Toss all ingredients with the liquid from the tinned fish, a dollop of mayonnaise, and the juice of ¼ lemon. Serve alongside a light, crisp coleslaw.
by Kate Christensen | Aug 1, 2012
It’s a quiet, green summer morning. The watery humidity makes birds’ calls sound liquid and amplified. The smell of the fresh-mown grass in the field around the house is mixing with the smell of coffee at my elbow. The air is clean and cool, the sunlight diffused by high, puffy white clouds whose underbellies show that hint of charcoal that predicts rain. The old, shaggy trees are rustling in the slight wind so loudly at the bottom of the field, their leaves sound almost like rainfall. The green crabapples on the tree just outside the window are swelling; a sleek and healthy coyote just trotted up past the house. A heron is scouting out the meadows from the top of the tallest hemlock for plump baby frogs and juicy little snakes.
It hard to believe the things I well know are happening all over the world, sitting here. It’s a powerful cognitive dissonance, reconciling this pristine, preserved, as-yet unchanged place with the shit that’s going on “out there” – the massive-scale insanity of hydraulic fracturing, the plastic and trash deposit in the Pacific Ocean the size of Alaska, Manhattan-sized chunks of ice falling and melting into oceans at the poles, the terrible wreckage caused by fire, drought, flood, and storms all across this country, right now: crops dead and lost, people and animals displaced, trees dying.
Just now, as I was writing about fracking and ocean trash, the sunlight slipped through the clouds and lit the grass and gilded the trees. The crickets are humming. The clouds are casting shadows on the mountains’ furry green blanket of trees.
This cognitive dissonance also intrudes naturally into every decision I make about food. Food is not a simple thing. Deciding what to eat carries implications that go far beyond our own mouths and stomachs. Grocery shopping has become possibly more powerful than voting.
And I am resolutely, unquestioningly nonjudgmental in almost all things except other people’s shopping carts. I can’t help it. When I see a conveyer belt heading for the cashier loaded with individual plastic-wrapped high-fructose corn-syrup-laden GMO-heavy processed corporate-stamped dreck, I blanch like a Victorian maiden aunt whose niece is running out of the house in rouge and plunging neckline. “There goes the world,” I gasp to myself with the hand-fluttering futility of the privileged, overly well-informed first-world consumer.
My mother, who is recovering from her recent surgery with her usual zest and amazing capacity to heal, has once again been questioning her own eating habits and practices in its aftermath. I am always available to discuss the topic, so our emails lately have centered anew, for the thousandth time, on What and How To Eat.
She and I have been talking about fish. Buying fresh fish is fraught. Wild salmon? Endangered. Farmed salmon? Full of PCBs. Tuna, swordfish? Loaded with mercury and endangered. Sea bass? Endangered. Haddock, hake, cod? Overfished.
So I generally buy tins of so-called “sustainable” little ocean fish that are, luckily, both delicious and healthy: herring, mackerel, sardines. We eat them on hot toast with a smear of mayonnaise and another of horseradish, or over a big plate of salad greens with avocado, red pepper, and cucumber. Who knows if they’re really okay? Who knows if anything is, anymore?
My mother, who, at the suggestion of a doctor, experimentally went vegan a number of months ago, thrived on an animal-free diet and embraced it completely. But now she’s started eating those oily little canned fish again, because she can’t stand eating soy anymore, the mainstay of vegans, since most of it is genetically modified. She buys the same brand of tinned fish I do, I learned yesterday: Bar Harbor. She also reminded me yesterday that we visited their factory when we spent a summer with my grandparents in a Maine farmhouse, the summer I turned 8. I have no memory of this, but it’s kind of nice to know that I’ve been to the source of my go-to seafood.
However, last night, we splurged and compromised and wickedly ate wild-caught salmon. A pound and a third of Alaskan sockeye cost $17.45 at the local Hannaford, a price that reflects how rare it is and how far it had to come.
I put a can of chipotles in adobo sauce in the blender with a dollop of safflower mayonnaise and whizzed it. I poured this spicy, creamy sauce over the fish and baked it in a hot oven until it was sizzling and cooked through. I served it with chard steamed with garlic, and wild rice cooked with vegetable broth and a minced onion.
My pleasure in eating that rich, flaky, sweet-tasting fish was unspoiled by my knowledge of the implications of eating it, but I was in no way unaware of them. It almost made me appreciate and love the salmon more than I would have if it had been abundant, caught nearby, cheap and plentiful and perfectly safe in the food chain. My pleasure in this landscape follows the same trajectory. I love it more, find it even more beautiful, because it’s so threatened and rare.
by Kate Christensen | Jul 27, 2012
Yesterday afternoon, Brendan and I drove back to Portland. I was supposed to give a reading with Cathi at 7 at Books-A-Million in South Portland. I was going to read from my new paperback, and Cathi was going to read from her “stunning, fearless, dazzling” (says me, her greatest fan and promoter) new novel, Gone (Atria, $24.95; website: www.cathihanauer.com).
After I finished at the soup kitchen, Brendan and I went to Whole Foods to lay in supplies for the next few days, armed with a list I got in an email from Cathi. At home, we unpacked an unfamiliar array of food: orange-flavored seltzer, an approximation of Cinnamon Life cereal (Whole Foods naturally carries an organic alternative, not the thing itself), half a gallon of 1% milk, watermelon and berries and “pluots,” a carton of Chunky Monkey ice cream and a box of ice cream sandwiches, caramel popcorn, and a box of penne and a jar of pasta sauce in case Phoebe doesn’t like whatever meal is served at any point.
The Hanauer-Jones family arrived just before 5, laden with backpacks, sleeping bags for the kids, plus a bag of enormous cookies, most of which turned out to be gluten-free, tomatoes from their garden, and the wine we had brought to their house 2 weeks ago and didn’t drink.
I quickly wrote an introduction to Cathi’s and my reading, 5 long, sincerely gushing, earnestly admiring and adoring paragraphs; when Brendan proofread it, he asked me if I were really intending to read it aloud in front of an audience.
“I’ll wing it,” I said. “I promise I’ll try to be funny.”
Cathi and I got gussied up in dresses, brushed our hair, and then we all trooped out to the cars. When we arrived at the huge Maine Mall and found the bookstore, a vast chain affair in a low cinderblock building that sprawls over about 100,000 square feet, Cathi’s father, Lonnie, was waiting for us outside, in a bit of a flap.
“Apparently they think you’re just doing a signing,” he said. “They set up a little table with two chairs. There’s no reading.”
I was instantly relieved: this was great news. So Cathi and I sat together at the little table and signed copies of our books for three extremely famous female writers who’d shown up because one of them, Elinor Lipman, is friends with Cathi. Their lovely husbands had come too; they chatted with Brendan and Dan and Lonnie and Bette, Cathi’s mother, while she and I scrawled our signatures in as many of our books as we could find in the store. Everyone there evidently felt compelled to buy one of each of our books; it turns out that signings are a good idea, and stealth signings are even better.
After Cathi and I had thanked the staff, signed the poster with our book jackets and author photos side by side on it, and posed for photographs standing by the poster, taken by Phoebe, Dan, Brendan, and Bette, Cathi’s mother, in a flurry of paparazzi-like clicks, it was time for dinner. Brendan suggested, for convenience’s sake, a nearby seafood restaurant called the Weathervane. “Ahoy, matey!” we called to each other as we walked into the heavily air-conditioned, fish-smelling place. After a bit of a kerfluffle, they seated the eight of us at a long table in back and handed around menus.
“Can I have a kids’ menu?” Phoebe asked. Although she’s 17 and theoretically capable of eating adult food, and the menu is for kids 10 and under, they gave her one, including the box of crayons. After she ordered “Kraft® mac and cheese” with a side of celery sticks, Nathaniel, whose palate is 14 going on 30, asked for the “wicked cheap” Thursday night special of 2 steamed lobsters, which arrived lurid red, splayed on a platter. He began expertly dismantling them with nutcracker and pick while his older sister tucked happily into her neon-orange noodles.
“The best Kraft mac and cheese is at Friendly’s,” she announced. “They squeeze hot cheese stuff out of a bag onto some instant noodles then let it sit for 20 minutes so you think they made it fresh. It’s the best anywhere.”
Cathi, who had been laughing too hard to order when the waitress was making her rounds, had nonetheless bravely managed to squeak out a request for 5 separate plates of food, including a fried seafood platter “breaded with crushed Ritz™ crackers” and “steamed” asparagus, which had been drenched in butter and melted cheese. To my right, she was working her way through most of it, still laughing, as was I, almost too hard to eat my “lazy man” lobster with drawn butter.
“Why do they call it drawn?” we all wondered. No one had an answer.
After we’d finished eating, Dan performed a dramatic reading of my ardent encomium for Cathi, inserting the word “erotic” into every paragraph and accentuating certain especially over-the-top words and lines.
“But I meant every word,” I said weakly.
“You were going to read that aloud?” her father, Lonnie, wondered.
“Maybe I was going to paraphrase,” I said.
Nathaniel had finished with his platter and was now gnawing on a giant gummi bear the general size, shape and color of a lobster. We could almost see his braces dissolving in all the sugar. It inspired a new round of ordering: more Cabernet for Brendan and me, a hot fudge sundae for Cathi, and ice cream pie for Phoebe.
When we got home, there was an email from Lonnie: “It is always fun spending time with two teenagers — and Nat and Phoebe were there too.”
Bette Hanauer’s 1970s homemade version of Kraft Mac and Cheese, as described by Cathi Hanauer
Melt half a stick of butter and stir in enough flour to make a thin paste. Slowly whisk in 2 cups of whole milk to make a roux and stir until it thickens and scalds. Add mounds of Velveeta or American cheese and stir well, then pour this thick, cheesy sauce over 1 lb. hot cooked macaroni elbows, mix, and serve immediately to your 4 kids, all their friends, and the rest of the neighborhood.
by Kate Christensen | Jul 23, 2012
This weekend, we made a pact to try to stay off our computers as much as we could. Brendan succeeded entirely, which was no surprise, because he’s not as addicted as I am to the computer in the first place, and also, his laptop went mysteriously dead yesterday morning.
I was less successful, but I had a good reason to be online. My mother had a serious operation on Friday morning, and her blood pressure fell very low afterwards so they’ve kept her in the ICU, so my computer has been my lifeline to her and to my sisters. We had all wanted to jump on planes to Arizona to be with her, but she adamantly told us not to come, so we three all hovered around our email programs on separate continents, Susan in Holland, Emily in New Zealand, and me up here in New Hampshire, about as far from Arizona as it’s possible to get and still be in the continental U.S.
Our mother came out of surgery and began sending us cogent, hilarious, poetic bulletins as soon as she was awake enough, typing with her pinky fingers on her iPod. All three of us sisters kept the round robin of emails going, checking in as often as we could. There’s a golden hour, or maybe half hour, every day, when the four of us are all awake at the same time, Emily just getting up, Susan on her way to bed, my mother and me somewhere in the middle. It’s a narrow window: Emily’s having breakfast and rushing to get her four kids to school; Susan’s tired from her day of working hard and mothering her two kids and eager to get to sleep. We all love it, though – that feeling of temporal simultaneity in the virtual computer world.
My mother will be 76 on Wednesday; I’m turning 50 next month. My two oldest nephews, Eben and Luca, who were newborn babies about a week ago, are teenagers now. The mysteries of aging and a lifespan only deepen with time; there’s a startling disjunction that begins at about 30 and widens with every decade. How can I be 50 when I’m still 15? How can my little sisters be so damned old? How can I ever live without my mother in the world? The next generation is coming up fast; all too soon, before we can blink, Susan and Emily and I will be the old ones, the ones having serious operations, the ones the younger people will have to face losing. And our mother will be gone. I can’t fathom any of it.
It was quite a weekend, and I didn’t succeed at all at staying off the computer. But the attempt to at least stop trolling the Internet forced me to do other things, summer things, things that reminded me of being much younger, that brought back that sense of summer, the bottomless, open, bright and empty days, oceans of sunlit hours. We went kayaking on the lake, paddling past the rocky, piney little island where Brendan camped as a little boy with his brother and friends. “It seemed so far away back then,” he said. We dove in and floated in the bathtub-warm water, low from the drought, but still clean and sweet-smelling and silky on the skin.
We played Scrabble all afternoon in the summer barn, the windows open to the thunderstorm. At sunset, we sat on the stone bench down in the meadow and watched the light change on the mountains. We took long walks along the road by the lake, bought paper bags full of vegetables, local wine and cheese and ice cream, homemade sausage, and berries from the farm stand over in Maine. We went up Foss Mountain to look out over the whole mountain range and valley; we sat on the slab of granite at the top and watched two little boys pick blueberries, eating more than they managed to save. We took deep, quiet late-afternoon naps, sprawling barefoot on the couches.
We’re spending 10 long days in the house Brendan was born in. All of his early childhood history is here. It’s a cozy, welcoming, homey farmhouse surrounded by mountains and woods. Almost nothing has changed here, physically, since Brendan was born. Being surrounded by his family’s happy past is always comforting, but this weekend, it was especially so. I remembered being 8, 10, 13 in the deep summertime, buried in long hot days that ended with bedtime when it was still light outside. Waking up the next morning, it was all the same again, and would be, it seemed, forever.
Farm Stand Pizza
On a ready-made or homemade crust, spread pureed, cooked-down Roma tomatoes mixed with olive oil, minced fresh herbs, salt, and pepper. On top, spread a good layer of shredded mozzarella. Meanwhile, roast sliced onion and red pepper in olive oil on a cookie tray till they start to caramelize. Spread them generously on the pizza, then add a layer of sliced fully-cooked sausage. Bake in a hot oven till the cheese is melted and bubbling.
