Month: July 2015
July 29
Today is our eighth wedding anniversary. It’s also the 11th birthday of this blog, the first day of our first-ever corporate tax audit, and the day that my mother officially moves to Seattle. It’s a lot of Big Adult Stuff, and I have lots of feelings, including immense gratitude for our accountant. But most of all, I’m glad that these two wide-eyed pups, the ones in this shot circa 2007, decided to take the great leap that is marriage, that they’ve kept at it, showing up, cooking, eating, building, building some more, figuring it out, duking it out, and loving, loving, for eight whole years. And I’m glad that this blog made it all happen. Thanks for being along for the ride, everybody.
P.S. A wonderful, and relevant, episode of On Being.
P.P.S. Pavement’s Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain in the car on a hot, sunny day, with the windows down!
And now, for a properly celebratory cocktail: The world does not need Campari Granita. It is enough, I think, that Campari exists, and that we can mix it with soda water and drink it. But the instant I saw this recipe in Jennifer McLagan’s excellent book Bitter, I knew I had to make it, because the only thing better than straight-up Campari and soda (or a Negroni, or an Americano, or a shandy), is Campari and orange or grapefruit juice and the smallest splash of lemon juice, frozen and forked to the texture of a snow cone and eaten with a spoon on a sticky July evening, while you make dinner. Or more succinctly, in the words of our friend Michael Riha: this stuff is great. Cheers. Stir the juice, Campari, and lemon juice (and sugar, if using grapefruit juice) together. Pour into an 8-inch square metal pan (or another pan of similar volume). Place in the freezer. Stir the mixture with a spoon every hour or so, to break it up into large ice crystals. I used a fork for the last stirring, to make the ice crystals finer and fluffier. It took about three hours for my granita to be fully frozen and to the right texture. If you forget to stir the mixture and it freezes solid, don’t panic: just break it into chunks and pulse briefly in the food processor. To serve, spoon the granita into chilled glasses. Yield: 4 to 6 servings
Campari Granita
From Bitter, by Jennifer McLagan
For the orange version:
Or for the grapefruit version, which is more bitter, and which I prefer:
We’ll go from left to right
I promised cookbooks, and I shall deliver cookbooks. No more nostalgia! No more old photographs! No more zoning out with Danzig videos on YouTube because a man in a Danzig t-shirt just walked into the coffee shop where I am writing and reminded me of the song “Mother ’93“! I will be useful. Four years ago, when we moved into the house where we now live, I started keeping a small collection of cookbooks on top of the refrigerator. Most of our books live in June’s room, on the wall of shelves there, but that’s down the hall from the kitchen, and I wanted to have my most-used, best-loved, most-consulted books within reach. I rotate them as new books come…
Read moreJuly 10
My mother tells me that she had always loved the house. She used to drive by and admire it. When I was thirteen, it came on the market, and she and my dad snatched it up. The house was built in 1948, old for Oklahoma, painted brick with wrought iron and ivy. It needed a lot of work, and they tore out walls and opened it up, changed everything. It was their biggest, finest collaboration, and they made it exactly what they wanted. It was weird in ways, or maybe quirky is the better word, with a mirror on the ceiling of the downstairs bathroom and Pepto-Bismol pink wallpaper in the dining room. But mostly it was beautiful, obscenely beautiful, full of…
Read more