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The solution to this is simple, just add another inch of wine to the glass and your sponsor will no longer be able to see you. Then drain and repeat until you can't see him. See, no problem.

Just found out that Mary Travers (A.K.A. Mary of “Peter, Paul and Mary”) died on Sept. 16th after a long hard battle with leukemia. Her voice was iconic, unique and unforgettable, and her presence captivating. It’s just sad.

Title may or may not have anything to do with this entry.

At 6:15 this morning, one eye popped open. It was followed shortly by the other. On a normal day this wouldn’t be a big deal, but I’d only just managed to fall asleep three hours before hand. After an hour of lying there, stubbornly trying to pretend I could still go back to sleep, I got up, and got dressed.

I’ve spent the past four weeks retraining my body, or possibly the other way around, to go to bed at a decent hour and get up early. Regulating my sleep has always been a struggle, but I am hopeful, despite today’s set back, that I’ve found a comfortable groove. Certainly it’s better than being awake all night and sleeping most of the day away.

As a side note, my brain is only working in three sentence paragraphs, apparently.

On the food front, I’ve made two apple tarts – one rustic and one fancy – that I’m planning to turn into a blog entry as soon as I can muster the caffeine required to attempt cleverness. I’m thinking of calling it, “A Tale of Two Tarts.” The one is really more of a galette with the edges folded over onto the filling in an artfully disheveled kind of way, and for the other I arranged thinly sliced apple into a tight spiral pattern in a proper tart tin. I’ll post pictures when I can navigate them off our cheap digital camera and into a computer.

I’ve also pickled a mixture of hot pepper rings and (separately) some jalapeño rings. Last weekend we picked crab apples, and preserved some outrageously purple Italian* plums we found at the market, which happily didn’t change color when we put them in syrup.
Today, I’m making grape jelly, a honey and yellow tomato spread, pumpkin butter, (from two whole pie pumpkins) quince jam, and oven drying some yellow pear tomatoes that we’re going to pack in olive oil, all the while I’ll be sewing my own designer straight jacket, for when they come to take me away.

*They weren’t actually imported from Italy, but are an elongated style grown locally.

Cat’s are fine, Tarc is fine, the weather’s turning colder, (which is fine) and soon it will be time for ghost and goblins, and little brats in costumes too.

Once again I find myself feeling slightly insulted by a compliment. I read a lot of food articles, (and I mean A LOT) most of which are published in NYC by, lets be totally honest here, New Yorkers who seem to think that the city they live in is the physical center of the universe.

This article, meant to encourage people in the slow food movement, went on and on about how even in Michigan people are going to farmers markets and buying local produce. Even in Michigan! While the writer attempts to pat us on the back for following an international trend, like we’re some kind of slow cousin who is finally learning their ABC’s. The author keeps mentioning how poor a state we are; how we have no discernable culinary culture of our own; how high our unemployment rate is; how pedestrian we are; and how we’re all ignorant toothless factory workers who celebrate our special events down at the IHOP and live on a diet of process cheese food and Cola. OK. I may have made that last bit up, but I’m sick of being treated like some backwater bastard child of the real United (Coastal) States. In fact, most of the country manages to survive without the benefit of being New York, Los Angeles or San Francisco, thank you very much!

Michigan farmers have been second only to California in food production. And yes, in the past most of that produce has been shipped to factories and ended up in processes foods. Our bad. But as that market dried up, due to cheaper imported produce form third world nations, our farmers very deftly changed the focus of their production to consumer direct, restaurant, and fresh market production: all without having to tell the world repeatedly how wonderful we are.

Perhaps that’s what is wrong with Michigan, we’re all to busy getting the job done to sit around feeling self important!

Another chicken tonight, weighing in at six pound 43ounces. This one stuffed with apples (I peeled them this time) and rubbed with olive oil, SALT, PEPPER, and herds du province. Oh, and it’s free range, but not organic, so it only got the one boutique term/price hike.

We’re also having roasted sweet potatoes and green French lentils served warm with a lemon and shallot dressing. And, of course, wine.

I want to be Jeffery Garten the equally accomplished husband of Ina Garten AKA The Barefoot Contessa. OK not really, but her cooking show paints a picture of Mr. Garten arriving home every Friday night to a slow roasted – and delicious – chicken. You see, there are certain things I can no longer imagine because the plain truth is; if there is a chicken roasting in my oven, I’m the one roasting it! Sure, there are some memories lurking in my childhood of my mother roasting a chicken or turkey, but they are, to say the least, vague. Slowing growing accustomed to the smell of something in the oven is not the same as coming home and being metaphorically hit in the face with it.

Tonight, not having my very one Food Network star to cook for me, I roasted a chicken. I mashed herbs into fresh butter, and rubbed that under and all over the skin. I stuffed the cavity with onions and apples. I started high 425ºF to seal the skin and roasted little clucky for an hour and half at 350ºF. My bird came out of the oven, beautifully browned and jeweled with herbs. It was postcard pretty.

I let it rest, and served it expectantly. I took my first bite expecting nirvana; it was juicy, and also slightly grassy. Not good. It tasted bland, it tasted like – dare I say it – hospital food. It needed something…

That’s when I realized, I’d forgotten to season the chicken.

No salt. No pepper.

FUCK!

If I were on Top Chef I’d be going home tonight. Fortunately, I am already home. Unfortunately, I can’t run away.

It just occurred to me that I’ve been too busy cooking and canning to keep track of the recipes I’m using and all the little tweaks and notes I want to apply in the future. This may be because I have the time management skills of a third grader.

Ooooh, look shiny…

Woke up at 5:45 this morning, tried to go back to sleep, but was out of bed fifteen minutes later. After forty years I shouldn’t be slave to my body’s whims, but I am. It beats being in pain.

Breakfast was toast and coffee, and lunch…to be determined. I’m meant to be constructing a meal plan for the upcoming week, but don’t yet feel up to performing the Herculean task of standing up, turning around, and opening the freezer. I know there’s some Hake or Cod in there, squid, and if I’m lucky, some bay scallops. Not a bad start admittedly, but still not a weeks worth, and very little room for leftovers. As for the scallops, there can be only one answer, bacon and cream: probably not the solution my doctor had in mind when he recommended I eat more omega 3s.

Time to make the bread…

I just performed a ritual that anyone who lives in a university town will know all too well: I posted the football schedule on the fridge. So, now I’ll know which Saturdays between September and November will be totally fucked up, when the buses will be re-routed and when I should tell out of town guests to avoid Ann Arbor completely.

Love autumn, but I HATE the fall.

My nightmare has come true, as we speak there are four undergrads moving into the apartment next door. Nice quiet students would be fine, graduate students excellent, but NO these folks have their very own blue and maize (U of M colors) beer fridge. In fact, most of the things they are unloading are hand painted blue and maize.

Gee, do you think they’re going to be throwing any parties? Do you think I’m going to spend the next year calling the office or the cops?

If there was any way in hell I could tell the folks in the office to bite me and move out I would. I may still stop in to tell them thanks for nothing and to expect to be hearing from me every time there’s a problem. Still, I need this like a need someone to kick me in the head again, and again, and again!

Yes, I have become THAT guy. This complex was filled with families and young professional folks when we move in four years ago. If I wanted to live in the student ghetto I would have chosen to live there!

Fuck me with a chainsaw!

So tired today…I have a list of 45, or so, jams, jellies, pickles, and preserves that we’ve been putting up this summer. I am really enjoying learning different recipes and methods but today I am very pleased pay day is a full two weeks away and we’re taking this weekend off! Well, at least from canning. The list of housework that’s been being ignored while we’ve been playing in the kitchen is long, and the shower is getting crusty.

This morning I decided that people you haven’t seen in fifteen years, who call you to tell you they’re coming to town, arrange to meet up and have dinner, but then, on the day, leave you waiting for their confirmation call for like three hours when they have no intention of actually calling or showing up… (Also leaving you depressed and wondering if you’re even a likable person, because you don’t have that many friends in the first place. Then you spend the entire night rehashing everything you wrote in an email or said on the phone that might have indicated you don’t really want to see that person, or that might have been offensive in anyway, until you end up wondering why you give a fuck in the first place ‘cause there is probably a reason you didn’t maintain the relationship after college and…) Anyway, yeah, people who do that to you, suck big hairy donkey balls!

So…yeah. I’m tired and just a smidge depressed. Mostly, I let myself get excited about meeting up with an old…person I was close to in college… but you know things don’t always work out, so I’m disappointed and trying really hard not to take it too personally.

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This actually counteracts the grumps every time I look at it.

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...but it IS improving.

It’s mid-summer. The tomato plants out on the balcony are flowering even as they continue to climb - what seems like three and four inches per day- up their make-shift trellises. Two have small green growths on them that will someday be (I hope) a delicious side-dish, or addition to a salad at dinner. But for now they have reached the stage of growth where I must flood their pots with water twice a day, and eye the tomatoes at the grocery store with a certain amount of jealous contempt.

The Birds Eye peppers I planted have produced – so far - 15 shiny green fingers mixed with the tiny white promise of more. I am waiting, impatiently, for them to become bright crimson before I pluck them from their mother and ruthlessly toss them into tarka dal, matar paneer, or some other spicy dish.

I have already had one harvest of greens, and am due for another any day. Though a treat, I cannot sustainably grow enough greens to keep me in salad all summer, but I like to imagine the three harvests I get per year helps to decrease the demand for commercially grown produce. Besides, there are some magical flavor enhancers that only exist in foods that you have grown for yourself.

The pots of thyme and oregano are flourishing, despite some impatient harvesting. And this year’s only true casualty, the Sage, has found a place to rest in the mulch bin. Tomorrow I’m off to the garden center to get hold off some mint, chervil, and rosemary, which I’m told do well in direct sun. Or at least better than Sage…

All in all, it has been an oddly cool summer, thus far, with only two days of temperatures above 90, and a handful of days above 80. There has been very little rain. We are fortunate to have a twenty foot long south-facing balcony, with two patio doors; a curse in the winter but a definite plus in the warmer months. This summer in particular, I find myself engrossed in the comfortable tedium of watering, weeding, and waiting. Perhaps it’s some latent urge to nest, the desire to be more “green” and self sufficient, or the secret romantic dream of being a farmer; or else I am actually becoming my father. Whatever the cause, I can’t resist planning and scheming; what I might like to plant next year; what I might do differently; how I’m going to expand this little garden, and what I must scour my local home store to purchase during the end of the season clearance sales. For example: large pots!

One should not attach a flash memory drive to their keys; no matter how convenient it is, even if the manufacturer of said drive provides a key ring with the device.

One should always stow their keys in a pocket, a purse or some other place of holding, and not the hand cart at the grocery store.

On a possibly related note, I may, or may not, have lost my keys today. And I may, or may not, have had to walk all the way back to the grocery store to claim them.

I’m checking with my legal team before I admit to being such a dumb ass!

Mornings are such a good time for writing. A time to just get some words on the page before your brain has fully begun to function (or in my case worry) when you haven’t begun your to-do list, or hell, when you haven’t even made one yet. This morning I woke up to a thick blanked of fog covering everything, for a few minutes I couldn’t see past the bank of trees, wild flowers, and sumac, that separates our apartment property from the highway, and traffic on I-94 was blissfully slow. I could pretend I was alone, an oasis of solitude in a busy city/suburb. Ann Arbor may not be the biggest city on the map, but it’s certainly metropolitan if not cosmopolitan, the sound of cars/trucks never really stops.

I sat in the comfortable reading chair next to our sliding glass door, watching the cats at my feet as they watched the birds outside. I’m not sure they’d know what to do with a bird if they caught one, but they like to pretend they do, even if the largest live thing they’ve ever hunted was a moth: caught, eaten, and thrown up again. Eventually, the tiny weeds poking their way out of our container garden got to me, and I had to go out onto the balcony and tease them out of the dirt. They are with Christ now.

Our tomato plants seem to have gotten bigger, literally, over night. It has been perfect weather for them, 79 – 80 during the day and 55 – 60 at night. (Perfect weather for me too, but that’s beside the point.) I wish I could say the same of the Birds Eye Peppers I was planning to dry and use in Indian dishes, the tiny plants seem to have flowered prolifically and are already bent on producing chilies. Clearly they do not need even half the real-estate I’ve given them, so they’ll be moving down to smaller pots later, and will be replaced by a second planting to snow peas. Some of our mixed salad greens are ready to be harvested – actually need to be - to make room for the smaller less mature plants to grow. I can’t wait to have them on my fork.

Today I am making Mango chutney, and hoping that the same basic canning procedure I use for preserving jam will work to make something I can store at room temperature until I’m ready to eat it. And, speaking of jam, I think its breakfast time. Mmmm, toast!

Somehow I have to convince myself that the entire economy will not collapse if I skip going to the farmer's market for one week and buy a couple of bags of salad greens at Wholefoods. Damn you Alice Waters!

P.S. My allergies are kicking my ass today.

SNOT!

New Berlin, Wisconsin is apparently part of the Bermuda Triangle: It bet ya’ didn’t know that! I’ve been obsessively checking the tracking information on a package since yesterday around 2pm - when it left New Berlin – and it, as yet, has not arrived anywhere. *cue Twilight Zone theme*

What did I order? You ask, because I need a convoluted device to continue this post without destroying continuity, and I’m too lazy to come of with something original…

Crocs.

Yes, I know, they’re ugly, they’re dorky, they’re time is over. I don’t care. After years of working on my feet in improper shoes, I have erosion of the fat pad on the bottom of my metatarsal region, repetitive task injuries and arthritis in my hips, knees, and ankles. In short, I’m in mild but annoying pain everyday, and frankly Crocs are the only shoes I’ve found that don’t hurt. That statement includes the very expensive /scary prescription Birkenstock clogs that took six months to get used to and never were comfortable.

So, here I sit, waiting on my Crocs to return form the neither world, or at least arrive somewhere closer to me and get checked in.

Gee…I wonder if New Berlin was founded by German people.