True North

Home-baked...

bread.

Everyday Oat Bread, specifically, from The Rhythm of the Family (yes, still very much enjoying that book). Also found online at the Soulemama blog, here. (Though the online version contains cinnamon, which the book's - and mine - doesn't.) It's delicious. Time-consuming, as all bread is, what with all the rising and waiting and whatnot, but otherwise easy. Somewhat magical, as all bread is, what with all the producing something incredible out of the humblest of ingredients and inevitable thinking about women throughout history doing the very same motions with their hands... Like knitting or nursing a baby, baking bread is one of those meditative, primal ways to spend time that make domesticity seem a little more like something sacred and a little less like one big chore.

I brought this bread, along with some homemade sweet potato-carrot-bean-ginger soup (no recipe, just threw some good things together and pureed) to my dear friend, Anastasia, this week in exchange for an acupuncture treatment. Bread for healing. A perfect trade.

Feeling Fall-ish

From a new banner here at the blog to a new wreath on our front door at home, we're beginning to celebrate autumn and all its blazing beauty. I can't wait for the leaves to start changing and for hot apple cider and for putting together the girls' Halloween costumes (on deck this year: one princess, one vampire bat). Maybe it's because I have an early-fall birthday, or maybe just because, like spring, fall is so fleetingly and extravagantly beautiful, but I am definitely a fan.

Around our home, we've changed the seasonal mobile in the kitchen by switching out the little flowers we had up all summer for some pretty fabric leaves.

Then with more fabric leaves, I made a fall wreath for the front door. I picked up a plain twig wreath at Michael's (I think it's called a grapevine wreath?...), and on the same trip bought a garland of fake fall leaves. I cut the garland apart, leaving the leaves in groups of two or three so that I could easily thread them between the twigs of the wreath - much easier to get these to stay than if I had used single leaves like the ones in the mobile. Then I decorated with a big bow made with leaf-patterned ribbon, and looked through my craft supplies for other little bits and bobs to tuck in and wind around, like the owl ribbon and red beads. I love that you don't really notice these little touches until you get up close, like treasures scavanged by a bird for its nest.

And, in our house, autumn means pomegranates! My girls and I go crazy for the tangy, ruby seeds, and removing them from the fruit's outer peel and inner pith underwater (much easier and cleaner) is actually part of the fun. It's a whole fabulous sensory experience for the girls, and the rewards for their labor - both culinary and visual - are more than worth the time spent.

 

I've done other seasonal home updates here before, most recently: summer and winter/holiday. Lately my belief in the importance of these yearly traditions has been re-energized by The Rhythm of Family: Discovering a Sense of Wonder through the Seasons, a lovely new book by one of my favorite bloggers, Amanda Soule, along with her husband Stephen. I highly recommend it.

Happy Autumn!

Our Summer Days

One week at the beach and a few adventures in the city later, plus some outside painting fun, weekly trips to the pool, red tomatoes finally coming in from the garden, new Gillian Welch in heavy rotation, nightly pre-dinner Pimm's cups with strawberries cucumber and mint, and Maeve's innaugural trip to the movie theater for the new Winnie the Pooh ... and I think I'm finally getting the hang of this summer thing.

P.S. If your childhood self was as obsessed with making friendship bracelets as mine was, then you'll find it's just like riding a bike to pick it up again. If you need a refresher, or you never learned, there are plenty of tutorials on the internet - just google friendship bracelets. I'm loving how effortlessly cool they look, especially worn mixed in with actual grown-up bracelets.

Rainbow Food

How pretty are these colorful potatoes, all glossy with olive oil and about to go into the oven? Sometimes it's the big things - murals and launch parties and dreams coming true and all that. But often it's just the little things that make me happy...

Toronto

I have a new style crush: the city of Toronto. I could gush about it for hours. I just got back from a three-day trip there, a business trip (which is hard to pull off as a stay-at-home mom, let me tell you!) to flesh out plans for a non-profit social innovation center I am helping to start up. More on that soon, as it promises to take over and change my life in the best possible way. But Toronto! It is So. Cool.

Want to share some quick highlights and links now and then give you a tour of my gorgeous, artist-designed hotel room tomorrow - totally worthy of its own post.

::The Gladstone Hotel:: where we stayed and where we rented meeting space to work. It is part hotel and event space, part arts center. Each room is competely different, each designed by a different artist. There are multiple art galleries threaded through the spaces, artist studios, a gorgeous little cafe, fantastic community events, even two green roofs and a green wall. They say their business mandate is "to facilitate other people’s ideas." How cool is that? From a hotel?

{the green wall helps filter the air in the main stairwell and lobby. plus it's pretty.}

::The Centre for Social Innovation:: one of the organizations we toured on the first day in order to spark our subsequent thinking and discussion. Totally incredible, from the way it looks and feels to their mission and the success they've experienced. A totally outside-the-box way of imagining business. As they describe it, a place where "where creativity and social conscience ignite each other." Check out the website, it's chock full of great stuff - I'm particularly jazzed by Our Theory of Change.

::West Queen West neighborhood:: the little "off" time we had was mostly spent exploring the boutiques and galleries lining the streets around our hotel. (well, the ladies anyway. the men we were working with spent their off time back at the hotel napping !) It is such a fun, creatively inspiring area. Tons of street art, which, as a mural painter, I love to be surrounded by.

{glass apples at The Devil's Workshop jewelry boutique, so gorgeous}

{dress sculpture by Toronto artist Sophie DeFrancesca of Lausberg Contemporary Gallery}

{beautiful textiles make for some fabulous neckties}

and lastly...

::George restaurant:: I've been thinking about it ever since Saturday night, and have come to the very High Fidelity-like conclusion that this was one of the top five meals I have ever had. The place, the food, the service, our laughter, the wine... everything sparkled and shone. I was in love with the whole world, eating at the George.

The thing about my time in Toronto is that I work pretty hard to be inspired by the small, unnoticed lovely things in my normal everyday life. But this weekend let me put that work aside and feast on inspiration, and I remembered how good it feels to be surrounded by magic and spark and beauty. I won't be moving anytime soon, of course, but I will take away from this trip a pledge to myself to move beyond noticing and into full-out creating my own inspiration. Noticing is the practice, and one definitely needs to keep practicing for maintenance's sake, but I think I'm finally moving away from preparation and into the Big Show. I'm so excited!

First Harvest

I've been meaning and wanting to write some more about our visit to Storm King and at some point I will, but man, it has been too hot to sit in front of this computer and think. It has been too hot to do much of anything at all. Luckily the veggies out in the garden do not have this same response to the heat. They are being productive enough for all of us. This morning I woke up before my children, walked the dog, and harvested one bell pepper, one biggish tomato and thirty-six cherry tomatoes from our little backyard garden. We had had two or three little tomatoes trickling in at a time, but this was the first time I could come upstairs with a big bounty, and it was thrilling. A tomato doesn't ever taste better than it does right off the vine, I don't care who's preparing it or what fancy olive oil they use!

Someone else thinks so, too. I was going to slice up the big one for sandwiches today, but she woke up, came into the kitchen, and was immediately desperate to bite into it like an apple. Which is not an urge I feel any need to dissuade... Delicious.

 

In the Kitchen

Over the weekend, the little ones got inspired to cook. They do regularly help out in the kitchen, mixing ingredients together, stirring macaroni on the stove (supervised, of course), dumping scraps in the compost. Also getting underfoot and making giant messes! But on Saturday morning Stella pulled out our new (to us) kids' cookbook and decided she and Maeve would be making breakfast All By Themselves.

Unfortunately for my budding chefs, the only thing in the book we had the ingredients for was scrambled eggs. Isn't that just the way it goes with cookbooks sometimes? Not enough prior planning and you end up with eggs... But the girls were happy. I helped them a little bit - fishing eggshells out of the mixing bowl and turning on the stove - but mostly they really did do it by themselves. It's a fun little cookbook. It was a hand-me-down from my teenage brother, and is still in print despite being more than ten years old - you can find it on Amazon here. I think it was originally a British book that got translated into American English, since it's chock full of recipes that no one but a Brit would think of as child-friendly food: chicken curry... fisherman's pie... fruitcake. Hilarious. It has great, simple pictures, though, and fun little details like toast in shapes from the scrambled eggs page, which my girls took very seriously. "Mommy, where are the cookie cutters?!"
{theirs}
{ours}
The eggs were good, fluffy and creamy at the same time. The recipe calls for a whole tablespoon of milk per egg used, which is totally different from how I usually make a scramble, but I might do it again this way in the future because the consistency was so nice.

The best part of this whole thing for me was how happy and angelic the girls were, proudly eating their breakfasts they made themselves. Chris was at work so it was just the three of us, and there was such a loving, happy feeling at the table that morning. A feeling I will certainly work on recreating again soon -- with more ingredients, next time!

Outside Creativity

We live in a semi-urban neighborhood. As in: we live in the upstairs apartment of a two-family, semi-attached house, with a shared driveway and no real backyard to speak of, on a quiet block in a small city. I spent my childhood smack in the middle of Manhattan and my teenage years in a lovely house with a gorgeous garden in a sleepy little suburban village, so this life I have now is... I'm never quite sure what it is. Very in-between.

It is easy to get lazy and turn the in-between-ness into a negative, especially regarding our lack of outdoor space. It stinks to have to get in the car and drive in order to be out in any kind of wilderness, especially since I believe that fostering a relationship with the natural world is one of the most important things you can do for your children. (I realize, though, how lucky we are to have a car to do that driving, and to have preserved woodlands in our general area to go to.) I try very hard to move beyond such laziness and to work within the limits of this situation, to choose the life I have instead of always wishing for bigger and better. One way I try to do this is to appreciate the threads of nature that are here, weaving around us. Our little dead end street runs parallel to a busy highway, but in between us and the cars are a thick band of huge, beautiful trees standing sentinel against the noise and energy of the big road. Our little square of grass in front of our house, the window box of herbs outside our kitchen window, the occasional hawk we spot circling overhead and the squirrels we see on our walk to the school bus each morning - all these give us the chance to notice and receive nature's gifts. 

I've been really inspired by all the farming that is going on in New York City lately. Beekeeping was just legalized in the city, and more restaurants are starting to get produce from local (rooftop) gardens like this one. Clearly you do not need multiple acres of arable land to be connected to the source of your food. Since we moved to our home 3 1/2 years ago we have tried to keep a vegetable garden in our little back plot behind our driveway. Mostly, though, that "we" has been Chris, since I've been pregnant with or nursing a small one through every spring and summer here. This year, with Maeve a more self-sufficient preschooler, things feel so much more doable and I've been getting out there with Chris and working our itty-bitty land. And instead of berating the space for not being better, and then giving up, I've been enjoying it and feeling proud of us for making the most of what we have.  {Tomato plant}

{Pepper plant. After three summers we have decided to admit that we are always going to be terrible at staying on top of the weeding, so this year we got this black weed barrier fabric for the veggie beds. So far it's working.}

{Grape vine growing up the back fence}

We have four raised beds separated by little paver stone pathways (otherwise the kids cannot help but trample all over everything). One end of the garden directly boarders an identical plot owned by the neighbors we share the driveway with. The other end, in the corner, is home to the giant meat smoker Chris built a couple years back. We can smoke vast quantities of meat in that thing. Last weekend Chris and his buddies did a whole pig. {Looking down the garden towards the smoker (on the left) and the covered shelves where Chris stores wood for the smoker}

The new addition that we're excited about is our compost bin. We've been wanting one for so long, and this year we finally made the investment. It came with a little kitchen bin (with an odor-reducing filter, thankfully), and Stella and Maeve are really into figuring out which food scraps can go into it. Rather, I should say that Stella is into figuring that out, Maeve is more just interested in dumping the scraps in! The girls being curious about this new addition to our home life has been such a nice surprise, though I really should have expected it. To a five year-old, this is not a conversation about garbage, but about how the world works - a bulletin from grown-up land about food and science, about making choices and seeing the consequences, about the values of our family... all important stuff to a little information-gathering kindergartner. And to a two year-old, learning that certain things go in certain places in our house, and understanding family routines and feeling a part of them, can be very comforting and empowering. 

I always feel a little funny writing about home in this way on True North. Obviously gardening can be an incredibly artistic pursuit, but it's not like I'm designing gorgeous flower beds here, I'm talking about weed barriers and composting. But the lesson I am learning, both slowly and over and over again, is that creativity and day-to-day life are not separate. I can't access my creative energy when I'm feeling judgmental about my own life, and I'll never be living the life I want unless I am regularly doing something creative. I was reading a New Yorker from a few weeks ago (I'm always behind) in which they had published some of Saul Bellow's letters - fascinating in general, but my favorite was one letter where he was giving advice to a younger writer just starting out: "To be a writer one learns to live like one.. The craft one learns oneself. The main business is to find the most appropriate and most stimulating equilibrium." 

To me, living like an artist looks like seeing the abundant beauty all around me all the time - in everyday things, in ugly things, in nature, in people. The craft (whether sewing, drawing, mural painting, knitting, writing) I am learning as I go along, and feeling nurtured by that pursuit. But the main business is to find the most appropriate and most stimulating equilibrium between my creative projects and my roles as a mother and wife and daughter and sister, a member of my various communities, a friend, a part of the larger world. So, composting. So, parenting philosophy. So, balance amongst it all.

Oh. Yeah.

Bacon Jam. Need I really say more? Chris made this last night to put on top of baked chicken. Then I ate it this morning on the heart attack that is that plate up top. (Yes that is a waffle. It had maple syrup, too. I am not even embarrassed about this, because the bacon jam made me do it.) And then I had it again for lunch as a condiment on a ham and cheese sandwich. I'm going to have to eat nothing but veg for the next three days to avoid getting scurvy, but it's so worth it. Sweet and salty and savory and seriously delicious.

Recipe here. Chris says it's totally easy but the reductions take a little while, so allot about an hour. He also says that while butter is in the ingredients list (ha! butter too!), the recipe doesn't say what to do with it, so he melted it in last thing before taking it off the heat and throwing it in the blender. Just so you know.

We like our pork products around here. It's all Chris' fault. Next thing I want us to try making is bacon ice cream, that sounds bonkers in the best possible way...

Eggs

Have I ever mentioned how much I want my own chickens? Chickens, and also bees. I'm a little obsessed.

We got to eat some eggs from a backyard coop recently. They were delicious, with rich, almost sweet, orange yolks. Scrambled, they were so yellow they seemed to glow. Maeve pointed to a plate of them and exclaimed, "Them are yellow eggs!"

Even more lovely were the shells, in an assortment of creams and browns and palest grey-green. I was really taken with them.