the green flash

An early Happy St. Patrick's Day to all you lads and lassies. No, guacamole is not Irish, but it's green, and I love green food. You can skip to the recipe at the bottom now, if you just want the how-to. Grab a seat. I'll be there in a minute or two. 

For the past four years, D has attended an annual meeting in Pacific Beach, California, and I've tagged along, feeling lucky that I get to spend a few days gazing at the ocean, eating delicious sushi, wearing white jeans in February, and running on the boardwalk in the sunshine and the low humidity. Pacific Beach is also famous for its sunsets, which frequently feature something called the green flash. Residents of the town and of nearby La Jolla describe this phenomenon with varied attitudes. Some people are openly skeptical or derisive, while others avow that they've seen the green flash numerous times. D himself swore that he had glimpsed it, a couple of years ago, but I could never tell whether he was just teasing or not.

He's not the only one caught by the fascination of this odd natural phenomenon. In 1882, Jules Verne published a novel called The Green Ray, in which a young woman sets off on an adventure with two very different would-be suitors to find the elusive green flash, which according to Scottish legend "has the virtue of making him who has seen it impossible to be deceived in matters of sentiment; at its appearance, all deceit and falsehood are done away, and he who has been fortunate enough once to behold it is enabled to see closely into his own heart and to read the thoughts of others." The opening paragraph in the second chapter of the novel gushes: "If there be green in Paradise, it cannot but be of this shade, which most surely is the green of Hope!"

little polished gold nugget poems + greek salad salsa

I often say that my cat is a bottomless pit of emotion: extreme highs and lows. In fact, D has said before that Esme has the same quality in her facial expression that my mom and Steve Spurrier have: even when they're happy, their smile looks kind of like a grimace. Esme is easily spooked, loyal to D and me to the point of insane hatred towards all other people, and often oscillates from vicious hissing to trilling and cooing (and back) in a matter of seconds. Her moods ebb and flow like the ocean. When Esme is upset, here is what she does:

My response to being upset is a bit different, but not much. When I am sad, angry, or otherwise angsty, instead of kneading biscuits like Esme, I chop things into little pieces. Hence the recipe at the end of this post.

teenie sardini

Esme's favorite toy.

Sardines are good for you. Everyone says so. Unlike tuna, sardines have almost no mercury in them, and they have more Omega-3 fats (the kind that make your heart happy) than tuna or salmon. Plus, they are one of the most sustainable types of fish. Win-win-win.

Yet most people think of them disparagingly as hobo food. When I was a teenager and discovered how good they were, my mom used to send me out to the garage to eat them because they smelled up the kitchen. This is the same woman, by the way, who used to tell us to "go outside and run a couple of laps around the house" if we were too hyper before Dad got home and we all sat down to dinner. Honestly, I suspect I was all wound up because of how much I always looked forward to my dad coming home from work.

So let me back up a little and start this post in a more logical place. It will take a bit of a story to get back around to the sardines.

ode to tomatoes (+ salsa + lasagna!)

Oh, you shiny, red beauties. I think that I must have some Italian blood in me (not that you can tell it, with the red hair, pale skin, and freckles) because I love tomatoes with everything. And I mean E. VERY. THI. NG.

Witness Exhibit A above, which was my breakfast one day last week: a bowlful of grape tomatoes, splashes of balsamic vinegar and extra-virgin olive oil, and a sprinkling of sea salt and pepper (there was also a poached egg and a slice of toast to go with it). Another favorite breakfast: thick slices of salted tomato on toasted sourdough bread with mayo and bacon - how I love using the crust to swipe up those pink splotches of mayonnaisey pulp that drip onto the plate!

For years, with the zeal of a fanatic, I have proselytized to D about the joys of tomatoes - he likes them cooked but hates them raw—to the point where it's a minor miracle when he concedes to having enjoyed raw tomatoes in something. A few years ago, he admitted that he had eaten a slice of tomato on a sandwich from Zoë's that was delicious and looked as beautifully red, in his words, "as a piece of raw tuna." (From an avowed carnivore, this is the highest praise.)

truffled vichyssoise + butter lettuce salad with lemon-mustard vinaigrette

The first time I ever had vichyssoise, I was sixteen years old and staying in a rented house in the North Carolina mountains for a church weekend with my parents and siblings and several other families. As a first course one evening, our congregation's unanimously elected cook, Marcia, served us a cold potato and leek soup. We ate it out of mugs, sitting at a picnic table in the yard, all of us still flagging from the day's early July heat, which was formidable even after sunset and even at that altitude. Vichyssoise was the perfect food for that evening and its quintessentially blue Appalachian twilight, and Marcia's version was, not surprisingly, the perfect one to serve as my introduction to the dish.

Marcia was one of my first Sunday school teachers when my family started attending church again in 1982. Powell Presbyterian had a small congregation, and some Sunday mornings I was the only kid in the class. Stories have always appealed to me; I often say I'm a sucker for a narrative, which is probably why I became an English teacher. Marcia's explanations of biblical tales gave me a familiarity with the narratives of both testaments that would eventually help me win a partial Bible Scholarship to Montreat College ten years later. (I wrote my scholarship application essay on Noah and the significance of the rainbow's promise). Though Marcia always wore ladylike skirt suits to church, she was no shrinking violet. She had studied chemical engineering in college and then worked for eighteen years as a safety analyst in the nuclear industry, in addition to having raised three sons. Even now, whenever I think of the Biblical St. Paul, I always picture her bearded, intelligent, kind-faced husband of the same name. Marcia was kind, too, yet she was also outspoken and had a certain earthiness: she made my high school church friends and me blush furiously when she remarked baldly, during one youth group outing to her house to harvest peaches from her orchards, "Hmph! Sex is the smallest part of what marriage really is." (I suspect we had probably been giggling and whispering about something along those lines.)

bram stoker's pot roast

Happy Belated Halloween!

So, I was talking with my friend Valerie recently about my fascination with maps. This love affair with cartography began when I was in elementary school: my favorite subject next to English was social studies. Later, as a thirteen-year-old, I kept a journal; in it, there's a notebook page filled with the names of ten U.S. cities, chosen during a couple of summer days I spent poring over an atlas, where I'd decided I might want to live when I grew up. One example: the intriguingly named Snowflake, Arizona. When I got my driver's license, I became an avid railfan, so I have a box full of paper maps in the basement from my days of chasing trains on zigzagging back country roads. (Those days are far from over, actually.)   

In our current technological age, with the advent of Google Maps, I can freely explore new places, revisit old ones, and find all of the railroad tracks I want, anywhere on earth. Google's Street View makes this even better, because not only can I see a bird's-eye satellite view of a location, but I can virtually walk past it and see what it looks like from a Heather's-eye view. I do this a lot more often than I'm guessing the average person does. Over the past few months especially, it hasn't been unusual for D to come home and ask me what I did that day, and for me to answer, "Well, I walked past our old apartment on E. 101st and then I went to that little place in midtown where I used to buy jump rings," or "I was trying to find the restaurant where my parents and I ate one evening in Cañon City, Colorado, back in 1999," or "I spent the afternoon revisiting Paris/Venice/Seattle/Lenoir City."

So, last week when Valerie and I were talking, I told her that a couple of days before, I had been strolling through the real Dracula's hometown—Sighișoara, Romania—via Google Street View. I also confided to her that my new mission is to spot a train passing by on Google Street View. The idea hit me after I happened to look "up" on a particular Tuscan freeway at dusk and see a beautiful waxing crescent moon, and I suddenly realized that these pictures were taken at random moments by a camera on a Google Maps car traveling through the region. Surely, these cameras might serendipitously catch other cool things, too?

noodle bowl with green curry broth

Every semester in English 102, I teach a unit on food. Every semester I assign Perri Klass's delightful article, "How to Invent a Family Recipe," for my students to read. And every semester, when we discuss the article in class, my mouth starts watering so much I can hardly talk, at the thought of spicy broth and noodles.

As I often do, yesterday I was craving some noodles in broth with maybe some chicken and vegetables. To put it another way, I was hankering for what I've recently nicknamed "slurpy pasta" (as distinguished from, say, "cheesy pasta").

For the broth, I took my inspiration from Heidi Swanson's vegetarian recipe blog, 101 Cookbooks, which I've followed since late 2007, when I had just moved to Manhattan and was trying to cook more adventurously. Swanson takes the most alluring photos of her food, and the woman loves interestingly flavored broths and vividly colored vegetables - also some of my favorite things to eat. She often does slurpy curries, and they always look so prettily yellow or red or green in the pictures that I've long wanted to try my hand at one of my own.