Sea asparagus
When I was a little girl, nothing made me happier than a heaping plate of horta – a Greek peasant dish of boiled dandelion greens dressed with lemon and olive oil and salt. A funny sight, I’m sure, a six-year-old reverently diving into a plate of weeds, but I can’t help it. I love green vegetables.
(I suppose people have worse affections.)
My fridge keeps the usual suspects: a head of kale, containers of spinach and baby greens, and bunches of mustard greens and butter lettuce.
Tonight’s Tuesday visit to Riverdale made me squeal delightfully, though – sea asparagus! A salt-loving wild green harvested seasonally along British Columbia’s coast, it’s like a tiny-fingered green bean that’s been injected with saline. Crisp and surprising and fleeting, and completely the kind of vegetable you scoop up when it makes a market appearance.
I knew its fate straight away: used in place of salt in a simple kale salad, massaged with ripe avocado and lemon juice. Kale – surprisingly enough – is delicious raw, but it benefits from a bit of coaxing with some lemon juice to soften the hardy leaves. Against the salty, crunchy sea asparagus and dressed with avocado, it was a perfect summer dinner.
Kale salad
(makes two servings)
Massaging kale sounds kind of silly, but it’s actually very therapeutic and makes a big difference in the salad’s texture. Get your hands right in the bowl and give it a rub – plus it makes for really soft hands, between the lemon and avocado!
Ingredients
1 bunch kale (curly or Tuscan or lacinato or dinosaur – whatever’s prettiest that day)
1 small very ripe avocado, roughly diced
juice of 1 lemon
sea salt to taste (or 1/2c sea asparagus, blanched lightly and chopped finely)
Tear or cut the kale into bite-size pieces, discarding the tough stems. Combine all ingredients in a bowl and give them a good smoosh with the kale until the avocado and lemon become a creamy dressing. Taste a piece of kale for texture – it should be crisp but yielding – and add salt, if needed. Plate and serve.
God help the girl
Belle & Sebastian make me think of my little sisters – all three of them – sweetly belting out tunes in our backyard. Niki, Mel and Leni have been fans for longer than I can remember, though 2006′s The Life Pursuit was my first real introduction.
God Help the Girl is a new three-woman group courtesy of their frontman, Stuart Murdoch. The first two songs – a cover of Belle & Sebastian’s own Funny Little Frog and an original number titled Come Monday Night – are sweet and brimming with lovely voices and remind me of old photographs of my mom.
The album comes out this Monday, June 22.
Funny Little Frog
Come Monday Night
[via A Cup of Jo]
Stripes sunshine smile
Yesterday I walked to work through the garden and the sun was shining and I wore stripes and toted an incredible bag sent to me by an incredible person. And I stuck my toes in the grass and the flowers and looked to the sky and smiled because the world felt so good.
Rainbows
“All this to say. There are rainbows. Reminders … With rainbows we weather rough storms, I realize.”
“Thank you for letting me be your rainbow when you need one. Sorry if my colors fade from time to time, but I’ll be your rainbow any time, because you are my sunshine, and rainbows are nothing but reflections of their sunshine through the rain.”
It’s always the simplest shared words with a dear friend that make things okay.
[photo via]
Of course I have ghosts
(You have ghosts?)
(Of course I have ghosts.)
(What are your ghosts like?)
(They are on the insides of the lids of my eyes.)
(This is also where my ghosts reside.)
(You have ghosts?)
(Of course I have ghosts.)
(But you are a child.)
(I am not a child.)
(But you have not known love.)
(These are my ghosts, the spaces amid love.)
— Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated
But the rhubarb
My Great Gran Emmy and her powder-blue home on Lena Street stir many memories. Papa Oz passed away when Eleni and I were little girls – just old enough that I remember the funeral home and his so-very-serious brown suit – so most of the images I hold of my gran are her alone in that little house.
There she was, propped up in her flowery pink bed, ubiquitous crochet needles alternating in her shaky arthritic hands with the equally ubiquitous chain of cigarettes and china tea cup rattling on its saucer. Sometimes we would sit at the foot of the bed petting Muffin – her angry little lhasa apso – but more likely at her kitchen table where she’d always have still-slightly-frozen jam thumbprint cookies waiting.
But the rhubarb. Come spring, it was another world behind that little house on Lena, a world entirely composed of sturdy pale blushing stalks under great big leafy-green canopies. If you’ve ever grown rhubarb (intentionally or otherwise) you know what I mean. Its season comes much earlier than the rest of the garden, and good thing at that, as it just doesn’t know when to stop growing.
We’d be set outside to rip these abundant stalks from the earth, little girl against plant, using all our weight to yank the stalks (most taller than us) with an “oof!”, give them a rinse with the garden hose, and cart our treasure to the kitchen, a great pile forming alongside the jam thumbprints.
Gran Emmy made lots of things with her rhubarb. Crumbles and jam and the most incredible strawberry-pineapple-rhubarb sauce that she’d spoon for us still warm into little black and white Pyrex bowls. But when I’m feeling slightly less indulgent and want to extend the rhubarb’s life past me eating it straight from the pot (not that I’ve ever done that) I make apple-rhubarb butter. Very tart, slightly sweet, smoother than jam but thicker than a sauce – it’s good on toast and in oatmeal, or let’s be honest – straight from the spoon.
Apple Rhubarb Butter
(makes 4 cups)
Tonight when I saw six brilliant fat rhubarb stalks at the Riverdale Market I snatched them up. If you’re near Toronto’s east end on Tuesday evenings, Riverdale sets up a great market that’s open from 3-7pm through to October.
Ingredients
4 medium-size apples, diced fine (a sweet variety, like galas or pink ladies or golden delicious)
6c rhubarb, cut across in small pieces
1/2c brown sugar, loosely packed (or more to taste up to 1c – I like my butter very tart)
boiling water
2 500mL glass jars, sterilized
Before you start, boil the jars to ensure they’re nice and clean. I use old almond butter jars, since they’re abundant in my cupboards. No need to worry about a second boil, as these jars are going straight to the fridge.
Dump the diced apple and a bit of hot water (1/4c or so) into a pan over high heat. Cook, stirring often, until the apples are mostly broken down and soft, about 10 minutes.
Add the sliced rhubarb and a bit more water if needed, reduce heat to medium-high. Cook the rhubarb down with the apples, stirring frequently. When you have a sauce, add the brown sugar and stir. Keep reducing until the sauce thickens considerably, about 30 minutes. The mixture will have cooked ~45 minutes from start to end.
Ladel into clean jars and lid. Let cool and store in jars in fridge for up to a week (though it won’t last that long).
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