My favorite Massachusetts meal

My friend and former graduate school colleague, Tinky Weisblat, who lives in Hawley MA, asked her many blogging friends to publish a post on Massachusetts food during the week of August 22–28 as part of Loving Local: Celebrating the Flavors of Massachusetts, a “blogathon” celebrating the Bay State’s Farmers Market Week. I highly recommend her blog, In Our Grandmother’s Kitchens: Cooking, Singing, and Sharing in New England and Beyond. Tinky, this post is for you.

My favorite Massachusetts meal of all time is probably one at which I wasn’t even present. It took place during the fall semester of our senior year at Williams College. Heather lived off campus that year, in a funky old two-story house on Water Street that she shared with three housemates, an enormous wood stove, and some unidentified fungi in the upstairs bathtub. I had long since become convinced that she was The Girl For Me, but she did not yet share my conviction. So one chilly winter night when all three of her housemates were elsewhere, she invited our classmate Bill Holt down for an intimate dinner, with distinctly romantic ends in mind.

Bill was actually a good friend of mine—he lived one floor above me during freshman year, and he was a kind, funny, sweet-natured guy—a real gentleman. Cute, too. Heather was in one of her Molly Katzen vegetarian phases, and made one of her specialties—a vegetable pie—for dinner, with ingredients carefully selected at the Slippery Banana, the little organic grocery store on Spring Street. She even bought a nice bottle of wine, by which I mean one that cost more than two dollars. (This was college, remember?)

After Bill arrived, they opened the bottle of expensive wine and chatted for a while, and things seemed to be going according to plan. When they finally sat down for dinner, she placed a steaming slice of pie before Bill.

He took a bite and said, “Wow, this is great! What’s in it?”

With the earnestness that often characterizes youthful vegetarian evangelists, Heather proudly rattled off the ingredients: broccoli, carrots, cauliflower, peas, peanuts for complementary protein, in (naturally) a whole wheat crust.... Bill nodded, patted his mouth with his napkin, and stood up.

“I’m sorry," he said. “It’s really delicious, but I have to leave now.”

Heather was stunned—this was definitely not how she had imagined the evening ending—but Bill was politely determined. She was left with most of a vegetable pie, an almost-full bottle of wine, and a lot of unanswered questions.

When she next saw Bill, on campus a few days later, he immediately apologized for his abrupt departure. In the course of the conversation, he grudgingly let slip that he had actually gone straight from her house to the college infirmary, where he had spent the next three days recovering from a severe anaphylactic reaction. Turns out he was deathly allergic to peanuts—she’d almost killed him with that vegetable pie and its complementary protein!

Bill was hardly one to carry a grudge, but the romance between them never blossomed. As for me, I knew an opportunity when I saw one. I spent the next several months discreetly and repeatedly reminding Heather that I, unlike some others I could name, had no food allergies. That spring, perhaps intoxicated by the scent of the lilacs, she finally succumbed to my many charms, and the rest, as they say, is history; we were married four years later. But who knows how our lives would have turned out had Bill Holt not been allergic to peanuts?

Heather’s vegetarian phases seem to be behind her; we still have a well-thumbed copy of Katzen’s Moosewood Cookbook on the shelf, though I don’t think Heather has looked at it in years, and she has permanently retired that vegetable pie from her repertory. Perhaps that disastrous romantic dinner remains a little too memorable for her.

—Martin

What we’re reading
Heather: Oscar Casares, Amigoland
Martin: Peter Fish (ed.), California's Best: Two Centuries of Great Writing from the Golden State

“A cup of tea, a warm bath, and a brisk walk”

A path is little more than a habit that comes with knowledge of a place.

—Wendell Berry

If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again; if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man; then you are ready for a walk.

—Henry David Thoreau

I’m an enthusiastic walker and believe firmly in walking’s spiritual, psychic, and medicinal benefits. Whenever our kids were feeling puny, they were usually told that a cup of tea, a warm bath, and a brisk walk would put them in order—one of the reasons my family nickname is “Deathmarch.” “We’re DYING,” they’d moan. “You’ll feel better after a walk,” I’d respond. After tugging a drooping daughter on one particularly frustrating foot-dragging outing, we discovered she had mono. But I’m sure the walk did her good.

Both nature and nurture have gone into creating this momster that is me: my mother used to frog-march my three siblings and me up the mountains around the Roaring Fork Valley in Colorado, hoping to create the conditions for quiet evenings in the little cabin we stayed in every summer. “It didn’t work,” she admitted. “The four of you never got worn out, but I sure did.” (That’s a somewhat older me walking in Colorado in the photo above.)

So whether it’s genetics or training, I walk, and Madroño has been—and surely will continue to be—a treasure trove of most excellent walks.

When we first started going to Madroño, when our youngest was a wee babe and the other two not much older, sneaking out for walks made me feel both guilty and liberated: for a brief time, at least, I was free to look at, listen to, think about, or not think about whatever I wanted, without interruption. Now that our youngest is leaving for college, I still feel that solitary walks are a guilty pleasure, albeit one about which I’m increasingly less apologetic, but I still feel the sense of release that comes when I head out the door with at least one ecstatic dog who’s noticed I’ve put on my boots and my hat and picked up my binoculars. (Walking with unbelievably brave and stupid dogs will be undoubtedly be my next blog topic.)

For a long time, I went for what my dear friend Ellen calls the yodelaiEEoo pace of walking: trying to cover as much ground as quickly as possible, preferably headed up or down steep inclines. This is a really dumb way to walk in the Texas Hill Country, especially if you’re not on a road and even if you are. First of all, if you’re off-roading and going uphill, there’s not a lot of purchase, given the rocks, leaves, and cedar detritus that cover the heavily wooded hills. There’s even less purchase when you’re coming downhill, which can look a lot like skiing, especially if you’re a really spastic skier. But off-road descents can be easier than on-road ones: once, when our youngest was about five or six, I bullied her into walking down the steepest road on the ranch with me, after we had driven up. She was so little that her relatively slight weight couldn't overcome the force of incline + scree; the final equation was an extremely sore little heinie from having her feet shoot out from under her every three steps or so.

Aside from the falling down problem, when you’re moving at the yodelaiEEoo pace, it’s very easy to miss all the Interesting Stuff to be found—or to run straight into it when you’d really rather not. I was walking on one of the roads on top one morning in June many years ago at a yodelaiEEoo pace only to find myself entangled in an enormous—no, I mean ENORMOUS—spider web. After shrieking, dancing, frantically patting my head, pulling my clothes off, etc., I slowed down enough to notice these spiders. I still don’t know what kind they were—maybe golden orbs? As I walked along, twitching and squinting with every step I took, I saw their webs everywhere. Some of them spanned fifteen- to twenty-foot gaps. How had they done that? Parachuted? Hailed taxis to drive them across? Not only were the webs huge, but they were invisible until you were two inches away from them. They taught me to slow down AND to limbo.

Once the kids got big enough, we went for what we called scrambles, which involved walking up and/or down one of the many mysterious draws that pepper the ranch. Walking with children, of course, cannot occur at a yodelaiEEoo pace, at least not until they’re bigger and stronger than you and you start calling plaintively: “Guys? Guys? Hey, wait for me!” But while I was still bigger and stronger than they were, we loved to go poke around in the draws, especially with some of our family’s emergency back-up children. (We haven’t actually outgrown this.) The kids were the ones who found all the Interesting Stuff: the rocks that looked like Swiss cheese or hearts, the iron bedsteads alongside a cast-iron Dutch oven, the fossils, the arrowheads and stone tools, the tiny flowers and ferns hiding in the shade, the little caves, the really weird bugs, the secret springs. And the snakes.

I must say a word about walking and snakes. I’ve climbed up, fallen down, and poked through a lot (though not nearly all) of the property, and I’ve concluded that snakes don’t want to see me any more than I want to see them. I try to be sure I can see where I’m putting my hands and feet, and dogs (at least the smart ones, if any such exist) are often helpful, hopping sideways to let you know that you shouldn’t step on that spot. Robert, the intrepid ranch manager, sees them all the time, but he does things like drain and dig around in the bottom of ponds. I’ve been lucky so far, with one notable exception.

One warm November day my then-fifteen-year-old son and I went walking to the back of the property. For some reason, he had brought a shotgun, and as we were walking through a patch of tall grass, he stopped and said calmly but urgently, “Mom. Snake.” And one step ahead of me was the fattest, longest, ugliest water moccasin I had ever seen. As it slithered off, he shot it, securing his place in my heart (and my ankles, where I probably would have been bitten had he not been there) as a hero.

As I've become more interested in birds, my yodelaiEEoo pace has become a thing of the past, for a couple of reasons. One is the difficulty of trying to track the little boogers through thick live-oak canopies or heavy underbrush. Another is having to stop and listen to them over the clatter I make. Our beloved old black Lab Phoebe is too blind and creaky to walk with me now, but back in the day she hated these stop-and-listen moments; if I paused for more than a minute or two she commenced with a low and pitiful moaning that wouldn’t let up until we started again. Phoebe liked the yodelaiEEoo pace. But even she was stilled into silence that February day when we turned into a usually still canyon only to hear the voices of what turned out to be literally thousands of robins and cedar waxwings, feasting—and maybe drunk—on cedar berries. The noise level was on par with I don’t know what: maybe a middle school hallway after the last class of the year, but considerably less smelly.

In fact, much to my family’s astonishment, I’ve learned to walk places and then just sit, at least sometimes. Chula the Goggle-Eyed Ricochet Hound walks with me now that Phoebe can’t, and Chula is fine with just sitting. (She has other issues that will be revealed in my walking-with-dogs post.) Did you know that certain grasses snap and crackle when the sun first hits them on cold mornings? I must have spent twenty minutes on my hands and knees one morning trying to figure out what was making that noise. Bugs? The little creatures in my head? Nope, it was just the grass talking. We had a lovely conversation, while Chula looked on, quietly concerned.

Perhaps, finally, it’s time for a new family nickname.

—Heather

What we’re reading
Heather: Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster
Martin: Ellen Lupton, Thinking with Type: A Critical Guide for Designers, Writers, Editors, & Students (still)

Listapalooza: top ten Austin restaurants

Yep, another one of those crazy lists. This one, of my ten favorite restaurants in Austin, was a real toughie. The one clear choice was Texas French Bread (pictured above), our absolute number-one favorite dinner spot. After that, however, things got a little murky.

A few disclaimers: Austin is a pretty good eaters’ town, but I tried to restrict myself (for the most part) to restaurants that feature local and seasonal ingredients, which narrowed the field somewhat. Virtually all of the places I’ve listed are in central or north Austin, because that’s where we live and spend most of our time. Heather’s list might look somewhat different than mine, though I trust there’d be a healthy amount of overlap. I’ve included only one barbecue place, which may strike some Austinites as sacrilegious. And there are a number of other places I’ve tried and enjoyed immensely, but haven’t managed to return to often enough for them to make my top ten just yet.

But enough stalling; here’s a first attempt at a top ten, in alphabetical order.

Café Pacha, 4618 Burnet Road: a great spot to feel that inimitable Austin groove, with fair trade coffee, smoothies, empanadas, sandwiches, omelets, etc., most of which are organic, and a vaguely South American vibe.

Changos Taqueria, 3023 Guadalupe: wonderful tacos (and enormous burritos), made to order with fresh ingredients. We’re partial to the aguas frescas, too, especially the horchata.

Eastside Café, 2113 Manor Road: a longtime Austin favorite, with a beautiful organic garden perfect for strolling before or after dinner.

Fino Restaurant Patio and Bar, 2905 San Gabriel: a pan-Mediterranean place with a great bar, and the sister of Emmett Fox’s Asti Trattoria in Hyde Park. We really go for the small plates and tapas.

Julio’s Café, 4230 Duval: a funky little Hyde Park neighborhood favorite serving wonderful Mexican food. The chicken enchilada plate with green tomatillo sauce is one of my very favorite dishes in Austin.

Ruby’s BBQ, 512 West 29th Street: genuine pit-smoked barbecue (the all-natural brisket is my favorite), terrific sides, excellent tacos and Cajun dishes, and signed memorabilia from a variety of blues, R&B, and rock and roll legends who played at the now-relocated Antone’s when it used to be next door.

Salvation Pizza, 624 West 34th Street: great thin-crust pizza. The #5 (white pie with chicken, prosciutto, dried sage, and fresh garlic) is our family’s favorite.

Somnio’s Café, 1807 South First Street: the dining room feels like your grandma’s house, with mismatched furniture and an informal feel, but grandma never cooked like this: fresh, locally sourced, organic, even some vegan options. BYOB.

Texas French Bread, 2900 Rio Grande: fresh, locally sourced bistro food; reasonable prices; casual ambience; BYOB – what’s not to like? If you live in or near Austin and haven't had dinner there yet, you need to do so as soon as possible.

Vino Vino, 4119 Guadalupe: this wine bar-cum-restaurant is not the place to come for a quiet, intimate dinner, but we love everything about it – the food, the incredible wine selection, the wonderful and helpful staff – except the decibel level.

So there you have it. Now we’d love to hear about some of your local favorites, in Austin or elsewhere!

—Martin

What we’re reading

Heather: Robert McAfee Brown (ed.), The Essential Reinhold Niebuhr: Selected Essays and Addresses
Martin: Ellen Lupton, Thinking with Type: A Critical Guide for Designers, Writers, Editors, & Students

Cleaning out the mental refrigerator: Niebuhr, McKibben, and Band-Aids

I’ve been surveying the multitude of leftovers in the refrigerator of my mind. When was the last time this thing was cleaned out? Jeez. Prodded into further examination of my last post by subsequent emails, conversations, and readings, I’ve concluded that my thinking is a little moldy and needs either to have the fuzz shaved off or be thrown out. Caveat lector: slightly smelly smorgasbord on the way.

Fuzzy thought number one: Chiding me for a Band-Aid approach to life-threatening environmental crises, a friend emailed this: “I actually think democratic control of the world through political action must be established. For me that means crushing the power of corporations.” On the one hand, I agree fully. The sheer, concentrated force of most multinational corporations is flabbergasting: the fact that British Petroleum still enjoys reasonable financial health despite the costs of the oil spill cleanup beggars the imagination. That much money is as good as a private militia, if not a private nuclear arsenal. Like anything powerful and willful, corporations need constant skeptical scrutiny.

Fuzzy thought number two: Bill McKibben, environmental prophet extraordinaire, was the first speaker a few weeks ago in a new annual lecture series endowed by my father in my mother’s memory at the Aspen Center for Environmental Studies. Martin and I were unable to attend, but my sister told me that the evening was beautiful, the talk was inspiring, and McKibben was a passionate and humble witness to the planet- (and therefore self-) destructive path we’re currently running down. (A few days later he gave a more formal version of his lecture at the Aspen Ideas Festival; either version is very much worth the time it takes to watch.)

Likening the scope of climate change to the devastation of nuclear warfare, he says that Americans “have so far failed to imagine that the explosion of a billion pistons and a billion cylinders each minute around the world could wreak the same kind of damage on the same scale.” Contributing to this failure of imagination are national inertia (we like the way we live); the divide between wealthy and poor nations (how do we tell others not to do what we have done when we are so comfortable?); and, unsurprisingly, the defensive position of the fossil fuel industry, which has hefted its mighty bulk directly on top of anything that might derail profits as usual. Imagine the public response to a campaign by the munitions industry downplaying the effects of nuclear warfare; one assumes that most of us would be thunderstruck. We should be as horrified by an industry that uses “the atmosphere as an open sewer for the effluent of their product” and makes more money than any industry in the history of money. But apparently we're not. Yet.

Fuzzy thought number three: corporations aren’t going away, nor should they. They (can/should) provide the infrastructure that local and sustainable economies need to thrive. The problem comes when mighty corporate bulk squishes the little guys flat, which is what usually happens. Governmental regulations meant to restrain the mighty corporate bulk often squish the little guys even flatter. (That’s about the most sophisticated economic observation I’m capable of producing, so I hope you enjoyed it.)

Fuzzy thoughts numbers four through six, which come from the very back of the bottom shelf: when faced with complex, apparently insoluble problems, my tendency is to go for a walk. Or pull out Band-Aids. Or make a big messy meal requiring lots of cleaning up. (Martin, as chief dishwasher, gets tired of this one.) But having spent the week reading Reinhold Niebuhr, one of the great Christian theologians of the twentieth century, and listening to Bill McKibben, I must sadly conclude that mine are inadequate responses. Writing with the stench of World War II still in the air, Niebuhr rebuked those Christians who had concluded that the only response to evil in the world was pacifism, trusting in power of human goodness to convert evil. Nor did he allow those who act against evil to trust fully in their own righteousness. Rather, he said, we need to be acutely aware that “political controversies are always conflicts between sinners and not between righteous men and sinners. [The Christian faith] ought to mitigate the self-righteousness which is an inevitable concomitant of all human conflict. The spirit of contrition is an important ingredient in the sense of justice.” As tempting as it is to preen, when we choose to fight the bully power of corporations, we need to be clear about our own implication in the tangled web of environmental injustice.

Add Niebuhr’s words to these: McKibben, a mild-mannered science writer, published a column titled “We’re hot as hell and we’re not going to take it anymore” on the TomDispatch.com website this week that immediately went viral. Furthermore, our mild-mannered hero writes specifically about the refusal of our political leaders even to consider climate legislation last week: “So what I want to say is: This is fucked up. The time has come to get mad, and then to get busy.” This from a Methodist Sunday School teacher!

The organization he started in 2008 with seven recent Middlebury College graduates—350.org—was a ragtag effort to organize a worldwide response to climate change. The results of that effort were astonishing. It turns out that the term “environmentalist” does not apply just to a bunch of over-educated, effete white Americans; in fact, the rest of the world—most of it brown, young, poor, and powerless—knows something we Americans still aren’t willing to confront: climate change, driven by fossil fuels, has crippled the regularity of the natural order we rely on for everything. Everything. Everything.

Through 350.org, we have an opportunity on October 10, 2010—10/10/10—to tell the powers that be that we’re hot as hell and we’re not going to take it anymore. We should still walk through our neighborhoods and chat with our neighbors. We should still introduce people to the profound pleasures of eating locally and according to the seasons. Acts like these will give us sustenance for the battle ahead, especially those of us who don’t feel much like fighters, who don’t want to crush anyone or anything, and most especially those of us who don’t want out clean out our refrigerators.

—Heather

What we’re reading
Heather: Dan O’Brien, Buffalo for the Broken Heart: Restoring Life to a Black Hills Ranch
Martin: Warren St. John, Outcasts United: An American Town, a Refugee Team, and One Woman’s Quest to Make a Difference