WITH HUMOR AND GRACE, EVEN IF IT RAINS

The gathering goes on.  We have a month and ten days until we’re left on our own, with just what we think we need and a Jeep named The Tank. We have

• two tents
• a screen house
• a cot
• two sleeping bags
• pillows
• a rug
• a little wood stove
• a flame diffuser
• an axe
• band-aids
• pots
• pans
• burn cream
• sunscreen
• lovely silver-plate utensils, because we need beautiful things even if we are sleeping in tents
• a silver set for tea, again because of that beauty issue
• wooden platters and bowls, shaped like leaves, differently beautiful but still lovely
• cups
• solar lanterns
• candle lanterns
• a real candlestick for the table
• rocks
• soap
• clothesline
• a dish rack
• assorted musical instruments
• a cutting board
• a kettle
• real blankets and sheets
• buckets
• truly sharp knives
• a table
• tablecloths
• real chairs and camp chairs
• hope and faith
• parasols
• a typewriter
• watercolors
• paper
• pastels
• toilet paper
• an incense bowl

We need

• a camp banner and personal pennants
• altar goods
• a chuck box
• dresses for the ball
• more sunscreen
• a cooler
• a drum
• a map
• wide-brimmed hats
• duct tape
• a pot of mint
• a tea strainer

We could do without everything but the tent, blankets, the stove, the axe, a couple of pots, two spoons, and a gallon of sunscreen.  That’s not what the trip is all about. We intend to live well.

Why bring only one tent when we already own two alike, in case sleeping alone sounds nice, or one might be necessary for a space to lounge if the weather turns wet and windy?  Why not carry along those two flat-folding wooden chairs to use at the table?  Maybe two more will turn up, and we can have guests to dinner. Maybe we will have enough guests to dinner that they have to sit one the ground, and for that, we will have a rug.  Gloriously garnet-toned pillows with golden fringe will make the rug more comfortable. Come to think of it, we’ll need the huge platter, just in case a couscous tagine sort of thing happens at our camp.

A week without a trip to the supermarket requires careful planning, but I feel ready for the challenge.  Carrots and potatoes and onions keep well without refrigeration. Hard cheese and unsliced bacon and the makings of all manner of breads can stay safe in a shaded box, not to mention noodles and grains and coffee and tea. I should keep my radar set to “food dehydrator” between now and takeoff, just like it’s been set to “big sturdy box” to transform into a portable kitchen.  There’s one down the street at the flea market, along with an army cot that may or may not be intact.

LATER, THAT SAME WEEK…

Army cot is gone, and so is the Big Sturdy Box.  I did score a flame diffuser for the amazing little wood stove (added to the list above), and a set of Korean stainless steel bowls that will make fine pots (not on the list yet).  They have lids, and I already have a pot lifter.  Many camp cookware sets I’ve scoped out are just stainless pans with no handles and a sturdy one-size-suits-all lifter, so these bowls are a serious treasure.  They have lids, too, for leftover management.  A week without a grocery store requires wasting nothing.  Of course, food vendors will be scattered around the farm, but I like to cook.

Planning this camping trip keeps my head in a happy place.  The things gathered will serve me  and mine for many trips, years of trips.  The people I love need to love the low-budget high-style form of travel that I adore. That I would bother to acquire a silver service exclusively for using in the great outdoors might hint at my enthusiasm.  We will sleep in tents, and we will do so with grace and a good sense of humor, even if it rains for a week.

My mother will never sleep in a tent, but she and two daughters and I will do a week in a cabin at a campground adjacent to a theme park.  For Mom, that is a big deal.  For me, it’s a bigger deal.  The girls know how we roll, but my mother has yet to see us deck out a home away. We hang our unique-but-similar string of freak flags at the doorway, whether at home or under a thin dome of nylon.  It just can’t be helped, and anyway, we wouldn’t want to.

If you are at a campground this summer, and stumble upon two purple tents and a screen house, perhaps sheltering a nicely set table for four, leave a note.  We are off dancing somewhere, or sleeping in the sun, or digging for shells and petoskies on the beach.  We’ll be back soon, and there will be tea made of flowers that we picked along the way.

LIFE IN A POT AND NOT

Some of the years’ old plants just didn’t stick it out this winter.  The lavender would have begun to green up, and the Autumn Joy from Ramona’s yard has always grown a few inches by now.  This spring, nothing from either of them. The everblooming roses look like bare brown twigs, which is a worry, but they may rally.

And the impossible-to-kill bamboo, well…I killed it.  Only three springs in its pot, and pthhht.

Surprisingly, the transplanted houseplants all pulled through their first winter here at the Charming Wreck.  Squirrel did her best to eat anything that remotely resembled grass, and the spider plant at the base of the dracaena has mysteriously disappeared, but I hid two more in the rosemary.  She does not like rosemary at all.  My plan worked.

The lemon tree from Santa (that now bears tiny green proto-lemons) and the carrion cactus (from Jean’s Venezuelan friend) seem to like sharing a pot.  They both need water water water, and I simply cannot let anything from Santa or Jean or Venezuela wither this summer.  High light, moist soil: check.

My fortieth birthday lilies froze to the bulb, but I have photos; they were beautiful.  Two birthdays’ ago blackberry lilies have come back, and the irises from the falling-down house in Kentucky seem to have multiplied despite being potted.

The irises that survived in this yard are important irises, first Papa’s then mine, then the house’s when I left them behind.  I’m back, and they waited for me.  So did the mint, with a vengeance and with promises of juleps and spring rolls in summer heat, and maybe the poppies which blaze at the same time the irises unfold.  The three have always had an affinity for one another, glorious fiery red tamed by sedate woodsy almost-purple, nice to look at while sipping minty-sweet bourbon.

The loss of the lilies and bamboo and maybe even the potted roses, too, makes me only a little sad.  I walk past Papa’s irises and my own long-ago lemon balm when I come home, whether anything blooms or not.  I know the shade of green unique to those leaves.  They are clones of what bloomed in the first back yard I ever knew.

Nothing blooms there now, unless a stray tulip missed the backhoe or the neighbors’ shovels.  A new house on those lots meant scraping the soil bare of green, to be laid with a perfect monoculture of sod.  I missed being there when the daffodils lived next to where the house used to be and the apple trees I saved from a dumpster fed the rabbits so well that they waddled instead of hopped away.  I don’t miss it, now that a “modern luxury villa” has filled the spot where my mimosa grew.

Nothing can replace a mimosa, and a mimosa can not survive for long in a pot.  I’ll find another one, soon, I’m sure of it.  It’s a weedy sort of tree, invasive where the cold doesn’t kill it, unwanted by real botanists but beloved by me.  It waits to leaf out until the irises bloom, leaving plenty of sunshine, which I think is just good fair play.

I like plants that fight for existence but play fair once they grab a good spot.

I won’t mourn what didn’t survive this very long, very icy winter.  I’ll save the pots, take advantage of the soil still in them, and see what takes hold this spring.

The best part?  Those very important irises won’t be left behind again.  I have a pot for that.

COLD BUT PATIENT

This morning, a thin shattering of ice floated on the back-porch buckets.  The iris shoots and lily leaves didn’t notice, but we dragged the rosemary and sanseveria back into the kitchen last night.  No harm.  Pretty soon, everything can move to one porch or another.  Pretty soon, the green will be darker in the trees and frost will be just something I imagined, unreal in the shimmering heat of summer.

At this tenuous time of year, we fall asleep with windows open and wake shivering.  It’s good to feel the air, and good to burrow under heavier blankets before dawn.  To feel the transition seems important.  Watching the season change isn’t enough when warmth and sun and green things sustain us in so many ways.  I’m happy to shiver a little in the name of change, when an open window at five in the morning would have meant misery just a month ago.

My sweetheart had to wear a stocking cap and a scarf to watch daughter-softball at the high school this afternoon.  At least it’s sunny.  My own small person and I are settling into a sort of hibernation, but she’d rather go outside and shiver.  I’m not okay with that, and I stand my ground under this blankie on the couch.

Tomorrow will be warmer.  A fort-improvement plot brews in my head, but the “in my head” part doesn’t satisfy the stir-crazy half of this couch bound duo.  Tomorrow, we’ll lash sticks together and fashion a roof made of army tent leftovers.  I have patience enough for both of us.

BECAUSE THERE’S ALWAYS BACON

Lately, I’ve joined groups on Facebook dedicated to cooking in cast iron.  “Kentucky Cast Iron Cooking” is my favorite so far.  Kentucky food looks familiar.  The corn bread is properly yellow, the beans properly soft and creamy and mostly pale Great Northerns or navies. The gravy doesn’t look at all like gravy, but that’s the way it’s supposed to look in Kentucky.

Two skillets have come to live with us this month, bringing the total number of skillets to six, all #8s, I believe, or #10s.  Add to that one plain dutch oven of the same gauge and one larger camp oven, a corn-stick pan, and that’s it.  Still on the lookout for a griddle, round with a handle, and a spare lid so the dutch oven and the skillets don’t have to share just one amongst them. If I’m very lucky, maybe a hibachi will turn up. I do love a kebab.

Why so many?  One was Gram’s granny’s and one was Papa’s mother’s.  One, exceptional because of its smoothness, I acquired at the yard sale down the block about twelve years ago.  One newer pre seasoned Lodge came with my sweetheart, and the two new-old ones came with ridiculously low price tags: three dollars each, on two different days at the flea market.   Those are for camping, lacking provenance.  They’ll gain status with time, I’m sure. The corn-stick pan replaces one I left with another house in another life, when I thought that baking cornbread was something that I wouldn’t do again. I was wrong.

Maybe I’m greedy.  The foreverness of cast iron pans reassures me that no matter what, if I am careful and avoid soap and tomatoes in these vessels, my daughter’s daughters will bake a very nice cornbread in her great-great someone’s skillet as I have done too many times to count.  I want my name to stay with them, or just my title. When I use either of the granny-skillets, black iron gleaming, I imagine those women, aproned, holding the pan handles with a dishrag.  My hand becomes their hands, and I feel more real, connected to my past.  The taproot effect: if I keep my roots deep enough, I’ll never know drought.

My small person is almost nine years old now.  At nine-almost-ten, I learned how to measure out proper proportions of yellow meal, flour, oil, baking powder and salt-no-sugar, one egg only, to fill a hot skillet full enough but not too full of batter.  The only utensils required were a teaspoon for the baking powder and the short-handled, worn-down wooden spoon known as “the wood spoon”. The ingredients went into a bowl, always the same bowl, and with luck, a nice, stiffly fluffy mass would develop while the skillet heated in the oven.  Pouring semi-solid goo into a four hundred degree metal pan thrilled me at nine.  My love of certain foods comes from the act of preparing them with my Gram.  Maybe my own small person will come to love what we cook together, especially if an element of danger can be incorporated.

The family of pans and griddles should keep growing for a while, and will shrink again when our small people leave us.  Four women-to-be wait to inherit the weight of someone’s grandma’s essential piece of cookware, but maybe they don’t know it yet.  Future apartments will require at least one good skillet per daughter, and before they leave us, they’ll find a favorite something to cook.  My responsibility is to maintain the seasoning and spurn the soap, and maybe write down a few recipes with real measurements before I forget.  There’s time, but only a little.

I read group members’ posts on these cast iron cookware forums, and the most common question is always, “How do I get the rust out of this pan, and how do I make it cook right?”  Kind strangers throw advice involving vinegar and oven cleaner and bonfires and bacon grease.  All of them will set those pans straight with patience, but how did they come to such a sorry state in the first place?  My heart breaks to see a skillet that’s been tortured into rusting.  Modern convenience is to blame.  Dishwashers, detergents, overzealous brillo-wielding well-meaning germophobes…all when nothing hot water and heat and oil will chase off every stray microbe better than anything that claims to be antibacterial.  I love that dishwasher with all my lazy heart, but it’s death to beautifully seasoned cast iron. My favorite advice to save a skillet that seems unredeemable?  Throw it in a fire all night, and fry onions in it the next day, but don’t eat them because they’ll be black.  That skillet will gleam.  I learned this the hard way, after a long-ago roommate stored a batch of tomatoey chili in my first good skillet.  The chili tasted like metal and the deep black coating of the pan came off in great flakes.  One back-yard bonfire finally undid the damage.  I don’t know why the onions helped, but they did.

The Chinese grow a certain onion specifically for christening woks.  Those woks  need love, just like cast iron, and a panful of not-so-tasty green onions tossed with plenty of oil is the first dish to come out of a new wok or the best thing to revive the slickness of a neglected one.  Knowing that on the other side of the world, hopeful cooks are crying oniony tears over their very important pans makes the world seem smaller.

In June, I’ll be squatting over a little stove full of kindling and frying whatever will stay fresh enough during a week of no-fridge camping. Onions shall certainly play a part, and so will potatoes and cornbread. While I’m down there, I’ll think of my grandmother’s grandmothers bending over a fire to flip hoecakes, of the luxury of standing to do the same work at a black iron stove, and my ridiculous repeat of the primitive ways that were shed in the name of safety and ease.  My little portable bucket-sized stove matches ones now used all over the world to efficiently cook food with as little smoke and soot as possible, a huge advancement from open wood fires.  What’s that stove made of?  After hundreds of years of technology, the best material for the job turns out to be cast iron.

I think my small person will learn to bake a pan of something next week.  Maybe not cornbread, but we have other options.  Skillet cookies are pretty awesome, and there’s always bacon.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THIS IS OKAY TO PUBLISH

Theme: plain food.  I’ve never tried this one before, but I’m ready for a challenge.

Baked chicken, steamed broccoli, maybe a baked sweet potato? I once listened to a program on NPR about a woman who was served exactly the same meal for supper every night of her life, until she went to college and had to eat in the cafeteria.  She didn’t know that not everyone ate baked chicken, steamed broccoli, and a baked potato every single night, until she crowed to her new classmates about the fabulous, exotic food offered by her midwestern college’s kitchen.  It had never occurred to her that her mother served one meal and only one meal and her mom must have been a little weird.

I ate Oscar Mayer bologna and Kraft singles on white bread with Miracle Whip, corn curls, canned peaches, Oreos, and an RC cola for lunch every day of my sophomore year of high school, unless salisbury steak or chicken fried steak or roast turkey was on the lineup.  Every day. Gram accommodated my lunch request without question.  The winter before, my house had burned down, so we were all a little weird.  Bologna, no crust, fixed something in me that missed the sameness of my old house.

It worked, and Papa always took the same lunch to work every day, anyway.  My lunch was devoid of much nutrition but filled other needs. As for Papa, the only thing that changed for him was the swap of tongue for ham when Gram had the stomach to do the tedious, gut-wrenching process of cooking a fresh tongue.  I peeled and she dug out “roots” with a very sharp knife.  Cow tongues are huge, and messy, and really should have stayed in those cow’s heads.  She was so relieved when cheap tongue became chi chi and the price went up at the butcher shop.  After that, ham all the way.

Ham, to me, will always be an enormous thing with a bone that benefits from being baked and glazed with mustard and brown sugar, much soaking required before baking. The square stuff from the deli isn’t ham.  It’s just the pig leg version of head cheese, which has its merits when one can overlook the bits of ear and snoot.

No one has ever told me what I can and cannot eat.  In this way, food remains in a happy place in my head.  I eat when I’m hungry, stop when I’m full, and I love to feed people I love.  However, besides having a healthy awareness of my physical need for certain foods, I’m very attuned to the emotional meaning of something like properly prepared ham, or bologna with no crust.  I pushed vegetables on my kids for years before I realized that they wouldn’t die without cauliflower, and none of them may ever enjoy a beet the way I enjoy a beet.  They liked my chili mac, at least.  My smallest person must only taste a bit of anything on her plate and stop when she claims fullness, whether there’s suddenly room for ice cream five minutes after supper or not.  It’s not my place to tell her what her body and soul need.

I sometimes slip out of range of the signals from my own body and soul. These last few weeks of being me did some damage which I’m actively undoing.  Last night, I slept all night for the first time in a month.  Tonight, I intend to do the same.  A bowl of Breyer’s chocolate ice cream with Ovaltine sprinkled on top would help, but I’ll shop for that tomorrow or the next day.

Five rather long posts are hanging out together in my list of drafts.  This week and last have called for crazy mad output of words, but not one of those words makes for appropriate blog content.  Hitting that “publish” button would do more harm than good.  I now have those words, and I’ll commit them to paper where they belong, and delete them from this website, and look at them in ten years and feel relief that I’m over all of that.

Now, it’s time to talk about the relief that comes from knowing I’ve weathered another storm without losing my mind. I forgot my mommy’s birthday in my bewildered fog, but it’s lifting. I’ve gained some knowledge, a little power, and a few more coping skills that don’t make me feel like coping is a trial. Still here, just me after all, and I’m okay with myself.  Still properly left of center, still planning obsessively for summer trips and next week’s supper menus.  Some things endure through the worst of times and make them less bad.

Next time, I’ll tell you about the camping that’s happening soon.  And what I’ll be cooking, of course.