The Bolter

I never liked gardening. As a kid, I loved the gardens we had, but I didn't much care for the enforced labor part of it--the digging and pulling, the bugs and the sweating, all done under the hot summer sun before I could go play. That changed when Ben and I started living together and began planting tomatoes in the boxes he built that adorn the strip of what used to be lawn. It's the only spot that really gets full sun. Ben tore out the grass, laid in discarded bricks he got for free at a landfill place in East county, and built four wooden raised beds in the strip. Every summer we talked about the garden we would have but I rarely got it going in time for a good crop of anything except the tomatoes. The tomatoes seemed to actually thrive on my neglect. I put them in much later than real gardeners--like mid-June. I sprinkled in some bone meal and watered, but other than that, those plants were on their own. Come late August you'd never know how sloppy a gardener I was, there were so many tomatoes. I made gallons of sauce and froze it in a stand up freezer Ben salvaged from a friend's garage. There's nothing like the taste of sauce from your own tomatoes in December when it's been raining for a solid week and the cold and dark feel like permanent and badly behaved house guest. Last year, with the help of Tammy who lives upstairs, we turned the whole front strip of ground into a vegetable garden. That's when I got the idea for a Joy Journal. It feels like too much of life is spent not loving what's right there to love--like the barren waste that used to be our front yard. With lots of compost, seeds, water and time, the yard has been transformed. It's not a fancy garden where well-tended roses and ornamental grasses have been landscaped to create a beautiful setting for a house. My garden looks like a description of chaos theory. Nasturtiums spill over the rock wall mingling with Scarlet runner beans that climb up a handmade trellis from discarded wood scraps. Sunflowers pop through densely packed tomato plants in one of the front boxes, and the second box only appears empty because after finishing off shell peas in a fresh pea risotto a month ago, I've replanted the box with rows of lacinato kale, nantes carrots, cylander beets. There's a smaller box with salad greens that grow bunched together, the butter lettuce leaning against romaine, arugula and some fancy greens mix are jumbled in patches not in evenly spaced rows at all. With the high heat of July, the arugula is bolting and in another day I'll pull it all and make my favorite summer pasta dish. Put some water on to boil for pasta--use angel hair or fresh pasta if it's hot outside and try to think like an old Italian woman who would probably not whine about a little hot weather. I stem the bolted arugula and roughly chop it--even the little white flowers because they're so pretty. Saute the arugula with lots of olive oil, a few cloves of garlic slivered up, and a good big pinch of red pepper flakes. Drain the pasta when it's done and toss it with the greens. Sprinkle with some parmesan and there you have it. I love summer!

Chock-Full-o-Nuts Liqueor

So, I guess it was last Thursday when Molly called and asked me to check my nuts. They aren't actually my nuts. The neighbor's giant Black walnut tree hangs over the roof and drops its load every fall along with a ton of leaves. Molly said to cut one open and check to see if the meat inside was spongy still without the any brittle bits of newly formed shell. The flesh of the unripe walnut is white, crisp as an apple and full of deceptively clear walnut smelling liquid. I say deceptively clear because after cutting open a few nuts my hands started to stain brown. The nuts had yet to form a shell so they were ready to turn into Nucino. Sunday morning we picked the nuts. I guess there was a fancy article in the MIX magazine about doing this very thing but without Molly, Pat and Joan I don't think I would have felt compelled to make this stuff and it's so easy. You chop in quarters--though Joan says she did some in a Cuisinart--30 green walnuts and put them in a quart jar. You dump in about a cup of sugar, a long twirly of lemon zest, 1/2 a cinnamon stick and a couple of cloves--again other people put in other things. Then you top the jar off with about half a liter of 100 proof vodka, put the lid on tight and shake it like a Polaroid picture, baby. You set the jars in a sunny window and every day for forty days you turn the jars upside down and evidently after forty days and forty nights you strain the nuts off and can use those bad boys to put on ice cream and around Thanksgiving you can use the walnut liqueur to sip or drizzle about on desserty things. I'm imagining pound cake and homemade ice cream. Ooooh, or my mom's Burnt Sugar cake. Ack Yah!