A winter walk and a bowl of cream of tomato soup

Winter without snow: A hard season to love and find beauty in. You have to look. You have to want to find it. So you set out for a walk with your eyes open, looking, defining the aesthetic pleasures of the barren season: the unexpected flashes of intense color, welcome among the dominant themes of browns and gray; the delicate, watered silk of a cold sky; the intricate texture and structure of bare trees and underbrush; a leaf suspended in ice.  

And after you return from your cold walk with frozen cheeks and runny nose and a deep, quiet satisfaction, it's time to indulge in another pleasure of the season: a nice warm soup, rich and creamy, a mellowed dream of summer flavors. Maybe served up with a perfect grilled cheese--all crispy golden edges and soft, gooey center?

The trick to making a smooth, satisfying bowl of cream of tomato soup is that you don't use cream. If you did, you would end up with a nasty curdled mess because of all the acid in the tomatoes. Instead, you make a bechamel sauce--a basic sauce of milk, butter, and flour--and add it to your tomato base. Bechamel sauce is used as a base for many other sauces, including Mornay sauce (a tasty cheese sauce), so it's a good basic to know.

Part 1: The Tomato Base

What you'll need:

• 1 28-oz can of crushed tomatoes (obviously home-canned would be preferable, but I am not always that efficient at the end of summer, so organic will do)
• 1 yellow onion, chopped finely
• 2 cloves of garlic, crushed
• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• 1 tablespoon dried herbs of choice (basil, thyme, oregano are all good; rosemary and sage are probably too strong for this soup)

Here's what to do with the ingredients:

1. Add olive oil to your favorite soup pot and heat it over medium heat. Add the onions, let them sweat for about 10 minutes. Stir from time to time. They should be soft, shiny, sort of translucent around the edges, but not brown. 
2. Add tomatoes (if you are using whole tomatoes, go ahead and buzz them up in a blender or food processor first), garlic, and herbs. Let this mix simmer gently for about 15 minutes. 

Part 2: The Bechamel Sauce

Bechamel sauce is basically a white sauce made with milk, butter, and flour. The ratio for these three ingredients is always the same (1 cup milk to 2 tablespoons butter and 2 tablespoons flour), so you can make as much or as little as you like. For this soup, I usually like to add 2 cups of bechamel sauce.

What you'll need:

• 4 tablespoons butter
• 4 tablespoons flour
• 2 cups of milk (traditionally you are supposed to scald the milk, but I usually skip this step)
• 1 small white onion, studded with cloves (this is traditional, but I sometimes just add a few peeled and bruised garlic cloves instead)
• 1 bay leaf
• 4-5 black peppercorns

And here's what to do:

1. Melt the butter in a pot.
2. Stir the flour into the melted butter, let it get a little golden (about five minutes over medium-low heat).
3. Whisk in the milk a little at a time (using the whisk minimizes lumps).
4. Add the onion (or garlic cloves), bay leaf, and peppercorns.
5. Let the sauce thicken and simmer for 10-15 minutes (if it starts to feel too thick, you can always add a little more milk).

Finally, to complete the soup:

Strain the bechamel sauce into the soup base and mix it together. Using a stick blender (if you have one; these are enormously handy tools, so I would recommend getting one), buzz the soup until it is smooth. (If you don't have a stick blender, you can blend it in a blender or a food processor, just bring it back to the pot and back up to temperature before you serve it.) Add salt and pepper to taste. Enjoy!

My garden has run amuck

I am exhausted today after staying up late last night writing something that was perhaps overly emotional and embarrassing, but, hey, there it is, I did it, let it stand. I can't undo what I've done.

So I am moving on. Being in a wildly dreamy, exhausted state of mind, I have been catching up with lots of reading, especially some of the blogs I follow. I have enjoyed beautiful pics, friendly cooking advice, interesting facts and tidbits about the state of the food industry. (I especially like the link to "endangered foods" that I found at Civil Eats.) (Most of the blogs I follow are in the blog roll; I definitely recommend checking them out.)

As I was reading them, one reason I like them so much came to me. The photos--beautiful, composed, and professional though they may be--don't feel like catalog photos. They don't make you long for things you don't have. Or, to be more precise, they don't make you long for things to buy. They often make me long for things I can create, but that's an altogether different kind of longing. And I like that.

Another thing I like is that they show glimpses of real lives, of real pockets of beauty nestled within the everyday. In an everyday I can find if I only try and look for it.

In the spirit of finding my own pockets of beauty, I took my camera out back to the garden I have woefully neglected for the last month. Sadly I let lots of tomatoes die on the vine, but there's still a little beauty left back there. At least I think so.

Here is the lemon I thought a rascal of a squirrel had stolen when I couldn't find it the other day. But here it is, still attached to my little lemon tree.

Signs of new life on the lemon tree. I am thankful. Especially because it lost most of its leaves over the winter.

False indigo floating in a puddle left after Irene.

Winslow, my fat grumpy cat. He thinks he's a tiger. I hate to break it to him...

The basil still looks good. Soon, I will harvest it and make a batch of pesto to freeze for later.

An out-of-control stalk of grass, almost ready to reseed itself.

A cluster of cherry tomatoes left from a wilderness of vines that reached more than seven feet high at one point, which are now a brown and ugly mess. I'll leave these in the hope that I can make something of them.

A sprig of ivy, taking over the fence.

The bird feeder Mike's uncle Melvin made for us, chewed by squirrels.

A lovely fern, growing by the compost box.

Some of our harvest bounty--still not sure what to do with it all...

I also decided to start some plum jam. I bought a whole mess of plums at the farmer's market on Saturday morning, before the rain from Irene began to roll in. Most of them are prune plums, but I am afraid I can't remember what the bigger ones are. I like the red etchings on some of them. Looks like a galaxy of stars trapped within a thin skin.

I love the contrast of the purple skin with blue bloom against the strange green of the flesh. I wonder what color the jam will be? Of course, I won't know until tomorrow, because I ran out of sugar. No matter, I will let the plums macerate with the sugar I have and then we will see. It may be beautiful. It may be weird. That's part of the fun.

Working my way back to inspiration

I started sliding weeks ago, before our dog got sick and we had to put her to sleep. Losing her made me let go. No, losing her made me tell myself it was OK to let go and slide some more. To sink into a wallow of not trying, not being passionate, not caring much, and just getting by--not really a pit of despair so much as a comfy couch of meh. I lose focus and energy sometimes. This is especially true when I've worked hard for a time toward making significant changes in my life and behavior, when I have consistently toughed something out for a few months, but that first, fat rush of progress slows down. When the realization sinks in that change will no longer have dramatic effects, but is now the standard. When the work (easier now, granted) remains, but the heroics of fighting up that hill aren't there anymore. I just don't seem to have the hang of just living. I am either sinking deeper and deeper into my worst habits, with attendant ill effects on mental and physical health, or I am struggling mightily to get back up again. It's a tedious, frustrating cycle. A cycle I want to break.

Knowing that inspiration doesn't strike magically and mysteriously from the universe, but must be sought for, I tried to get out of the funk and find inspiration again. I flipped through books, started looking over my long-neglected Google Reader with its array of blogs and learned about a food blogger named Jennifer Perillo who lost her husband suddenly. A community of bloggers and readers poured out care, love, and concern. I felt deep sadness for Jennifer's loss, but couldn't help but ask myself why. Why did I feel so much for someone I did not know? I hadn't even read her blog before. Then, a few days ago, I learned through Facebook that a former colleague had died. A man I had liked very much, but not known well because we had little cause to spend much time together. I felt hideously voyeuristic when I went to his Facebook page and read the loving comments from close friends and family. Once again, I felt genuine grief and loss for someone I knew so little. One of the saddest things is to like someone but not have a chance to know them better because there isn't enough time.

I feel their loss because I can imagine what it would do to my life if I lost Mike or someone else close to me. It would leave a black hole that would distort all life around it--a void that would be almost unbearable. But like most people, I would force myself to keep going, to figure out a way to live with the void, and even eventually to learn to be happy again, even though early days would see me preferring to creep under the blankets and sleep my way to oblivion.

So what is this possibly morbid mulling over death about? Well, there's just plain sadness and grieving, but there's also the recognition that to overcome any emotional pain, whether it be the loss of a loved one or loss of passion and focus takes work. It takes going through the motions of doing what some part of you knows matters to you. It takes forcing yourself to think about what you care about and why. It takes remembering what you value.

And so, I am trying to remember what matters to me and why. Why do I care about food? Why do I care about art and literature and music? They connect me to humanity and life as little else can do. These are the things I return to again and again after losing my footing. (That's at least one definite good thing about me: I don't give up. I may fail a lot, but I always try again.) Sure food is good, and restaurants can be fun, glamorous, tantalizing. I enjoy watching great chefs do masterful things with ingredients and make edible works of art. But my care for these things is more fundamental than that. It's about connecting. It's bringing family and friends around a table to share in something together. It's passing along history and culture from past generations to future ones. It's linking your body and existence in a tangible way with the earth and the people who bring food into being. After weeks of slipping up and eating too many soulless meals in chain restaurants, I have to remind myself how much justice matters to me. How much it cuts me to the core when I eat foods that are produced by slaves, that are grown by poisoning the earth and abusing animals. Good arguments may be made for producing food in sustainable ways, but for me the reasons are all emotional. I love getting my food from the people who grew it. The large, heavyset farmer who handles his peaches like fragile kittens. The father that bickers in a comfortable, loving way with his son who can't seem to add up the total correctly. The pretty woman with brown hair and freckles who says eggs are her favorite food and sells me beautiful, tender greens. The cute young guy with a nose like a chisel and dirt under his nails who sells me flats of berries. These are the individuals who worked miracles, turning dirt into food and then worked more and slept less to get it to me.

Making food is a form of creativity--like all arts, it's an expression of the individual and the cultural context of that person. Ultimately, it's a way to communicate. That's why I love food and art and music and literature, because these are ways out of the isolation within our skin and minds, ways to cross the boundaries between us.

It's now 2:30 in the morning, I am tired and foggy. But I know what I have to do tomorrow: I have to think about what matters to me. I have to start work on a new painting. And I have to make food for my family that says that I love them.