Enjoying the remaining quiet moments and simple scenes of the season. Thankful for traditions, family, old friends, sweet children, happy times with my beloved, onion rings, pound cake, impromptu rain boot purchase, and sockless warm weather.
The start of the school year always feels like the right time for embracing new structure. As we have prepared for The Boy to return to school today, we have shopped for supplies, completed all the proper forms, started a new folder for all of this year’s information, and purged his wardrobe of too small clothes. I am ready for some of that organizing, preparing, straightening, and purging, as well. Though many new beginnings will need attention in the next month, I began with a fun one.
The cookbook shelf.
There are moments when I am able to sit and thumb through cookbooks in search of something new. Rare are the moments when there is actually time for seeing those new ideas come to life, however. I am more likely to try something based on what is in our pantry or treats that arrived in our weekly CSA share. With two small children, a fast approach is almost always the best approach. Lately, my filing system has turned into a piling system. Time for order. I moved forward hoping to create something useful, beautiful, and a tool that will truly nourish my family.
The new supplies.
I ran out to a big box store (yep, sure did) and bought two binders that I’ll love holding, flipping through, adding to, and seeing on my shelf. I also bought a large box of sheet protectors. For a decade or so, I have kept favorite recipes from family, friends, magazines and whatnot in one of half a dozen file folders. I typically pull from these folders rather than actually sit and flip through cookbooks because they are favorite, tried and true recipes. And the best ones have a story.
Like this one of my mom’s persimmon recipes.
My father planted persimmon trees along the front walk of the home where I grew up. There are legendary tales of strange folk stopping by to steal persimmons. The paper is stained from batches of pies and cookies past, and one sheet has the fax date from the day my mother sent the recipe to my work. Hilarious! Our kids won’t know what fax machines are.
The legendary cheese ring.
Found at every important function in Mobile, Alabama, including my wedding reception in 2001 and my brother’s wedding reception in 2009, this cheese ring sometimes includes bacon crumbles. My mother has noted below the recipe that pre-shredded cheese is just too dry. Although the treat calls for a gracious helping of mayo, you still must grate your own cheese for proper moisture. No wonder my home is one of the fattest states in the country!
My grandmother’s Thanksgiving dressing.
My interest in this recipe came along a little late as she no longer cooks a hen to include in the family holiday staple. She doesn’t have a single thing in writing, but we arranged a lesson one year well before Thanksgiving when I was in Mobile for a visit. I quickly scratched out notes as she threw ingredients together, and the scrap paper has already been torn in half once by my kiddos. I love that the instructions include phrases like “already pretty soupy before you add the water.” It’s a family concoction with little precision and lots of second helpings.
Now, instead of losing these treasures to time or a kitchen mishap, I have two beautiful new cookbooks that will evolve with our family and with my own culinary skills. If you’re curious to try one of the favorites above, just click on the photo above or give me a head’s up before you drop by.
Our annual summer family visit trip was the closest we’ve come so far to feeling like an actual vacation. We managed to get a little sleep, eat some great food, laugh with family, visit old friends, go for walks, and do a little shopping. It’s not quite as restful as a proper vacation might be, but the time together was still connected and good. We needed this.
We found many a swing on many a playground.
The kids insisted we have a hat party. My Love and I complied.
We played in dirt, sand, and water. The Boy even found this little guy.
I am from the Gulf Coast, just two hours east of New Orleans and a quick drive from shrimping communities still reshaped by Hurricane Katrina. Some of my best and favorite memories of home revolve around the water. Whether the hope of Jubilee on the Bay, fresh shrimp and crab at the dinner table, falling asleep on a friend’s wharf, watching my parents slurp oysters on the half shell, or summer days spent at Gulf Shores and Dauphin Island, the water forever speaks to me of home.
I don’t have coherent words to articulate my feelings about BP & Halliburton’s oil spill in my Gulf. I cannot imagine it filling with oil. Savitri D wrote this week of the Gulf oil spill, “I weep. I get angry. I want to look away, I can’t look away.” My anger is so raw and almost paralyzing. I know my own addiction to oil is to blame. Yet my raw, pulsing fury for BP is more than I can stomach. Fewer safety measures means more bucks for big corporations and executives living far away from us back-woods, shoeless Southerners, right? If Massey & JP Morgan Chase can rape the mountains of Appalachia, then it should come as no surprise that BP or Exxon or any of their ilk can and will wade right out into my home waters and destroy them, too.
Right now I’m still too lost in the anger and disbelief of it all to move onto how I will respond. I want BP to suffer and pay. Do you know that they’re already trying to pay us off?! My instinct is to fight. Don’t they know about the University of Alabama School of Law? Surely they’ll discover that my home will fight for its oak trees, and we damn well plan to fight for the water that shows us life, gives us life, shapes our life. But that rage needs some reason and some rest. Better words will come. Clearer words will come. Sadly, I know they will not suffer. This is but a blip on their quarterly statements that will all smooth out with bonuses for all. Truly, it grieves me in a way I cannot describe.
Rituals of Southern entertaining often catch me by surprise as I watch my hands move as my mother’s and aunt’s and grandmother’s do. Silver polished, china and flatware washed and dried, all ready for the next celebration. An unexpected sense of home.
