I was looking through my old photo archive the other night. I can’t believe how time flies. I used to consider these pictures outtakes, but now they’re treasures. Sophie on her sixth birthday. She was a little overstimulated. Jake at Sophie’s sixth birthday party. He …
Yesterday we went out to Monticello, a little historic town east of Tallahassee, to browse in the antiques shops and look around at houses (my sister Bunny is thinking about maybe moving). Pretty much the whole family went–me, Rob, Bunny, Mom, Kris, Jake, and Sophie. …
Rob, about to tuck into some delicious peanut chili
I mentioned before that we harvested our sweet potatoes on Sunday, but I forgot to add that, aside from the rotten ones, they were really nice—big and bulging and fat. We used two that very night to make a batch of peanut chili spiced up with some of our lovely Long Slim cayenne peppers.
The chili was really good (it also contained some of our homegrown garlic and onions), and it was fun working with the brand-new sweet potatoes (they were a gorgeous coral pink). We ate out on the screen porch under the ceiling fan, the cats lying about like little fur rugs; they get so lazy in the heat. Except for June Baxter, of course; she’s always busy. You can see her in the picture, behind Rob. I kept getting “mad” at her because she was cleaning herself in all my shots.
Anyway, here’s the recipe for the chili:
Peanut Chili
Ingredients:
1 Tbls peanut oil
1 large yellow onion, chopped
1 clove garlic, minced
7 fresh cayenne peppers, minced
28-ounce can crushed tomatoes
5 cups water
2 tsps salt
2 large sweet potatoes, peeled and cut into 1-inch pieces
¾ cup chunky peanut butter
1 Tbls curry powder
¼ cup dry roasted peanuts, chopped
Limes
Directions:
Heat the oil in a large pot over medium heat. Add the onion, garlic, and cayenne peppers. Cook until softened, about five minutes.
Add the tomatoes, water, sweet potatoes, and salt. Bring to a boil, then reduce the heat to low and cook uncovered until the potatoes are soft, about 30 minutes.
Stir in the peanut butter and curry powder. Mix well and allow to heat through.
Use an immersion blender to puree the soup, but don’t blend too long or too thoroughly–leave some chunks. Sprinkle the chili with chopped peanuts and squeeze some lime juice over the top to serve.
On Saturday morning I couldn’t wait to get up and get out in the yard. We’d been on vacation, so everything had gone to pot. There was so much to do, it was hard to know where to begin. Rob and I spent the whole …
When my sister Kris and I were kids, we were big fort builders. We were always crouching in a fort under a tree. We built a great succession of forts, little lean-tos concocted without nails or screws. We’d usually stay in each place for about …
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| Giant sequoia, Sequoia National Park |
When I was a little kid, probably about nine, my father, one day, brought out a leaf collection he had made when he was about my age, about nine. I saw it only once, that one time, but I never forgot it. It was beautiful, a whole album filled with leaves neatly mounted on heavy, yellowing pages, each carefully labeled in my father’s looping, flawless handwriting (perfect, apparently, even when he was a child).
The leaves were North Carolina leaves (my father was from Winston-Salem). There were lots of lobed, fancy ones, the kind you saw in storybooks but not where we lived, not in a suburb in Florida.
I was sick with admiration for the leaf collection. I asked my father how he had even found so many leaves (our own neighborhood was new and bare), and he said it was easy, that he had just picked them up, that fancy leaves fell like snow, like manna, all over the neighborhoods in Winston-Salem, and lay in lush, tempting drifts on the sidewalks, just waiting for children to collect the best ones.
That was the impression I got, at least. You see, when my father talked about North Carolina, he spoke so fondly and with such nostalgia that it seemed like the greatest place in the world, like paradise. It seemed so much better than Florida, where we had no extended family and no family history, where we had no leaves to watch turn red and gold in fall.
The leaves in Dad’s collection were labeled, like I said, and I was so impressed by that, by my father’s boyhood knowledge of his surroundings, of his close connection to the place where he lived.
“How did you know the names of the trees, Daddy?” I asked, dizzy with wonder and reverence and envy. “How did you find out?”
He said he wasn’t sure, that he guessed he “just knew.”
The day Dad showed me his leaf collection, I tried to start my own. It was a pretty frustrating project because our young neighborhood consisted mostly of open, grassy lawns, a fact that made interesting leaves quite difficult to come by. Even worse, when I did find a good leaf, I didn’t know its name or how on earth I could ever discover it. I remember my little collection, my little bouquet of three or four leaves, and how quickly I gave up on it.
I think because both my parents were from far away and were often (I’m guessing) homesick, I grew up with a strange sense of displacement. For a long time I thought we’d “move back” to Winston-Salem, end our self-imposed exile. But we didn’t . . .
And gradually I came to understand that I didn’t need to move away in order to find a home, that I could make my home right where I was. I figured out that I could read books and learn the names of the trees, that I could plant trees where there had been none, and, most important, that I could make the commitment to stay and nurture those trees and watch them grow.
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| General Grant Tree, Sequoia National Park |
Rob and I just got back today from our trip to Sequoia National Park. It’s always so hard to come home from a vacation because the yard is such a mess. After a week of neglect, most of my potted plants are dead, and my …
Our house is 162 years old, and all over the property there are ghostly vestiges of gardens. Sometimes these are just little arrangements of old bulbs (daffodils and summer snowflakes)—and sometimes they’re something bigger, better. When Rob and I moved in eight years ago, the …
On Saturday morning Mom, Kris, Sophie, Jake, and I went out to Windy Hill Vineyard near Monticello to pick muscadine grapes. This is an annual tradition for our family, something we’ve been doing for 30 years. When I was in high school I always loved the drive out to the farm. Back then, U.S. 90 was a two-lane country road lined with hot pink crape myrtles, and there were always lots of cloudless sulfur butterflies, the clearest, brightest yellow.
Things are a little more built-up now in the area, but Windy Hill itself is the same, the gently rolling hills striped with rows of grapes. There’s a shady little farm stand near the front gate, and that’s where you get your buckets for picking and where you pay for your grapes. There’s a Coke machine next to the stand that sells the coldest Cokes (in the old days I would always get a NuGrape).
On Saturday morning, there were several other pickers in the dewy fields besides ourselves. There were the loveliest old ladies in picture hats and dresses and high-heeled espadrilles.
“I wish I had dressed up,” I said to Kris. “It’s so pretty here it seems only right.”
“Hey, are you guys almost ready to go?” Jake asked. He’s in third grade and is no great lover of U-pick farms; he prefers video games.
“Um, we kind of haven’t gotten started yet,” I said.
“Well, how much longer do you think you’ll take?” he asked. “Are you going to fill up your whole bucket? Leslie, are you going to try to fill up that whole thing?”
“Um, yeah,” I said sheepishly. “Sorry.”
Jake helped us pick so we could get done faster. He also stirred up some ant piles with a stick and bothered Sophie.
Sophie was in a bit of a bad mood because she had gotten up too early. “I’m hatin’ on that kid,” she muttered to me under her breath. I love it when she calls Jake “that kid.” He’s only two years younger than she is.
I was eating as I picked. I just love a fresh muscadine still warm from the sun.
“Can you believe we’ve been coming here for 30 years?” I said to Kris. “I can’t believe it’s been 30 years.”
Jake didn’t find it so amazing.
“Let’s go,” he whined periodically over the course of the next 30 minutes. Then he tried a new tack: “Hey, guys!” he said, so brightly and cheerfully. “I’ve got an idea! Let’s go!”
Kris rolled her eyes and shook her head. “It’s all in the delivery, right, Jake?”
We paid for our grapes (they were so cheap I felt bad) and bought some hot boiled peanuts.
In the car on the way home, I was making a little pleasant conversation with the kids. Jake’s going to turn nine on September 2, so I was asking him about his birthday plans.
“So where would you like to go out to eat for your birthday?”
“Um, Melting Pot,” he said, “or, um, Golden Corral.”
I smiled. “Six one, half-dozen the other, right?” I turned to Sophie. “So, do you guys really like to eat at the Golden Corral?”
“Yeah,” Sophie said. “It’s good. They have cotton candy there, and a chocolate fountain.”
“Cotton candy?” I said. “A chocolate fountain?” This was news to me.
Sophie nodded. I can just imagine her and Jake at the Golden Corral. I’m sure they don’t eat any vegetables. I picture Sophie, perfect little Sophie, eating blobs of cotton candy with a knife and fork.
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| Sophie and Jake aren’t that fond of grape picking. I think Sophie might actually be crying here. |
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| Jake indulging his aunt with a little trace of a smile |