Last weekend we cleaned our house for hours. We mopped and scrubbed and polished. And all the while we were working we were giving our cats a hard time, saying things like, “Maybe you guys should try shedding your fur in the garbage instead of just anywhere. . . .”
Last night I was reading the journal I kept during our trip to Oregon in 2004. That’s the last time we visited my brother Jacob–six years ago, which makes me sad. Sophie was only three then, and Jake was a smiling, serene baby with big blue eyes and a bald head …
A strawberry-fig jam bar posing with some Turk’s caps
The other day Mom gave me some homemade strawberry-fig jam that was way too good to eat on toast or anything boring like that. So I made delicious vegan jam bars with it! I’ve been eating them every morning for breakfast. They have a crumbly, buttery, sugary, oatmeal-y crust, and the recipe called for the whole jar of jam. I keep coming across whole strawberries and nice big chunks of fig. That jam is high quality, I tell you.
I also came across this great old picture last night. I like how ghostly Kris and I look in it. It’s my ninth birthday, and I was nervous about my upcoming party, I remember. (Every year I worried that my party would be a bust.) Anyway, I think this picture is cool. It looks like it was taken so long ago, just before we died . . . of scarlet fever.
Leslie and Kris, 1975
Strawberry-Fig Jam Bars
Ingredients:
1 ¾ cups all-purpose flour
1 cup brown sugar
¼ tsp salt
½ tsp baking soda
¾ cup vegan butter
1 1/2 cups quick-cooking oats
1 jar strawberry-fig jam
Directions:
Heat oven to 350 degrees F. Mix flour, sugar, salt, baking soda, and butter in a bowl until a crumbly dough is formed. Mix in the oats.
Press about 2/3 of the dough firmly into a greased 9×13-inch pan. Spread the whole jar of jam evenly over the top. Sprinkle the remaining third of the dough over the jam.
Bake about 20 minutes until golden brown. Let cool and cut into bars.
*This recipe isn’t original; it’s just a slight variation on Colleen Patrick-Goudreau’s Raspberry Jam Bars in The Joy of Vegan Baking, one of my very favorite cookbooks.
On Saturday Rob, Mom, Kris, Sophie, and I went antiquing in Quitman, Georgia, a small town about an hour and a half from Quincy. It was a brilliant day in Quitman, so bright and sunny.
On Sunday night, Rob baked cookies, which is so comforting to me. I like to sit at the kitchen table and watch him carefully sift and measure. Rob was making vegan snickerdoodles, and our cat Carl was sitting on the table, watching too, and I was petting Carl and calling him “Snickerdoodle” just to make myself mad.
A bit of the fence, painted “Salamander” green
On Saturday we finally finished painting the picket fence around our pond. It took five hours in some truly brutal heat, but we got it done and it looks beautiful! To pass the time as we worked, Rob gave me a detailed summary of the plot of Highlander, a 1986 fantasy action film starring Sean Connery as an immortal Egyptian swordsman. The movie sounded terrible, but Rob said he really enjoyed it.
“Hmmm, what about it did you enjoy?” I said. “I mean, specifically. Tell me one thing.” I was getting a little crabby because I had a cramp in my back.
So, yes, I was a little bit bad toward the end of the painting, but the point is we finished and we were able to move on to other, more fun projects, like planting a new little crop of tomatoes! We planted a Roma, a Better Boy, a Husky Cherry, and a Talladega, mixing into the planting holes a little Black Hen and some rich, nutritious “worm juice” from our worm bin.
That night we made vegan butterscotch cookies, and I made popcorn too, so we could eat while we were baking. (We were starving.) The cookie recipe is one we got from Rob’s mom and veganized. We make it all the time because it’s so easy and only calls for very basic ingredients that we always have around. The cookies come out perfect every time—partly because the recipe is so good and partly because Rob is an excellent baker. He’s very methodical and careful with everything he does, which can be annoying sometimes but really comes in handy when we’re baking. I tend to be half-assed with measuring (and lots of other things) and to say, “Well, close enough,” but Rob is very precise—hence the great cookies.
While we baked, the cats entertained us. June Baxter was chasing a tiny pebble around, and she had her tail all puffed up–as if the pebble presented a real threat. Then she chased her tail, perhaps discovering it to be a traitor. Next, she wrestled her sister, Softee, who is a big baby and usually cries when anyone tries to play-fight with her. But Softee was very brave this time as she grappled with busy, tough June Bee. Softee is chubby and white with black spots and kind of reminds me of a bunny—or a small Holstein. June Bee is thin and wiry and “always up to some kind of business,” as Rob says.
It was so nice baking cookies, eating popcorn, and giggling at cat antics. I had no complaints. After all, it was Saturday, the best day of the week!
Vegan Butterscotch Cookies
Ingredients:
¼ cup vegan “butter” (Earth Balance . . . )
¼ cup shortening
⅓ cup granulated sugar
⅓ cup brown sugar
1 “egg” (use egg substitute)
1 ⅓ cups all-purpose flour
⅓ cup chopped walnuts
¾ teaspoon baking soda
¾ teaspoon vanilla
Directions:
Melt butter and shortening together. Add sugars; mix well. Add “egg”; beat till light colored. Sift flour with baking soda; stir into egg mixture. Add vanilla. Add walnuts. Chill.
Roll into small balls. Bake on ungreased cookie sheet (parchment paper works well) at 385 degrees for 11 minutes. Remove at once. Makes about 3 dozen cookies.
We doubled the recipe and ended up with a pleasantly huge mound of cookies. Here are three of them.
A couple years ago, I started getting into vintage and recycled clothes again, and I’m having so much fun with it. Eco-friendly fashion! What’s not to love? When I was in college, I was obsessed with vintage clothes, and I had a pretty great collection …
On Saturday afternoon Rob and I went to my sister Kris’s house to celebrate her birthday. Kris’s daughter, Sophie, who’s nine, planned the entire party, baked the cake (with my mom’s help), and saw to every detail. It was a summery beach-themed party, and Sophie insisted that we all wear plastic …
Birdhouse with bear’s foot
Saturday morning was so strangely cool and bright, a welcome change from the usual July humidity and haze. I ran around the yard taking pictures and feeling wildly happy. My giddiness reminded me of the way I used to feel when I was a kid and my sister Kris and I would “rejoice for spring.” “Let’s rejoice for spring,” I’d say, and we’d go running and leaping through the wild violets in the backyard. (Rejoicing for spring always involved leaping.) Spring is such a short season in North Florida, gone in the blink of an eye. We’d spend the precious days picking the neighbors’ loquats, sipping wild honeysuckle nectar, and making half-assed crowns of white clover.
But anyway, back to my present-day dorkiness. I am still very affected by beautiful weather, and Saturday’s coolness and freshness made everything Rob and I did seem extra fun. We picked lots of tomatoes that morning—and eggplant and habanero peppers. The vegetable garden was full of sparkle, with lighted raindrops hanging from the tassels of the corn.
After we picked and weighed all our vegetables, we got busy with some projects. We worked on painting our picket fence around the pond (but we still didn’t finish). Then I planted five Georgia asters and three purple coneflowers in the big bed under the dining room windows. Next we made another batch of cement stepping stones, using cheap cake pans as molds. We make four every weekend, decorating them with old marbles, bits of broken crockery, foreign coins, seashells, buttons, and bits of glass. We’ve made dozens so far, and we always need more. My favorite is the one Rob made to honor our beloved cat Pittle, who died last winter. He used glass jewels to suggest her pure white fur and huge blue eyes.
All morning, Buntin, our pretty, wild-eyed tortie, kept running outside, which she’s not allowed to do. She’s so funny—so intense and so moody, subject to fits of jealousy and wild emotion. Rob says she runs outside so she can have “special time” with us, away from the other cats. So on Saturday whenever she dashed out through the screen door, we’d take a few minutes to sit with her and pet her and let her eat grass . . . and she’d be so happy for maybe 30 seconds . . . but then she’d get a little mad and maybe she’d bite me.
But that’s just Buntin for you. I call her our tame hyena—because her pattern really is quite hyena-like. Often I’ll say, “Rob, you need to do a better job taming your hyena.” Because she does have a bit of a temper. The one thing that really calms her is when Carl (her best friend, her baby brother) lets her groom him. She is so patient then, carefully licking his stripes into place. . . .
Birdhouse with corn
One of our homemade stepping stones, surrounded by mint
The great “Pittle” stone
Cutleaf coneflowers galore
