Ah ha The vocational sense

My father wasn’t a writer, or not in the vocational sense, but he liked to play with words, and I grew up thinking of him as someone who wrote. He never made a big deal of it; writing was just something he did sometimes, a few quick lines on one of the index cards that he always kept in his shirt pocket. I haven’t seen a lot of his work - only a goofy poem he once jotted for me on a notepad from a medical conference he went to, and some haikus that we found in his bathroom drawer after he died. Many years ago, in a context that I now don’t remember, my mother told me that Burg tended to write most when he was feeling down, and not so much when he was happy. I don’t know if he would explain it that way, and I can’t ask him, but it resonated with me at the time. Probably because I was a teenager then, and I was doing my own share of mopey writing - mostly about the tall, long-haired kid who was a senior in my high school when I was a freshman, who played in a moody band with a clever name and reportedly smoked a truly staggering amount of weed but, I was certain, could be reformed into a fine, upstanding boyfriend if only, if only, IF ONLY I could manage to open my mouth and try speaking to him. There was a lot of woe going on, a lot of longing. I had a lot of feelings. In any case, I remember that conversation with my mother, and I remember thinking, Ah ha! That’s it! I too write the most, and the best, when I’m unhappy. That’s the trick...

Of course, that was sort of an unhelpful realization, and after some years passed and I stopped being a teenager (FINALLY), I began to see that it was not only unhelpful, but also untrue.  I discovered other ways to approach writing and other things to write about. I think we can all be grateful for that. Though I do wonder what happened to the tall, long-haired kid.  He’s totally unGoogleable, and you know I’ve tried. He’s also now almost forty.

Anyway, what I’m trying to say, and I swear that I really am going somewhere here, is: I don’t like being unhappy, and I don’t like writing about being unhappy. It’s boring, and it makes me tired. But about three weeks ago, I was diagnosed with postpartum depression, and I don’t see a way to not write about it. It began in the form of insomnia, and it took me a while to recognize it, because it was more complicated than I thought depression would be: I wasn’t sad so much as I was overwhelmed. Statistically, something like one in ten mothers get postpartum depression, but few seem to talk about it - or at least, few that I’ve found. When I was diagnosed, and when I was first trying to make sense of it, what I wanted most was to talk with another woman who had been through it and come out the other side, someone who could reassure me with full confidence that it wouldn’t be a permanent condition. I knew that logically, intellectually, but THE HORMONES, they pull the wool over your eyes, and the wool, whoa, it is heavy. You spend nine months growing a real live human baby in your abdomen, and then you push that baby out, and then you feed that baby milk that your body somehow makes, and though we mammals have been doing it for as long as we mammals have existed, it is big, weird, screwy stuff. It makes you have more feelings than you did when you were fifteen, and they feel very real. And in my case, the case of postpartum depression, they don’t go away when they should, and instead, they build.

I am grateful to have been able to ask for help, and I’m relieved that the help is actually helping. I am grateful for Brandon, and I am grateful for June. And though I would certainly rather just la la la pretend that it never happened, I want to write this down, on the off chance that you or someone you know needs to hear it. I am grateful that I can now reassure myself that this isn’t a permanent condition, that I now believe it.

Whew.

A small revolution

You good, good people. Before I say another word, I want to thank you for your many comments, your e-mails, and the incredibly kind card - a real, three-dimensional paper card - that one of you sent to me at Delancey. Your kindness blew me away. I thought for a long time before deciding to write that last post, and I want to thank you for making me feel not only safe in deciding to do it, but very, very glad. I remember my doctor saying to me, one day in mid-December, that I would not only recover, but that someday soon, I might even have a hard time remembering exactly what postpartum depression felt like. Though he’s been my doctor for years, and though he knows us very well - he’s Brandon’s doctor, too, and June’s doctor, and he delivered June - in the privacy of my mind, I thought, Riiiiiiiiiiiight. Suuuuuuuure. Well! Turns out, being wrong is my new favorite thing.

In other news, June is a champion. She’s my new favorite person. She sleeps with her arms straight up by her ears, like she’s cheering very, very quietly about something, or like a gymnast who’s just stuck her landing. She thrashes around like a rodeo bronc when in the nude, and if you sing "Katy Too," by Johnny Cash, with the words "Baby June" subbed in for "Katy too," she will grin and stick her tongue out. This is because she has just discovered that she has a tongue. Every day is a small revolution.

I’ve been cooking more regularly, which is a great development, except that I haven’t been cooking particularly well. I have long had a special talent for making bland soups, and I guess it should be some kind of consolation that, with so much change in my life in the past year, this, at least, has remained consistent? On the upside, I’ve been roasting a lot of rutabagas, and I highly recommend that. And the other day, I made braised endive with prosciutto for the millionth time, and for the millionth time, it was excellent. And last night, after dinner, I fell down a rabbit hole of Bon Jovi videos, which has nothing to do with food but was also excellent. When I was eight years old, I had a Bop magazine poster of Jon Bon Jovi, shirtless and wearing a fringed scarf, on my bedroom wall. I think that explains everything.

I have a recipe for you today. Not the best photographs, but a recipe.

For years now, I’ve followed the site 3191 Miles Apart and the work of its co-creators Maria and Stephanie. Two years ago, they began publishing a quarterly, which is filled with photographs, recipes, projects, travel guides, and anything else they feel excited about, and it’s always beautiful and beautifully produced, printed on matte paper that feels nice in your hand. One night last weekend, while June was sleeping and Brandon was working, I climbed into bed with 3191 Quarterly No. 9 and promptly fell onto Stephanie’s recipe for oatcakes.

I should say that oatcakes are not actually cakes.  As Stephanie explains, they’re sort of a cross between a cookie, a cracker, and maybe a biscuit - a small, crunchy, nubbly thing that you could eat at pretty much any time of day.  The concept is Scottish, although I’m going to be totally blasphemous and uncouth and American and admit that I like Stephanie’s version better than the oatcakes I tried in Edinburgh. In my defense, my friends who live in Scotland - and one of them is Scottish by birth - didn’t love the oatcakes we ate that day either. No idea what the brand was, although I can tell you that we bought them at Mellis. Anyway.

I like to eat oatcakes with sharp cheddar, though you could also treat them more like a cookie and dunk them in a cup of tea.  This week I’ve been eating them with peanut butter and slices of apple, as a second breakfast. (I eat my first breakfast around 6:30 am, while sitting next to June on a blanket on the kitchen floor, singing "Baby June / Katy Too," and it’s gone long before lunchtime comes around.) They’re a little sweet and a little salty, and they somehow manage to come across as both wholesome and tempting.  Do any of you remember Carr’s Wheatolos?  Oatcakes don’t really taste like Wheatolos - maybe a cousin of the Wheatolo - but for me, they push the same buttons. God, I miss Wheatolos.


Oatcakes
Adapted slightly from Stephanie Congdon Barnes and 3191 Quarterly No. 9

1 ½ cups (150 grams) rolled oats
1 cup (140 grams) all-purpose flour
1/3 cup (60 grams) packed brown sugar
½ tsp. baking soda
½ tsp. fine salt
1 stick (113 grams) cold unsalted butter, diced
¼ cup (60 ml) full-fat plain yogurt
Whole milk, if needed

Preheat the oven to 350°F. Line two baking sheets with parchment.

In a large bowl, combine the oats, flour, brown sugar, baking soda, and salt, whisking to blend. Add the butter, and use your fingers, pressing and squeezing, to work it into the oat mixture until it resembles a coarse meal. Stir in the yogurt until a soft dough forms. (If your yogurt is on the thick side, you may need to add a tablespoon or so of milk, just enough to bring the dough together.) The dough should be a little crumbly. Lightly flour a work surface, and turn the dough out onto it, rolling or patting it to a ¼-inch thickness. (I found that the dough was a little too sticky to roll cleanly, but it worked out alright.) Using a 2-inch round cookie cutter, stamp out oatcakes, and transfer them to the prepared sheet pans. (A bench scraper comes in handy for transferring the oatcakes to the sheet pans and cleaning the counter afterward. I found that I could comfortably fit about 15 oatcakes on one pan and the remainder on the second.) (I am really into parentheses today.) It’s okay to gather and re-roll any scraps of dough.

Bake the oatcakes for about 15 minutes, or until they are golden brown around the edges. Transfer to a wire rack to cool completely, and then store in an airtight container at room temperature.

Yield: about 25 oatcakes

P.S. Thank you, Stephanie, for allowing me to reprint your recipe. It’s a keeper.
P.P.S. This essay by Zadie Smith is wonderful (via Brian Ferry).

The usual

In the time since we last spoke, I’ve revised the manuscript for my next book! I’ve traveled alone with my five-month-old baby to a family wedding on the other side of the country! I’ve felt like an Olympic gold medalist for having survived traveling alone with my five-month-old baby to a family wedding on the other side of the country! I’ve consumed biscuits and dark chocolate milkshakes and fingers and cheeks, listened to Fugazi and almost remembered what it felt like to be 15 and have a crush on Guy Picciotto, tried two recipes for healthy cookies, decided that I’m not into healthy cookies, made my daughter wear a pair of sunglasses that were intended for a doll, and rekindled my love for farro. The usual.

I don’t know what made me think of farro again, but I’m glad I did. A few years ago, I went through a period of cooking it regularly, but then I forgot about it. I’m good at that. Farro went the way of this apple cake, these oatmeal popovers, this egg salad, this broccoli soup, and this boiled kale, foods that I love but almost never think to eat. But: yesterday I bought farro for the third time in less than a month. The third time! LOOK OUT.

A billion (or five and a half) years ago, when Brandon and I got married, one of the dishes that our caterer made for the reception was farro with caramelized onions, carrots, celery, and feta, with a red wine vinaigrette. I didn’t have much experience with farro, but I liked the sound of it when they suggested it, and it was, in fact, terrific: chewy, nutty, and complex. In its uncooked state, it looks a little like barley, and once cooked, it looks a lot like brown rice, but its flavor is more interesting and lighter somehow than either.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been cooking big batches of farro and stashing it in the fridge, scooping out a few spoonfuls at lunch or dinner as the base for a hearty salad. I’ll bet a lot of you do this, too, with some grain or other? At first, I threw in whatever I found in the crisper drawer and any leftovers that were lying around, but slowly, over a number of days, I settled on a few ingredients that got along especially well. The flavors in my salad are not unlike the farro salad from our wedding, but mine is quicker to make, more of a bang-it-together thing. I’ve been sitting on this post for a while, wondering if this recipe - if you can even call it a recipe - was too simple to write about, but then I decided that if I like it enough to eat it a few times a week, well, you know, what the hell, why not.

Let’s call it a warm farro salad with chickpeas, feta, and spicy dressing.  You’ll need a good-sized bowl - maybe the kind they call a pasta bowl?  I use a medium-sized mixing bowl, because I’m a classy lady. Whatever you’re using, put a nice amount of warm farro in the bottom of it, and then pile on a spoonful of chickpeas, maybe half of a sliced carrot, a handful each of chopped escarole and radicchio, and a generous hunk of feta, crumbled. You could also add some small pieces of cooked chicken, if you want, or leftover steak or braised pork, and other raw or roasted vegetables. Everything is negotiable, except the feta. DO NOT SKIP THE FETA. Then you douse your salad with a dressing that’s essentially nuoc cham: fish sauce, lime juice, sugar, water, garlic, and a chile. You are now ready to sit down with your mixing bowl and eat.  There’s something very special, I think, about the union of farro and feta, and then the chickpeas, the bitter chicories, the sweet carrots, and the salty-hot dressing: it’s crunchy and juicy, now warm, now cold. It was my dinner yesterday and my lunch the day before, and if I’m lucky, it’ll be my dinner tonight.

P.S. My friend and Spilled Milk co-host Matthew Amster-Burton has written a new book, and he’s just launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund it. It’s called Pretty Good Number One: An American Family Eats Tokyo, and like everything Matthew writes, it’s funny, insightful, and very smart. (...Annnnnnd now he is blushing.)


Warm Farro Salad with Chickpeas, Feta, and Spicy Dressing

I’ve found farro in Seattle at Whole Foods, PCC, and some grocery stores, or you can get it from ChefShop. I like the farro grown by Bluebird Grain Farms of Winthrop, Washington. Farro should be soaked briefly before cooking, although Matthew often uses Trader Joe’s quick-cooking farro – done in 10 minutes! – and says that it’s great. In any case, I give instructions below for cooking standard farro, and hey, feel free to scale up and cook an even bigger batch, if you’d like. From one cup of uncooked farro, I wind up with enough cooked farro for three or four servings of this salad.

Also: among types of feta, I like French feta best.

For the farro:
1 cup farro
½ tsp. salt

For the dressing:
3 Tbsp. fish sauce
3 Tbsp. lime juice
2 to 3 Tbsp. (25 to 35 g) brown sugar
6 to 8 Tbsp. water, to taste
1 medium garlic clove, minced or pressed
1 Thai chile, very thinly sliced

For the salad:
Chickpeas, either canned (drained and rinsed) or cooked from dried
Escarole, coarsely chopped or sliced
Radicchio, coarsely sliced
Carrots, sliced into rounds
Feta, coarsely crumbled

Put the farro in a medium (2 ½- to 3-quart) saucepan, add cold water to cover, and set it aside to soak for 30 minutes. Then drain the farro, put it back into the saucepan, and add 3 cups of cold water and ½ teaspoon salt. Bring to a boil; then reduce the heat to maintain a gentle simmer and cook until tender but still a little chewy, about 45 minutes. It’s up to you, really, how “done” you want your farro. At 30 minutes, mine is usually too tough, but a few minutes later, it’s just right: al dente, but not exhausting to chew. When it’s ready, drain it, and either use it while it’s warm or transfer it to a storage container for later use. (Covered and chilled, cooked farro will keep for a few days, easy.)

To make the dressing, combine the fish sauce, lime juice, 2 tablespoons of the brown sugar, 6 tablespoons of the water, the garlic, and chile in a small bowl. Whisk well. Taste: if it’s too pungent, add more water 1 tablespoon at a time. If you’d like a little more sweetness, add more brown sugar ½ tablespoon at a time. (Covered and chilled, the dressing will keep for three days to a week.)

To assemble a portion of salad, scoop out a couple of large spoonfuls of farro – maybe 1/3 to ½ cup – and put it in a wide bowl. If the farro is cold, you might want to microwave it for 45 seconds or so, to warm it. That’s what I do. Or you could put it in a small ovenproof dish, covered, and bake it for a few minutes to warm it. Or you can just leave it cold. Add a large spoonful of chickpeas, a good handful each of escarole and radicchio, and maybe half of a carrot, sliced. Top with a generous amount of feta, and then drizzle some dressing – maybe a tablespoon? Or to taste – over the whole thing. Toss, and eat.

We have a rhythm

June is six months old. She has two teeth, monstrous thighs, and is my favorite person in the world. Totally predictable, I know, but I really never thought I would say that about someone who spends most of the day drooling and pulling my hair.  Sometimes she looks at me tenderly, places a dimpled hand on either side of my face, and then lunges forward, giggling, and savagely bites my nose.  She suits me so well.  Really, she’s perfect for me.  We have a rhythm.

I sent my revised manuscript to my editor in the final days of February. A few days later, we lost our manager at Delancey and Essex. Though losing a staff member always makes me and Brandon feel mopey for a while, the timing was eerily right.  I hadn’t been involved in the day-to-day operation of the restaurants since last summer, shortly before June was born, but suddenly, with the book out the door, I had some time on my hands. And anyway, I’m not very good at not having a project. So I’m back to managing Delancey and Essex. My job isn’t the kind of thing that most people fantasize about when they think about opening a restaurant; it doesn’t involve a chef’s coat, gleaming copper pots, copious booze, or anything that could remotely be described as badass.  I do payroll, front-of-house scheduling, organizing, filing, e-mail tending, and polite whip-cracking.  I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but I like it. I like the quiet aspect of it, the behind-the-scenes-ness of it, the tangibility of it, the fact that I get to make things work better.  It brings a kind of satisfaction that’s very different from writing.

So the days are full. I’m at the restaurant during the daytime hours on Wednesdays and Fridays, and June and I also stop in most evenings, before she goes to bed. June drools on everyone within a ten-foot radius and, when she’s feeling sporting, lets me dance her along the bar like a marionette.  I know she will see in us the many stresses and frustrations that come with owning a small business, but when I think about her growing up there, in that community, with so many people who care about her and have known her since she was born, I feel glad in a way that I don’t have words for.

In any case, it’s true what they say: there’s never a dull moment.  On Thursday, I got a splinter in my tongue while using chopsticks to eat bibimbap. On Friday, I dreamt that my mother confessed that she doesn’t like my bangs, something I have long suspected. A few nights before that, I read a New Yorker article about Ruth Bader Ginsburg while taking a hot bath. I don’t like to make a big deal of it, but yes, the rumors you’ve heard are real: my lifestyle was the inspiration behind Katy Perry’s hit song "Last Friday Night." Tonight I might throw caution to the wind and mix up the dry ingredients for tomorrow morning’s baked oatmeal.

If you’ve been in a bookstore or on the Internet anytime in the past couple of years, you’ve no doubt heard of Heidi Swanson’s wonderful Super Natural Every Day, and you’ve probably also heard of her wonderful baked oatmeal.  I first tasted it shortly after Heidi’s book came out, when Jess came to visit and made a batch, and then Lecia brought some over one morning when we met for a walk, and now, for the past few months, I’ve been making it nearly every other week.  Maybe you’ve been making it, too, but I wanted to mention it, in case you haven’t.  Because you should.

There’s a tiny chance that some of my love for this oatmeal has to do with the fact that I can assemble most of it the night before.  (I am not so great at making a hot breakfast with Tiny Nose-Biter around, or not unless it’s mostly done when I climb out of bed.)  There’s also a tiny chance that I love this recipe because I will eat anything that involves oats.  (The only way I would probably not eat oats is if I found them in my coat pocket, tangled in lint.  Probably.)  But mostly, I love this oatmeal because it pushes all the buttons that I like breakfast to push: it’s sweet but not too sweet and filling but not too filling, and it makes you feel totally virtuous about eating maple syrup and butter.  Plus: the leftovers might be my favorite snack, whether hot, room temperature, or cold.

Happy week! Go forth.


Baked Oatmeal
Adapted from Heidi Swanson’s Super Natural Every Day

I’ve made this oatmeal a few times with walnuts, as described below, but I also like to make it with almonds or pecans, either whole or coarsely chopped. It’s nice to toast the nuts beforehand – and it’s easy: just a few minutes on a sheet pan in a 350°F oven, until they smell fragrant – but I often skip it. No harm done.

I’m a big believer in whole milk, and I think this recipe needs its fat and richness. (I’ve had it with 1% and was disappointed in the result.) Actually, the next time I make this oatmeal, I might try replacing a cup of the milk with coconut milk.  That could be exciting.  I might also throw in a half-cup of unsweetened shredded coconut.  I’ve added coconut before - about a quarter-cup, or 25 grams - and though I can’t say that I was aware of its presence, Brandon and I both agreed that the baked oatmeal was especially good that morning.

As for the fruit, you could use any berry, including frozen ones. I don’t even worry about thawing them first.  I suggest a range of amounts for the berries below, one that’s very berry-y and one that’s less so.

2 cups (200 grams) rolled oats
½ cup (60 g) walnut halves, toasted and chopped
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 ½ teaspoons ground cinnamon
½ teaspoon fine sea salt
¾ to 1 ½ cups (90 to 185 g) blueberries
2 cups (475 ml) whole milk
1/3 cup (80 ml) maple syrup
1 large egg
3 tablespoons (45 grams) unsalted butter, melted and cooled slightly
2 teaspoons vanilla extract

Preheat the oven to 375°F with a rack in the top third of the oven.

In an 8-inch square baking dish, mix together the oats, the nuts, baking powder, cinnamon, and salt. (This part can be done the night before, if you like, to make things easier in the morning.) Scatter the berries evenly over the oat mixture.

In another bowl, whisk together the milk, maple syrup, egg, about half of the butter, and vanilla. Slowly drizzle the milk mixture over the oats. Gently give the baking dish a couple of thwacks on the countertop to make sure the liquid moves down through the oats.

Bake for 35 to 45 minutes, or until the top is golden and the oat mixture has set. Remove from the oven, and allow to cool for a few minutes. If the remaining butter has solidified, rewarm it slightly; then drizzle it over the top of the oatmeal. Serve.

Yield: about 6 servings

April 7

I’ve been feeling a little under the weather for the past few days, but I wanted to pop in. I promise not to breathe on you.

June is going to be seven months old on April 9, this Tuesday, which would have been my dad’s 84th birthday. Brandon says that she has my eyes, and if it’s true, then she has my dad’s eyes, because that’s where I got mine.

She and I are flying to Oklahoma City on Wednesday, to visit my mother. June’s first trip to my hometown, to the house where I grew up! It feels like a big deal. But if you’re on our plane, I would like to apologize in advance: June is chatty, and by chatty, I actually mean screechy, shrieky, chirpy, gargly, and generally deafening. It’s totally adorable, and then you lose your hearing.

In any case, we were roughhousing in the living room this afternoon, before Brandon went to work, and I took these pictures. I don’t know how to explain it, but June is developing a real sense of humor. She’s a very funny person. Or maybe I’m just amused because I am her mother. Probably. I’m going soft.

I have a cream cheese pound cake recipe to share with you shortly, as soon as I can type it up - before I leave, I hope! - but in the meantime, some nice things for your Monday:

I always appreciate what Sarah has to say.

Mr. Rogers + a rad breakdancing kid = yesssssss (via Youngna).

I would like to someday cook like Margot Henderson, and I’d like to live in her house, while I’m at it. 

Sarah Farr of Harbor Herbalist blends excellent teas, and her monthly tea subscription is brilliant.

Back soon.

I'm feeling daring

I have finally learned how to use the espresso machine that Brandon chased down on eBay and gave me for Christmas in 2011!  The best part of this development, however, is not the double espresso that I can now enjoy each morning while sitting on the living room floor with June, reading Madeline or singing along (poorly, loudly) to our favorite song, “On the Road Again.” No, no, the best part is that while I make said double espresso, I get to recite aloud for June and Alice, in my best/worst Italian accent, the molto gag-worthy slogan written in loopy script on the side of the machine:

For Music ~ Puccini

For Art ~ Bernini 

For Espresso ~ Pasquini

In other news, do you know what goes nicely with espresso? Cream cheese pound cake. CREAM CHEESE POUND CAKE! (Holy holy holy, finally. Delancey and Essex have been needy lately, heedlessly gobbling up my time. Stupid restaurants. My sincerest apologies.)

Listen: I’m not normally pound cake person.  Not a real pound cake person. I may have gotten riled up about a pistachio pound cake last year, and there was that sweet potato pound cake a few years ago, and I may have put a berry pound cake recipe in my first book, and I may have even found my way around a few Sara Lee frozen pound cakes as a teenager - remember the crust on top? The way it was soft and spongy and eerily uniform in its brownness? I loved that part - but those were all special cases. I don’t get wildly excited about pound cake as a general concept.  I can get behind a nice, plain cake, maybe a busy-day cake, but pound cakes are often too plain, too heavy, too doorstoppy.  Pound cake, in the classic sense, strikes me mostly as a vehicle for transporting strawberries (or other fruits) and whipped cream from a plate into my mouth. I know that, in the eyes of many, there’s all kinds of sacrilege in this paragraph, but I’m feeling daring.

All that said, this pound cake is exceptional. It caught me off guard. I was looking for a way to use up some cream cheese that I had lying around, and I came upon the recipe in the excellent book Southern Cakes, by Nancie McDermott. That’s the same book that gave us the sweet potato pound cake, so it’s not surprising that this cream cheese version is spot-on. But really, it’s a keeper. Lovely is the right word for it. There’s nothing revolutionary about the ingredients - just your basic pound cake building blocks, plus a pack of cream cheese - but it’s unusually moist and even-crumbed, with a top crust that crackles like a wafer. And as you begin to chew, here comes the cream cheese, a gentle tang kicking through the sweetness. I love the way McDermott describes it: she says that the cream cheese makes a “quiet little sensation.” Am I alone in being unable to use the word sensation without thinking of INXS, and then having to listen to this song a few times, feeling mopey about Michael Hutchence’s untimely death 16 years ago? Probably?

Anyway, I baked two loaves and froze one of them, and both Brandon and I noticed that the frozen cake, once thawed, was even better than the fresh one had been. This discovery makes me want to bake a half-dozen of these cakes and stash them away for future occasions that demand sweets on short notice. Like tomorrow’s breakfast.


Cream Cheese Pound Cake
Adapted from Southern Cakes, by Nancie McDermott

This recipe was shared with McDermott by one Suzanne O’Hara of Burlington, North Carolina, and it comes together with remarkable speed and ease. I think I’ll be making it often.

3 cups (420 g) all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
¼ teaspoon fine salt
2 sticks (226 g) unsalted butter, at room temperature
One 8-ounce (226 g) package cream cheese, at room temperature
3 cups (600 g) sugar
6 large eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Preheat the oven to 325°F. Grease and flour a 10-inch tube pan or two 9-by-5-inch loaf pans. (I also lined my pans with parchment, because it makes the cakes so easy to remove.)

In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, and salt.

In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, combine the butter and cream cheese, and beat on medium speed until soft and fluffy. Add the sugar, and continue to beat for about 2 minutes more, stopping once to scrape down the sides. Add the eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition. Beat in the vanilla. Reduce the mixer speed to low, and add the flour mixture in three doses, beating only until the flour is absorbed and scraping down the sides of the bowl as needed. Scrape the batter into the prepared pan or pans.

Bake for about 1 hour and 15 minutes (for a tube pan) or 55 to 60 minutes (for loaf pans), or until the cake is golden brown, pulling away from the sides of the pan, and a cake tester inserted into the center comes out clean. Transfer the cake to a wire rack, and cool completely before loosening the sides with a thin knife and removing the cake from the pan.

Eureka

You women who manage to keep up smart, articulate blogs while raising young children? You women who manage to keep up smart, articulate blogs while working and raising young children and doing all that household stuff that most of us wind up doing? I throw myself at your feet.  I don’t have anything remotely original or insightful to say on the subject; I just think you’re remarkable. I have childcare twelve hours a week, jobs with flexible hours, a supportive spouse, and a kid who (usually) sleeps well (please don’t let this jinx me, please don’t let this jinx me), and yet I fight to get to this space. Of course, part of the problem could be that, each night, when I sit down in front of the computer, I wind up lip-syncing to Fleetwood Mac on YouTube, inspecting my reflection in the window and wondering what kind of atrocities I would have to inflict upon my hair in order to pull off a convincing Stevie Nicks next Halloween.  (I WILL, OH, I WILL.)

The other night, after June was asleep and before I turned on Fleetwood Mac, I went down to the dungeon, also known as the garage, and dug up three boxes of old Polaroids. I was looking for two shots that I needed to scan and send to my editor for my next book, but instead I found approximately four thousand others that I had forgotten I ever took. I never found the two images that I actually needed - no doubt tucked away for “safekeeping,” never to be seen again - but I did find this:

Eureka! A broccoli pizza atop a shop vac!  And a crimini pizza and Brandon’s favorite very very sharp knife, on a cutting board, balanced haphazardly on a rung of an extremely dusty ladder!

These shots are from early 2009, the winter when we were building Delancey and testing recipes, shortly after Brandon finished building and curing the wood-burning oven but before the restaurant had anything resembling a kitchen.

I was slicing mushrooms that night on a folding card table, wearing the same gray hooded sweatshirt that I’m wearing at my desk this morning, only today it’s not crusted in drywall.  That night feels sort of romantic to me now, now that I know how it all turned out, but at the time, I was freezing, and it was dark in there and everything was covered in debris, and we were tired, always tired.

Yesterday June and I ate dinner at Delancey with a friend from our childbirth class and her nine-month-old daughter. I sat in one of the chairs that were stacked precariously in this photo, and June tasted (by which I mean sucked awkwardly on, and then wore) her father’s pizza for the very first time.  June, the child I had no idea I even wanted to have, back when I took this photo!

I am easily awed this morning.  This might be my espresso talking.

And Katie was our server. Sweet Katie! Still there, after three and a half years!  A billion years in Restaurant Time.

One day almost four years ago, in early June of 2009, the chef of the restaurant across the street, which was then A Caprice Kitchen but is now The Fat Hen, knocked on the door of Delancey. We were inside, doing some construction task or other, and she handed us a package wrapped in white paper.  It was a gift from the elderly lady who lived in the apartment behind her restaurant, she said, and the lady had asked her to deliver it to us.  I peeled off the tape and folded back the paper, and inside, there was a homemade cake, a dome of vanilla cake with vanilla frosting, sculpted into soft, feathery peaks.

The older lady never came to Delancey, and I never met her - though Brandon did once, and he reports that she was very shy.  She moved away at some point to a retirement home. There’s now a young couple in the apartment that was hers, and from what I can tell when I park my car on the street outside, it sounds like one of them plays the drums. But the residual warmth of her gesture struck me the other night in the garage, and I can still feel it.

June 4

Last night, it occurred to me that I had inadvertently neglected to write down something important: that June’s head smells like strawberry jam. I’ve thought about it for a long time, trying to make sure that was it, and now I’m certain: not strawberries, but strawberry jam.  She smells like something I would like to eat on buttered toast.  Now there’s a menu idea for Delancey.

Brandon bought himself a record player as an early Father’s Day present, and he’s been buying old records left and right. The other day he came home with Cat Stevens’s Tea for the Tillerman. The next morning, before he woke up, June and I were hanging out, like we do every morning, and I turned on the record player. June sat on my lap and played with the zipper on my sweatshirt while I drank my coffee, and we listened to Cat Stevens. And as my friend Andrea so eloquently put it, I had this feeling that these mornings of ours, and these days, they’re the good old days. I was telling my friend Ben about it later that evening, when he asked how my day had been, and he said that it sounded “death defyingly sweet.” I couldn’t have said it better.

A few of you have asked what June is eating these days, and the answer is: mostly breast milk. She will be nine months old on Sunday, old enough to be eating solids, but she’s only vaguely interested. I’m kind of glad, actually. I’m happy to take it slow. We’ve been giving her tastes of whatever we’re eating, so long as it seems manageable for her tiny mouth, and letting her take the lead. (In these photos, she was playing with a hunk of Matt Dillon’s wonderful sourdough bread.) I’ve read many different takes on the subject of feeding young children, and so far, what seems to work best for our family is to not worry too much about it. I hope we can sustain that feeling. We’ll try to make food that is reasonably good for us, and to create moments to sit down and eat that food as a family, and I trust that June’s body will know what it needs and when it needs it.  Maybe I’m naive.  I mean, of course I’m naive.  But mostly, I hope that June will grow up thinking of food as something fun, and not as a battleground.  Because as everyone knows, in any battle, the loser’s head gets eaten on buttered toast.  (Maybe I’ve been watching too much Game of Thrones?)

A few nights ago, June went down at seven, like she usually does. I poured myself a glass of wine and started going through some boxes of hand-me-downs that we’d picked up from friends that afternoon. A little before eight, she woke up crying. I let her go for a bit, hoping she’d settle back to sleep, but when she didn’t, I went into her room. I reached down in the dark and picked her up, and she burrowed her face into my shoulder and rubbed her eyes and grunted. I sat down in the rocker and held her while she continued to do her best impression of a mole in sunlight, and after a few minutes, I set her back down in the crib. She rolled onto her side and popped her thumb into her mouth, and I leaned over the railing and gave her a “back tickle,” the way my mother and my aunt Tina and my grandmother used to do for me, and as I looked at her in the faint light that trickled in under the blinds, I felt almost unbearably glad, like I might split right open.

Of course, there are less glad moments, like that sunny afternoon when I was feeling all lovey and we were about to take a walk, and I popped open the stroller and then turned to get June out of the car, only to find that, when June and I turned back to face said stroller, it was gone, having rolled down the driveway, careened around the corner, and overturned into the drainage ditch alongside the road. PARENT OF THE DECADE! You can rest assured that I will never, ever, ever again forget to set the brake on a stroller - or a car, or a toy car, or anything that moves.  Also, feeling lovey is dangerous.

June Pettit: Living Dangerously since September of 2012!

I’m trying to get back into the swing of cooking more than just eggs and roasted vegetables and banana bread, and hopefully I’ll soon have something to report about that.  But in the meantime, I’ll be Austin this weekend, speaking on a panel about storytelling at the BlogHer Food Conference.  I can’t wait! See you out there.

Told you so

Every so often, I encounter a recipe that makes me want to forgo the usual niceties of a post - the introduction, the story, the conclusion, the delicate foreplay - because that would only slow you down, when what you should really do is grab your shoes and make a list and run to the grocery store and throw some money at the cashier and run back home and make this immediately and I mean it, go, right now, DO IT.

One such recipe is Conchiglie with Yogurt, Peas, and Chile, from the stunning book Jerusalem, by Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi. Even June is all over it.

The only problem is that I made it for a late dinner a few nights ago, when the sun was already well into setting - which is really and truly very late, here in my northern city - and it was too dark to take a picture. Today I tried to take a picture of the photograph in the cookbook, but that didn’t pan out either.

(Yeah, yeah, my child owns a pair of elastic-waist jeggings.  In my defense, they were hand-me-downs.)

In any case, you can picture it yourself. First, you zizz some Greek yogurt, olive oil, peas, and garlic in a food processor until the mixture is an even shade of pale green. Then you heat a pot of water and boil some pasta in it, and while that’s going, you warm some pine nuts and chile flakes in a skillet filmed with olive oil until the nuts are golden and the oil is red, and you also heat some more peas in a little bowl of water scooped from the pasta pot.  When the pasta is ready, you drain it and fold it together with the yogurt sauce, the now-warm peas, some torn basil leaves, and some crumbled feta.  The hot pasta heats and loosens the sauce, and the overall effect is creamy but not heavy in the least, bright where you hit a basil leaf or a pea, salty where you hit a lump of feta. You scoop it into a bowl, spoon over some pine nuts and the chile oil, which brings that kind of low, creeping heat that makes your lips tingle, and as I scraped my bowl and went back to the kitchen for seconds, I decided it was the best thing I’ve made in a long, long time. (The best savory thing, I should clarify. Nothing compares to cake. Who do you think I am?)

Yesterday afternoon, June and I went to our friend Lecia’s house for a visit and an early dinner, and while we were sitting around on the floor, talking and catching up and watching June torment the family cats, Lecia mentioned that, the previous night, she’d made what she thought might be the best pasta she’d ever had.

“It has yogurt, and peas. I think you’d like it,” she said. “Have you heard of the book Jerusalem?” (!!!)

I told you so.


Pasta with Yogurt, Peas, and Chile
Adapted slightly from Jerusalem, by Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi

The original version of this recipe calls for conchiglie, or shell-shaped pasta, but you could use any small pasta shape you like: orecchiette, penne, farfalle, and so on.

If you have some exotic type of dried chile, like Urfa chile, Aleppo chile, or Kirmizi biber, you lucky lucky dog, this is a great place to use it. If not, you can use regular red pepper flakes. I happened to have some Aleppo chile, and though it was ground, not in flakes, and probably a few years old, it worked beautifully. Oh, and if you’re worried about the amount of heat, consider starting with a little less of the chile than what is called for - or just don’t put much chile oil on your pasta.

2 ½ cups (500 g) whole-milk Greek yogurt
2/3 cup (150 ml) olive oil
2 medium cloves garlic, crushed or pressed
1 pound (500 g) fresh or thawed frozen peas
Kosher salt
1 pound (500 g) pasta shapes of your liking
Scant ½ cup (60 g) pine nuts
2 teaspoons Turkish or Syrian chile flakes, or red pepper flakes
1 2/3 cups (40 g) basil leaves, coarsely torn
8 ounces (240 g) feta cheese, coarsely crumbled

In the bowl of a food processor, combine the yogurt, 6 tablespoons (90 ml) of the olive oil, the garlic, and 2/3 cup (100 g) of the peas. Process to a uniform pale green sauce, and transfer to a large mixing bowl.

Bring a large pot of water to a boil, and salt it until tastes like pleasantly salty seawater. Add the pasta, and cook until it is al dente. While the pasta cooks, warm the remaining olive oil in a small frying pan over medium heat. Add the pine nuts and chile flakes, and cook for 4 minutes, or until the pine nuts are golden and the oil is deep red. Also, warm the remaining peas in some boiling water (you could scoop out a bit of the pasta water for this); then drain.

Drain the cooked pasta into a colander, and shake it well to get rid of excess water that may have settled into the pasta’s crevices. Add the pasta gradually to the yogurt sauce; adding it all at once may cause the yogurt to separate. Add the warm peas, the basil, feta, and 1 teaspoon kosher salt. Toss gently. Serve immediately, with pine nuts and chile oil spooned over each serving.

Yield: about 6 servings

June 28

Friday!  Yessssssss.

It’s just after noon, and I’m sitting in Essex, my “office” by day, with an imposing to-do list. But before I put on my blinders and get down to it, I wanted to stop by and share a few things that I enjoyed this week. It’s going to be hot (84 degrees! Sunny! HOTTTTT!) in Seattle this weekend, and weekends aren’t really our weekends, living as we do in Restaurant Land, but I have plans nonetheless to get new tires and a rack for my bike, so I can start riding to the office next week. (My last real bike ride was at 19 weeks pregnant and a very bad idea.) In any case, I hope you’ve got a great weekend ahead.

I’ve mentioned Kate Christensen’s writing before, but in case you’re not yet reading her work, please allow me to direct you to this post, which feels so... so... right. I can’t wait for her new book.

A short and funny but useful flower tutorial on the World’s End Farm blog.  I will never be known for flower arranging - ha ha ha please - but I would kill to see things, just for a second, the way Sarah does.

This post of Ganda’s took my breath away.

I want to drink this immediately.

This photo of Katie’s pointed my way to this spectacular-looking cake, and now that strawberry season has arrived in the Pacific Northwest, it’s finally time to try it.

An important piece about women, ambition, and power.  I think it’ll be on my mind for a while.

And last but not least, we’re teaming up with Book Larder to host a dinner in celebration of the new cookbook from the geniuses behind Franny’s!  July 29!  Tickets are available now!  I can’t wait.

Cheers.

This thing is on

Maybe you will remember a day, more than two years ago now, when I announced that I was writing a new book, and that, if all went according to plan, it would be out in the spring of 2013?  And then maybe you will also remember that nothing went according to plan, in ways that were hard and good-but-hard and then great and really, really great, and here we are, with no book, in July of 2013. Maybe you will join me, then, in heaving a giant sigh of relief - more than that: a great wind, a hurricane-force gust - that Delancey is not only done, donedonedone, but that it now has a cover.  A cover!  This thing is ON.

I will tell you something: the process of arriving at a book cover is, as an author, somewhat harrowing. First, you write a book. You do this by huddling over your computer for a while, alternately feeling like a Nobel laureate and something lower than a bacterium, eating a lot of peanut butter (on bread, on toast, on a spoon) and making mental lists of what you wish you were doing instead of writing. When you can’t stand your manuscript anymore but can’t think of anything else to do with it, you send it to your editor, and she edits it and sends it back, and then you revise it, and you repeat these last steps a couple more times - or three, in my latest case. Then your book goes to a copyeditor for fine-tuning, and you crack open a beer and start doing all that stuff you had wanted to do back when you were lashed to the desk, writing, and then, just when you’re starting to relax and think about filling up the kiddie pool and sitting in it all evening, you get an e-mail from your editor with a proposed cover attached.  Dun dun dun dunnnnnnn.

Before I wrote my first book, and before we opened Delancey and Essex, I was briefly a book publicist at a university publishing house. We mostly published scholarly monographs, the kind you would use in a graduate school course, and my job was primarily to drum up reviews and other media attention for them - not an easy task, and one at which I did not excel - but one tiny part of my job was also to weigh in on potential covers for our books. This usually involved me and my colleagues in the marketing department staring at a wall of mock-ups, our chins in our hands, trying to figure out which cover a) best fit the book in question, b) would be legible online when reduced to the size of a thumbnail, and c) would appeal to readers and, most importantly, sell.  Striking that balance was a tricky proposition, and that was even before the author, who would have her own very strong opinion, was consulted. Now, as the author in that equation, I feel slightly queasy when I think about the negotiations and the back-and-forth that go into producing a book cover. I try not to think about it - kiddie pool kiddie pool kiddie pool - until I have to.

So it was with trepidation that I opened the e-mail from my editor with "Delancey jpegs" in the subject line, and with relief that I saw the cover up there, the one with the photo of the exterior of Delancey, warm and glowy, chalkboard in the window, people on the bar stools, chipped paint on the facade and ugly doorknob and all.  I had no idea what kind of cover this book would get, but this one feels exactly right.  Delancey is not really a cookbook, though it does contain twenty recipes, and it’s not really a book about opening a restaurant, per se, although it is.  It’s a book about a man with a big idea and a woman (hi!) who wasn’t entirely sold on that idea, a book about learning to work with yeast, fire, heavy machinery, and each other.  It’s a book about muddling through, figuring it out, eating a lot of pizza, making the most of what we got.  And though there were many moments when I wished the book would just write itself and leave me out of it and hurry up, I can now say that I’m glad the writing took as long as it did, that it was interrupted the way it was, that I was granted time to live the story and tell it in a way that feels honest and complete. I am now so excited, and totally terrified, to share it with you.  Of course, it won’t be released until next May, but after all this time, that’s nothing. Nothing! Right? (RIGHT.)

Thanks, always, for being here.

Update: In the days since I posted this, I have learned that the photograph on the cover was taken by a fellow blogger who came to Delancey as a result of reading my first book and this blog. Incredible! I love that. Thank you, Conni, for taking such a beautiful shot, and for letting us use it.

A rare benefit

I’ve started this post four different times now, on five different days. I’m already tired of it, and I still haven’t figured out how to start. Does that ever happen to you? Do you do what I do and take a "break" to raid the walk-in at Delancey for chocolate chip cookie dough? Do you tell yourself, What harm could it really do if I listened to Freedom '90 again? Do you ever wonder if you’ve missed your chance to be a dancer in a Janet Jackson video? Shall we start this thing already?

First, I want to tell you that I was elated by your response to Delancey. Totally elated. Ecstatic. Even slightly stoned. I’m still coming down from it. Thank you so very, very much. And HURRY UP, MAY OF 2014!

Now, speaking of Delancey: when I was cleaning up the office there a couple of weeks ago, I found a large container of shredded, unsweetened coconut.  We’d been using it to make macaroons that were served with a key lime mousse, but the mousse was no longer on the menu, and the coconut wasn’t flagged for another use, or not yet.  So I took it home - a rare benefit of being the unfortunate person charged with maintaining the office!  I WIN THIS TIME - and made something with it that we liked so much, and ate so quickly, that I made it again less than a week later.  The recipe I’m talking about comes from Heidi Swanson’s wonderful Super Natural Every Day, a title that has recently joined the select group of favorite cookbooks that I keep on top of our refrigerator. It’s called a macaroon tart.

(For the record, June did not eat any, but she wished she could.)

What we have here, or what we had before we ate it all, is a buttery crust that tastes and crunches a little like shortbread, topped with hunks of soft summer fruit and a blanket of chewy macaroon. Heidi’s original recipe calls for studding the tart with blackberries, but I had some beautiful apricots on the counter, so I used them instead. I also threw in a few raspberries, but I preferred the apricots.  I loved the apricots. In fact, I want to call this an Apricot Macaroon Tart.  I think I will. And while I’m in the business of making bold statements, I should say that I also took liberties with the crust. I hope Heidi will still call me a friend. Her recipe calls for white whole wheat flour, but my niece Hillary is living with us this summer, and she’s gluten-intolerant, so I gathered up my courage and tried making a gluten-free version of the crust. I used a mixture of buckwheat, brown rice, and tapioca flours, and though I don’t know what the tart would taste like as Heidi intended it, I liked the toasty, nutty flavor of the buckwheat so much that I now can’t imagine the tart without it. Apricot, coconut, butter, buckwheat. I’m in.

Happy weekend.


Apricot Macaroon Tart
Adapted from Heidi Swanson’s Super Natural Every Day

A word (or many words) about flour: using Shauna’s 40/60 ratio for gluten-free baking, I whisked up a batch of all-purpose flour mix from 100 grams of buckwheat flour, 100 grams of brown rice flour, and 300 grams of tapioca flour.  (I then used 170 grams of this mixture in the recipe.)  I have no idea how well this mix of flours would work in other recipes, and I probably did everything wrong, but it worked nicely here, yielding a crust with a crunchy, slightly nubbly texture and great buckwheaty flavor.  The one thing that I will say, however, is that the crust wept a not-insignificant amount of butter onto the sheet pan.  I have to assume that this had something to do with the mix of flours I used, and their properties? Anyway, I doubt that the original recipe, as Heidi conceived it, has a butter-weeping problem.  In any case, consider yourself alerted. If your crust leaks a little butter onto the sheet pan, don’t worry.  That’s why the sheet pan is there.

And one more word about flour: even if you do eat gluten, as I do, you really should consider using some buckwheat flour. The next time I make this tart, I might try using a mixture of buckwheat flour and standard all-purpose flour - maybe one-third buckwheat and two-thirds all-purpose?  Not that white whole wheat flour or whole wheat pastry flour are not interesting enough, but I really love what buckwheat brings to this crust.

Oh, and if you find yourself without pistachios and are contemplating a trip to the grocery store: don’t worry about it.  I’ve forgotten to add the pistachios both times that I’ve made this tart, and though I imagine it would be prettier and maybe a little, little bit tastier with them, it’s wonderful without.

Finally, if you live in Seattle, I strongly recommend the apricots from Bill’s Fruits, a stand toward the Ballard Inn end of the Ballard Farmers’ Market.

For the crust:
1 ½ cups (170 g) white whole wheat flour, whole wheat pastry flour, or a mixture of flours (see above)
¾ cup (60 g) unsweetened finely shredded coconut
½ cup (100 g) sugar
½ tsp. fine sea salt
10 tablespoons (140 g) unsalted butter, melted and cooled slightly

For the filling:
2 cups (140 g) unsweetened finely shredded coconut
1/3 cup (70 grams) sugar
Pinch of fine sea salt
4 large egg whites
8 ounces (225 g) fresh apricots, pitted and quartered
1/3 cup (45 g) pistachios, chopped

Preheat the oven to 350°F. Butter a 9-inch round removable-bottom tart pan, and set it on a rimmed sheet pan.

To make the crust, combine the flour, coconut, sugar, and salt in a medium bowl. Stir to mix. Stir in the butter, and mix until the dough no longer looks dusty and all flour is absorbed. Press the mixture evenly into the bottom of the prepared pan: it should form a solid, flat layer. Bake for 15 minutes, or until barely golden. Remove from the oven, and set aside to cool for a few minutes.

While the crust bakes, prepare the filling. Combine the coconut, sugar, and salt in a medium bowl. Stir to mix. Add the egg whites, and mix until well combined. When the crust is baked, evenly distribute the apricots over it. Drop dollops of the filling over the fruit, using your fingers to nudge it into the spaces in between.

Bake for 20 to 30 minutes, until the peaks of the filling are deeply golden. Cool completely before topping with pistachios, slicing, and serving.

Yield: 8 to 12 slices, depending on how much you like dessert.

Nine

I am typing this post from the back office at Delancey, where I’m holed up, working on a deadline, while Brandon and Co. prepare a five-course meal for forty-five in celebration of a gorgeous new book. Deadline: I will destroy you. In more ways than one.



But I had to take a break to pop into this space, and to send up a cheer - if you can, in fact, hear me from back here behind the Essex walk-in - that it has been nine years today since this site was born. Nine! I was a delinquent graduate student then, giddy to be creating a space to write about things other than Michel Foucault and discourse analysis and anything described by the word liminal, and if you had told me what would happen in the nine years to come, I would have told you to stop teasing, that it was cruel. NINE years! I said to Brandon the other day that, oddly, I still feel like the same person I was that summer, when I was twenty-five and newly single and energetic and very eager to bake cakes, listening to a lot of Ted Leo and living in an apartment that overlooked a grocery store parking lot. Will I always feel like that person? I hope I will. I also hope that I will always feel as grateful as I do today, when I think about what has happened, and who has happened, in the last almost-decade.



Today, as it happens, is also our sixth wedding anniversary. And this morning I started planning a party - just a small one, mostly family and carrot cake and nothing remotely Pinterest-worthy - in celebration of June’s first birthday, which is coming up soon. It’s been a big day today, and also a happily ordinary one: a baby, a babysitter who showed up with new barrettes for the baby, a dog with an injured tail, a lot of work to do, a visit with a good friend, a lot of great food.





I took the pictures in this post on July 9 at Skagit River Ranch, where Brandon and his team spent the day cooking a dinner for Outstanding in the Field.  I am so proud of Brandon - that he was asked to do it, that he and his sous chef Ricardo "Regulator" Valdes made the most insane brisket I have ever eaten, that they managed to douse the flames when the smoker caught on fire with all of the pork inside, that the pork was perfect anyway, that he didn’t fall asleep on the long drive home. I somehow took no pictures of him that day, but he was there. Let the record show.

I started this blog for myself, because I needed it.  But because of it, I got a Brandon, and then a Delancey, and then an Essex, and this back office that I’m sitting in, and a June, and days like today, and nights like the one in these pictures - and along the way, you’ve been here, too.  Thank you.  I’m so glad for all of it.  And before I get any sappier tonight, I’m heading home to bed.

See you back here in a couple of days.