Asa

I haven't declared a summer soundtrack for a few years. But now I've got one for 2009. Everybody needs a favorite album to listen to with the windows down, cruising around in the heat of the summer sun. And the memories of each summer are inextricably linked to a group of songs, so that when you hear them again, the summer's warmth and meaningful events come wafting back to you.

This is my album for 2009: Asa (pronounced "ah-sha") by the artist of the same name. She's got just the right combination of jazz, soul, folk, and world flavor to get you dancing, yet there's a rich depth to her voice; an effortless musical gift that will keep delivering new subtleties with every repeat hearing.

Her radio hit, "Jailer," is a fun, reggae-influenced, sassy tune that gets better and better the louder you play it. (I think I've shared it with most of East Liberty and Highland Park now. Heh heh.)

The album doesn't gloss over life's inequities or pain -- if you know me, you're probably painfully aware that I seem to gravitate toward angsty, heartbroken artists -- but Asa has an optimism that shines through the blues. Just the fresh album I needed for 2009 summer adventures. Hope you enjoy it, too.

Adjusting

Someone told me yesterday that motherhood is pretty much just a series of adjustments and readjustments. Parents experience a progression of their children's stages -- from newborn to college graduation and everything in between -- and just when you get used to one phase, it's time for the next one to begin.

Actually, it seems like much of life is like this. Seasons come and go. We adults go through stages, too, even if they're not as dramatic as the developmental leaps our kids are making. This is perfectly natural.

But it does take time to adjust to each new stage in our lives, and I wonder how many people really give themselves the space to make healthy transitions; to fully enjoy each season and prepare themselves for the next one.

There's one thing that gives me comfort as I make space for healthy change. Adjusting is normal, and I should just expect that I'll spend the rest of my life doing it.

Creamy butternut pasta sauce

Squash has become almost an icon of American autumn. Yet, most of us are satisfied to arrange it artfully on the front steps and carve it into lanterns. I am definitely a fan of both of these uses, but I'm also a strong proponent of eating it.

Squash is full of the kinds of vitamins and minerals that most of us don't get enough of: vitamin A, vitamin C, and vitamin E (antioxidants!); folic acid; and potassium. It's also quite filling and (in my opinion) incredibly yummy.

You do have to work a bit for that nutrition, though. But I promise, the creamy, garlicky pasta sauce I made with it today is totally worth the effort.

First you have to peel, chop, and de-seed the squash. This is the hardest part. Use a sharp knife and consider this an opportunity to get out your aggression for the day.

I like to separate the neck from the bulb -- this makes it easier to chop into segments.

Then it's time to roast it with garlic, olive oil, salt, and pepper. It's pretty easy from there -- just purée it in the blender with some half-and-half.

Squash on the front steps is beautiful. But you have to admit, so is this.

















And this (the finished product). It'll go into the freezer for use on cheese or veggie ravioli, with a few walnuts sprinkled on top.

And when it's all over, it's time for a turkey provolone sandwich with cranberry mayo (compliments of Mr. Incredible).















Happy butternutting!

Butternut Squash Pasta Sauce

1 medium butternut squash (about 1 1/2 pounds)
1 Tbsp. olive oil
1/2 tsp. dried rubbed sage
coarse salt and ground pepper
5 garlic cloves, peel on
1 cup half-and-half

Preheat oven to 375°. Trim, peel, and de-seed squash. (Halve crosswise to separate bulb from neck, then halve both pieces lengthwise.) Cut into 2-inch chunks; transfer to a baking sheet.

Toss with oil and sage and season generously with salt and pepper. Scatter garlic around squash. Roast until squash is tender, about 40 minutes, tossing once halfway through.

Remove and discard garlic skins. Transfer squash and garlic to blender; purée. With motor running, add half-and-half and process until smooth. Add some water, if necessary, to achieve desired consistency. Continue to process until smooth.

Season again with salt and pepper to taste and freeze for a quick and delicious topping for ravioli or just plain pasta. Serve with chopped walnuts or pecans on top.

[Note: my butternuts, grown with love in Dillsburg, Pa., amounted to about 8 pounds together, so I quadrupled the recipe above. This yielded a lot of sauce, but it also means I have plenty on hand for those weeknight dinners when I have no time to make anything else.]

Of apple butter and autumn-colored yarn

As September draws to a crisp, cool close, I’m happily overwhelmed by the rich colors of the season. From the pale green and red painted leaves—just starting to turn—to the glossy, deep brown of my apple butter, neatly contained in timeless glass jars with brassy-colored rims . . . these are my comfort colors.

Rich reddish-brown chestnuts with blackened ends scattered across a grey sidewalk—

The deep, vibrant coppers, teals, and browns of the chunky, hand-painted yarn I’m using to knit a baby blanket—

The quilted brown of my bedspread, next to the creams and whites of our bedroom carpet and curtains, against the dusky green of our walls—

The glossy, almost waxy orange of my solitary $1 pumpkin against the creamy tan of butternuts ready to be roasted and eaten—

These are a few of my favorite [fall] things.

Nesting

I’m making apple butter this weekend. The apples – an entire paper grocery bag’s worth of Macintoshes – are sitting by the window in the dining room, filling the air with their crisp sweetness.

It feels good to be making apple butter again. Last year we couldn’t get ourselves and our ramshackle house together in time to make it happen, and as a result, it felt like we had cheated ourselves (and all the friends and family who enjoy our apple butter) out of the enjoyment of autumn. If I have energy, I may end up making a second batch this year; I can already see the jars flying off the shelf for gifts, leaving none for me!

I’ll return with an update on the aroma and the general apple butter-making experience later this week or next.

In other food news, Mr. Incredible and I have decided that jasmine rice is the only acceptable rice for Thai food. After getting a little tired of the super-cheap Goya white rice we’ve had in our pantry for eons and the brown basmati – which is great, but doesn’t go with everything – I sprang for a bag of jasmine rice the other day. We’ve been making a lot of Thai food recently – more often than Indian, which has been a staple in the past – so I thought it was fitting. Well, fitting is not the word. It’s sticky, but it holds its shape. Moist but not mooshy. Slightly translucent, but a rice of substance nonetheless. In other words, it’s perfect to receive that coconutty gravy with its range of meats and vegetables and aromatic basil garnish that we all know and love so well: Thai curry.

I’m still stocking the freezer and finding ways to cook the randomness it contains. Last night I added cottage pie to the growing premade meal section, and also discovered I have a few challenging items to use up: a pound of phyllo dough, a large bag of accumulated chicken bits intended for stock, a small tub of what I think is last fall’s tomato sauce, and several bags of pitted plums.

My last attempt at spanakopita was delicious but time-consuming and only used up half a pound of phyllo. I do, however, remember a recipe for modified baklava with pistachios, as well as one for a Greek spinach pie, which both call for the phyllo to be cut up and piled loosely on the top of the dish – not authentic, but a definite time-saver. And since I do most of my cooking after 8 p.m. now – the time of day when I feel most pregnant – that’s pretty appealing.

I guess I probably need to make some chicken stock, too, and I have a new way of dealing with the plums: coffeecake! It’s an unexpected combination, but the cooked, gooey tartness of the plums actually works well in this context. I foisted my first plum coffeecake experiment on our church sometime in August, and although no one had any idea what they were eating, it was a definite hit.

This obsession with canning and stocking is fairly typical for me at this time of year. Yet I can’t help but think that the impulse to stock up for the cold winter has been intensified this year, both by the realization that, as the semester goes on, our finances will likely get tighter and tighter, and that by the end of the semester, there’ll be another mouth to feed. So am I nesting? Perhaps . . . although I’d hate to admit that I am participating in a clichéd, hormone-induced rite of pregnancy. I’ve generally thought of nesting as a flurry of wallpapering and painting and rearranging the nursery, but I suppose it’s possible that nesting could take other forms, such as stocking up on food.

Pregnancy aside, this is definitely the time of year for squirreling away nuts for the long winter. What are you preserving, stocking, freezing, or saving for the cold months?

Stocking the freezer

Wow, it's been a long time -- and I still feel like I don't have a lot to say. What have I been up to these past weeks? Mostly just eating, sleeping, working, and cooking. No, seriously, that's about it.

But then, it is that time of year to gather all the ripe fruits and veggies and find some way to store them for the otherwise bland, hungry winter ahead. Here's what I've been stocking the freezer and the basement shelves with recently:

• 21 jars of peaches (together, my mom and I canned 42 jars on a very hot Saturday in Pittsburgh)
• Aromatic basil-tomato pasta sauce
• Pureed pear baby food (the only thing I could think of to use up the abundance of pears that were ripening in our backyard)
• Curried carrot soup
• Creamy carrot soup (we like carrot soup, okay?)
• Cheeseburger pie
• Deep dish tacos
• Several bags of corn, fresh off the cob

I'm hoping to make a nice batch of apple butter this year, and I may make some baby food with some of the exceedingly cheap and good-looking squash that's beginning to dominate the farmer's market. I'll probably continue to stock the freezer with a few more meals for those cold winter nights soon after the baby arrives. But other than that, I think I'm just about done making my winter provisions.

So even though my blog has been going through somewhat of a famine, it looks like the Brubakers won't starve this winter. :)

Country roads / take me home

You’d think, living in the middle of one of the most backwoods cities in the country, that I’d have just about enough of the country here in Pittsburgh. Also, considering that our fair city is one of the most tree-lined in the nation, I really do have a lot to be grateful for when it comes to shade and freshly made oxygen balancing out the oppression of the urban jungle.

But somehow, it just ain’t enough for this country girl. On our way home to Dillsburg last weekend to visit with friends and family, Lewis the mutt and Mr. Incredible just about got drunk on fresh spring air flowing through the car as we passed into Central Pennsylvania (it smelled good to me, too, but I was the designated driver and had to control myself).

We love our neighbors, the diversity of the people around us, the many events and opportunities the city offers (especially for foodies like us) . . . but this is what we miss:

The willow tree in our old backyard. It was probably destined to die sometime soon anyway, but the way it swayed in the breeze, thrashed in thunderstorms and provided a 15-foot diameter of dappled shade—I will never stop missing that.

Driving down the road in the dark. The city never sleeps, so they say, for which I’m grateful, when I’m a pedestrian after dark. But on the other hand, it never really gets dark. There’s something seductive about driving down a main country road in the dark: it makes you want to run away with the person you love and follow whatever crazy dreams you’ve always had, but never acted on.

Having a yard where our dog can run around and poop. That’s probably enough explanation for that topic.

Seasons in the country. We have spring in the city, yes, and it is stunning in its own way, as flowering trees and shrubs lend extra grace to century-old architecture that you’d never find in the country. But spring in the country means that when the trees begin to leaf out, you see masses—even mountains—of bright green tips against dark bark. And when trees bloom, there are clouds of white and pink blossoms filling the sky. You can’t miss it, and you can’t help being overcome by the drama of country seasons.

That’s probably only the short list of what we miss. We also miss our friends and our family . . . although in some cases, moving away has only shown us how strong our relationships are.

We’ll move back to the country someday to start our commune (any takers? I’m serious), and when we do I’m sure we’ll miss the comforts of city life, like only filling up our gas tank once a month, only needing one car, not having a yard to mow and living on the same block as our friends from church. We’ll miss Trader Joe’s and the other three grocery stores within a mile and a half of our house. And the convenience of the farmer’s market.

But overall, when we move away from the city, I’m pretty sure that those country roads are going to take us home to the place where we belong.

(Not West Virginia, though. I hope.)

Bare legs on a cool spring day

It is a joy to put on a flouncy skirt on the first of May;
To revel in the freedom of bare feet in soft flat shoes—
No tights, no nylons, no pants—
No constraints.

It is a shock to walk outside in a flouncy skirt on the first of May;
Though it’ll be seventy-one later it’s forty-three now—
Only eleven degrees between freezing and spring—
I must be nuts.

It is a relief to feel warm rain on a flouncy skirt on the first of May;
It soothes the leg hairs that have grown 1/8 inch in the cold air—
Drops falling slowly and warm puddles forming promise a warmer day—
I can’t wait.

The best thing about Halloween

Is that when you're riding the bus and the subway, and walking around town, you get to try to figure out if people are wearing a costume, or if that's their normal look.

September hope

There is something about these early autumn days that just invites dreams and wandering thoughts that have very few practical elements. Autumn is the season of renewed hope -- of gathering up all the pieces of your life and actually believing that something good could come of them.

It's not spring, by any means -- there is nothing poking up through the soil for the first time, and the pace of life is not quite so frantic or harsh as the rapid growth of spring. In early fall, the time for growth has come and gone, and some things haven't quite turned out like you thought they would. If spring is hopelessly, naively optimistic, then autumn is the season of mature hope, when you've seen hard times and know they will come again but you have renewed energy to press on in spite of the past. Failure and a general sense of doom may be looming in the distance, but autumn is the time for squinting at it from afar and saying to yourself, "I think I just might be able to beat this" -- whatever it is, it seems there's always something like that in my life come September.

This September, of course, there are a number of things -- among them, just surviving in this new environment. And so, on this sunny, cool afternoon that's driven me to sip steaming coffee and pull on a waffle-knit henley . . . I am staring down the loneliness, the financial discomfort, the frustration with the state of our house, the fear that I might keep worrying and hating myself for the rest of my life, the thought that this whole Pittsburgh experiment might just fail miserably . . . I am staring it all down from afar with that against-the-odds optimism, and thanking God for His renewing strength this September.

A random thought about music
I was listening to the radio today, and was again annoyed by the trend that music artists are taking to calling themselves by singularly band-like names. If you heard a song by Feist or Iron & Wine for the first time, would it be instantly obvious that these are individuals, rather than bands? And if you heard a song by Rilo Kiley, would you guess that Rilo Kiley is a band? Of course not! So why do they do it? I have a theory: they are setting us all up to be mocked and ridiculed by their nerdiest, most dedicated fans who laugh and say to each other, "ha ha, she doesn't even know that Rilo Kiley isn't a person; Rilo Kiley is a band!" Music artists like this are drawing boundary lines between "true" fans and casual listeners who aren't absolutely obsessed with them yet.

Now, I know what you're saying: "But Dulci, you like Sting." And for those of you who didn't know I like Sting, please don't feel like this has to come between us. I know most people don't like Sting, and that's O.K. -- I won't try to push old Police albums on you or anything. Anyway, I realize Sting is somewhat of an ambiguous title for an individual music artist. But there's a bit of a difference here; most people have no idea that Sting's real name is Gordon Matthew Thomas Sumner (I can see why he changed it -- Gord Sumner doesn't quite have the 80s rock appeal that Sting does). Whereas people like Leslie Feist have a sort of dual public identity; they have no qualms about telling people their real, full names, but on their albums, they go by their enigmatic stage name. See? There is a difference.

If you asked me to suggest an underlying social change that is contributing to this shift in the way that musicians refer to themselves, I could probably come up with some kind of B.S. about how today's artists are much more willing to openly admit that they lead a double life; that the person on stage and the person on the street are not the same by any means. But I'm afraid I'd have to do a great deal more research in order to really confirm that hypothesis, and like I said, it's B.S. anyway.

Feliz Navidad

The birthday girls . . . on ice

I'm 24 today. And Laura's 25.

And so we celebrated.

Celebration isn't something I feel I'm naturally good at. I have this Anabaptist work ethic that tends to keep me from celebratory actions--after all, there's always something "better" to do.

But is there? I don't know about that.

To mark our mid-twenties, the three of us went out for a lovely Italian meal (which I now have the task of bleaching out of my white shirt!) followed by some particularly graceful laps around the local ice rink. It was Mr. Incredible's first time on skates (which the rental guy assured him were razor-sharp!) and he did wonderfully, even making friends with another first-timer, who was about 7 years old, and kept him updated on her spectacular wipe-outs. Laura and I did our best to recall the mad skating skills we'd learned years before, in the process bruising our feet in places that we don't even know what they're called. (Is there such a thing as an ankula?)

We topped off the evening with fribbleccinos, and sundaes at Friendly's, and drove home, rocking out to Van Morrison in the Element. Good times.

It's been a weird year . . . so many changes. I guess I'm a grownup now--a career woman, too--and I'm not always sure what I think about that. But I am thankful for another year spent on this earth, learning more about God and the world around me in my bumbling way. Here's to more learning--and less bumbling--in the year to come.

Enjoying my birthday gift!

Meta-thanksgiving

The annual question: what are you thankful for?

And my answer this year is weird. I mean, I could say that I'm thankful for my husband, my friends, my church, my family, my dog . . . it's all true. I am thankful for all those things. But this year, as everyone around me seemed to be thankful for the things I would usually mention, I was just thankful for Thanksgiving itself.

I am thankful for the break--for the time when pretty much everyone in the country decided to take it easy, hang out at home, or spend good times with friends and family. I have a hard time resting when I know people are working and trying to be productive without me . . . so as I continue to live this grown-up life in which I go to work five days a week, I'm beginning to appreciate holidays so much more. This holiday, for me, was Sabbath. I was freed up to rest--or at least, to not work--and I am so thankful. Heck, I'm thankful that I live a life that I can be grateful for.

Apple butter at Willow Cottage

Someone asked me the other day if I had any favorite fall traditions. I know lots of people pick pumpkins, carve jack -o- lanterns, or take part in other gourd-related activities. I was about to say that I don't really have any traditions--I don't think of myself as a particularly traditional person--and then I remembered: apple butter!

Every autumn for the last several years, Mr. Incredible and I go to Ashcombe, pick apples out of the huge bins they keep on the porch of the perennials department, bring them home, and make apple butter. We usually make two batches, two Saturdays in a row, and those are the coziest, best-smelling days of the year!

Interested in trying it out for yourself? Here's the recipe (I got it from my grandma; the measurements are a little weird, but it works well):

Apple butter

Lots of apples (I use Jonamac or Jonagold)
7 cups sugar
1/2 cup cider vinegar
2 1/3 tsp. allspice
2 1/3 tsp. cinnamon

Fill a 5 1/2-quart crockpot 7/8 of the way with chopped, cored, and peeled apples.

Add other ingredients and cook on high for 5-8 hours and purée.

Pour into jars and seal them using a canner.