A Million Words

This is the weekend of the Martha's Vineyard Agricultural Society Fair . It's the biggest event of the year in West Tisbury (barring presidential visits) and although some curmudgeons avoid it like the plague, I've gone almost every year for as long as I can remember. The exceptions were 1986, when I was in Japan, and 1991, when I was in New Zealand. This is the first year in a long time that I've entered anything. I decided that if we're going to settle down here again, I'd better start participating. So I went the category I've been working on most lately: baking. For my entry, I decided to make carrot cake. I used fresh local eggs, laid by my brother's chickens, and carrots from the local CSA. I spent about an hour peeling those tiny little roots, put everything together as planned, and stuck it in the oven. Ten minutes later, I looked up and noticed that a key ingredient was still sitting on the counter. Ooops. When I took it out of the oven, I ...

When I was about Nova's age, my parents built a house in the woods. We lived there summers and weekends while I was growing up, and later, when we moved further away, other people rented it in the winter. The place has housed quite a menagerie over the years, and it's held up OK, but decades of wear and tear and sweating slate floors have left it almost uninhabitable. When I arrived home in late July, the house smelled of mold and abandonment, so much so that it was difficult to breathe inside. Some of the mold was the result of recent water damage, but it had been growing over the years, especially during winters when the house was unoccupied. In any case, the work was already well underway. In the photo bellow, you can see the new dormer: In the former upstairs, there were three small bedrooms, a nice library nook, and a virtually windowless storage nook. The dormer creates a whole bunch more space in two of those bedrooms, and gives them closets. My parents also wanted ...

Yesterday was my birthday, and I thought I'd celebrate by cooking up a whole mess of things I hadn't tried before. I spent most of the day cooking up three different salads. I was particularly excited about Octopus Salad . Copping up the octopi was strangely fun, but I was sadly disappointed when they came out of the boiling water 45 minutes later at about half their original volume. It was fairly tasty when done, but much, much smaller than I'd hoped for. My mother was supposed to make this tomato and mozzarella salad , but she had strep throat, so she couldn't cook. I think I probably had the strep the weekend before we left Ireland, and chances were she caught it from me. Anyway, I wound up making this, too, with some last-minute help from my cousin Jethro. We had a huge load of green beans from the local CSA, which went into this salad: The recipe called for hazelnut oil, but I couldn't find it at any of our local shops, so I just used olive oil. It was still ...

When I was young, my mother had a nearly-complete set of the Time-Life Foods of the World cookbooks. Although the recipes in these were not, as a rule, very good, I was much taken with the photo on the cover of The Cooking of Vienna's Empire -- a Spanish Windtorte. I told my mother that I wanted one for my birthday cake. I had not grasped quite how difficult they were to build. I think we wound up with more of a Pavlova instead. The thing is, a Spanische Windtorte is almost exactly the same thing as a pavlova, only with a fancier-shaped meringue. So, when I set out to make one again yesterday, I used a combination of this Pavlova recipe and these Spanische Windtorte instructions . I increased the quantities in the pavlova recipe by about 1/3, and, in the final step, did not macerate the fruit but rather mixed it with sugar immediately before adding it to the whipped cream mixture... but I'm getting ahead of myself. Making the meringue was fairly straightforward, except that...

Two weeks before our departure from Ireland, Mike, Nova and I jetted over to London to visit some friends of mine. While there, I fit in a bit of research. We visited the Soane House Museum , Spencer House , and the Victoria and Albert Museum . There was not enough time for any of it, and I was struggling with the early stages of the head cold from hell, but I managed to glean a few general impressions. Here's a picture of us on the Tower Bridge. We were there, honest, even if my memory is a bit cloudy: We visited Soane House on Saturday morning, with Nova in a very fussy, tired mood.  She didn't like the closed-in, crowded rooms, so Mike took her out to find some ducks while Meg and I looked around. It was quite an eclectic collection of stuff, and interesting to see the house of a moderately well-off architect in that era. I also picked up a book from the museum shop called The Soanes at Home , which is a fantastic resource on daily life in their era, from the late 1700s thro...

We arrived in the US two weeks ago today, after several exhausting weeks. During our final two and a half weeks in Ireland, we visited London, packed up the apartment, and tried to keep up with the normal round of daily activities. Meanwhile, I wrapped up the rough draft of the Regency romance I'm working on and battled one of the most exhausting head colds I've ever had.  Nova sprouted her final eye tooth during a whirlwind trip to Edinburgh to visit a friend, and started putting words together.  Mike sorted through his entire collection of games and books, and shuffled everything over to his father's new attic.  Our final day in Ireland was spent cleaning the apartment and dealing with our landlord. He had seemed like a decent enough landlord up until that point, but he walked in that afternoon affecting a "very angry" mood and roaring that the place was "very dirty" (it was a hell of a lot cleaner than it had been when we moved in), and making up spur...