Rain and Chicken Soup

"Maybe, just once, someone will call me 'Sir' without adding, 'You're making a scene'."
- Homer Simpson

I’m not inclined to the dramatic today. Which is just as well, because nobody has called me Sir/M’am lately. Nor have I been making public spectacles of myself. Not that I remember, anyway. Which might be a clue, but I’ve also been undergoing a bout of cluelessness lately. Anyway, I think I am coming around.

Rain helps. It seems to water my soul after the long dry spell, with its promise of renewal. Rain is pattering down just enough outside to make me want to stay inside and make soup out of yesterday’s roast chicken. I could wax poetic about the rain and/or chicken soup, but I simply can’t compete with the eloquence of Homer Simpson, so you’ll just have to imagine the scene. Misty rain outside, and rich chicken broth inside.

While vegetable simmer in the broth, I clean the bird like my Mom used to do: two bowls, the carcass, a knife. She’d sit and pick the meat off the bones, carefully placing the unadulterated meat in one bowl, cut into bite sizes with the paring knife against her right thumb. The gristle, skin, and bones mostly went into the other bowl. The fun part was what became of the uncertain bits. Those would be popped into her mouth with the crispy skin. If you hung around, she’d pop a bit of chicken in your mouth too.

When Mom ate chicken, the bones would be left looking like they’d been out in the desert a month – they were so clean they were white. Mom died 16 years ago next month. That time of year, the first snow might be falling. I’m a long way from snow, but the gentle raindrops clinging to the pine trees look like snow if I squint.

So, I’ve got winter outdoors, and some very nostalgic smells inside. Which leaves me with a very healthy “mission accomplished” feeling this afternoon. And which leaves me to conclude with another bit of questionable wisdom from Homer: All my life I've had one dream, to achieve my many goals. What Homer said.

Tastes in November

“I thought I had an appetite for destruction. Turns out all I wanted was a club sandwich.
Homer Simpson

I’m mostly inside these days, my obsession with the doll house once again activated by the cooler weather. I managed to get lights into the wisteria chandelier I’m making.

The purple beads themselves were acquired years ago - woven into a bonsai-sized tree with a twisted gold wire stem that looked pretty tacky. I got it at a festival in Pomona, and knew I was going to deconstruct the tree and use the branches for the chandelier. I wound several strings of white lights around the branches with floral tape. Here’s the first floor. Notice the inlay in the floor of the dining room at rear beneath the wisteria arch.

It’s November but it’s still summer here. This is the time of year when I usually decide there is no such thing as winter and I can garden comfortably year-round. Then, it gets cold and rainy and stays that way until March. It does cool down enough in the evenings that we've already had a fire and heard the furnace kick on in the early morning hours.

When I did get outside, I planted some recent acquisitions – this being the time of year to plant natives and drought-tolerant plants. In deadheading and cleaning up, I ended up with enough cut things to make a lovely arrangement at the side of the pond (below). I put the copper canyon daisy and my tiny pomegranate tree that was a volunteer in the Veggie Garden.

I got a ton of starts at the nursery yesterday for the Veggie Garden: snow peas, red cabbage, yellow cauliflower, more broccoli. I have to buy beet seeds, but found some golden ones to plant next to the red. Got some asparagus in six-pack starts, deciding against buying the bare root ones. We need things in the veggie garden that will last more than one season, so why not make room for the asparagus and see what they do, even if it takes them a few years to get going.

I found some lovely red lettuce and some spinach. We have some radicchio in the ground, but the outer leaves taste bitter and I’m not ready to pull out the entire plant to eat the heart until I get something to replace it – hence the lettuce and spinach. Spinach is my classic example of how something that tastes lovely raw in a salad (especially with bacon and a dressing made from bacon grease and cream curdled in the microwave and tossed warm). You can wilt it and it’s still edible, but if you cook it and eat your spinach like Popeye did, it gives you that squishy feeling when you swallow that my sister K used to say about eating canned peas: “It makes my head wiggle”. That was when she was a kid. She probably doesn’t say that these days.

I also got some shallots, and chard, but passed on the collard greens. I’ll only grow what I like to eat and cooking greens seems somehow sacrilegious. While I’ll stoop to growing chard, it seems to be taking things too far to cook collard greens or kale. Once, I went to a KFC in the hood in Oakland and they had a side called “mean greens” which sounded more appetizing than their international orange mac and cheesoid product.

The greens turned out to be cooked collard greens with some nasty hot sauce. It was like the cook decided if you were going to eat something with a texture like cardboard only slimy, you might as well spice it up with enough Tabasco sauce and salt to preserve an Egyptian mummy. Why not just eat boiled cardboard seasoned with ground up mummy powder? I’d rather eat grass: which I actually do every morning when I juice some wheat grass and drink a shot. Tastes awful but goes down quicker than Homer Simpson can eat a club sandwich.