once upon a time

zwetschgenkompotterinnerungen

~ carin ~ 2 Comments

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The german language likes to take two or more things and make them one. So… memories of plum compote becomes Zwetschgenkompotterinnerungen (plumcompotememories).

This is the language I grew up with, spoken by my parents to each other and to me, although I almost always answered in English. Still, most of my childhood memories come with German subtitles. And it doesn’t take much to inspire memory, especially when it comes to food. Recently, a conversation about compote had me back in my parents’ fruit cellar where cement walls held wooden plank shelves which held rows of glass jars which held preserved pears, plums, cherries, peaches, and pumpkin, each of them eventually served as compote, a simple dish of fruit-in-syrup to end a meal, and then only occasionally, depending on the meal. No such thing as dessert in our house, which seemed to me (and still does seem) a strange course. In a restaurant, if I’m still hungry after a meal, I’ve been known to order another starter, but never a ‘dessert’.

My favourite of my mother’s compotes was pumpkin (which, I’ve learned is, botanically, a fruit) because of the way the pumpkin-stringy texture softened in the sugary brine but remained al dente, a hint of cloves… perfection. Unlike, say, her pear compote, which I didn’t like for being either too hard or too soft or the texture rough, depending on the pears. Peaches were reliable preserves, and cherries were excellent. (She once gave me a particularly ancient jar, at least a decade or two old, assuring me it was safe to eat. I survived, so I guess it was. It was also nectar. The cherries so soft they melted on my tongue. I ate them straight out of the jar with a spoon.) I didn’t like her plum compote much, again the texture wasn’t right and anyway I preferred plums in dumplings… but this morning I happened to take some from the freezer, Zwetschgen I’d pitted last year and ate them with yoghurt and the texture was fine, which made me think it’s possible my mushiness standards have loosened over time. Or maybe now that I preserve my own fruit, I’m not so fussy.

It’s also probably worth mentioning that if you come to my house for a meal I will almost certainly not have thought to make anything for dessert and because I don’t make compote, there will be nothing at all sweet. (I do, however, always have chocolate on hand…)

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and sow it begins

~ carin ~ 2 Comments

I sow radishes because of how they are with butter on slices of bread I make with almond flour and because of that night a half dozen decades ago when in a rainy cabin there was nothing to eat but radishes, butter, a rye loaf my mother made, and I ate and ate and ate and because it instantly became, and remains all these decades later, one of my most precious culinary experiences.

when thoughts turn to radishes, as they inevitably will — what to do with them? the radishes, i mean

rosehips

~ carin ~ 4 Comments

Every year my mother went to the beach to pick the hips of wild roses. Only a short drive from our house, the beach was somewhere we spent a lot of time as a family, swimming, picnic suppers, walking in the rain, collecting stones for a new rockery. The rosehip outings, though, were just the two of us, and always later in the year, in the fall when the hips were ‘ripe’. Not that I helped with the picking, I just liked any excuse to be at the beach. I picked shells and danced barefoot on cool sand while she, some distance away, stood, back slightly bent, leaning over thorny bushes that formed a long line parallel to the shore, filling her apron, or maybe a bag or a pillowcase, holding it open to receive each fat red hip. She would dry them for tea, mixing them with handpicked calendula, chamomile and linden, to make her own special blend kept in tins to enjoy all winter.

I remember how the hips turned the water pink. Magic.

It wouldn’t have occurred to her to buy tea, even if such blends were available then. ‘Making her own’ was a way of being… a farm girl from the Austrian alps, where there were no shops nearby and where everything was homegrown and homemade and medicine came from the garden, the fields, or the forest. Teas were medicine. Even after moving to a medium sized city in Canada with shops at every corner, her way remained homegrown and homemade, our medicine cabinet was the garden.

Someone mentioned roses the other day.

It doesn’t take much.

Another kind of magic.

♥

I think of her whenever I see wild roses anywhere but it’s only those that grow on beaches that come with a memory made in a millisecond a thousand years ago when a child looked up from her barefoot dance and in the distance saw a woman she knew so well but would never truly know, holding open an apron, or was it a bag or possibly a pillowcase…

♥

♥

once upon a time, the series (in no particular order & with random garden pics): part one

~ carin ~ 1 Comment

 

Once upon a time there was a girl who wanted to be a telephone operator. This was in the days when telephone operators actually had some form of conversation with people, when they would be allowed to take the time to look things up and ask questions and solve mysteries based on being given info such as I’m not sure what street so and so lives on or if the first name is Robin or Roberta but for some reason I’m thinking butterflies has a part in things. And the operator would say hmmm, well, let’s see… But the telephone company didn’t hire the girl even though she filled out an application and wore a very nice dress when she dropped it off. And so the girl had to continue to have conversations only with her friends and remain unpaid. This was in the days when # was a number sign. Also a pound sign.