We’re packing out to go and live the second half of our summer in Tunis.  Going together to Tunis, all four of us,  is the carrot, but counting down all of the “lasts” of our Lummi summer is sad.  We’ve got the last times to see family and friends we love.

The last pull of the crab pots.

The last time to watch the Alaska ferry cruise past our house into the sunset with its load of adventurous passengers destined to witness the Inside Passage.

We gasped this week realizing that we hadn’t yet had our fill of blueberries, one berry we won’t get in Tunis this year.

This pie is in honor of all the beautiful things we will be saying goodbye to this week.

From Rustic Fruit Desserts (Schreiber, Richardson)

Makes four 9-inch pie shells

5 cups all-purpose flour

3 tablespoons granulated sugar

1 1/2 teaspoons fine sea salt

2 cups ( 1 pound) cold unsalted butter

1 cup ice water

2 tablespoons freshly squeezed lemon juice

     Put the flour, sugar, and salt in a bowl, stir to combine, then put the bowl in the freezer for about 10 minutes, until super cold.

     Cut the butter into 1-inch cubes, then add it to the flour mixture and toss to evenly coat.  Cut the butter into the flour mixture using a pastry blender, food processor, electric mixer, or your hands, just until the mixture becomes course and crumbly ad the butter is about the size of peas.

     Stir the water and lemon juice together, then drizzle over the dry ingredients, 1/3 cup at a time, tossing with a fork to distribute the liquid.  The pastry will be shaggy, but should hold together when squeezed in the palm of your hand; if not, add an additional teaspoon or two of ice water.

     Dump the pastry onto a lightly floured work surface and press down on the dough, folding it over on itself a few times until it holds together.  Thy not to handle it too much or it will warm up and may become overdeveloped.  Divide the pastry int 4 equal parts and shape each piece into a disk, 1 inch thick.  Wrap each disk in plastic wrap and chill for 1 hour.

adapted from Kingston Hotel Cafe Cookbook (Weinstock)

1/2 recipe all-butter pie pastry

6 cups blueberries

2 tablespoons cornstarch

2 tablespoons flour

3/4 cup brown sugar

6 tablespoons white sugar

1/4 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon ground ginger

2 tablespoons freshly squeezed lemon juice

2 tablespoons unsalted butter

     Prepare all-butter pie pastry and line a 9 inch pie pan, reserving some dough for the top crust.  Chill reserved dough.

     In a large mixing bowl, combine all of the filling ingredients except the butter.  Pour into the pastry-lined pie pa.  Dot the top of the fruit with the butter.

     Roll out the top crust.  Wet the rim of the bottom crust with ice water and place the top crust over the berries.  Turn the edges under and crimp.  Make little slits in the top of the crust or cut a small circle to insert over the top of a pie bird to allow steam to escape while baking.

     Place the pie in the center of a parchment covered baking sheet.

     Bake at 425 degrees F for 10 minutes.  Turn the oven down to 350 degrees F and bake for about 45 minutes.  Cover edges with aluminum foil if browning too quickly.  Uncover, then bake for another 30 minutes or until the top crust is golden brown and the juices are thick and bubbling out the top.

          This summer we’re experimenting with cooking over a wood fire, basically, cowboy cooking.  We have an old-school backyard barbecue at our house in Tunis and I want to develop some skills this next year in cooking over wood.  My son, Gabe, has an interest in essentially “making fires” so he and I made a start this summer.  This barbecue pit was his design and it turned out to be clever and definitely atmospheric for parties.  

 We have a bounty of dungeness crab for a few weeks in the summer.  Tossing cooked crab halves in a cast iron pan with garlic, lemon, and white wine gives them a nice dressing and a little wood smoke flavor.

  Similarly, halved artichokes roasted in olive oil and lemons, melts them into a ready-made sauce.

Paella is traditionally made on the beaches of Catalan over wood fires, topped with shellfish.  It fits my conditions of a summer entertainment dish that you can make from memory and vary with local ingredients.  Bon Appetit has a great starter recipe.

Good friends who are always happy to sample experimental cooking.

            As our summer entertainment schedule began to take shape, it looked like we would be hosting about five big dinner parties, of about 20 people each, within two weeks.  It has long been our motto here on the island: If you will come, we will cook.  This way we get to see the people we want to spend time with without running off to town and missing a day on Lummi.  I like to learn to cook some new things in the summer, but I’ve finally convinced myself that I don’t have to create a completely unique menu for each party nor, probably, should I.  I’ve also made a summer vow to be a guest at my own parties instead of frantically pulling some complicated meal together in the kitchen. 

            I think for a menu item to become truly useful, you need to know it well enough that you can make it without pulling out any recipes.  It also needs to allow for variation, depending on what you can find in the market.  Following are my three anchor recipes for the 2011 summer season narrated in the way I’ve crunched them in my mind.

I wanted to put as much thought and effort into a nonalcoholic beverage as is put into selecting beer and wine.  We bought this giant novelty pitcher for the presentation.  It was handblown in Romania and has a charming seal on the side.  I only wish I knew what the glassblowers who made it thought it would be used for.  Anyway, it makes a statement and I’ve pretty much forced all of our guests to hydrate and antioxidate at some point in the party.  I think they’ve felt the better for it.

Process:

I know, pulled pork is ubiquitous this summer, but that’s what makes it a pretty good party item.  It’s more thoughtful than hot dogs and hamburgers, but familiar to most people.  If you have a slow cooker, you toss it in and then spend the next 7 hours doing something else, possibly sleeping. 

Process:

 

This one looks a little fancier, but once you make it once or twice, you can do it from memory and include some variations.

Prepare:

Two large flank steaks pounded into rectangles of consistent thickness

Gremolata

1 cup finely chopped flat-leaf Italian parsley

¼ up finely chopped basil or other herb combination

6 garlic cloves, chopped

1/3 cup bread crumbs

zest of 1 lemon

1/2 tsp. red pepper flakes

1/2 tsp sea salt

Moisten with 2 tbsp. olive oil

3 bell peppers, roasted, peeled, seeded, cut into wide pieces

8oz. Fontina cheese (or any cheese) sliced

2 cups sturdy greens (spinach, chard, kale) washed and dried

Process:

These bottles of milk in our local grocery chain may have been available for awhile, but they are new to me.  When I saw them, everything in my body screamed, “Yes, this is so right!”  You see, Whatcom County, where we live, is diverse in its talents and beauties and one corner of it, nestled in a valley just below the Canadian border, is home to some of the sweetest, most earnest dairies in the world.

The town of Lynden, in particular, was founded by a collective of Dutch immigrants.  Their community grew around their adherence to the Dutch Reform Church and so morality was legalized and vice versa.  In Lynden, you can dance or you can drink, but never both in the same establishment.  A drive down Main Street conjures up the set of Pleasantville.  The streets are wide and clean and the modest homes have impossibly manicured lawns.  The children of Lynden, boosted by their genetics and steady calcium intake, are uncommonly tall for these parts and regularly dominate the high school basketball league.  Even the perfectly laid-out cemetery, the cornerstone of their city planning, is a continual reminder that we’re all going to meet our maker and we had better be wearing clean underwear when it happens.  All of this attention to cleanliness and self-discipline has also been applied to the dairy farms on the surrounding acreages.  Picturesque family owned and operated dairies, their round-roofed barns and silos marking the individual properties, are scattered from Lynden to the border.

Back to the milk bottles.  The idea of buying milk, produced on these righteous farms, not 10 miles from the store, fits with all of my values.  The fact that the milk is bottled in reusable glass jars that you get a substantial refund for returning to the store made me squeal (inside) with happiness.  I still have growing boys at home and plastic milk jugs make up the biggest bulk in our recycling bins.

And so these nostalgic looking bottles are sitting in my refrigerator while I continue to pour every last drop of milk and half and half from the plastic and cardboard containers we already had.  Sure it makes sense to use up the older product first, but is there a problem?  I can’t believe I am still dealing with this at my age, but I have had a life-long phobia about drinking milk that comes directly out of cows.  We had a milk cow on our farm in Colorado when I was a child and when she was giving milk, we had tons of it.  My dad would bring a 5-gallon bucket of steamy, raw milk into the kitchen where my mom would proceed with straining and chilling it. Then she would separate a substantial layer of cream from the milk, though there was plenty still floating around.  From there we actually churned butter and made cottage cheese.  These are all things I support in theory.  Problem was that I hated the taste of the milk.  It tasted cowy.  I also didn’t like seeing chunks of cream floating in my cereal bowl and so when it was homemade milk season at our house, I pretty much went off dairy.  My mom even tried to trick me once by pouring our farm-fresh stuff into a leftover cardboard milk container from the store, but I knew in an instant what she had done.  Now, staring at these translucent bottles, I can see that the color of the milk isn’t pure white, but an ivory color.  A thick head of cream is clogging the neck of the bottle and a true anxiety begins to wash over me at the thought of cracking open the lid and pouring/glopping it out.  I just don’t know if this is going to work for me.  I find myself yearning for the comfort and familiarity of the bleached white, plastic bottled milk I know. But I have an idea, I saw a jug of this milk in the store done in a chocolate version.  Maybe I will revert to my old “add chocolate flavoring” trick to resolve my dairy contradiction.

            As the years go by, and the longer we live in cultures outside of the US, the sentimental holidays that used to mark the calendar year have fallen from our interest.  Birthdays are still sacred, of course, and we also love Thanksgiving and Easter, especially when we are in a Catholic or Orthodox country at the time, but many of the other seasonal holidays pass by us without much observance.  What I can get truly thrilled about, on the other hand, are the solstices, perhaps partly because they coincide with our twice-yearly homecomings.  I love the cloaking darkness of the winter solstice in the Northwest.  It feels like the perfect time to gather inside a cozy house with dear friends and great food to appreciate the goodness of this moment in our lives.  Conversely, the summer solstice in June indicates to us, at least psychologically, that summer has arrived and that we have a few upcoming weeks to revel in the dizzying natural beauty of the Northwest and partake of the generous bounty the earth provides at this latitude.  I really can’t understand what can be considered pagan, or unchristian, about pausing a few times each year to notice and appreciate that we are on a complex, yet rhythmic, planet that abundantly gives us what we need. 

            My friend Beth is a Feng Shui consultant in Fremont, Washington.  Being tuned into the energy cycles in life, she wrote some insightful thoughts about summer. 

            I have developed a ritual meal that we have twice a year, called Solstice Stew.  It is an adaptation of the German-style Square Soup that Allan’s grandmother used to make.  The perfect ending to this meal is a hunk of gooey chocolate cake, eaten, of course, around a roaring bonfire with people you love.  Have a joyous summer!

1 meaty, smoked ham hock

16 cups water

1 large onion, quartered

4 ribs celery, chunked

3 carrots, chunked

2 bay leaves

Simmer the stock for one hour.  Remove the hock, pull off all of the meat, and reserve.  Strain the liquid and discard the bone and vegetables.  Cool the stock, skim off the fat, and reserve.

3 whole eggs

Enough flour to form a dough

Pinch of salt

Crack eggs into a mixing bowl.  Add a pinch of salt and then begin adding flour until a soft, but workable dough forms.  Turn out onto a floured surface and roll to 1/8 inch thickness.  Cut into desired shapes, preferably with star or sun shaped cutters.

Simmer the ham stock.  Add the reserved meat and then the pasta.  Serve when pasta is chewy, but still tender.

Confession:  My family much prefers that I make this soup with a package of those Lil’ Smokey sausages that are nothing but fat, and salt, and smoke flavoring.  I continue to resist.

            Sitting half a world away thinking about my five acre farm on Lummi Island, it’s all pastoral perfection and seaside serenity.  But pulling into the driveway, after six months away, I see that nature has once again exerted her dominance over the place and I think our home could be in an episode of that television show that speculates how nature would undo man’s edifices in short order if we suddenly vanished from the earth.  My house already has a head start and during my first 48 hours at home, I shook my head several times and muttered Karen Blixen’s lament from Out of Africa, “Everytime I turn my back, it wants to go wild again.”  It does. 

The most noticeable effect of nature’s invasion is a solid sea of grass as high as and right up to the window sills.  We can’t even figure out where to jump in to begin forcing it back.  My sons had been working at it with a weed eater for a few days before we arrived and had barely cleared a swath to the door.  Of course, our Husqvana riding mower is no match for this type of tenacious growth and so it is perennially in the shop, which is a contributing factor to this whole thing getting out of hand to begin with.

  The garden berms and flagstone patio we have been working on developing over the past two summers are undetectable, also grown over with tall grass and big bruisers of invasive weeds that have taken advantage of a lightly supervised garden bed situation.  Trees and shrubs we planted late last summer, Japanese evergreens, miniature fruit trees,  and a couple of olives are either dead twigs or stumps that have been chewed to a nub by the deer.  What could deer possibly find palatable about pine trees?

The pump in our “good” well had already broken at Christmas and we weren’t able to get anyone to fix it during the holidays.  Since then, the house has been running off of the ancient hand dug well that the property came equipped with.  Did I mention the herd of cattle who live happy lives right uphill?  Fortunately, living in Kathmandu for five years built such bacterial resistance in us that we can live in these sorts of conditions without stomach disturbance. 

Then the boys broke the news to us that as they were running loads of laundry, the sewer began to back up into the showers, requiring, of course, every towel in the house to prevent damage to the floors.  Quick thinking.  But we came home to mounds of soaking wet laundry, sewer sludge in the bottom of the showers, and no water evacuation from the house.  It turned out to be a broken pipe where the house waste empties into the septic system, no doubt caused by winter freezing.  For the first two days, we couldn’t jump into large scale cleaning like dishes and laundry, took fun outdoor baths from 5 gallon buckets, and poor Allan spent many hours with his head stuck in our septic manhole.

So that’s what I mean: It’s an uphill battle.  But it’s our little square of paradise, even if we have to beat the natural world back with a whip and a chair.  Bit by bit, we will reexert our dominance and will once again project the illusion of an effortless island life.

Working in schools as an adult gives your life a distinct rhythm.  You pour yourself into setting up the course of instruction each August, strive to deeply get to know students throughout the fall, press them to make the gains you know they can make through the winter, and then assess them in the spring.  In a nutshell, that is the pace.  The thing is that none of this can be accomplished in a relational vacuum.  I just completed my 26^th year of teaching and one thing I know is that I have to contribute my “pound of flesh” to match the gains I want my students to achieve.  The other thing I know is once you give so much of yourself to an effort, the result is a deep bond of trust and affection and it is difficult to end the relationship.

All schools have their year-end rituals and to anyone who says “They’re not doing anything at school the last week,” I defend that we have to end an intense relationship in a way that feels like a satisfying ending, not unlike a story.  We actually put a tremendous amount of thought and effort into the last week of school.  It feels very much like bringing a train into the station.    International schools, however, have the added intensity of families and faculty who are moving on from that location, so there is the overhanging melancholy that you aren’t going to see some of these people, ever again.

          The last day of school at an international school reminds me so much of the last day of summer camp.   When I was growing up, my family was very involved in Christian summer camps.  For as long as I can remember, my dad was on the board at Miracle Ranch, in the ponderosa pines near Dove Creek, Colorado.  Every one of my five siblings and I, throughout our different years of attendance, experienced significant life challenges and teaching at that camp.  I do remember, though, the tearful goodbyes and promises to write as my parents herded me to the car, where I collapsed in the backseat, grimy and exhausted. 

            This time of year, I bring that background experience to my overseas life.  We have had multiple parties, dinners, lunches, outings, wanting to make the parting as complete as it can be.  Last night, we had one last party at our house, but it wasn’t about goodbyes, but hellos.  Some dear friends of ours are moving here to help us do this work and they are in Tunis for a few days to settle their dog and see where they will be living.  We had a barbecue in our backyard with some of the staff, who are not leaving, so they can begin to make their new friends.  And the cycle begins all over again.

            I made a custard cake I have wanted to try.  The recipe calls for raspberries, but we have cherries at the moment so I substituted them and I can’t imagine it being any better.  Clearly, you could use any soft fruit.  There were several unsolicited comments of, ”This is the best cake I have ever eaten,” so I think it is worth posting for friends who are just heading into berry season in North America.  

Raspberry Custard Cake
Recipe adapted from Alice’s Cookbook by Alice Hart
Makes one 9-inch cake

Custard

2 cups light cream or half-and-half 

1 vanilla bean, split lengthwise   

2 egg yolks 

2 teaspoons cornstarch

2 tablespoons sugar

Cake

1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, softened, plus more for the pan

3 cups raspberries (or any soft fruit) 

1 1⁄4 cups granulated sugar    

4 eggs    

1 2/3 cups all-purpose flour   

2 teaspoons baking powder     

1⁄2 cup milk     

1⁄4 cup Demerara sugar

1. Make the custard: In a small saucepan over low heat, warm the cream or half and half. Using the tip of a sharp knife, scrape the seeds from the vanilla bean into the cream, then drop in the empty pod. Meanwhile, mix the egg yolks, cornstarch, and sugar together in a heatproof mixing bowl.
2.When the cream is almost”but not quite”boiling, remove from the heat and pour slowly into the egg mixture, stirring constantly. Pour the mixture back into the pan and cook over medium heat, stirring constantly with a wooden spoon, until the mixture bubbles and thickens. Boil about 1 minute; the cornstarch will prevent the custard from curdling. Remove from the heat and cover the surface with plastic wrap or a circle of parchment paper so a skin cannot form. Let cool; once cool, remove the vanilla pod.
3.Make the cake: Preheat the oven to 325 degrees. Butter a 9-inch spring-form cake pan and line the bottom with a round of parchment paper. Crush the raspberries roughly with a fork to release their juice. Stir half the crushed raspberries into the cooled custard and set aside.
4.In a medium bowl, beat the 1 cup of butter and granulated sugar together until light and fluffy. Add the eggs, one at a time, beating thoroughly between each addition; if the mixture starts to look a bit curdled, stir in a spoonful of flour. Sift in the remaining flour with the baking powder. Pour in the milk and gently mix together. Fold in the remaining crushed raspberries until just combined.
5.Pour half the batter into the prepared spring-form pan and make a shallow well in the center with the back of a spoon. Pour the raspberry custard into the well, then cover with the rest of the cake batter. Sprinkle with the Demerara sugar. Bake until golden but still a bit wobbly in the center, about 1 hour.
6.Let the cake cool in the pan, then chill in the refrigerator overnight or for at least 4 hours. Remove from the pan when completely cold; you may need to run a knife around the edge to loosen. Cut into slices and serve.

            And now, with a huge feeling of satisfaction about our first year’s work in Tunis, and excitement about starting it all up again in August, we are leaving tomorrow for Lummi Island and our fabulous boys.  It’s going to be a wonderful summer.