author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

Writing metaphors! They're not just for breakfast anymore! In fact, they're what's for dinner. Also lunch for the next three days, because we cook in quantity.

So on Wednesday John and I had our first Cooking Date of the year. We made French onion soup and insalata caprese. It was all a spectacular success, and, as implied above, I've had leftovers to eat every day since then.

Today at lunch I sat down with a freshly broiled toast-and-cheese top on a rewarmed crock of our awesome soup, and, apropos of nothing extraordinary, I finally figured out how to eat the dang stuff.

Pause. Rewind. Replay a Wednesday night in Metairie, Louisiana circa 1988. Maybe it was a Sunday, I don't know. Once a week, or maybe just once a month--memory is hazy here--a group of neighborhood ladies got together to sing barbershop harmony. They had hopes of founding a brand-new Sweet Adelines chapter. Mom met with them and brought me along, and this was when I first got pegged as a baritone. (Yes: I was a Type A at the age of 12.) But where I'm going with this trip down memory lane is down the road from the neighborhood home in which we rehearsed to the local Ruby Tuesdays for late night appetizers. Where I always, always, always ordered the French onion soup.

And I always made a mess trying to get through that toast-and-cheese lid. And Mom and all the other grown-ups enjoyed great and gentle amusement at my exasperated expense.

It's not simple! A spoon isn't sharp enough to get through that thick swiss cheese. And even if it was, the toast is floating; you can't very well slice it with a knife and fork. There's no leverage. Best I managed to do was poke at the edges of the cheese until I had a hole through which to sip the broth down to a less perilous surface level, such that mangling the toast and cheese no longer caused catastrophic overflow.

Even John asked the question when we sat down to dinner: "Now how do I eat this?" "I have no idea," I told him. "You just muddle through and make a mess. It's why I put the soup crocks on plates."

But today at lunch, I got it. If you just let the soup crock sit, all patient-like, until all components are cool enough to eat without burning your mouth, the soup will have soaked into the toast and softened it up. Then you can push... not too hard... very very gently... at the cheese-topped toast with the edge of your spoon, until it gives way. The cheese will try to glue it together, but once the bread breaks, the cheese will stretch thin and you can bite through it when you eat the broken-off bite of bread.

After that, everything's much easier.

So this was my discovery. And I thought, "That's another metaphor for writing, isn't it?" (Yes. I know. Everything's a metaphor for writing. Shut up, I'm making a point, it's an effin' marvelous point, it's bloody brilliant. Because I say so. Hush.) Of course I thought that. I was in the middle of my writing day, and I was trying to figure out how to get my mental spoon through the thick cheese topping that was keeping me from going deeper than babble draft into anything.

The plan was to spend a good hour moving an unfinished short story closer to submission-ready. Only I didn't know which one. "First Breath" was done and out the door (though it may yet see further revisions pending an ongoing conversation a colleague and I are having about its worldbuilding details). "Lambing Season" also hit the slush again yesterday. A number of stories are in the post-critique "almost perfect, but not quite" stage, but none felt... permeable, if you know what I mean. None felt accessible. I spent half an hour going through my files, looking for some half-baked idea from a freewriting exercise that might spark itself into a full-blown story. Nothing went ping.

Finally I latched onto a "scene" from the Daily Story Idea yWriter file. It had to do with sentient, human-sized Ants coexisting with humans. One of them goes into a coffee shop and orders a cappuccino. As story ideas go, this one was light and fluffy and funny and nothing at all like "First Breath," and it amused me to read it. I had no idea what to do with it, though. I didn't even know what to call it. ("The Ants Go Marching Latte-ward, Hurrah" is very much not a working title. It's an "I have to call this something and I mustn't take it too seriously this early in the game" sort of for-now title.) I set the timer for another half hour and attempted to figure it out where this thing was going.

I pasted that ridiculous excuse for a working title at the top and printed out the not-yet-a-story. Then I read it again, letting its broth soak in and soften things up. Then I got out a pen and began making notes as tentative as the spoon's assault on the toast-and-cheese. "Barista shouldn't be too enlightened; anti-Ant prejudice shouldn't all be big bad boss's." "Would Ant use mandibles for speech? How would Ants speak?" "What barista thinks but doesn't say parallels what Ant doesn't say but telegraphs with her antennae." Several of those notes put together became a solid story development idea, like a nice big bite of toast that lets you finally get your spoon into the soup. And after that, everything becomes much simpler.

Really, everything about writing that looks scary and impossible tends to seem less so once you take that first nibble. But then, isn't that the case for most scary and impossible tasks?

A friend of mine wanted to know what it is precisely that I do at Abbondanza. The quick answer is, "Not nearly enough," and probably would be even if I volunteered there every day instead of one morning a week and didn't feel guilty giving the farmers an extra job to do, namely, assigning me tasks and making sure I don't screw them up along with the farm's chances at a successful harvest. But it's not a useful answer. Therefore, I blog.

Writing five days a week gives me a two-day weekend, which I take on Sunday and Monday. Sunday because social stuff tends to get planned then. Mondays because of the farm. I'm a wimp, and after the bus/bike commute and the actual work done, I tend to have no brain. Sometimes I in fact have no consciousness--but that's more of a middle-of-summer thing. During March, the workload is a little less physical and leaves me a little less wiped.

The pace is just as hectic, maybe even more so. March means scrambling to get ready to plant.

My first Monday in 2010 was two weeks ago. There were some miscellaneous clean-up chores needed doing around the greenhouse, where planting would happen, and in the barn, where squash and onions stored from the fall needed sorting and rotating. There were beans to be sorted--there are always beans to be sorted, which means picking out ones that are moldy, cracked, or simply not the right variety. Then we worked on soil.

Soil is important. You can't just dig up dirt from the ground, shove it in planting trays, and call it good. And you can't buy all the potting mix for a season on a shoestring budget. Farming means shoestring budget, unless you're Monsanto I guess, in which case, eff off. (Hey, when you google "Monsanto," one of the first suggestions is "Monsanto evil." That tells you a little something about their public image, I think.) So before you can plant seeds in little trays, you have to make your soil mix. At Abbondanza, this appears to involve homemade compost, a cow manure mix, vermiculite to keep it breathing, and another bag of fertilizer that had fish on the label. The remaining hours of my March 1 were spent sifting the compost through a big screen that had been propped up at about a 45-degree angle. Compost was shoveled through it, and what didn't go through was stomped on to break up the clumps and then shoveled through it again. What didn't go through then got put aside for use as tree mulch or similar.

That was just while I was there. A lot more mixing and sifting would happen before the finished soil mix would be ready for use.

The following week (last week) was spent cleaning trays. Again, if you're on a shoestring budget, you reuse as much as you can. I would reckon that, during my few hours on site, we cleaned about 400 trays, some being 200-cell planting trays and others flat trays to give the cell trays something to sit on without breaking. These trays were set out on screen tables, hosed down, brushed off, hosed some more, turned over, brushed some more, and hosed some more. Then stacked in stacks of 10, sorted by cell size (deep or shallow), and put away. It was a cold morning, so our fingers all ached after the first batch. But then the sun really started coming up, and it felt nice to be working in the wet. I am grateful they had extra rain gear and rubber overalls I could borrow.

This week, actual planting happened. Which will explain the bizarre contraption in the photo included here.

Back up a step. First, we had to fill those cleaned planting-cell trays with soil mix, which isn't as straightforward as it sounds. You don't want the soil compacted too badly, and after all that sifting and mixing the soil is fine enough to get compacted if you just give it a heavy look. Best practice goes something like this:

1. Lay out trays on the ground. Well, on a board. On some tarp.
2. Gently shovel soil over the trays. Use a forward-back motion to distribute it more evenly.
3. Use shovel tip to spread excess over cells that haven't been filled.
4. Use a 2-by-4 to scrape excess off.
5. Lift tray up an inch or two and drop it sharply. This causes the soil to settle.
6. Top off gently with more soil. Scrape excess away.

Finally the trays were ready for seeding. The machine pictured here, the one that looks like a sewing machine with multiple personalities and a can-do attitude, does that. It was made in 1982, did you know that? And they still make the parts. It's like a 1970s-era Cessna or something. Abbondanza recently bought more needles for it. The needles are hollow, like blunt hypodermics. They come in different sizes depending on what size seeds you're using. The row of needles dip into a tray of seeds, grabbing one each (or two if things aren't adjusted perfectly) by the power of suction. Then the needle arm rotates to drop the seeds down a row of funnels. The funnels channel the seeds onto the cells of the planting tray below. Then you move the tray forward so that the funnels are lined up over the next row of cells in time for the whole process to repeat. Supposedly you can get a part that causes the machine to advance the tray automatically, but this not being present the tray was advanced by dint of a careful and patient farmer.

After a tray is seeded, more soil is sifted on top and tamped down. Then it's tagged and laid out for watering. What you see here are three varieties of leeks being put to bed.

And that, friends, is the sort of stuff I do on one of my days off from writing.

So. First, you gotta make stir fry. Stir fry requires sauce. Sauce requires soy, hoisin, mushroom sauces. Also hot sauce and a spoonful of dill relish (because it's easier than chopping chilis and acquiring sezchuan pickles). Also veggie broth. And you gotta totally overestimate how much veggie broth the stir fry sauce needs. Those dried mushrooms don't really soak up all that much juice, reconstitutin', after all. So you end up making a really soupy stir fry.

Oh well. You serve it with a slotted spoon and use some of the extra to moisten the rice. It's damn good. Mmm, mushroom stir fry with selection of Asian greens from Abbondanza's last veggie share.

Meanwhile, you have all this stir fry sauce left over and, incidentally, the leaves of all that young celery you chopped up. The celery was really more leaf than stem, to be honest. You hate wasting it. So. You toss those leaves and that sauce into your crock pot. You put an extra cup of water in. You crush up one of your home-grown tomatoes that's starting to reach the use-it-or-lose-it stage. You set the crock pot to "low" and you go to bed.

Good morning! Now. You've been defrosting that lovely 1/2-lb Celebration Roast since a couple days ago, because you wanted to roast it up with some vegetables. Now is the time. Pull out your pyrex casserole dish with the clear lid. Set the roast in the middle. Surround it with the results of chopping up one onion, two potatoes, and two big carrots.

Ladle over it a little of that broth that's been simmering all night. Did you strain out the solid bits first? I recommend this.

Put the covered casserole dish into the oven on 425 degrees F for half an hour. When the buzzer goes off, baste with more broth. Give it another half hour and another basting. Then give it another 10 minutes but this time uncovered.

During that last 10 minutes, make a roux of about a tablespoon each olive oil and whole wheat flour. It's not going to be a gumbo roux. It's just going to be a basic thickener. When the roux is well mixed and bubbling creamily, pour in the last of the broth. The roux will go all shreddy; don't worry. Stir it casually and let it simmer until the mixture gets homogenous again. This is your gravy. It will need salt.

Serve the field roast with veggies and cover all with gravy. Do not be afraid to invite your vegan friends to the table, or indeed to create this dish if you are yourself vegan, 'cause it is.

Eat leftovers cold for maximum delight.

Go forth and try this come thanksgiving.

(This post coming to you live from BeauJo's Pizza in south Boulder. We started tonight's write-in at the Baseline Brewing Market, but they unexpectedly closed early "for cleaning." So we hopped across the parking lot and had pizza and garlic-cheese bread and fountain drinks in mini mason jars. Today, Melissa finished up her first visit with the Ghost Prince, and I discovered that the first lesson she learns from him is, "You think you've got it bad? You think you're lonely? You, missy, are eight years old. Come back and whine when you've endured loneliness for ten centuries." Except the Prince was a lot nicer than that, breaking this to her.)

As I may have mentioned before, this is Chez LeBoeuf-Little's second year in CSA membership with Abbondanza Organic Seeds & Produce. Last year we had far, far too many veggies even for our renewed resolution to eat out less and cook together more, so this year I yielded to John's wisdom in signing up for only a partial share. Even so, possibly because I've been going out of town at frequent intervals and John's been working late, we have a situation.

Thus, on a snowy day in Boulder, I present OMG Nothing Will Fit In The Fridge Soup.

1. From that still unopened package of bacon you bought because it looked like a good idea at the time, remove four fat slices. Cut them into 1" squares. Start them frying.
2. If you like, add a quarter-cup chopped up roasted chilis. The ones that looked so gorgeous at the farmer's market last week. You only meant to buy three ears of peaches 'n cream sweet corn, but you can't resist a bag of freshly roasted chilis.
3. When the bacon is about half-done, delve into this week's CSA share. Slice up and add to the bacon pan the stems of that beautiful bunch of rainbow chard, one fat green pepper, and one yellow onion. Let these cook until the aroma makes you salivate. Let cook a few minutes longer.
4. Roughly chop the chard leaves and stick them in a soup pot with just enough water to cover. Dump in a can of navy beans. (This is why you stocked up on canned beans.) Dump in a quarter-cup or so of frozen turkey drippings. (This is why you save and freeze the turkey drippings.) Dump in a nice big anonymous spoonful (teaspoon? tablespoon? Who knows? Who cares?) of your favorite bouillon.
5. Take the pan of bacon-onion-pepper-chili off the stove and put the soup pan on. Turn fire up to "please come to a gentle boil, if you please." Dump contents of pan into soup pot. Stir.
6. When the pot's boiling, reduce to "simmer but don't take forever about it" and wait as long as you can stand it.

Typically some greens haven't been used up. Make stir fry tomorrow with the choi, using those Hazel Dell oyster mushrooms you bought for just this purpose. Also one of those great long yellowish-green peppers that you're never sure what to do with.

Take the rest of the chard, collard, arugula, mizuna, and whatever choi didn't fit in the stir fry, and boil them down for Green Gumbo. (This has the advantage of using up more peppers and onions, though you may have to go out and buy the celery and parsley.)

"Next time on the CSA Overflow Creativity Show: OMG Nothing Will Fit In The Freezer! Stay tuned."

Hello, and a belated Happy Winter Solstice to everyone! Days are growing longer now, and sunrises will come earlier every day. I can't begin to tell you how cheerful that makes me.

We had our usual Solstice Vigil/Open House, Saturday night. The basic plan goes like this: Light the Yule Log at dusk, make sure it stays lit all night long, and, at sunup, go to sleep. Or, if there's interest, carpool down to Red Rocks Amphitheater for the Drumming Up of the Sun. Then come home and go to sleep. This year, I just went to sleep. But it looks like someone posted some lovely footage of the event!

Our Yule Log this year was a hunk of cottonwood reclaimed from a tree chopped down outside the climbing gym. I biked it home and left it out on the porch to age and dry. I had a really dramatic hollowed-out wedge of last year's log to start the fire with, along with some grocery store firewood bundles and a couple of wax-coated pine cones Avedan gave us. We lit it, drank a toast to it, and cheered in on into the night.

I cook a lot more than is reasonable on Solstice Eve, especially considering there's no guarantee we'll have guests at all. We had one this year; a neighbor from downstairs came up and chatted with me straight until dawn. She wasn't very hungry, however. I am drowning pleasantly in leftovers. Mostly I did the "traditional" dishes, the ones I do every year (although in some cases the "tradition" only started last year). Tomato and Orange Juice Soup, from The Wicca Cookbook. Teresa Nielsen Hayden's A Savory Pie for the First Day of Winter. Tree's ultra-thick-n-fluffy eggnog. But then I also had a bit of extra Napa cabbage in the fridge brought home from my most recent volunteer shift at Abbondanza, so I brought home a game hen and did a crock-pot sized version of Whole Chicken and Chinese Cabbage Soup, a la Kenneth Lo's Top One Hundred Chinese Dishes. And satsumas had just come into season, so I put out a bowl of them on the table.

And Avedan made empenadas - lovely little pastry tarts filled with apples, raisins, cinnamon, and further yummies I cannot recall to enumerate here. And our neighbor brought us a little tin of sweets. And another neighbor had earlier brought us a basket of cookies as a thank you for our occasional cat-sitting services, which I swear we thought well repaid by his own sitting upon our cats. And there was my fruitcake, too, as you'll remember. Which turned out divine. We were overflowing in goodies.

Since then, I've been snacking on cold slices of pie followed by satsuma chasers, and the other leftovers are looking at me like commmmme eeeeeat meeeee naaaaaaooooooo. 'Tis not the season for watching one's waistline, I fear. But it's a good season for breaking bread together, for keeping each other company, for making music, for reading books and poetry aloud together, for knitting in front of TV and radio with friends.

Whether you celebrated the season Sunday morning, during the darkest night of the year; or celebrated it Sunday evening and will continue to for a total of eight commemorative days; or will celebrate it Thursday morning with presents around a tree; whether you prefer to wait until the Kings come marching in on January 6th, with or without the eponymous Cake; or whatever way you do celebrate, as I do not have encyclopediac knowledge of all winter festivals... or perhaps you celebrate simply by getting up in the morning, like you do every morning, and saying "yes" to life in your own way... my wish for you is the same: Love, light, warmth, and hope to comfort and delight you during the cold darkness of winter, and to see you through to Spring. And may all good things come to you during our planet's next good lap around the Sun.

Today's thing happened in the kitchen. John and I made spanakopita. Pictures! We have pictures! I really wish I'd taken some during the actual manufacture of the triangular pockets. That was... involved. I got too distracted with "Gods damned filo layers won't separate ARGH!" to remember to take pictures then. (Yes, this was our first time cooking with filo. Oh my Gods that sucks. But I would do it again, and probably will sometime soon; there's all sorts of leftover filo in the freezer.)

But meanwhile you get to see John sauteeing the fresh spinach (and wondering how it could possibly all fit in the pan) and, later, the cute little finished spanakopita triangles bubbling and crisping away in the oven.

They just came out of the oven. We need to let them cool down. They smell sooooo good... Good thing I've already stuffed myself on homemade turkey/andouille gumbo and I'm not starving or anything.

Hee hee.

I am a kitchen Goddess.

The thing about Thing-a-day is, it's sort of unspecific. I mean, think about it: "Starting on February 1st, make one thing a day." Thing. Sort of noun-ish. Creativity is involved here, also newness ("no recycled old work"), but of what sort?

For obvious reasons, most of my things tend to be literary things. Today, however, I'm going with culinary.

Annie's Mac with Squash Brabant and Sauteed Walnuts

1. Cook the pasta from one box of Annie's Alfredo And Cheddar. Drain.
2. Defrost about 1.5 C cubed sweet potato and acorn squash. Alternately, you can start from fresh vegetables and cook them to tender.
3. Melt 2 Tbsp butter and toss in the vegetables, a handful of walnut pieces, and a clove or two of minced garlic. Sautee for a bit.
4. Add about 1 Tbsp onion powder, 1 Tsp paprika, and pepper to taste. Sautee a bit more.
5. Add one or two chopped up green onions (scallions) and the Annie's cheese packet. Mix well.
6. Add 1/4 C milk and 2 Tbsp heavy whipping cream. Lower heat, stir, and cook until warm.
7. Add cooked pasta, mix well, and allow to simmer until sauce has reached desired consistency.

Enjoy! And leave yourself time for a nap afterwards. I came home pretty tired from work and this meal topped my sleepy right off.

What? Cat food? Screw that. That's boring. Fruitcake is where it's at. Fruitcake in the oven for the next 3 hours, slowly making my house smell niiiiice.

Today, SlyCrow and Kandybar and I all went to Caffe Luna, in Longmont, and held miniature writing races where we'd set a timer for five or ten minutes and see who got the most words written in that time. I started the day at 29,131 (how the hell do I remember that?) and you can see where I'm at now. I highly recommend this activity. Especially if you type fast. Kandybar kept track of the math, and I'd watch to see if she punched the air triumphantly or gave me a squinty glare to see which of us had beaten the other by five words or so.

Caffe Luna claims to have free wiFi available. Actually, what it has is wiFi available. Boingo Wireless, to be exact - the kind where you need a login, and you either have a monthly subscription or else you "pay as you go," and that's not free, not in the littlest bit. Good thing we weren't there to web surf.

Not much else to report. It's Teen Titans tonight on Cartoon Network, followed by Justice League Unlimited and Megas XLR. And somewhere in there I want to do another 45 minute writing session or so, just to try to get me up to the 33K mark. And that's all I got for now.

(Oh, all right. Homemade cat food. Bake 1 lb chicken livers and 2lb ground turkey breast. When cooked, chop the liver fine and crumble the turkey. Take 1.75 cups uncooked brown rice and cook it. Open a can of pumpkin - not pumpkin pie mix, OK, just regular pumpkin - and set it aside. Open up a bag of Wellness brand dry cat food. Now, make up five batches of cat food by mixing 2/3 C turkey, 1/3 C chicken liver, 1 C rice, 1 C dry cat food, and 1/4 C pumpkin per batch. Stick all the batches but one in the freezer. That last batch goes in a closeable container in the fridge. Feed 1/3 C twice a day to overweight tabby cats with finicky digestion. In Uno and Null's case, said cats will lose weight and their digestion will improve.)

(Take leftover pumpkin and mix with falafel and a little olive oil. Form patties. Fry 'em and eat 'em like hamburgers.)

(Take leftover turkey and mix it into mac and cheese. Or saute up some celery, onions, scallions, and garlic to mix with leftover turkey; add a cup of water, a half cup uncooked jasmine rice, a couple boullion cubes, some chili powder and cayenne pepper, and a couple bay leaves. Bring to boil, reduce heat, cover and simmer for fifteen minutes. Voila - Cajun dirty rice!)

(There oughtn't to be leftover brown rice. If there is, add it to the Cajun dirty rice during the last five minutes of cooking the jasmine rice.)

It's time for my thousand word blogging break. Readers - all two of you - rejoice!

So I have this fruitcake recipe. Someone sweet sent it to me a few years back on the condition that after I followed it I send her a slice. Which I did. And then I never did it again. Make the fruitcake, I mean.

But now the Tea Spot (I never get tired of linking them!) is selling little slices of the stuff, heavy in cherries and walnut, and you know what? I gotta do it again.

So yesterday when I went to Whole Foods to pick up the ingredients for cat food (about this, more later) I also started in on fruitcake preparations. This is both the fun and the obnoxious part: bopping up and down the bulk goods aisle, deciding which dried and/or candied fruits to include, scooping them into little baggies with PLU numbered twist-ties, and weighing them to see if I'm adding up to 3.75 lbs yet. I got...

• pecans
• walnuts
• almonds
• currants
• bing cherries
• sour cherries
• black mission figs
• dates
• cranberries
• candied ginger
• and sweetened papaya spears.

Now. About chopping up dried fruits. Dried fruits are sticky. I don't care how much your friendly Pampered Chef Dealer hyped the Food Chopper, it is useless for chopping dried fruit. Dried fruit sticks to the blades at the very first slice and then rides them clear of ever getting sliced again. Besides, you don't want randomly minced fruit; you want cubed cherries and quartered dates. So stick with the knife. It's old fashioned but it works.

By the way - here's a little bit of trivia for you. True or false: "It is safe to leave bags of dried fruit out on the kitchen counter in a cat-infested household." False! I came back from retrieving the second load of groceries to find Uno and Null regarding a scattering of black mission figs, occasionally batting them to watch how they rolled. Bad kitty-owner!

So now I have a bowl of chopped-up dried fruit sitting in a covered bowl and happily getting drunk on half a cup of cognac. Tomorrow there will be the mixing of the batter, the baking of the cake, and the beginning of the process of curing the cake in more cognac in my big round Tupperware™. I plan to let that sucker pickle right up until Solstice. Yes, yes, I know. "Waste of good cognac." Well, you know what? It's just as much a waste to leave the stuff sitting on the kitchen counter until it spontaneously quadruple-distills itself. Which is what would happen. Believe me, the last third of a cup of brandy from the bottle I used on my last fruitcake was still hanging around as of yesterday. So, deal.

Next entry: A musical interlude, with homemade cat food. You (all two of you) may want to skip it, as it involves baked chicken liver.