Back from Choir Tour

I promise not to make such long absences habitual, but a number of obligations (and pleasures!) including summer visitors from abroad have kept me away. And now I’m just back from a week-long in-state tour with the vocal ensemble I sing in (and manage). We rehearsed four hours a day, gave 5 full concerts, gave 5 - 45 minute programs in nursing homes, and provided special music for two worship services. We also squeezed a recording session into the week.

I’m quite a bit older than most of the rest of the singers, so I’m exhausted. I don’t know where they get their energy for staying up late and partying on top of everything else. But there they are at breakfast every morning, raring to go again, regardless of the how late they stayed up talking or how many beers they had. Ah…youth! Actually, it’s pretty inspiring.

But I can see I have to get busy. My sidebar needs updating both in terms of books I’m reading and music I’m studying. And I want to share some of those reading thoughts too. I also see that Jacques has tagged me for a meme and that there are a scary number of posts to be poured over courtesy of Google Reader. I look forward to it all! But first a boat ride with hubby and the dog, a good supper, and a good night’s sleep!

The Last Uncle

I’m just back from a short trip to Southeastern South Dakota. It’s where my father’s ancestors settled when they came from Germany at the turn of the last century. I traveled there to attend the funeral of my last uncle, my father’s youngest brother Bill, who died in his sleep last week at age 84.

Besides being my last uncle, Bill represented the last of an entire generation of our family’s members. Both of my parents and all of their brothers and sisters, and all of their brothers- and sisters-in-law are now gone. Granted, I am among the youngest of the cousins. But it is still a strange feeling indeed—the loss of that generational buffer between yourself and the great hereafter. But my thoughts along these lines were rather vague until one of the cousins read the following poem at the reception following the funeral:

The Last Uncle
Linda Pastan, from The Last Uncle: Poems (2002)

The last uncle is pushing off
in his funeral skiff (the usual
black limo) having locked
the doors behind him
on a whole generation.

And look, we are the elders now
with our torn scraps
of history, alone
on the mapless shore
of this raw, new century.

↔ ↔ ↔ ↔

I was so taken by this poem, I copied it down to memorize it. And I picked up Pastan’s The Last Uncle and a newer volume, Queen of a Rainy Country (2006) at a Sioux Falls bookstore before I left. I can’t quite get out of my head the image of we cousins, left now to decipher for ourselves “our torn scraps of history.”

Here’s another poem on the same theme, also from The Last Uncle:

Family History

My uncle changed
from Izzie to Irving
to Irvin, enroute
from the Lower East Side,
via Bush Street,
all the way
to Riverside Drive.

But now that his skull
is taking on
the luminous form
of his father’s,
we hurry
to ask him
all the questions

we never thought
to ask before.
It is twilight, even here
in the suburbs.
He is the only
Herodotus
we have left.

↔ ↔ ↔ ↔

What do you make of “It is twilight even here / in the suburbs.”? Why “even here in the suburbs?” Is it a reference to better lit streets than, say, the older city neighborhoods she references above? Is it that not even the suburbs (havens of safety) are exempt from this particular dark? What great stuff this is!

Rhubarb Pie & Nigella Lawson

Okay, one more post on rhubarb and then I’ll move on. Promise.

My mother made the best pie crust on earth. No measurements were involved, just years of experience and the feel of the pie dough in her hands. None of her six daughters inherited her knack. Two have given up entirely. Two have declared themselves winners—which of course they aren’t—and have left the ring. Two of us continue to duke it out in hopes that the competition will bring us closer to that ur-crust we can’t get out of our heads.

I have to admit, my sister D’s pie crust is better than mine. In fact, I’ve been cheating of late and have settled into Nigella Lawson’s recipe and method with great results. Lawson’s crust is not as good as my mother’s was. Nor is it as good as D’s. But there’s no ignominy in coming in third in such a competitive field.

Here’s what I’ve done so far with this year’s seemingly endless supply of rhubarb! 12 cups frozen rhubarb (2 C portions are for future cakes; 1 C portions for muffins); 1-1/2 quarts ported rhubarb (what a great recipe! thanks Jacques!); two rhubarb pies; and (not shown) 3 pints of rhubarb sauce (made from 2 ingredients: rhubarb and honey to taste).

I’m including Nigella Lawson’s crust recipe below. My sister won’t part with hers. And I’ll let Nigella speak for herself, delivering her recipe in her trademark prosey and delightful way. If you don’t know her books, you don’t know what you’re missing. You’ll never find a more knowledgeable, chatty, or fascinating companion in the kitchen.

Nigella Lawson’s Plain Pastry Dough
(makes 2-9″ crusts)

1-3/4 cups flour
1/2 cup cold, diced fat (half lard…half butter)
5 - 7 tbsp iced water
squeeze of lemon
pinch of salt

Measure the flour into a bowl and add the cold fat cut into 1/2 inch dice. You then put this, as is, in the freezer for 10 minutes. Then you put it in the food processor with the metal blade attached…, and switch on…until the mixture resemble oatmeal. Then you add, tablespoon by cautious tablespoon, the ice water, to which you’ve added a squeeze of lemon and a pinch of salt.

When the dough looks like it’s about to come together, but just before it actually does, you turn off the machinery, remove the dough, divide into two, and form each half into a ball; flatten the balls into fat discs and cover these discs with plastic film or put them each inside a freezer bag and shove them in the fridge for 20 minutes. This makes pastry anyone could roll out, even if you add too much liquid by mistake. (36)

Rhubarb Custard Pie

3 eggs

1 1/2 C sugar

3 Tbl flour

1 Tbl orange juice

1 tsp orange zest

3 C diced rhubarb

1. Beat eggs slightly. Mix in sugar, flour, orange juice and orange zest. Add rhubarb and mix well.
2. Pour into an unbaked pie shell. Cover with top crust and flute/seal edges.
3. Brush top crust with beaten egg and sprinkle with a little sugar. Pierce/vent in a decorative manner.
4. Bake at 450 for 10 minutes, then at 350 for 40 minutes, or until custard is set and crust is golden brown.

got rhubarb?

Well I certainly do! Not only do I have my own thriving patch, but a good friend brought a mountain of it yesterday–in trade for heirloom tomato seedlings I start for her each year. But no worries. I’ll use some now and freeze the rest for later. I have as many rhubarb recipes as there are hours in the day (or maybe as there are in two days). My favorite rhubarb recipes are perhaps mundane, but represent what I consider to be two of the staffs (staves?) of life: muffins and pie.

But first, I thought you might like to meet my helpers in the rhubarb patch.

John the Dog (1/2 border collie and 1/2 Newfoundland) came to us a couple of years ago from the animal shelter. He is sporting his summer haircut. I can’t imagine a more wonderful dog. He’s sweet, loving, protective and gets into very little mischief. Best of all, he knows his place outside the garden! Here he’s doing what he does best: overseeing the situation. His favorite spot for this activity is on the back of the pontoon boat. But watching me garden is a close second.

This is Indiana. I tried to catch her in the act (just emerging from underneath the big rhubarb leaves), but she’s pretty quick. She did turn around just in time for you to see her pretty face. Indy and her brother Stink (from another mother–and yes, there’s a story behind his name) are actually indoor cats who enjoy the outdoors a little each day. They haven’t figured out yet that the great outdoors is one big cat box, so they don’t do their business in the garden. And neither of them are diggers. And, except for wanting to lie under the big rhubarb leaves, they stay out of the raised beds. In short, they make great gardening companions.

Here is the muffin recipe:

Rhubarb Bran Muffins

1 C whole wheat flour
1 C wheat bran
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp cinnamon
3 tsp baking powder

2 eggs
3 Tbsp canola oil
1/3 C honey
1 C milk
1 tsp almond extract
1 Tbsp orange zest
1/4 C coconut (sweetened or unsweetened is fine)

1 C rhubarb, fresh or frozen, roughly chopped

1. Preheat oven to 400°F. Grease muffin tins (enough for 12 muffins).
2. In a large bowl sift together wheat flour, salt, baking powder, and cinnamon. Stir in wheat bran.
3. In a separate bowl whisk together eggs, oil, honey, milk, almond extract and orange zest. Stir in coconut.
4. Make a well in the middle of the dry ingredients and gently pour in the wet ingredients. Fold gently with rubber spatula or wooden spoon until dry ingredients are just absorbed. Gently fold in rhubarb. Do not over mix. Batter should be lumpy.
5. Fill 12 muffin tins 2/3 - 3/4 full. Tap on counter to settle and to remove air bubbles. Bake for 18 - 20 minutes, or until wooden pick inserted in center comes out clean.
6. Cool in pans for 5 minutes before turning out. Eat warm or finish cooling on wire racks. These muffins freeze to very good effect.

I can see I’m going to have to work on my food photography skills

And in the Spring, for sheer delight…

Do you ever believe that lines of poems or songs are addressed to you personally? There’s a gorgeous SATB choral piece by composer Carolyn Jennings called A Feast of Lanterns. I’ve been privileged to perform it with more than one choir over the years. It’s a contemporary piece with abrupt stops and starts, wide dynamic swings, and a good bit of drama and dissonance. If my life depended upon it, I could not come up with the tune, much less my alto line. But the words “And in the Spring, for sheer delight” stay with me. And so…this blog. And so it’s simple theme of delight.

I am currently enjoying Ted Kooser’s poetry collection, Delights and Shadows (2004), for which he won a Pulitzer Prize. There are so many poems in this volume that I’ll return to again and again. But here’s one that stands out, probably because like Kooser’s Cassett, I have “little patience with darkness.”

A BOX OF PASTELS
Ted Kooser, from Delights and Shadows (2004)

I once held on my knees a simple wooden box
in which a rainbow lay dusty and broken.
It was a set of pastels that had years before
belonged to the painter Mary Cassatt,
and all of the colors she’d used in her work
lay open before me. Those hues she’d most used,
the peaches and pinks, were worn down to stubs,
while the cool colors—violet, ultramarine –
had been set, scarcely touched, to one side.
She’d had little patience with darkness, and her heart
held only a measure of shadow. I touched
the warm dust of those colors, her tools,
and left there with light on the tips of my fingers.

↔ ↔ ↔ ↔

Mary Cassatt, Young Girl in the Garden (1880-82)