It’s been a while, but I have not forgotten, Jo!

I do not have a sous-chef for this one because the sous-chef is only interested in baked goods and/or items with sugar, but we shall soldier on regardless, yes?

Ingredients:

Fresh asparagus

Olive oil

Salt

Pepper

Balsamic vinegar

Mural of Flavor seasoning

I have strong opinions on the subject of asparagus. I live in an area that is allegedly renowned for them and so every May, we are blessed with a bounty of the stuff, and once you get the stuff practically fresh off the field, tender and sweet, you will have a hard time enjoying the wooden, store-bought, out-of-season stuff.

So, there’s your first ingredient — asparagus, as fresh as you can find it. Contrary to popular belief, the skinny stalks are not necessarily better — the stuff around here is thick as my thumb and snaps with the satisfying crunch of a carrot when eaten raw.

Wash them, trim the bottoms — if there’s some of the purplish bit at the bottom of the stalk, cut that off. Don’t peel them.

Put them in a large bowl, douse liberally with olive oil. Add salt, pepper, mural of flavor and a couple swigs of balsamic. Toss the stalks so they are well-coated in the mixture.

Fire up your grill, and once it’s good and hot, throw them on for about 5 minutes. The tips may blacken and crisp up a bit — that’s good (omigod is it good).

Serve. Try not to stab the other people with a fork over the last one.

My grandmother died of an aneurysm rupture. 19 years ago, did my aunt A. 18 years ago, so did my dad. The latter two died of complications from surgery to prevent a rupture, and let me tell you, there is nothing to make you feel good like finding out that the alleged cure for a condition has in fact killed your loved ones.

Today, I received an email from one of my uncles that my cousin D has just been diagnosed with the same kind of aneurysm that killed his mother. Through a fluke of scheduling (never in the same country at the same time) I haven’t seen D since he was a kid, but I have seen his brother and his dad several times, and they are lovely, lovely people. D’s father is putting a brave face on it, talking about how much the field of vascular surgery has improved since his wife was taken from him and how D will be fine.

I sent them all an email and realized that one of the bad things about moving at 8 years old from the country where they speak your mother tongue is that you have no idea how to tell someone, “My thoughts are with you.” That’s just not the sort of thing a second-grader is expected to know. And my thoughts are with them — god, they are. I remember just enough about that stretch of weeks between diagnosis, surgery, and death never to wish any part of it on my worst enemy, let alone flesh and blood.

Please, think, pray, wish, cross fingers, throw salt, and send it my cousin’s way, that this will be the time that someone ends up on the right side of the statistics.

Sometimes, what passes for creativity in my life is just a literal-mindedness so exacting that it would never occur to anyone else.

My high school art teacher once assigned us, as homework, the task of drawing “a corner of your basement.” Everyone drew lovely little tableaux of discarded dolls or TV rooms or assorted junk. I cleared all that stuff away, sat down about 2 feet from the wall, and drew the physical point where the two walls met the floor at the far end of the basement — 18 inches by 24 inches of life-size, minutely-observed bumps in the stone, dried up bug carcasses, and cobwebs. (Took me FOREVER, by the way.) I wasn’t trying to be clever; I just assumed that he meant the actual corner. I don’t know if he ever caught on that this was my MO. He was always intrigued by my odd angles when we drew still lifes, and I just always thought that when he said to draw what was in front of us, we should, you know, draw what was in front of us.

(Digression: This is also why I am SUCH a gratifyingly gullible audience for my husband’s humor; I just take things far too literally. Last week when we got economically stimulated, he called me at work to announce the arrival of our check. “Came with a letter, too,” he started. “It explained why we’re getting the check. And about how the Democrats hate freedom and didn’t want us to get the money. And to remember to vote Republican in November.” I was about 3 paragraphs into my rant about the military-industrial complex and their vote-buying practices when I noticed that he was snickering. Really, I should know better. This is the same man who once convinced me he had done heroin, after all, in the same tone of voice.)

It seems that my daughter has inherited this tendency. When you ask her to look up, like, for a photo, she will invariably throw her head back and gawk at the ceiling. Today, her grandpa called and asked her what she was doing: “Puttin’ on my Hello Kitty UNDERPANTS!” she over-shared.

Then, as I discussed recently, we’ve been talking about boundaries and how some things are things you only do when you’re by yourself. When she reminded of this, instead of ceasing the behavior(s) in question, she will order all assembled parties to leave the room, slam the door shut, and remain thus sequestered until she is good and ready to come out. And then smear her boogers on my shirt, but hey, baby steps.

My favorite is her misinterpretation of traffic rules. I explained to her that when you cross the street, you need to see if there are cars coming, and if there are, DON’T MOVE! We have to cross two streets to get to the playground, so we have had ample opportunity to discuss this. Somehow, though, she has gotten her stories mixed up, because she now thinks this applies anytime you see a car while you are walking, in the course of our 2-block walk, she will suddenly freeze and remain stock-still until the car has passed, at which point she will skip merrily on her way.

I am reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma. I am on page 64 of 450 and so far I have decided that I must never eat corn or meat again. Here, have a provocative sentence about what modern agribusiness, and especially the corn industry, owes to the depredations of World War II: The chemical fertilizer industry (along with that of pesticides, which are based on poison gases developed for the war) is the product of the government’s effort to convert its war machine to peacetime purposes. I can tell that this is going to be one of those reading experiences that will drive Jim up the wall, what with the ranting and the gesticulating it is sure to engender. If he’s really lucky, I’ll do that thing again where I wave my arms around so much that I accidentally rip an earring out of my head and fling it across the room.

On the other hand, he really has no cause to complain, does he, when the aforementioned book combined with Sarah’s intriguing post to inspire me to make mozzarella and ricotta cheese tonight from scratch. Eliza and I tried two recipes, and the one Sarah posted in the comments was definitely the better of the two. I ran into trouble when I was looking for rennet, which I could order, the Whole Foods dude said, but only by the caseload. Uh, no, thank you. Luckily, they had a cheese-making kit which contained rennet tablets, as well as citric acid, so I bought that and poached the stuff I needed. I tried another recipe that called for fruit juice, milk and half and half and it made sweetened ricotta, which wasn’t at all what I was looking for, although it’d be a delicious pie ingredient.

Once I made the cheese, I also made a whole wheat focaccia dough, and from there, Eliza and I made calzones, stuffing them with our brand new cheese, pesto and tomato sauce. It was not exactly the quickest meal, but since one batch of dough plus cheese yielded enough for 6 good-sized calzones, I also have several meals covered, and deliciously so.

I am a supporter of hunting and fishing, and I don’t see that as being contradictory to my liberalism in other areas. I think that in some ways, getting your meat from an animal you have killed while hunting is a more ethical thing to do than buying pig from a hog farm. The animal’s led a much better life, the impact on the environment of bringing that animal to your table is lower, and because you come face to face with it at its moment of death, you have a much better awareness of what had to happen (i.e. something had to die) to put that meat on your table.

I think that understanding of the continuum of raw material to food has been disrupted not only in terms of meat but in all the things we eat. I have a lousy garden for growing my own food and I don’t own a milk animal, so obviously there are going to be limits to practicing what I preach, but I like getting my hands in my food, kneading the dough myself, peeling my own carrots instead of using those little ground-down nubbins, and now, getting cheese curd under my fingernails. It puts me closer to the source and it makes me more mindful of what it means to eat well. It also makes me wonder on whom I can now foist those plasticky cheese blocks I bought on sale last week because I have suddenly become aware of just how artificial they really are. Cheese shouldn’t really be plasticine, should it?

I see this as part of a series of issues created by modernization and mechanization. We are so divorced from our natural world and our physical presence in it — the idea of our bodies being nothing more than vessels for our brains, of living entirely in a virtual world. I don’t consider myself particularly sensual but I cannot abide that idea. I lost part of myself for a while when I spent my teen and college years as a sedentary creature, and as much as I hate the get-some-exercise flippancy of Crazy Cruise and his minions, I must admit that part of feeling mentally balanced for me is to feel at home in my body.

Part of that, lately, seems to be the sense experience of the whey running through my fingers, of the knife slicing through the onions, of spinning efficiently between cutting board and sauté pan — and of steadying the milk jug so Eliza can pour into a measuring cup, and of dusting off her hands and face after she has stuck her arms elbow-deep into the dough I am making.

Bon appetit.

1. I password-protected the answer to the question everyone had in yesterday’s comments because I’m paranoid since it’s job-related. If you don’t have the password yet but would like to know, email me at elizasmo_at_elizasmom_dot_com

2. Perhaps it’s wrong of me, but I must admit that every time I check my spam folder, I crack up when I get to the spam that says, “Get ready for tons of p0#n!” It just sounds so … festive.

3. Today, I brought to the Y: 4 towels, 3 jogbras, and 2 pairs of shorts, but sadly could not complete my work-out-based reinterpretation of the “12 Days of Christmas” because I forgot to bring a T-shirt. I rigged a top from 2 bras and the camisole I was wearing under my work shirt and pretended like I meant to do that. There are so many weird dressers up there in hippie land that I don’t think anyone noticed. I would’ve had to fashion a skirt out of the towels and a headdress from the shorts to raise an eyebrow.

4. I have started to get a little more into the idea of boundaries with Eliza, explaining that there are some things we only do in our rooms by ourselves. She understands this, superficially, but undermines herself completely by her running commentaries about same. As in this afternoon, when she stopped herself from picking her nose (a new favorite pastime we are having to crack down on), and then spent the rest of the walk from the parking lot to child watch monologuing about, “You don’t pick your nose OUTSIDE! You ONLY pick your nose in your ROOM! By YOURSELF!”