How you know it’s serious: boxed wine stores are low at The Wine Source
It’s March 17th, St. Patrick’s Day if you care about that sort of thing. The sun is shining, mostly, and Khristian and I are practicing social distancing from everyone but each other.
I have taken the cat for a walk (which is funny), and we have gone to my house for a re-stock on books and supplies for gluten-free scones. I am about to crack a pineapple cider (Austin Eastciders) and maybe will continue to read aloud from Michael Pollan’s book A Place of My Own, dreaming of a day when Canada opens its borders back to people in the U.S. and we can start building our little shack.
It’s strange times, these, and I have to have some sort of plan for myself to keep anxiety at bay. So far I am not great at doing the right things (e.g., staying off social media and not compulsively checking the news), but I am writing this instead of doing those things. Perhaps I will do this daily, write a dispatch, so to speak, and send it into the void as everyone learns how to work at home and crowds onto the internet like the train platforms they used to stand on for their daily commute. I have a few recipes to work on from recent travels, and those will happen in the next week or so.
How will you spend this time of quietly reflected madness where we try not to peer too deeply into the darkness of what might be?
Wash your hands, don’t touch your face, and cough into your elbow.
Apropos of nothing, I have come across the following proverb from William Blake: “The cut worm forgives the plow.”
I don’t feel the need to belabor the point, but it got me thinking. Who is the plow in my life?
Also, remember the World’s Best Brownies that I crowed about (linked for your convenience)?
Well, throw that recipe out, because I just made the basic brownie recipe from The Joy of Cooking, 1997 edition, and I believe, firmly, that this is the best recipe for brownies ever. I made it with my gluten-free flour blend, reduced the sugar by a smidge because I used bittersweet chocolate, and needed to bake it for much longer than the recipe time, but good lord. These are the best brownies I have ever eaten. Crispy, shiny top, deep chocolate flavor, and the best mouthfeel/chew of any brownie I have perhaps ever had.
Turns out, more sugar + real chocolate = amazing brownies.
Also, kudos to Austin Kleon, an artist/writer I have recently started following again after a dust-up on Twitter caused me to block him in a fury many years ago (the internet makes me sensitive). There is still something about him that rubs me the wrong way, but I am enjoying his lists and (nearly) daily blog. So maybe more of that in this year – short missives instead of a once-monthly tome.
I cannot decide if this is a good sign or a bad omen.
As I write this, it’s nearly 2020, the last Saturday night of the decade, to be precise. I am alone, lying snugged under a blanket and biting my fingernails to the quick as I alternate between watching season three Better Things and scrolling through Instagram.
It’s not an unusual way for me to spend a Saturday night in general; the only thing that sets this one mildly apart is an unusually strong craving for a brownie sundae and the fact that this is right around the time when I think of the upcoming year.
I do wish, just once, that the end of the year found me looking back with warm contentment at the preceding 12 months, not white-knuckling it into the next year. This past Thursday night, a friend of mine was attacked by 15+ kids and beaten, sent to shock trauma the day after Christmas on what should have been a fairly routine Thursday night reading of Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans at Khristian’s studio in the CopyCat building.
We were waiting for our friend who had just texted that he would be at the door in a minute. When he didn’t arrive after texting, a quick glance up the street at the police cars and ambulance told the story – just a block away and a minute or two after his text, he was knocked off his bike and set upon by a roving group of kids with nothing better to do and a whole lot of despair to expel.
He is better than he might have been had it not been stopped so quickly. Quick intervention by a mail carrier, concerned neighbors, and an uneasy feeling from Khristian meant that from beginning to end the whole incident lasted about ten minutes. Enough time to shove him around and shatter an ankle, but thankfully not much more (other than the trauma of the attack, which I am certain felt like a lifetime).
Seems odd, maybe, but this incident got me thinking again about home.
I have been back in Charm City for almost six years now. I grew up in western Maryland and went to college at UMBC, spending several years in Fells Point when Harbor East was a wasteland of abandoned warehouses and Druid Hill Park was still a place you didn’t go after 5 pm. I was once pinned down in a rowhouse by gunfire in my capacity as a counselor for women in transitional housing, and I saw my first dead body on the sidewalk in front of The Buttery (the restaurant featured in the movie Seven and has now been replaced by what is referred to as the “Ouija 7-Eleven“).
The city has always been dangerous.
But this feels different.
When Sicily and I came to visit after Dane died in 2013, we felt like we were coming home, but since I have been here it hasn’t fit quite right.
I love my house. I love my street. I have built a community here, in my neighborhood and among the people I have met. I have been lucky in my work and in the friends I have cultivated.
But it doesn’t feel like home.
I thought Baltimore would be the place where I would feel settled, and although there is a familiarity about it, and it is more home than anywhere else I have been, it’s not quite the comfort I have been seeking. I don’t feel held in the bosom of this place as much as I thought I would.
In this city that could be so great, with so many brilliant people from all walks of life and such a perfect location and size, there is so much daily desperation and pain that I find it hard to leave the house some days.
Is this the midlife crisis, the actual one instead of the one brought on by Dane’s death, where I make bad choices and rash decisions?
Super possible.
Fast forward four days – it’s New Year’s day, and I have been awake since 4, out well before midnight. I have already walked the Loch Raven Reservoir (found the new friend in the picture above), painted, edited some poetry, and felt regret for a decision I made last night. Khristian always says you feel lighter if the decision is a good one, but I don’t feel light. I am not sure if it matters.
The tone of the post is rambly and ranging – from New Year’s resolutions (eat more Daim cookies) to brutal attacks to what makes home and now finally bad decisions.
I don’t know what to say, but I feel compelled to write, and as this is my party, I will cry (write) if I want to, platform be damned.
I do wish everyone the happiest of new years. Hopefully, it’s a damn sight better than the last one.
As I write this, it’s December 13th, the day after the glorious last full moon of the decade (1990 was THIRTY YEARS AGO), and I am listening to a potent combination of rain, sleet, and drizzly snow hitting the new skylight on my new roof that, up until two weeks ago, had developed a leak.
There is a spice cake in the oven for Sarah, owner of Yoga Tree Baltimore, and I am not quite sure what to do with myself while I wait for the cake to cool. I have been thinking about the year that is coming to an end, and it’s taking up a lot of mental space (as you can tell by this sentence, which is less than stellar, if I am being honest. Which I always try to be.).
I have been, as is my wont and millions of others’s, too, as the clock winds down the calendar, reflective. I am not one of the people who shun resolutions, but I don’t also have a lot of faith in them either. Case in point: last year’s (2019) New Year’s resolutions. Other than using my time more effectively and exploring Baltimore a little more (very little more, as it turns out), I accomplished exactly zero of these resolutions.
In fact, 2019 was precisely nothing like I thought it would be. The summer was chaotic and sad, money was tight, a good friend died, and my house started falling apart (a lintel fell off, then the roof leaked).
In 2019, between housing issues and taxes, I spent $30,000 on unexpected expenses. Which is enough to make it impossible to travel or go on retreat or any of the things I had planned.
On the other hand, I published two poems and was accepted into my first juried art show (won second place!), and I am going on retreat to The Woods with Writers & Words and Ink Press Productions in January. I submitted a ton of work, got some good acceptances (and some terrible rejections), but also constructive, positive feedback on a few of my pieces.
Khristian and I built a camping platform on our land in Canada, and we have found an ally in one of the other homeowners there, kindred Canadian spirits who I met accidentally on a walk and am so glad that I did.
I am not here to tell you how to set resolutions or change your life. I am no expert, no self-help guru, and I would not presume to tell you how to live your life. I have had years when things went closely to plan, and others when nothing I planned worked out but other things rushed in to fill the void. Turns out, sometimes when a plan goes awry, it makes space for new discoveries and serendipitous occurrences.
These cookies, or the name at least, is one of those. They are your standard lace cookie, and I made them one night when I needed something sweet but was too lazy to hit the store and the cupboards were mostly bare. So I whipped these up in 30 minutes and had to remove myself physically so as not to eat them all.
Sicily tried them, and said, “Oh, these are Daim cookies.”
You may or may not be a visitor to IKEA, but they have these candies in their shop, Daim, that are bits of toffee covered in chocolate. We used to buy them all the time until they changed the recipe and they tasted off so we stopped.
These cookies taste exactly like the original Daim, a happy accident that nevertheless takes me exactly where I want to go when I want a delicious sweet thing with a bare minimum of ingredients and effort.
Enjoy.
Daim Cookies
(makes between 18 and 24 cookies)
Ingredients
1 stick butter
2/3 cup lightly packed brown sugar
3/4 cup almond flour
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon light corn syrup
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
optional: 1/2 cup chocolate
chips
Instructions
Melt butter in a saucepan over medium heat. Add sugar,
flour, salt, and corn syrup, cooking and whisking constantly until sugar has
dissolved and ingredients are combined. Turn off heat and whisk in vanilla
extract. This may make the mixture appear grainy, but that’s ok.
Let mixture rest ten minutes (it will become thicker as it
cools down). Preheat oven to 350°F.
Line baking sheets with parchment (I used three baking
sheets). You could also use silicone baking sheets.
Spoon teaspoons of mixture onto sheets (leave 3” on all sides)
Bake for six to eight minutes until golden brown around the edges. Cookies are
done when they are no longer bubbling.
Do not walk away. Burning happens very quickly. #askmehowIknow
Allow cookies to cool for five minutes on the baking sheets.
If you don’t have more to bake, you can leave them to cool on the baking sheet,
or you can transfer to a wire rack.
You can eat these as they are, or you can melt chocolate
chips in a saucepan and either paint to bottoms of the cookies with a thin coat
of chocolate, drizzle it over top, or sandwich two cookies together (use a
little more chocolate for this than if you were just painting a single layer).
Cover and keep on the counter for three days or in the ‘fridge
for up to a week.
I was about to let this blog go. Not the name, you understand – just the process of writing a blog every month.
But then…cake.
You should know that cake is the world’s perfect food, or at least in a three-way (tie) with watermelon and pizza.
I love it the best and the most and will eat it every day if I can. I believe in the power of cake for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
Perhaps most importantly for the purposes of this missive, I enjoy baking cakes for people. I like to see their faces when they open the box, and the whites of their eyes when they take their first bite.
That last little bit is creepy, but I mean it in the nicest way possible.
Additionally, if I made all of the cake I want to make/eat, the fit of my clothing would become problematic.
So, hello, you. Let me bake a cake for you.
I have updated my “Let Me Bake For You” page to list the offerings that are available.
Since I want baking to continue to be enjoyable, I won’t accept more orders than I can make with love (seriously. I know that sounds hokey or saccharine or whatever, but I mean it). If you want a cake, stake your claim early in the month and slap your money on the barrelhead (or the Venmo or PayPal – the 21st-century barrelhead).
If you want to give a cake to a person, I suppose I could whip you up a gift certificate for that person. Get in touch.
And if you want something other than a cake, get in touch. I could maybe work something out for you.
Oh, and hey. Share this post with a friend, using the buttons. I am off the Facebook but still use Instagram.
You can also take pix of your cakes and post on Instagram with my inventive hashtag: #charmcityedibles. That would not suck.
