Searching for Csilla, Part 1

Go ahead and click on the picture, to enjoy more of the beauty of Central California in the fall.

I’d first visited the area on a trip to Hearst Castle. My then nine-year-old daughter had put her foot down, when it came to roughing the entire trip. She was willing to camp out, but she didn’t see why we should have to make our own supper. It’s true that the two of us aren’t the world’s best cooks. My husband tends to do most of the supper making. But Jacob was doing field work in the Wasatch Range and we were fending for ourselves. I considered putting on my best determined parent act, and reminding her about that girl scout badge she was working on, but we’d been driving for three hours and, I’d just seen a sign for the Bear Valley Farm Diner.

The diner was everything she and I had wanted. It had been assembled in the 1970’s to resemble a pseudo-Victorian farmhouse setting, and the decoration hadn’t been changed since. There were french fries for her and a salad bar for me, plus air conditioning and hot water in the bathroom. Everything two campers could desire. I’d had a strong attachment to Bear Valley ever since.

Eszter and I had enjoyed camping together - there had been a beach within walking distance which helped a lot - but neither of us had ever been inspired to revisit Hearst’s overblown collection of more goodies than any one man could properly utilize. We had, however, stopped by the pseudo-farm every few years, on our regular trips to Disneyland. The kitschy décor of the restaurant, with it’s calico tie-back curtains and idyllic farmyard murals, gave us a soothing sense of returning to an imaginary era, nearly as good as our favorite fantasy world farther south.

Two years ago, Eszter had chosen a school from among nine colleges and universities into which she’d been accepted. And she’d chosen to go to U.Mo., just up the hill from Bear Valley Farm. I was only too happy to make the occasional three-hour drive down, to drop off clothes or sports equipment she couldn’t live without, because the Farm had a hotel as well as the diner. And every room in the hotel had it’s own gas-burning fireplace that turned on with an electrical switch. Just the spot for hanging out in an overstuffed wing chair and working on my laptop.

I suppose it was just the in-room fireplaces and the association with my daughter’s childhood that attracted me to the area. It couldn’t be anything else that had caused me to suggest to my daughter that she might cherish a visit from her mother in the middle of the quarter. Eszter was uncertain. Over the last two years, we’d transported every piece of sports equipment from the garage at home, and her closet was full. Still, I insisted she humor me. We could eat supper together at the diner, for old time sake. I was really coming down to visit a nearby specialty native plants nursery on the way back home the next day, I told her. The business was a small one, and open only certain days.

My husband was at work in remote area of Nevada. Having been married to a geologist for over thirty years, I long ago learned to enjoy time to myself as well as I appreciate our time together. But I suppose my daughter figured I was lonely, and I let her think it. The drive down highway 101 through the fields around Salinas, King City and Paso Robles was alight with color. The grape vines were decked in their autumn finery and the distant coast range was a compelling mass of blue shadows.

But I knew that something more than scenery was drawing me, inexorably, to the central coast.

to be continued

Summer’s End Peach Cobbler

The weather’s been funny everywhere this summer. It poured rain several of the days I was in Madrid – a pattern the locals told me was normal ahora, pero antes, no! Here in the San Francisco Bay Area, we had a cooler than usual July and August. And my facebook-friend Judy, up in Oregon was most unhappy because it either rained incessantly or was boiling hot, nothing like the quintessential blackberry-pickin’ season I always imagined in the northwest.

I wonder if the funny weather is why every peach I tried, this summer have been crummy? I look forward to fresh peaches all year, but every one I’ve tried this year has been, what my mother would call, ‘mealy’.

Last week my husband hopefully brought home one last lovely looking box of peaches. Surely this batch would be different! They were so attractive, a beautiful shade of yellow with lovely red blushes. Today they were perfectly ripe, giving just, so, when you pressed one finger against their delicate complexions.

They tasted lousy.

What does good old Ann Landers say? Or was it Ben Franklin who suggested the connection between lemons and lemonade? But in the case of peaches, it’s cobbler. Tonight we made, and ate, the best peach cobbler I’ve ever eaten. Could it be, the mealier the peach, the better the cobbler?

Pretty easy.

1) I mixed up a batch of my 1960’s Style Buttermilk Biscuits (it’s the same recipe I wrote about earlier this month, in the art-journal entry “Kidhood Memories:1960’s Style Buttermilk Biscuits”) and filled the bottom of a deep dish, square type casserole dish.

2) I set the oven to 400 degrees (instead of the 450 degrees I’d use for biscuits)

3) Cut up 3 large, delicious looking, but mealy tasting yellow free-stone peaches and covered the biscuit dough. Then I topped the peaches with some sugar (maybe ½ a cup?) and a sprinkling of cinnamon.

4) I bakes the cobbler for 20 minutes (checking after 10 and finding it still very much un done). Then I turned off the oven, leaving the pan inside the still hot oven and took my dog for a walk around the park! (Probably for about 20 more minutes). When we returned from the dog walk, I turned the oven back on, but now at 450 degrees. It was done and fork clean, 10 minutes later.

Yummm. The mealier, the better!

Remember Me When This You See: Part 2: LIZZIE

If you missed it, you can click on

Part 1 of Remember Me When This You See: Blackberry Memories , to read the first part of the story

The following is Part 2 of

Remember Me When This You See

Slowly I laid the old piece of paper down on top of my desk, and re-examined the envelope I’d found in the old book. I still knew Lizzie’s writing, even after all these years. And she was right when she said I’d remember that typing project. Of course I’d have recognized her handwriting anywhere.

Even after all these years. I still remembered her modern take on a copperplate hand. That paper had been twenty pages long and I’d struggled mightily to read her funny ‘f’s and ‘p’, bfore I keyed them into the file. It had been terribly important to Lizzie that that particular piece of writing be captured in digital format.

When we first became roommates, back in our freshman year, I’d explained to her that the new word processor technology allowed text to be changed and re-printed, without having to be entirely re-typed, and she’d remembered. That was back before computers got personal and we still did a lot of our programming on card decks. When Lizzie had first begun working on her senior project about Elizabeth Snowden, she told me that it was terribly important that this paper, of all papers, be kept in this form.

It was several years before personal computers had emerged on the market, and the only people at the university who had access to word processor technology were Computer Science majors. Lizzie and I were absolute soul mates, closer than sisters, she always said. So I had typed the paper learning all about the life of Civil War spy Elizabeth Snowden’s contribution to the Northern Cause in the process. Lizzie had turned up some old volumes in the university archives that no historians seemed to have stumbled on. She thought it was probably because they’d been buried deep underneath a pile of Confederate bills that someone had donated, that no one had unearthed them before. I guess Confederate money is a glut on the historical donation market.

From her reading, my roommate painted the picture of a glamorous woman who, she argued, had made it possible for the devastating American war to end sooner than it otherwise might.

to be continued.....

Remember Me When This You See: Part 1: BLACKBERRY MEMORIES

Dear Diana,

I found a patch of wild blackberries just up the road this morning and picked three baskets full to make into jam. They're the last I’ll find this year. The raccoons have been making regular inroads on the vines I planted when I moved in, but they’d missed these. It might be because the dogs like to ramble up that way at night. Though, in truth, the raccoons around here don’t seem to have any fear of my hounds. More likely, it’s because they were half hidden under a grassy bank.

I’ve always been a little suspicious when berry picking because of that time you and I stopped and picked olallieberries on the coast, and saw the snake. I swore it was a rattler and you thought otherwise. We don’t have olallieberries around her, not yet any way.

Remember how we made berry cobbler that afternoon? Everybody in the house, and all their friends came over? Elliot played “Cripple Creek” on his banjo and I knew all the lyrics. Was that boy cute or what? All that Dixieland talk and the charm to go with it. Then you mixed in modern attitudes towards the environment and ethnic diversity and he was it! It seemed like there was a different girl coming over to see him every week. If I’d been any more interested in blond, southern manhood than I am now, that is to say not at all, I’d have fallen for him myself. But I do sometimes admit to wondering if he ever got married!

I was up to my elbows in berries and sugar this afternoon, remembering that day. Sugar’s been hard to get since the war began, but a military gentleman owed me a favor, and I got him to pay up in sugar. Our boys in blue, particularly those of his rank, seem to be able to get whatever they want. It’ll sure be nice to have those jars put up this winter.

I suppose you’ll be surprised to see this letter. It’s been a few years, one way or another since we saw each other, hasn’t it? You’ve been on my mind a good bit, and I’ve been meaning to get in touch. There’s a lot to tell, and it’s hard to know exactly where to start. I suppose I ought to begin by telling you that that paper you typed up for me in that class I took that last winter quarter, “A Study in Original Source”, has really come in useful in my, well I guess you’d just have to call it my new life.

(Continued tomorrow)

Click on the picture above for more arty details

First Signs of Fall: Forage 'Ye Fennel Will Ye May

Been eyeing this lovely spot of wild fennel by the edge of the train tracks on my walking route back from the Atherton Library, for a month or more now. I know Californians who forage for this floral treat. The bulb, seeds, flowers and pollen are all fodder for the native gourmet's kitchen. I'm not ready to take the chance on roadside produce. The creek below is sprayed for mosquito larve and there's also the potential that some other, toxic, little plant might creep in with the greenery. I'm better off sticking with the Sunday Farmer's Market downtown.

But I haven't found that sharp anise scent at the agricultural stalls. Last summer I cropped a big bunch and brought it home for a bouquet, which I plumped down outside in a big old aluminum watering pot, a la "Country Living Magazine". My husband, a much more orderly person than I am, was seriously displeased. It was a sticky, messy visitor, and he traded me some favor (not dishes - he already does a good deal of the housework around here!) to get me to pitch the pots contents after a couple of days on our outdoor supper table on the patio.

But this year I'd spied it again. Just as yellow and just as strong-scented. Ever since I first spotted it, I'd been considering the possibility of a bouquet to decorate the driveway. I was returning a stack of well-read books two days ago, when I saw the road crew pull up with shovels and rakes.

"Are you going take out the yellow flowers?" I cried.

They admitted the 'yellow flowers' were indeed their goal. When I returned with my camera in hand, fifteen minutes later, they'd already made inroads on my photo-bouquet. While I snapped my pictures, they were already bundling the branches into shocks, and leaning them against the metal fence for the guy with the truck. Meanwhile the seeds rained down on the heavy, adobe soil.

The fennel, in all it's strong-scented, sticky, yellow glory will be back next summer.

Take a better peek at this altered mass of yellow glory, by clicking on the picture above. If you're a regular reader of this journal, you might recognize some of the visitors I've added.

First Signs of Fall: Sour Grass in my Knish?

My new friend Marcia, from piano class, says she uses sour-grass to flavor her homemade knish recipe. Hummmm... check with somebody who knows more than me first, ok? Your local medical provider, maybe. If you've got one.

And don't use this much-altered picture of sour-grass to identify oxalis. I've altered it to make it arty. While you're looking, why don't you click on the picture to see the lovely details?

A Rose By Any Other Name

Cliff Rose

Grand Canyon

Please click on the picture to see the lovely details

My buddy Sasha always knows a strong character when she meets her. She told me

"Cliff can really hang in there when it is necessary. She's a real strong character."

And I agreed, "She's a stable girl. The kind who's got roots."