Canyonland

One of the aspects of travel I most love is the opportunity to see how landscapes change as you move across the earth's surface. You begin to see subtle changes in the land as you travel high above it in an airplane, or as you travel past it in car or boat. Seeing earth's rich diversity of color and textures inspires me both aesthetically and emotionally.

My husband and I hopped on a plane Thanksgiving Day and headed for the dessert. We flew to Las Vegas, rented a car, and drove four hours to the northeast, entering canyon country. While he had been to Utah before, it was one state in which I had never set foot into before. I had been on a mission to visit Bryce Canyon for quite some years, and finally now I had the chance.

Thanksgiving weekend was already winter for Bryce, Utah. We stayed at the alternatively touristy, rustic, and charming Ruby's. Everyone who has been to Bryce knows Ruby's -- you literally can't miss it. The first hotel was built by Ruby and his family there in the early 1900s and the rest, as they say, is history. We arrived late Thanksgiving night, having driven down winding and mysterious roads to come there. The high altitude made us sleepy. We awoke to a bright winter morning with temperatures in the single digits Fahrenheit, ate a hardy breakfast, and headed to the edge of the geological feature erroneously known as Bryce Canyon. (I asked a geologist park ranger where the river was. He explained that it's acutally not a canyon because there never was a river. Bryce is a natural ampitheater that was formed by wind, rain, and snow.)

When we drove south a couple days later to Zion Canyon, the climate was different: the weather remained autumnal. The soaring canyon walls had golden sun painting their surfaces and the trees held on to multicolored leaves. The weather was comfortable at this lower altitude. Zion's walls came in a palatte of colors, including white, brown, sand, red, orange, and green with foliage.
This trip expanded my understanding of canyons, which I had once thought all looked much the same, one from the next. (Not many canyons where I grew up in Ohio.)

Cooking Fresh for Fall: The Squash Files

This post is a follow-up to my article posted back in August, "Cooking Fresh Experiment: Summertime Foods." As summer drew to a close and I became busier at work, I was not able to keep up with the slower cooking ideas. It is so easy when I'm stressed out to fall back on cooking that is very fast. In contrast, it is much harder to find the energy to cook new foods. I did squeeze in a few experimental recipes that my husband pronounced winners, and I'm writing about those dishes here.

Spaghetti Squash is not a food I knew about from home-cooked meals in the Midwest. For me, it's a "new" veggie, but I have tasted it a few times from dishes prepared at the deli counter of my local organic market. It is the oddest vegetable, really. It looks like a big yellow squash on the outside, but when you cook it, it becomes all stringy inside like spaghetti. When I asked my husband what type of autumn meal he wanted me to prepare one weekend, he listed spaghetti squash as one of the approved fall harvest veggies he'd like. Well, thought I, Why not?

My cookbook advised that spaghetti squash may be prepared ahead and then used as a substitute for pasta in any meal. I admit to being a skeptic, but planned an Italian dinner around it. The squash didn't take long to prepare. Following instructions in my cookbook about poking holes in it and microwaving, I set to work. The most time-consuming part for me was separating all of the strings of squash from the skin into a bowl. I selected portobello mushrooms, olives and several fresh herbs such as Thai basil and rosemary. Added dried oregano and parmeasan cheese and sauteed it for five minutes. Presto! This Italian-flavored meal tasted surprisingly good for a main ingredient that was not remotely like pasta. It absorbs the flavors of spices and other vegetables much like another starch.

My other recent experiment involved a soup recipe from my new favorite cookbook by Annie Wayte, Keep it Seasonal: Soups, Salads, and Sandwiches. I adapted her original recipe for Squash Soup with Roasted Chestnuts and Pancetta slightly to accommodate my husband's lack of interest in chestnuts. Instead, I decided to use shallots so we could call this one Squash Soup with Shallots and Pancetta. We both like strong savory and onion flavors, so I guessed it might be a good substitution for the two of us.

Pancetta was also new to me since, unlike my husband, I did not grow up in a place big on Italian deli meats. (My local delis tended towards the Yiddish and Germanic ethnicities.) I actually had to learn how to pronounce "pancetta" in order to be able to ask for it and not sound ignorant: /pan-CHe'-tah/. When I bought the meat, I had to ask for 1/4" thick slices according to the recipe. I didn't know it looked like bacon, so it was a learning curve and instinct which told me three slices would be enough, when the butcher held up the meat.

I worked with organic chicken stock and used a butternut squash for the base. The butternut squash was so mellow and perfectly ripe, proving once again to me that there are great advantages to attempting this type of seasonal cooking. The results were so delicious that the many who is not big on soup got up and helped himself to another bowl before I could finish my first one. I think I've converted him to stews, a very least.

As a side note, I've discovered over the nine years I've known my husband that he is a very talented cook, especially when it comes to fall foods. He gets all excited about the prospect of cooking with cinnamon, ginger, and nutmeg at the time when the leaves start to turn. In fact, his pumpkin dessert dishes are not to be missed. My most often-requested dish is his famous pumpkin mousse. Apparently it was sometimes his job to make the pumpkin pie for Thanksgiving when he was growing up. So ladies, when you set to prepare your Thanksgiving dinner, make sure you give your sons kitchen duties! The way to any woman's heart is a man who can make spectacular desserts.

Summer's End

Back now to autumn, leaving the ended husk

Of summer that brought them here for Show Saturday

The men with hunters, dog-breeding wool-defined women,

Children all saddle-swank, mugfaced middleaged wives

Glaring at jellies, husbands on leave from the garden

Watchful as weasels, car-tuning curt-haired sons

Back now, all of them, to their local lives....

--Philip Larkin (1922–1986), British poet. “Show Saturday.”

How do I know that the summer has gone?

The humidity in Maryland drops low. Finally, by some time in October, the crisper and golden days of autumn are upon us. Dusk arrives more swiftly, by dinnertime, and the night begins to stretch like a tired worker, yawning and preparing for rest. Pumpkins are ripe for picking and carving. The fields of corn dry into husks and abundant apples, pears, and squashes are juicy flavors for mealtime.

October was my favorite month of the year in the Ohio Valley. As I raked our front yard and sidewalk, I loved piling the richly-colored maple and oak leaves into huge stacks and jumping into them. There would be powerful storm clouds on the horizon as the winds whipped leaves around the playground behind my house. I always loved it when summer came to an end. I greeted the full-on fall with relish. There was delight in the mysteries of shadows and magic of dressing up on Halloween. There was playing outside in the fading sunlight, knowing that winter's frost would soon be draping the sash windows of our Victorian house each morning. I was passionate about burrowing into my covers if I woke up early, in the coldness of dawn. It does not take much for me to be poetic or romantic about this time of year.

And, yet, this misty month of October presents a great quandary for my life today. October is the month where I am scrambling to fulfill my employer's needs in preparation for our largest fund-raiser of the year, which comes every first weekend in November. This is followed by a myriad of autumnal educational programs. I love all of these programs and would enjoy them immensely if it weren't for the sheer weight of days filled with more to do than time to do it.

So for me, summer's end is marked now with frustration, anxiety, and a sense of never completing all of the tasks I need to do within a day. I come home and fall asleep on the couch long before my normal bedtime or arise earlier than I normally must, my brain buzzing like a honeybee. Winter is near, draw in your honey now!

My Celtic ancestors who lived in cold, dark places of the British Isles believed that the beginning of winter was the first of November. For them, the harvest had to be completed by villagers just in time for the cold winds off the North Sea or Irish Sea to set into a permanent chill. The great festivals celebrating the fruits of worker's lives in produce or in craft. As the nights began to extend their reach and shorten the time a person had for her or his day's labor. A new year dawned on November 1st, so on the eve before they celebrated one last time as the sun seemed to leave them and the moon loomed large.

This evening at the end of the old agricultural year, October 31st, has morphed into an important commercial holiday of Halloween. But not too long ago, Halloween was All Hallow's Eve, a night when spirits of the ancestors walked and the doors to the land of the fey opened for mortals. (The Celts believed the fey, fairies, inhabited hollow hillsides). Mysterious and unusual things might happen. The Fey might play tricks. You might carve a turnip with a scary face and leave it on your doorstep to keep the fairies and wicked creatures of the night away from your family. Ancestors, however, were set a place at the dinner table in case they happened to walk by. They were the honored guests of the final feasts of summer. The recently harvested vegetables and fruits and freshly butchered meat was abundant still.

I do think deeply of my ancestors at the end of every October. Lately my grandfather, Walter H. Simpson, has come to my mind often. He passed on to the next world one October day, having already walked this earth ninety years. He was ready to go and had a long, full life behind him. He would probably council me that I work too hard. A hard-working man himself who built successful businesses as a mechanic and electronics repair man, my grandfather knew how to spend time at home doing the things he loved and surrounded by his family.

When he left us, he left me and my cousins and his children parting gifts. My inheritance from his equitably distributed small fortune, bought me out of my graduate school debt, paid for my car loan, funded a dissertation research trip to England, and enabled me to begin a small investment account. I never was able to thank him in life for these gifts of his labor, because I never knew his plan for his estate until a year after he died. So every Summer's End for the last ten since he passed on, I thank him with a candle lit in his honor and a photograph of him standing proudly in front of the gas station he managed on my hearth.

Wally -- which is the name by which I have come to know him through my grandmother's scrapbook -- was a tuba player in a riotous Roaring 'Twenties jazz band in Cincinnati called The Charlestonians. He recalled fondly to me playing "Tiger Rag" at top volume so that the police would not hear the bar fights in the background. (This was during Prohibition, mind you.) He was friendly with the brothers Machnowitz, the Lithuanian Jewish family from down the street. He may have surprised some when he ran off and eloped with an elder Machnowitz daughter. She was Ida, a willowy flapper with a gypsy-gleam in her eyes. A bold act for a pair who were not from the same traditions, at a time when anti-Semitism raged. Their romance of the mid-1920s is documented in her scrapbook, carefully pasted in with that awful acid-laden glue. They are laughing in groups with their friends and her siblings by the poolside or on the street corner. Like all teenagers they have the confidence and swagger of the young, who think they will never grow old. Some of these photos have faded or begun to disappear and pages are torn. Ida and Wally's memories survive, but sooner than me, some of those images will be dust.

These are my thoughts as Summer draws to a close and becomes November, the first month of Winter by Celtic reckoning. Long, cold Winter begins a new year. Ancestors and memories now deepen as shadows. The drawing the darkness around us like a cloak allows us to reflect upon the mysteries of life and of oblivion. Time is fleeting, but it must be faced. Come what may, Summer's end is a time for me to turn and look back over my shoulder to contemplate the long line of time behind me.

We are reformers in spring and summer; in autumn and winter, we stand by the old; reformers in the morning, conservers at night.

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson. “The Conservative,” Nature, Addresses, and Lectures (1849).