radio silence

Thursday 2 Sep 2010 by Maddie | 11 Comments
Filed under: to-bake list, trip list Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Hello, my name is Maddie, and I haven't been on a vacation in two. years.

It all started so innocently, with the wrapping-up of two delicious weeks in Hawaii in 2008, where I devoured tuna steaks and soaked in the ocean air like it was my job. But the next May brought with it a supposedly wonderful thing called "college graduation," in which you leave the all-expenses-deferred student lifestyle only to stumble upon a rude awakening called "student loan payments." Hello, full-time job. Hello, entire post-graduate summer spent running through the D.C. humidity in a pantsuit trying to secure said full-time job.

And now we are here, two years later. Recession be damned, I secured that full-time job, and the ten precious, precious vacation days it offered. I also secured a rather alarming amount of real life-induced, vacation-starved burnout along the way. So starting tomorrow, I'll be using half of my vacation days (and my entire tax refund) to fly to Croatia, sun myself on its beaches, and gorge myself on its seafood risotto. I will stay in a cozy little apartment, and take day trips to Bosnia, offshore islands, and national parks. The whole time, I will also be cursing myself for not living in Europe, where giving someone only ten vacation days would probably be considered a criminal offense.

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fly on the wall

Saturday 28 Aug 2010 by Maddie | 5 Comments
Filed under: CSA play-by-play, to-cook list Tags: , , , , , ,

There's a trap I fall into sometimes, and it's called "life is so perfect for everybody else." As in, nobody else's hair frizzes into an 'fro when August rolls around, or struggles to stay in shape, or gets obsessed with celebrity gossip in lieu of keeping up with their perusal of Nabokov short stories. Nobody at work sits at their desk cursing their job responsibilities, and nobody overdraws on their bank accounts or screws up their first attempt at home haircolor. Right? It's so easy to romanticize, even when your good sense chides you for playing such a ridiculous mental game.

And then I discovered the food blogosphere, which is like being James Stewart in Rear Window. Except it's a million little windows into the lives of others, and these people know they're being watched. There's an intimidating polish and structure to the whole thing. It's not a complaint, really—I've found honest, sincere friends and incalculable inspiration here, after all—but it's rare for someone to chat about a spectacular flop in the kitchen, or the mind-numbingly boring sandwich they eat everyday at noon.

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not enough chicago

Thursday 26 Aug 2010 by Maddie | 5 Comments
Filed under: trip list Tags: , , , , , ,

A few weeks ago, I flew home for a fleeting 28 hours. It was all I could spare without using a vacation day, and believe me when I say: it was not enough Chicago.

No, it wasn't enough Chicago at all. But it was just enough time to make me remember why I missed the place.

28 hours was enough time to make a post-flight stopover in Park Ridge for diner grub at the Pickwick Restaurant. It was enough time to hug Lily and Archie, who I'd picked out as kittens so many years ago. It was enough time to traipse through Chicago's neighborhoods with my dad, and enough time to visualize myself living in the Wicker Park apartment building surrounded by wildflowers. I had enough time to harass my little brother as we tooled around in the car together, and enough time to vent to my mother about life as an adult. 28 hours was enough to allow me one peaceful visit to the lakefront and bask in the almost Caribbean blue of the water. And it was enough time to sit on the porch under an eerie, post-storm sky, eating Paul Prudhomme's grilled chicken and drinking in my last few hours there.

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csa wrap-up

Sunday 22 Aug 2010 by Maddie | 6 Comments
Filed under: CSA play-by-play, to-cook list Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

My fingernails and cuticles may be safe from worried biting, but I do have nervous habits like anyone else—and my listmaking compulsion is an especially stubborn one. Deadlines, accomplishments, ideas? Bullet-point them! Write them down! We may be talking about something ridiculously trivial or seriously important, looming or faraway, but if it crosses my mind, it usually gets transcribed on a Post-It. What can I say? I like to organize my thoughts.

Until recently, I've been engaging in some public list-making as I shared my weekly CSA recap with you kind souls. This summer brought my first encounter with a farmshare program, and the recap was a vehicle for all sorts of things: exchanging veggie-centric ideas, asking questions, complaining, and doing a little dance whenever an experimental recipe worked out. Most of all, I detailed my CSA adventures to convince myself that I could rise to the challenge. For someone who used to come home from the office too tired to toast bread, the prospect of extensive weeknight cooking was daunting.

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the fabric of our days

Sunday 15 Aug 2010 by Maddie | 7 Comments
Filed under: to-bake list, to-cook list, trip list Tags: , , , , , , ,

It seems only appropriate to end these tales of Blueberry Week in Maine. It's full-on August now, and some of my best Augusts were spent there as a teenager, in a little house on Lake Sebago. And it's no surprise that blueberries—like those other Maine delicacies, lobster and maple syrup—figure prominently into my favorite recollections of those trips. After all, we always stayed with dear family friends (Dave and Sue) in a television-free cabin, sans computers, in a place where cell phone service was spotty at best. It was the simple pleasures that became the fabric of our days.

Instead of our electronic devices, the greatest source of entertainment was each other. Sue loved reading in the plastic lawn chair propped up by the water, on the cabin's tiny inlet that served as a beach. She also liked to take morning walks, and made us rooibos tea when the sun dipped low—a fixation borne from a trip to South Africa. Dave gathered us around the coffee table for card games, and he and my dad shared a fondness for almanac trivia sessions. (Seriously, I can't tell you how many times I was quizzed about the five longest suspension bridges in the United States.) They were both amateur astronomers, too, and no trip was complete before we'd gathered once on the dock after dinner, starstruck under the brilliant rural sky, to piece together constellations.

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blue to my elbows

Wednesday 11 Aug 2010 by Maddie | 9 Comments
Filed under: to-bake list, to-cook list Tags: , , , , , ,

We all cook for different reasons: to experiment with something new, to perform a political act, or simply to alleviate the growling of our stomachs. Lately, I've been cooking for the feeling that I've created something: for the tactile pleasure of working with my hands, and for the tangible results. When you follow a recipe from start to finish, you can rest assured that something real and material will be borne of your labors. (And it doesn't even matter if the resulting food is any good!)

Here's the thing: I sit in a swivel chair all day, staring at a computer. Behind the computer is a white wall. I enter data into Excel spreadsheets, I scan and file documents, and I sift through legal bills, but I don't encounter natural light and I don't ever finish the day having created something. Nowadays, cooking is how I stretch my boundaries, and how I exalt in my own ability to do something worth writing home about. Someday, I'll make a living out of my creative powers. For now, I have my kitchen.


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making sal proud

Sunday 8 Aug 2010 by Maddie | 7 Comments
Filed under: to-do list Tags: , , , , , , , ,

No matter how many candles accumulate atop my birthday cake, I still find that nothing captures my imagination better than a really well-written, well-illustrated children's book. A properly-told story captures the freedom and whimsy that came naturally to us as finger-painting, play-acting toddlers.

There were seasonal favorites in our little-one library; I still get the urge to read Happy Winter (as a 23-year-old!) every time Christmas rolls around. But for summer, there was Blueberries for Sal, in which a little girl spends most of her time among the berry bushes plunking fruit into her mouth, not her pail. Despite never having picked blueberries myself, I could almost feel the warm sun on my back whenever I opened that book.

Recently, I got to recreate Sal's plotline when Ted and I headed to his hometown blueberry patch outside of Richmond. Now, overshooting on hand-picked berries seems like it'd be hard to do, right? It's not like picking apples or peaches; bead-sized objects are slower to fill a bucket than fist-sized ones. The concentration it takes to find and reach the ripest fruit is intense, and by the time the early-morning clouds parted to reveal a hot midday sun, sweat was pouring down our faces.

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on treading water and pushing forward

Thursday 5 Aug 2010 by Maddie | 6 Comments
Filed under: CSA play-by-play, advice list, to-cook list Tags: , , , , , ,

Ask a little less of yourself. When was the last time someone said that to you? Because I have the sneaking suspicion that the minute I learned how to crawl, society started wagering about when I'd get on my feet and walk already. Whenever I accomplished something big, it was celebrated sincerely, and then assumed I'd wake up the next morning to try for something bigger. And so on and so forth, until I’d adopted the treadmill as my own, as an intrinsic thing I couldn’t shake, that would periodically drive me nuts and require Jersey Shore marathons and copious amounts of brownies to face the next expectation I thought I had to live up to.

Whew. Is it just me? I certainly hope so. I hope somebody told you, preferably early on, that there’s another way. That you’d be okay if you stopped to enjoy the scenic overlook for awhile before driving single-mindedly on to the next landmark. That it’s normal to tread water every once in awhile, saving your strength for the next push forward. It's been a realization I've come to naturally with age—that is, with experience and perspective. Still, I hope your parents, teachers and mentors gave you a knowing pat on the head whenever you got that crazed look in your eyes and said “Shhh. Just relax.”

After a tiring few weeks, that little voice in my head started telling me the exact same thing. So last weekend, I made no plans. I soaked in a tub full of lavender Epsom salts and finally read the last chapter of that book I’d been working on. I watched entirely too much True Blood—plus a particularly bad Lifetime movie about a haunted sorority—and didn’t even let myself feel like a waste of space. I went on a bike ride at sunset just to feel the wind whooshing in my ears, then let the mosquitoes chase me back home. I even managed to clean my apartment, but only because it felt like active meditation, especially with something on the record player and the smell of Murphy’s Oil Soap hanging in the air.

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it's a mad, mad world

Tuesday 27 Jul 2010 by Maddie | 10 Comments
Filed under: netflix queue, to-cook list Tags: , , , , , , ,

Do you ever wish that you were born into a different era? That you could experience the lawless underground of the 1920s, or revel in the gum-smacking, bell bottom-laden, disco ball '70s? To me, that sort of time travel would be a thrilling proposition. And not only for the adventure; sometimes I feel I would've fit in better somewhere in the long-lost past.

Am I alone in imagining my anachronistic traits restored to their proper time period? For awhile, my letter-writing habit had me questioning my 21st-century surroundings, as did my later, unrelated fixation on psychedelic rock and the '60s culture of revolution. And growing up, that was the appeal of American Girl dolls—or really, the American Girl books. I saw myself in all their protagonists: the headstrong little girls who performed heroic feats in their colonial-era petticoats, or who hunkered down with their families during World War II, planting victory gardens and collecting scrap metal for the soldiers of the Pacific front.

More recently, I've found that escapist pleasure in front of my TV, on Mad Men. I'm not as die-hard about it as many people are, but there's something mesmerizing about the ultra-structured clothing—and the ultra-structured façades of characters whose brimming emotions simmer dangerously below the surface. (Plus, I love Joan's hair, and really, everything else about her.) So you'll find me on the sofa these coming Sunday evenings, projecting myself into the '60s and enjoying a cold drink.

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feels like home

Thursday 22 Jul 2010 by Maddie | 6 Comments
Filed under: trip list Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Nowadays, home is a word with an increasingly flexible definition. It means Wilmette, whose geography is etched into my nervous system, and Chicago, where I've always loved getting lost. It means Los Angeles, where a gaggle of family (and might-as-well-be-family) members have settled. And home now means Virginia, whether we're talking about my current town (Falls Church, where I've learned the best place to get pho), or Richmond, where Ted hails from. When he and his sisters are lucky enough to return, Richmond is where they all settle in comfortably for family dinners and board games. And when I'm lucky enough to visit, it's lovely to settle into their routine for a few days too.

Last weekend found me in Richmond, breathing in some particularly humid summer air. To start our trip on the right foot, we visited a pick-your-own blueberry patch, spent an hour under the face-melting Southern sun plunking berries into our pails, and left with twelve pounds of them. Somewhere in process, another few pounds made their way into our bellies.


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