Between Books, and after a Re-reading of "Play It As It Lays".

My Chandler summer has come to an end. I am between books, having just finished "Farewell, My Lovely" and a re-reading of Joan Didion's 1970 novel "Play It As It Lays".I had not read the Didion for more than 20 years, and I wondered what time had done to it-

After reading it again, I think time has improved it. It is a wisp of a book that can be read in an evening. It is spare and ironic and pitiless as it tells the story of a minor Hollywood actress, already too old at thirty-one, whose only currency in the film world is her marriage to a working director. Maria Wyeth, the actress, is passive. Painful things happen to her because she is too listless to get out of their way. When she gets pregnant, and not by her husband, it is her husband who arranges the abortion. After a meaningless one night stand with an actor, Maria steals the actor's pricey car and drives away in it. Her husband cleans this up too, for her failures are beginning to threaten him.

For the real story of Hollywood is failure, not success. Here is Maria, worrying about meeting her agent-

"Only people in trouble came unannounced to see their agents.If Freddy Chaikin thought she carried trouble with her he would avoid her, because trouble was something no one in the city liked to be near. Failure, illness, fear, they were seen as infectious, contagious blights on glossy plants. It seemed to Maria that even the receptionist was avoiding her eyes,fearing contamination".

Of course Maria's husband once more intervenes. He calls his friends asking them to give her roles. But there is only so much he can do for someone who is no longer a fresh, new face. At a meeting about a possible role, Maria finds she is not being considered for the lead. She would be playing the lead's teacher.

This novel is forty years old. No one in it has a cellphone or a computer, but this does not make it less modern. Women still grow old too early and most of us are doomed to be minor. Remember what Robert Frost wrote in his poem "Provide, Provide"-

"No memory of having starred
Atones for later disregard
Or keeps the end from being hard".

A Walk along the Greenway, Looking for Signs of Autumn..

This is "Virgin's Bower", our fall flowering wild clematis. I saw it climbing bushes all along the Greenway. And the next photo is of Ironweed, which can grow to eight feet. It is at peak bloom now.

And here are some other scenes along the path, including the Ensworth School. Its carillon was playing "God Bless America".

A Mex-periment, and the Folly of Making Culinary Assumptions

K&S World Market labelled these strange little orange wagon wheels "Pasta Para Chicharron". I found them on a table in the produce aisle, and culinary experimenter that I am, I brought a package home.

Neither Rick Bayless or Diana Kennedy mentioned them, but this did not worry me since they did not mention Mexican vermicelli, or fideo, either, and I had cooked that pasta without a problem. And some research on the web at least told me that "chicharron" was pork skin. So there it was -pasta made of flour and pork.

What condiment would one use on pork skin pasta?

A good one, made with white onions, Mexican chorizo,poblano peppers, queso, crema, and avocado. I was proud of myself.

I threw the pasta into boiling water. I thought eight minutes would be enough. But it was still too chewy. At twelve minutes the chewiness persisted, but I drained it and dumped it in a bowl, fearing that any more boiling might cause it to self destruct. I took a cupful and tossed it with the sauce, and covered it with crumbled cheese. I took a mouthful, then told myself that this, like cactus paddles and prickly pears, must be an acquired taste. The pasta had all the charm of a tasteless gummy candy.

I planned to feed the rest of the wagon wheels to my dogs as treats and bribes. But once again, I found enlightenment on-line. I put a few inches of canola oil in a deep pan, heated it to frying hot, and tossed in the orange wheels. I watched them burst into pork skin snacks, fit for the corrida or a Titan's game. Feed these, salted,along with guacamole or cheese dip to a Super Bowl party, and your husband will have second thoughts about ever leaving you.

False Foxglove

This fine flowering plant is the Yellow False Foxglove ,Aureolaria Flava. This plant is as tall as I am, and I have seen it bloom each fall for the past few years. It is rooted on the side of a woodland ditch on the Main Drive of Percy Warner Park. It is on a hilltop facing southwest.

But this flower, lovely as it is, is of no use to the gardener looking for plants for the edges of the shade garden. This plant, like our spring Wood Betony, is a parasite. It lives on oak roots. The hillside where I saw this plant is covered with oaks, which like the dry hilltops.

Click on these photos to enlarge.

Tomatoes Roasted with Garlic, Basil, and Balsamic Vinegar

Some friends treated me to dinner last Saturday at the Turkish restaurant "Anatolia", over in Lion's Head. We all had baby lamb chops, and to thank my friends I gave them this dish.

The prototype for this recipe, which I have been making for a decade, is from Patricia Well's "At Home in Provence". Wells has been a restaurant and food critic for the International Herald Tribune, and a cooking teacher.

She does not use garlic in her version. I do. I also used balsamic vinegar in place of red wine vinegar. And my friends told me they loved the sauce so much that they sopped it up with bread.


The key to making this is to sear the sliced tomatoes on both sides in a very hot pan with a small amount of sea-salted olive oil. The tomatoes will begin to blacken slightly on each side. Use a slotted spatula to transfer them to a baking dish. Deglaze the pan with a couple tablespoons of balsamic vinegar and scrape it and the brown bits and olive oil over the tomatoes. Put some very finely diced garlic on each tomato slice, sprinkle with a little sea salt, then scatter chopped fresh basil on top. You could also sprinkle the tomatoes with some Herbs de Provence. Bake for ten minutes or so at 400 until the herbs are crisped . As the picture shows, I used only one very large Amish raised heirloom tomato. One big tomato will serve two, but one could easily double or triple this for a crowd. I will be eating this with lamb with citrus sauce and roast potatoes. Wells suggests serving it with roast chicken.

This is a summer recipe, and now is the time to make it,. There are so many wonderful tomatoes out there-

The Saddest Day of Summer

From the first of August on, when the heat begins to pall, I begin to long for signs of autumn. The ironweed begins to bud, and dry spells leave leaf litter along the roads. Darkness comes earlier and earlier. And I begin to find dead cicadas- our out-sized Tennessee summer cicadas. The one in the photo was already being eaten from the inside out by dust sized brown ants which fled all over my hand when I picked the cicada up.

These are welcome signs of fall, but there is another passage not so welcome. Two days ago, as evening came on I heard an absence. The sky above my apartment and its parking sheds was empty of swallows. They had gone. They came April 7th. At 4pm there were none. At 6pm I heard their chittering cries. I watched them return to their nests under the eaves of the parking sheds. I saw them mob the bluejay who tried to steal their eggs. They have gracefully dipped and soared their way through the sub-tropical Tennessee evenings.

It is still hot. There are millions of flying bugs still ripe for eating. Frost is two months away. I do not understand why the swallows must leave so early. But they do not live by our calendar. They join the barn swallows who leave the flaming swamp maples of New England. All must go. All over the world. In great flights to Africa and Natal and South America. Their instinct is to leave. Ours is to stay. And if we, in this provsional life, are fortunate to see another spring, we will meet them again in April.

My Best Soup, and an Evening at The Big House

Sunday evening I left The Free World for 8 hours. If I wanted to eat decent food at the place I was going, I had to bring my own. I had to put it in a clear container so the officers could see I was not hiding contraband cigarettes or a cellphone. I had to send the soup through an xray scanner as well.

I was lucky the other nurse I was working with had a plastic spoon, otherwise it would have been soup drunk bottoms up from one of the six styrofoam cups in the cupboard. Conditions in the clinic are spartan. A coffeemaker with no coffee. A cupboard with no sugar, no sweetener, no salt, no pepper. A miniscule refrigerator with someone's two forgotten hardboiled eggs inside- slightly cracked and resting on a paper towel. Drop a leftover in a wastebasket here, and you will see the quick moving shadows of mice that come out after the inmates go back to their guilds for the night when we have finished Med line and diabetic line and any left over treatments.

I could have gone over to the kitchen to pick up a tray. The inmate servers are always polite. "Hello, Miss Nurse", they say. I might have been lucky. They might have had eggrolls or a piece of cake, the only two edible things they offer there, outside of breakfast. Of course they would be disappointed to see me walk in, for they would be seeing me later at medline and I was no PYT, or "pretty young thing". One night I overheard them muttering outside the clinic window. "Who's in there tonight?" I heard one ask, and someone with a view replied "Some ol white girl-".

"I heard that", I said, "I know I'm old".

"Ma'am, we didn't mean nothing by that", they all said together.

But back to this soup. That the ambience at the clinic only made taste better. And that time improves, since the fire roasted tomatoes become more garlicky and tasty the longer they swim with the beans in the broth.

This soup takes under a half hour to make. You will need:

2 15 oz cans of good chicken broth

2 15 oz cans cannelloni beans.

2 cups diced fire roasted tomatoes

3 cloves of garlic. More if you love garlic.

1 medium yellow onion,diced.

Olive oil

Sea salt to taste

Italian seasoning to taste


As always, begin with the onion. Salt it lightly, then saute the diced pieces in olive oil till they are soft and golden.


Put the beans, broth, and tomatoes in a sauce pan, then add the cooked onion. Dice the garlic cloves or send them through a garlic press and add them to the soup. Now add Italian seasoning to taste as well as more sea salt. Forget the measuring spoon. Start by adding a little seasoning, and taste and taste until you have it right.

This will be enough soup for 4 or 5 people. It can be eaten cold, and as I already said, improves after a day in the refrigerator.