Aubergine

Make This At Home: Bowl of Soul

There’s a new coffee company that has exploded onto the Santa Cruz scene recently. A scene, mind you, with no shortage of already established coffee houses. But somehow Verve Coffee is shouldering its way into the crowd and making waves.  They have three shops now, as well as two or three other cafes that have some sort of lease and training arrangement to sell their coffee (beans and drinks).  I hear tell you can also buy their coffee beans as far east as NYC. They are active in the competition scene (did you know there was a barista competition scene?) and many of their baristas are award-winning. 

Their coffee is very good, but I’m not writing about coffee today.  What I’m writing about is the drink I’ve recently fallen for on their menu called a Bowl of Soul.  

Now I should say that this coffee company is really hip.  The interior design of their shops is all recycled industrial, with walls covered in large paintings by local artists that I don’t really get (and I’m an artist!).  The music is just the right amount of loud but not artists I recognize. There are only a handful of things on the menu and the baked goods are displayed like art.

At my ripe old age of 39, I’m probably a good 15 years older than their average customer.  I’m never sure if me drinking coffee in a Verve shop is increasing my hipness quotient or decreasing theirs.  So it took me a few visits before I had the courage to admit to the person taking my order that I had no idea what a bowl of soul was.  She was very nice and didn’t laugh at me. She said it was tea steeped in warmed soy milk with honey and cinnamon. She said normally it was made with chamomile tea, but they could make it with any tea on their menu. I ordered it that day with the Art of Tea cinnamon fig black tea they carry, because I needed to be awake, not lulled to sleep.

And it was awesome. Rich and just barely sweet in a big enough mug to sip while I worked.

Now it is one of my favorite drinks. But since I can’t afford the bar(ista) tab of drinking my tea out all the time, I have recently been making it at home.  This is so simple a recipe it is kind of silly to call it a recipe, but if you don’t live within range of a Verve cafe, I do recommend you try this drink at home!

 

Verve’s Bowl Of Soul

 

Heat enough soy milk for a large latte cup.  

In the cup, place your tea bag, a spoon of honey, and a cinnamon stick (or 1/4 tsp ground cinnamon).  

Pour in the soy milk and let steep for 2-5 minutes. Stir and enjoy!

 

You can make this with a range of teas, so try your favorite!

 

Guest Post: Momiji's Annual March

I'm pleased to again have a guest from my friend Joan Bailey who writes at Japan Farmers Markets. Japan is one the places I have not yet traveled to, but when I go I hope to time my trip to either the sakura or the momiji season. This post describes why!

Fall is my favorite season. The cold winds feel like old friends as they whip up leaves in a swirl of gold,red and orange turn my cheeks pink and make me pull my hat down a bit further over my ears. The golden light, somewhere between the vision of the Dutch realists and the bright splash of Manet and Van Gogh, seems so perfect to me. I feel in autumn, more than any other time of year, that my days are lived in a painting. 

In Tokyo, I roam in a somewhat similar but more urban masterpiece, but without the need for a hat. The cold winds are coming, but temperatures still loiter in the mid to high seventies. The shortening daylight comes in at a low angle casting a similar glow over the tightly packed houses and high-rise buildings. The trees along the nearby Tamagawajousui, in the parks and at our Tokyo farm are beginning to show tell-tale signs of color. The sakura (cherry) leaves, replacements for those beloved pink blossoms of spring, are the first to fade to yellow and then drop. Other will soon follow suit, including the maple.

Momiji's (Japanese maple) five to seven-fingered leaves come in a brilliant green that dims to yellow, but the star of autumn's show is the red maple – Iroha kaede a.k.a. Iroha momiji a.k.a. Acer palmatum. Unlike it's cousin, the red maple burns varying shades of red. Just as they do in spring, citizens of these fair isles gather on party sheets (otherwise known as tarps) under brilliantly colored leaves with friends and family for kouyou (leaf viewing). There in the warm glow of the trees, as they start toward their well-deserved rest over the winter months, the Japanese drink and feast before cold winds chase them indoors. Soon weather reports will include a map of Momiji's red path southward, the reverse of sakura's slow pink sweep northward in spring.

 Early in Japanese history it was the aristocracy who first picnicked under the branches and fostered the development of more than 250 different varieties. It was, as Sumiko Enbutsu writes in A Flower Lover's Guide to Tokyo, the eighth shogun, Yoshimune (ruling from 1716 to 1745) who ordered momiji  planted around the edges of the nation's capital. As a result, everyday people found themselves stopped short in their daily routines by brilliant color. Naturally, they gathered some snacks and drinks, called out to friends to do the same, and took a moment to admire this passing phenomenon. (It is worth noting that Yoshimune did the same for sakura, beginning a tradition of public plantings of these seasonal favorites that still continues today.)

Such celebrations and attentiveness to leaves and flowers not associated with a particular holiday seemed, at first glance, almost absurd. There is no great historical event being marked nor a religious holy day being observed. Yet, with little prodding, groups of people stream into parks or gather on benches to share a snack, drink a little something, and chat the sunset away. Such things – the first blossom in spring or the first hint of red in fall – mean that even in the most urban of spaces like Tokyo nature and the turning of the seasons are never far from heart and mind.

Read more about seasonal displays and food at Joan's blog, Japan Farmers Markets.

Ordinary Moments

Conflicted

I slump against the counter, crumbs under my bare feet, palm on something sticky.  The LHM is still sitting on the floor with Bean, where she patted the floor to indicate we should join her. “Eh?” she said, using her all-purpose question word. “What is this? How do you do it? Will you help me?” She looks at me with her eyebrows raised and I translate it to mean, right now, “Will you come sit here?” After I sit, “Dah-jee? Eh?” to her father, patting the floor on her other side. He joins us, holding his tumbler of water, which she immediately appropriates.

Drinking out of grown-up cups is her newest skill, but pouring water is one of her favorite activities and this is a heavy glass cup, so who knows how this is going to go. She takes a drink and sets it on the rug next to her. She looks around, then signs, “Book,” which she has spotted up on the edge of the counter opposite us. I get up get it and hand it to her father. I have already read my quota of board books for the day. I stay up, because while resting felt good, sitting on that dirty floor was grossing me out.

“I know an old lady who swallowed a fly,” he begins. Bean picks up the tumbler again and peers into it.

“Honey, be careful,” I warn. She doesn’t even look at me. It is 5:30 PM and I’ve lost most of my authority, and my belief in my authority, by now. Especially now that Daddy is home. Now her hand is in the glass, up to her wrist in water, and she is twisting it, making the water swish back and forth. The LHM is holding the base, but I know this is going to end in a mess.

I watch, pondering whether I should mop the whole floor while it is wet, or if I can get away with just sponging up that section. I’m glad he’s drinking water and not milk. She pulls her dripping fingers out of the cup and watches water fall from them onto her lap. She brushes her palms back and forth against each other, signing “Clean!” and grinning up at me. Water droplets fly out across the floor.

In the morning, at her water table in the yard, or in her bath, I love to watch her experiment with the world this way. But by the evening I have grown tired of picking up, cleaning up, and changing clothes. I need to start dinner and am thinking forward to all the things I need to finish before I can fall into bed. And the list is always longer than the time remaining before a reasonable bedtime.

“It is hard to find the line,” I say, to myself, to him, to her, “between letting her explore and maintaining some kind of order in this house.” I want to be a fun mom. I want to join her in seeing the world as a science experiment. I want to let her remind me that the world is a fascinating, wonderful place.

But in the evening I want a tidy house and a quiet, obedient child. In the evening these things are beyond elusive. They are so far from the reality of the situation that some nights I just want to sit down on the filthy floor and cry in frustration. She would probably come over and crawl into my lap. She would hold my face with her little hands and look into my eyes. Which would just make me feel guilty. I’m so relieved when he walks in the door after work each night and she runs to him.

The LHM smiles sympathetically at my distress but doesn’t answer. And doesn’t take the glass out of her hand. I know I usually err on the side of order. He errs on the side of fun. He can handle more chaos than I can. And he hasn’t been managing this particular kind of chaos all day.

She puts her hand back in the water and swishes some more. This time I say nothing more and let her play.

Desperately seeking autumn

Where I live we have an elusive autumn. Non-natives who live in the Bay Area joke that we have no seasons here.  We do, but they are subtle, and the edges are sometimes hard to identify.  Here on the coast, where I live, we have fog in the summer and then Indian Summer in the fall and then *bam* it snaps to cold (where cold=mildly cool to most of the rest of the country).  Sometimes in between those things we get a little hint of autumn. But not so much this year.

I need something to mark the transition between summer and winter, because if I don’t mark it that onslaught of rain and chill and soggy leaves in the gutters that signals fall is over feels a bit like a slap in the face. This year, especially, I have had to go looking for signs of autumn. Summer flowers are still blooming in my garden (though they are getting scraggly). The unusually warm days this month and dry weather last spring have sent most of the trees straight from green to brown. Even the liquid amber trees, common around here, are not so vibrant.  The maples are mottled, but not vivid.  The evenings are cool, but don’t have the delicious crisp scent of fall that I miss.

It seems odd that I crave this season, as if I had lived somewhere sometime where I experienced it.  I miss it in my cells, though I have lived in this 50-square-mile patch of California all but one year of my life.  Even that first year of my life, when we lived in Virginia, my family left the country to travel before the fall. I have never lived through an east coast autumn. But still, I crave the trees turning, the apple picking, the knitting of warm socks and mittens, the stacking of wood for winter and hot chocolate to warm my fingers after and the smell of smoke from the first cozy fires.

What is fall like where you live?  Do you miss a season you no longer get to experience?

Ordinary Life in Pictures

Photo taken by Kirsten.

I hate the playground

I hate taking my daughter to the playground.  In my pre-child life, I would walk past parks with playgrounds and see parents standing around with coffee cups in hand, visiting and laughing while their kids scampered over the equipment and ran, laughing and holding hands across the sand.  At least that’s what I remember.  

My actual experience of taking my own small child to the playground is something like this.  Before she could walk, I would sit on a blanket on the lawn under the shade of a tree in a circle of other moms while we shared snacks and stories.  The hardest part was keeping the kids from mashing their snack into another kid’s face.  Mostly we never left the blanket.  It was lovely!  

But then she became mobile.  

Even before she could walk, my child was determined to climb. I could lift her to the top of the slide and hold her while she rode down, but at the bottom she’d flip herself over and scramble back up the slope as far as she could.  Even on the new “less-dangerous” plastic slides we have around here, there was a high risk of her slipping down and off the edge, probably catching her chin on the way down.  

Stairs are for climbing, clearly, but even on the toddler-sized equipment in my neighborhood park (where “toddler” means "too big for my child"), the stairs were half her body high and the platform at the top had one long open edge at the height of my shoulder.  Still, she could climb those stairs on all fours faster than I could get up them on two and she did not inherit my fear of nights and edges.  And then, of course, I’m at the top of the slide with her and we all know it is dangerous to go down a slide with a child on our lap, but what do I do now?  She isn’t going to wait for me to climb back down to be ready to catch her before she launches herself down that delicious slope.

And don’t even get me started about the big kids who chase each other through the little kid equipment, pushing the babies out of the way as they go. I feel like a grumpy old mama but I really want to tell them to get back to their own quadrant of the park to play with kids their own size. 

Also, there never seems to be any shade over the play equipment. The slides get hot. The rails get hot. Mama gets hot. Mama hates getting hot.

So mostly we just don’t go to the park.  This truth is on my personal list of my failings as a mom.  No baby book. No swimming lessons. No parks.

Last weekend, though, we went to Oktoberfest in Campbell with my sister and her husband.  We parked a few blocks away at the Campbell Community Center.  After we left the festival, Bean really needed to stretch her legs a bit after being confined in her stroller and before I strapped her into the car for the 40 minute drive home.  So I released her to run on the lawn next to the pool. That was fun for a minute, but she’s an explorer, so she wandered off down the path and I followed with the stroller a short distance behind. The Community Center is an old, pretty complex of buildings with wide, shady paths and mature landscaping. Late on a Sunday afternoon the place was pretty quiet and we had most of the complex to ourselves. 

She was in little Bean heaven.  She’d go up the steps to a door, check the handle, come back down.  Run up the wheelchair ramp to the next door, peek at me through the bars, then wander back down.  Up onto a bench, around a tree, jump off the edge of the concrete into the flowerbed.  I could see her practicing all of her large motor skills - all the things playgrounds are good for - but in a context that didn’t freak me out. No hot slides that slide too fast and launch my baby into tan bark.  No shoulder-high unprotected edges just waiting for her to step too close. No big kids racing past and pushing her down.

Ironic, isn’t it, that an environment not at all designed for small children turned out to be a much safer and interesting playground than the actual playground?

Now I just need to find a similar place for her to explore in my own community.  Because I don’t think I’m going to get over my loathing of the park playground until she’s, oh, I don’t know, 16 maybe.

Where do your kids like to play that isn’t the park?

Ordinary Life in Pictures

Well, if they're eating it...

Once, when I was about seven, my father fed me dog food.  Not out of neglect or malice, but because I asked him to. 

We lived in the country, in a trailer leveled off a hillside on cinderblock and iron piers.  Our dogs, two German Shepherds with the stateliness of their breed watered down by the mongrel who sired them, lived under the porch built off the side of the trailer.  In the log golden sun of the evening that summer, I would walk out with my father after dinner to feed them.  Their food was stored in a metal trashcan, like the one Oscar lived in on Sesame Street.  It had a lid fit tight enough to keep the raccoons out and I couldn’t lift it on my own. In addition, a bungee cord was hooked to the handle on either side of the can and run through the top handle of the lid.

Dad would unhook the cord and pry off the lid and I would use the plastic milk jug cut into the shape of a scoop to fill the dogs’ metal food bowl.  The dogs were always excited to be fed and the small one would bounce around us.  I tried to keep my dad between me and her so she didn’t knock me over.  Elsa, the older dog, was a bit more patient, but her head was always in the bowl before the rattle of kibble on metal finished.  The last few pieces would fall across her muzzle and leave dust in her eyebrows.

That night I stood there with the milk scoop dangling from my fingers and watched the dogs scarfing down their food.  It didn’t look exciting to me.  The pieces were round, about the size of my big toe.  They looked hard and dry.  There was always a crumbly, dusty film on the food scoop after I used it.  But the dogs were chowing down like it was the best thing they’d ever tasted.

“Daddy?”

“Yes-ee?” 

 I kept my eyes on the dog food bowls because I didn’t want to see him laugh at me. “What does dog food taste like?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never tried it.”  I glanced up.  Dad looked over and lifted his eyebrows at me, but he wasn’t laughing. “Would you like to find out?”

I wrinkled my nose.  “But it is dog food. We can’t eat dog food.”

“Well, dogs eat people food sometimes.”  I couldn’t argue with him there. Elsa was always begging for whatever food I happened to carry outside with me.  “Let’s go look at the bag to see what’s in it,” Dad said.  “If it won’t make us sick, we can give it a try.”

Assured after reading the ingredients listed on the back of the 50 pound bag of kibble in the shed, that our dogs were basically eating people food in dog format I agreed that I’d try it.  But only if he did, too. Of course he would, he said.

We sat down on the wooden steps of our porch, feet in the dust at the bottom.  We each took one little ball of dog food in our fingers.  I rolled mine back and forth between index finger and thumb.  It felt hard and just a little greasy.  Not quite perfectly round.  Like it had been extruded and then sliced before whatever cooking process made it crunchy.  Little crumbles stuck to my fingers.  I smelled it.  It didn’t smell good, but not really bad, either.  It just smelled like dog food.

“You first,” I said.

“Together,” he countered.  “Ready? One, two,” he paused, to make sure I was going to continue. I nodded.

“Three.”

We each put the piece of food in our mouths.  I held mine between my molars.  I couldn’t bring myself to let my tongue touch it.  Dad was chewing his.  His beard vibrated over his cheeks as he worked the crunchy texture.  I gently bit down, just enough to break the hard ball apart. 

I can’t tell you what it tasted like. I have no memory of the flavor. I couldn’t get past my mind shouting “You are eating dog food!  That’s so gross!” And yet, I was watching my dad calmly eating dog food, too. He could have been tasting wine, or considering whether his soup needed more salt.  His face betrayed no hint of the oddity of the situation.  He swallowed.

“So, what do you think?” he asked.  I still couldn’t read his face.

I leaned over and spat the soggy mouthful into the dirt. “I can’t do it,” I said.

Dad chuckled. “Yeah,” he said, “That tasted pretty bad.  I’m glad I’m not a dog.”  He stood and brushed off the seat of his jeans before reaching for my hand.  “Ready to go in?”

Ordinary Life in Pictures