Bud Love

Recently my niece posted a picture on Facebook. It was a plump red tomato on a blue and white plate. She'd come back from a week at the beach to find it, their first homegrown tomato of the summer. It made me nostalgic for lush summers, even though all that waiting can be very trying.

All our yard tomatoes are long gone, of course. It's getting to be that time of summer when colorful, living things fade dustily, thirstily, into the past. But this past weekend I paid attention to the surprising array of buds in the yard. I had the feeling they were telling me that they feel rather neglected. Flowers get all the attention, they announced. Buds are promise, they are youth. Buds are the future. Buds are beautiful in their own right.

Rather than become defensive about such a confrontation, I decided to do some portrait work with the buds currently in residence at our house. Before long I found myself cheered by the existence of buds at the end of July; we've had just enough rain to keep the wild things happy, and it's nice to see that the plants I pour money on water want to give me something beautiful in return.

This is a bud on one of the night-blooming cactus. I'm glad I got this photo, because the next morning it was just a shriveled stalk. The night-bloomers above all remind me that appreciation must not be delayed: there may not be a tomorrow.

Usually I just let the Texas hibiscus in the front yard bloom once and go limp, then hack it down to the ground. I think I must foster some resentment about the amount of time I spend murdering the leaf-hoppers that would otherwise destroy them. This year I cut the six-foot-tall stalks back once the first blossoms were finished, and now we have a new array of red flowers waiting to happen.

The back yard Pride of Barbados has been blooming for weeks, but the one in the sidewalk garden is inexplicably late. Oh well, this just means more color as August comes and afternoons really heat up. This one is especially welcome, since when you approach our house from this direction, it's the first blast of color you see as you approach the sidewalk garden. And who could complain about tardiness when those flowers are so over the top?

I always forget the name of this fluffy, eagerly-spreading purple flower the butterflies love so much. A pretty good trimming has kicked them into gear to produce flowers that will last all the way through the Monarch migration. 

The lantana buds wished me to make it clear that they are colorful, too. I'm also happy to report that native lantana keeps showing up in more and more places in the yard - meaning pink and yellow blossoms that love to be neglected.

I had a slight surprise, after last week's rain, to see that the Texas sage was bursting into flower again. There was a 0% chance of rain in the forecast, as far as the weather people could tell. Despite my surprise, I decided to trust the sage. Sure enough, by midnight on Saturday, we had an impressive electrical storm accompanied by a rather unimpressive cloudburst. Clearly, even the tiniest bit of rain can kick the Texas sage into gear. All over the neighborhood today, shrubs covered with purple flowers are waving around in the wind.

This vivid butterfly bush came up from wildflower seed I threw on the ground to fill empty spaces when the sidewalk garden was brand new. Its first spring flowers attract every aphid in the zip code, and insecticidal soap burns the foliage to a crisp. However, this little dude is a survivor and has come back with weeks of insectless blooms. This is one of those plants that produces thistle-pods like milkweed (see the green pod in the second photo?), so now these orange stars shine here and there all around the garden. Plants that plant their own children, that's what I like.

The one little Indian Blanket plant I possess keeps pushing out new buds even in this heat.

While this red number looks like a plum tomato out of place, it is a pomegranate bud on the one cooperative pomegranate bush I have. Its sibling, out in the luxurious full sun of the butterfly garden, has beautiful foliage and a very pleasing shape. Flowers? Fruit? Not so much.

I'm sure that one of these Februaries, we shall have edible pomegranates.

Next up, just a stalk of buds on one of the small aloe plants I repotted in the spring. From one large, jammed flowerpot, I pulled enough plants to fill two window-box planters and a couple of square feet of bare ground under the purple butterfly bush. They won't all survive a really cold winter, if we ever have one again; but aloe plants have a way of dying to the ground and still having an array of offspring up their sleeves.

The vitex has managed to bring forth new buds even this late in the season. I swear, some of those DO NOT PLANT plants do the most delightful things!

The Mexican Bird of Paradise, looking more and more like a feathery tree, is now covered with buds. At some point this week, they will burst into blooms that look a bit like the Bird of Paradise flowers, but smaller and yellow.

It seems wise to finish with a cactus, since summer clearly belongs to them. They bloom obligingly all around the yard throughout the spring and summer. When I was strolling around snapping photos over the weekend, however, only one of the cactus had buds that looked close to ready. Looking like a shiny little pine cone in maroon and yellow, this one promised to do something interesting as the day progressed.

Indeed it did.

Summer Food

The realization of a radical truth takes place in many ways, but often it seems like a surprise: You didn't know something and then, all at once, you know it. This happened to me just the other night. I stepped out, late, to accompany Travis on his last potty of the day, and it was hot. Really hot. Not the romantic, Greek-isle-sexy-breezes kind of night, but hot. Once it's still 90 degrees and over after 10 p.m., you know without a doubt summer's arrived.

I have never been gifted with the loss of appetite over such trivia as weather. When utterly heartbroken or madly infatuated, I quit eating with the best of them. My smallest clothes belong to crises. However, most of the time I am a lover of food: fresh, leftover, restaurant-made or put together in my own kitchen; sometimes frozen, sometimes out of a can! I love food. Always have. But when your air conditioner is working hard 24/7 just to maintain a modicum of survivability, who feels like cooking?

A worthwhile gardening blog would now present you with mouth-watering images of succulent tomatoes, squash, peppers - home-grown foodstuffs with delicious names. Must I confess to you yet again that I can't grow food? I said it years ago and I'll say it again: I cannot, will not compete with insects and rodents for my food. Let those who are gifted in that direction make money from unruly gardeners like myself. Everyone has a place in the food chain.

This post is about a few of the things I like to eat when it's hot. I'm not a recipe innovator; you can find great recipes from those people online. Two of the dishes do require some cooking, which is a sacrifice. But this first one doesn't; it's just a salad.

I am an ambivalent fan of Molly Wizenberg and her food blog, Orangette. I first discovered her through her book A Homemade Life, and have made a number of her recipes, loving all but a few - which is pretty good for any food book. Most of the time Molly manages very adroitly to avoid the preciousness that plagues many blogs - especially those devoted to the arts, including the domestic ones - but the time she wrote to complain about being stuck in one European country when she really wanted to be in another European country, I quit reading for months. I'm glad I returned in plenty of time to read that her baby's head smells like strawberry jam.

One post I liked on Orangette was about a very simple salad made of cooked garbanzo beans, shaved Parmesan, and lemon juice with a few drops of olive oil. It was delicious, and it got me thinking. For a long time I've prepared a marinade of raw veggies to use in salads. Make the dressing first, shake the heck out of it a few times, wash and cut up the veg.

For the dressing: one peeled and smashed but not chopped clove of garlic in the bottom of an old honey jar; oil and vinegar (often balsamic); a good pinch of dried tarragon; salt & pepper; a squeeze of lemon; sometimes a dollop of mustard. Shake furiously, to help that garlic let loose its flavor.

Chop up whatever's in the vegetable bin, dress that with the oil and vinegar, and serve it atop whatever greens are in the salad bowl. Red peppers, celery, carrots are standard. Cherry tomatoes, halved and seasoned with salt and pepper. Boiled potatoes or green beans are great; a ladle of baked Tuscan white beans in winter, or a can of rinsed garbanzos or cannelloni when the weather's too hot to bake beans. Tiny cubes of sharp cheese. Chopped walnuts or pecans, or leftover toasted almonds from the green beans almandine. I imagine many people would slice a scallion or two, but I have a pretty hard time with raw onion-type things.

Once I'd tried Molly's garbanzo bean lunch I thought, why bother with the salad greens? It's not that I don't like lettuce as much as the next person, though I probably don't. But here's where the real problem resides: ever since I was a child I have loved to eat while I read. It is a lethal combination, railed against by anyone who practices mindful eating or any kind of sensible diet. You're supposed to savor every bite of food consciously, thereby avoid mindless overeating.

However, as I was telling my dental hygienist just the other day when she was saying I really ought to floss, it's really too late to expect me to develop any good habits now. It's amazing I don't take up Marlboros and heroin.

Sadly, it's hard to read while you are eating a salad full of lettuce. You have things you need to spear, and things you need to balance on the fork. With a salad, you might be needing to spear more than one object: a tomato and a piece of avocado, for example. Or lettuce, tomato, and avocado for the large of mouth like myself. This requires taking your eyes off the page, so that lunch seems to consist of a disjointed series of sentences. Not an insurmountable problem in youth, but at my age it's not easy to remember what you read thirty seconds ago.

Solution? Salad you eat with a spoon. Laugh if you must, but I can put together a big bowl of this stuff and eat my lunches and dinners from that bowl for days, reading or watching TV to my heart's content, hardly splashing any oily dressing on the pages.

I may have come to terms with the fact that I shouldn't even think about planting tomatoes, but if the day ever comes when I can't grow basil, I'll hang up my gardening gloves forever. Pesto, pesto, pesto.

Start with fresh basil and Marcella Hazan. But first: cold liquid refreshment to help the process along.

You can always find my favorite pages in any of my books. The cookbooks' pages are stained; all other much-loved books wrinkled from accompanying me to the bath.

I like my pine nuts toasted, and all you need is a sprinkle of salt in the bottom of the frying pan to keep them from sticking - nuts of all kinds have plenty of oil on their own.

It seems to be the sine qua non of all food writing that one be able to take photographs of oneself engaged in the process. I suck at it. However, once everything's tossed in the food processor, you have all hands free to snap away.

If you have never tried Hazan's pesto with
potatoes and green beans,
do yourself the favor.

Although the dish sounds impossibly
rich (pasta and potatoes?),
the green beans manage to cut the richness
somehow. Being an American,
I cook my green beans for much less time
than Hazan recommends -
she thinks we like our vegetables
to taste like grass.



For years I looked around for a yummy-looking recipe for cold sesame noodles. My sister Katherine introduced the concept to me decades ago in a Chinese restaurant on the Berlin Turnpike. I hesitated to go the all-out tahini route, because I just don't love tahini that much (I even prefer hummus made with white beans).

Last year Serious Eats (an excellent food blog) followed their dude Kenji through a month of vegan eating. It seems to me that professional foodies take a ridiculously harsh view of people who don't like to put pieces of dead animal flesh into their mouths; so it's refreshing to see what imaginative cooks do when animal products are crossed off the shopping list.

Kenji's "Spicy Peanut Noodle Salad" caught my eye right away, and I've made it many times since.

Nice fresh pourable peanut butter from Central Market.

Put in all the things. Don't you love the smell of fresh limes?

A mix of sweet and hot peppers sliced into a thin julienne to go with the spaghetti noodles.

Taking the seeds out of the cucumber will keep them from getting the dish all soggy.

Oh-oh, it's starting to look all out of control.

Better tame that spicy salad in a nice cool plate. All it needs is a sprinkle of chopped peanuts and a cold beer. Have it in the fridge for an afternoon when the thermometer on the patio looks like this:

The Sage's Wisdom. Or Not.

It is a mid-July Sunday in central Texas. The streets are quiet, the two neighborhood pools half filled with families doing family things. This summer's weather conversation is as follows: It's hot, says one person.

Yes, comes the reply, but we were lucky this year. It didn't start till late.

[End of conversation.]

It appears that in an effort to amuse the editorial staff, the weather page of the local rag has been turned over to interns. Either that or our local rag has finally become even worse than the worst city newspaper in the world, which doesn't seem possible. But it reminds me of something grandboy #2 said the other day when I expressed the hope that his big brother wouldn't have as hard a time with his teacher this coming school year as he had last year.

I don't think it will be as worse, said Cooper.

That's always my hope about our local rag, and yet it's always at least as worse. But I digress.

What I mean to say is that over the past several weeks, the "5-Day Forecast" has been posting 80-90% chances of rain every weekend. See? They seduce us into starting our week with hope, maybe thinking we won't be as mean to each other in traffic. By Wednesday, the rain chances are 30-40%. By Friday, the chances are 0%. But this is not a problem since it's the weekend, and who wants rain on the weekend? This tactic has probably saved the weather staff from listening to a whole lot of complaints. Good for you, interns. I hope someone toys with your affections every week for the rest of your life.

Atmospheric Mendacity

We can't trust clouds to help us. For the past several years we've been stuck in a terrible drought. Extremely promising clouds come in, the humid air hangs in suspense; we may even see lightning off in the distance. A little north of us, Dallas floods. South of us, San Antonio floods. To the southeast, Houston floods. We get...nothing. Clouds are liars.*

I saw the first signs of a possible change yesterday. I wanted to write about it immediately but of course that would be very bad luck. Trying to trust the newspaper's dire predictions, I had turned the automatic sprinklers off for our watering day, certainly spitting in the eye of fortune. Or it would have been, if my mouth weren't too dry to spit. I probably should have washed my car and parked it with all the windows open. So if this week's forecast turns out to be just another tissue of lies, blame me for jinxing our chances.

But yesterday I saw flowers on the Texas sage (Leucophyllum frutescens, famous predictor of rain). I took my phone across the street to sneak a picture.

It's not a good picture, but when you are hurrying in and out of your neighbors' yards you have to take what you can get. Besides, I had quite a bit of ambivalence about the whole enterprise, figuring on the bad luck that heartfelt hopes too often entail.

Getting ready for my bike ride this morning, I thought to minimize the jinx factor by only going out with my phone. No camera. Serious pictures could only cause trouble. I encountered a thrilling proportion of Texas sages that were singing songs of rain like botanical Sirens. The purple blossoms scattered throughout those silvery leaves would be pretty even if they weren't holding out the promise of anything.

As I pedaled through the neighborhood I calculated roughly 50% agreement among the Texas sages that our rain dreams will soon come true. Even the sage with white blossoms cast a weak but discernible vote:

Since the above sages are all attached to peoples' yards, I thought it would be prudent to gather some data from a large hedge alongside one of the empty fields, figuring that they would have been denied the benefit of artificial watering. It's a nice hedge.

Even from here you can see blossoms of hope.

*2:27 p.m. on Sunday July 14th. Hot off the press: my brother-in-law just texted the news that it's 69 degrees and raining at his house, 200 miles north of here. See what I mean?

PS: At just after 4:00, the skies over our house look like this:

Chance of rain? I'll keep you posted.

Update! Monday morning, July 15th: Trust the sage.