Back when I was dating my opposite, the racist homophobic conservative hunter J., I was a regular reader of Gourmet magazine. I would prepare special meals for J., smoked salmon ravioli, pissalidière crisscrossed with anchovies and dotted with bitter black olives, pears braced with crystalized ginger and honey and baked to a custardy finish. J. and I had chemistry, an easily bruised love, so we each tolerated the other's differences, limped along even though he lived in another town and had very real reasons to keep me at arm's length.

I remember preparing a meal for him in the decay of autumn, after the leaves had dropped from the trees and lay rotting in the gutter and the breeze was turning cold and harsh. I was just 21 years old and could focus on the kitchen, had the time to think about cooking, and it was all still new, too, love and cookery. There was a recipe in Gourmet for roasted fall vegetables. I skinned and hacked a heavy butternut squash, added knobby shallots, garlic, and chunks of red potato, then tossed the vegetables with olive oil and roasted them in the oven. Near the end of cooking, I added slivered sage leaves, the bitter scent of coming winter.

Sage takes well to butter and olive oil, get crisp and intense, medicinal over gnocchi, tucked among thick slices of potato. My husband and I grow sage in our front yard. The plant sits between the flat-leafed parsley and the lemon verbena, its silver green leaves upright, purple flowers still drawing honeybees. I’ll have to trim it soon, deadhead the flowers and clean off the spider webs in preparation for the feasts and sadness of fall.

Here is the original recipe, from Epicurious. Add 2 tablespoons slivered sage in the last ten minutes of cooking to recreate my more winter-scented dish.

Roasted Autumn Vegetables

1 1/2 pounds small red potatoes
1 pound shallots (about 24), peeled and trimmed
5 tablespoons olive oil
1 bay leaf
1/4 teaspoon dried thyme, crumbled
4 garlic cloves, crushed
2 pounds butternut squash, peeled and cut into 3/4-inch pieces (about 4 cups)
fresh thyme sprigs for garnish, if desired

In a bowl, toss together the potatoes, quartered, the shallots, 4 tablespoons of
the oil, the bay leaf, the dried thyme, the garlic, and salt and pepper to taste. Spread the vegetables in an oiled large roasting pan and roast them in the middle of a preheated 375°F. oven, shaking the pan every 5 to 10 minutes, for 25 minutes. In a bowl toss the squash with the remaining 1 tablespoon oil and salt and pepper to taste and add it to the pan. Roast the vegetables, shaking the pan occasionally, for 10 to 20 minutes more, or until they are tender. Discard the bay leaf and garnish the vegetables with the thyme sprigs.

Gourmet
October 1990

Image: Attractive sage bush, much nicer than ours, from eHow.

Tags: boyfriends, recipes, sage, DC, College, Gourmet Magazine, Roasted Autumn Vegetables, fall, autumn, cooking

One theory is that Nick suffers from existential angst, though I personally think he misses the stalking and the killing. He got out by mistake a few weeks ago, pushed his way through an unlatched back door in the early morning hours, and has not let us forget his gleeful four hours of freedom. Nick is too sweet to have been a born-and-bred street cat but I can tell that he’s spent a lot of time outdoors, probably even before the Island Cat Rescue Association volunteer found him in East Oakland with an abscess at the base of his tail. He wants to be out in the grass, wants to hide in a thicket of bamboo. He misses the crunch of hollow bird bones, the gaminess of mouse flesh.

Nick’s existential angst or blood lust, take your pick, has taken the form of 2:00 a.m. howling. He’s the loudest cat I’ve ever known, full of throaty confidence and the ability to project, the kind of cat depicted in old-time cartoons, sitting on the fence yowling as neighbors hurl shoes. He’s an opera singer belting out a sad little tune, “Let me out!” or “I must kill!”

It must seem like a cruel joke when we get out the cat fishing line, the feathers attached to a stick. As I whip them around the bedroom, the feathers turn and beat through the air as though they were birds' wings. Like all cats, Nick has an active imagination and allows himself to be taken in for a few minutes. He hustles and jumps, takes a very strong cat arm and pins the fluorescent feathers to the carpet in one swipe. The feathers crunch and crumble as Nick snaps his jaws against them, tries to carry his prize downstairs.

I am actually tempted to let him out – it feels cruel to keep him from something he loves and clearly knows well. My other cats have all been indoor-only from the beginning so they didn’t know what they were missing. But I know that it isn’t a safe world out there and we signed a contract saying that his paws would never touch dirt or concrete sidewalks again.

Perhaps it’s time to take in a budgie or two, a little something to make life more interesting for our 2:00 a.m. howler.

Tags: Pets, Nick, Pet adoption, outdoor cats, cat rescue, cats, Island Cat Rescue Association

Forgive me, fellow bloggers, for I have sinned. I did not intend to leave this blog for almost a month while I frittered away five weeks with my son. My mother visited for ten days and I did not blog. I had eight hours of babysitting one week and I did not blog. This past week -- my son's first back at school in over a month -- coincided with the visit of an old friend and I did not blog.

But during those eight hours of babysitting, I started to think about writing again, about tackling the never-ending story in some different way, fitting in time for as-yet-nonexistent freelance work, attempting to keep this blog somewhat current (all while finishing household projects). Good writing grows best in the dark (thanks, rcb!). What sees the light here in fragmentary form tends to stay that way. Or sometimes it embarrasses me later in its undeveloped melodrama and weak attempts at capturing reality.

It's tempting, really tempting, to put up little bits and pieces on the blog. There's nothing like instant feedback to keep one going, except that I don't keep going. The past -- meh. I've dug into it, and created stories out of it, have exposed enough. Now I'm looking to take the facts of my life, the weird experiences and characters as twisted and lively as wisteria in bloom, and make them fictional. I want to harness the crisscrossing metaphors of my subconscious.

Blah, blah, blah. I'm continually on the edge of something, a change, a new way of being, perpetually on the hopeful precipice. But I've come so far from the first days of this blog, typing in the dark and yearning for more.

Image: My mother and me walking in Muir Woods, August 2009. Photo by Mr. Trinkle.

Tags: dreams, blogging break, writing, Woody Allen, Muir Woods