Saying Goodbye

We spent last week in the heat and bright sunshine of Costa Rica, spending as much time as possible immersed in the water and drinking cold, sweet agua de pipas through bamboo straws. Our five-year old was wild for both the water and the young coconuts and managed to amass a sizeable collection of bamboo straws that he insisted on bringing home (they're now sitting in a plastic bag on the rug in the middle of his floor where they will stay until I move them.) Our two-year old was, unfortunately, terrified of both the pool and the ocean but he lapped up the attention from his aunt and uncle and his grandparents and put away astonishing amounts of food between frequent dips in the yellow, plastic baby bathtub I bought at the little supermercado in town.

But all good things must come to an end. On Wednesday we awoke in the hot darkness of the wee hours to load the bags into the waiting taxi, break down the travel crib and carry our two sleepy little boys out to their car seats for the two hour drive over bumpy, dusty roads to the airport. After a long but blessedly smooth day of travel, we returned home to frigid temps, one very happy cat and a driveway coated in a slick crust of ice. The next morning, just after I'd packed the children into the car for school, my mom-in-law phoned to say that she was heading back up to Vermont where her younger sister, Maggie lives.

Our beautiful Maggie.

I've written about Maggie here before but in case you missed it, she's been battling lymphoma for the past 10 years, undergoing two brutal but temporarily effective stem cell transplants and countless rounds of chemo and radiation. After exhausting the last of her treatment options - a drug cocktail including a new drug called Ibrutinib - this fall, her tumors had spread and grown at a frightening pace, she was having more and more difficulty breathing and was often in unbearable pain. It took her some weeks with help of hospice at home, before finally departing her poor, little, battle-scarred body.

Maggie and her love enjoying the sun in Maine after her first stem cell transplant which led to a 6-year remission.

I can't tell you how much I will miss my beautiful aunt. I loved her from the first time I met her almost 15 years ago, just a few months after I began dating her nephew who would eventually become my husband.

Maggie and her friend, Helen, swimming out to the seals during her remission.

She was full of life - downright irrepressible. When she was well she took care of people as a nurse practitioner at the Brattleboro Free Clinic, hiked, biked and swam, helped her friends tap and boil sap to produce hundreds of gallons of pure amber maple syrup, raised and slaughtered her own chickens and lambs, grew, picked and canned enough food for an army, collected plants for her beautiful botanical artwork, cooked and baked and cleaned, and generally showered her partner and kids and sisters and all the people in her life with affection.

Even during the many punishing rounds of chemo when her immune system had been zeroed out, she'd be out in her garden with her mask on digging in the dirt despite the fact that her doctors had expressly forbidden it. Having her hands in the earth made her feel alive and that's a pretty powerful medicine.

Maggie planting peas in her garden in the early spring.

In the week before she died, she shocked her family by calling on some unknown reserves of energy to finish framing the gorgeous, new prints for her final show, "Gone To Seed" that opened last week at Mitchell Giddings Fine Arts. Then she amazed yet everyone again by making the trip down to Brattleboro to see the show hung the day before it opened. She had to tour the gallery in a wheelchair with a barf bucket on her lap but it filled her with happiness to see her work writ large on those clean, white walls.

Below is her artist's statement for Gone To Seed - I find it very profound and moving.

In the late Fall of this year I hiked the familiar woods trails where every Spring for the past 30 years I have collected Vermont’s ephemeral flora. The transformation of the plants was so dramatic, from tiny shapes of starry pale flowers and their new born leaves clasped tightly around their stems to ungainly bug-eaten golden leaves bearing red and blue fruits, oozing their seed and juices into the soil and decaying leaf matter. What a metaphor for life, for my life, as I struggle with terminal cancer, birth, death and rebirth.                                             

-Maggie Lake, December 2014

I did not get to see Maggie more than once or twice a year but we had a wonderful email correspondence. I felt that I could share pretty much anything with her - absurd or awful anecdotes from my daily life, stories about my kids - both funny and frustrating, recipes I liked, gardening questions, fears and insecurities I was struggling with, thoughts about art and life, etc., I will treasure her emails which were notoriously lacking in capitalization and full of the vivacious, appreciative, no-nonsense, humorous, generous, and loving spirit that marked her life. It gives me a queer, hollow feeling in my gut to know that there won't be any new ones arriving in my inbox.

Below are a few bits from messages she wrote me while wrestling with terrible physical pain and the tremendous uncertainty of not knowing how soon her life would end.

"i still love life and the big fat golden quinces out the window begging to made into membrillo. delicious with goat cheese on a good cracker. better go pick em."

"i think the world of beautiful things is the answer to all problems; loving your kids, your partner, your friends and family. loving the growth of gardens and plants and the miracle of seasons. sharpening your awareness of the wind, sun on your face, the feel of dirt when you pull weeds, the beautiful smallness of life. i will so miss it. i love you m"

"i am getting into the tub. bath, bed and beyond. love you m"

Here's to you, sweet Magpie, wherever you are. I hope you have found the most wonderful peace.

Curried Lentil & Sweet Potato Stew

This delectable stew is a little bit sweet, a little bit spicy, very hearty, and has a lovely, subtle creaminess from the coconut milk. Served over rice with whole milk yogurt and lots of fresh cilantro, it makes a perfect meal.

Lentils are one of the unsung heroes of the food world. They're delicious, cheap, filling and remarkably nutritious -- packed with calcium, potassium, zinc, niacin and vitamin K and even more protein, iron, folate and dietary fiber. But perhaps most importantly, THEY DO NOT REQUIRE SOAKING!!! This makes them a boon to lazy people like myself, as well as those who do not excel at planning ahead.

Thanks to the overwhelming success of this summer's Great Sweet Potato Experiment, we have quite a lot of delicious, yellow-fleshed sweet potatoes. We do not have a root cellar (yet) so we've been storing them in paper grocery bags in our downstairs shower which we clearly never use. They're holding up nicely so far - no signs of softening or rot. But I feel some pressure to use them while they're still good. So I was intrigued when I saw this recipe on Food52 last week. It inspired me to create a similar soup with some modifications to suit my tastes and to make use of what I had in the larder.

As we were about to leave for a week-long vacation, I was practically gleeful about the chance to use up the two red onions and three cloves of garlic sitting out on the counter and finally put the tiny, wizened knob of ginger in the fridge to use before it dried up completely. I also liked the idea of freeing up a little room in the freezer which has gotten so full that the drawers are practically groaning. I could use up two quarts of my homemade vegetable stock (this is so easy to make, by the way) and one of the bags of kale I froze from our garden this summer. Aaaand, it would make good airplane food, too!

I began by defrosting the vegetable stock and the frozen kale since I knew that would take a little time.

Meanwhile, I chopped up the onions, garlic and ginger and sauteed them in some oil in the soup pot.

Once they'd softened, I added the carrots and sweet potatoes and cooked them for a few minutes before tossing in a can of organic coconut milk, the rinsed and drained lentils, half the cilantro and the spices.

Then I added the defrosted vegetable stock and let it simmer for about 45 minutes until the vegetables and lentils were just cooked through but still had good texture. I stirred in a few spoonfuls of lemon juice then served it over basmati rice (short grain brown would also be good), topped with whole milk organic yogurt and lots of fresh cilantro. Bliss!

-- print recipe --Curried Lentil & Sweet Potato Stew
Serves 6-8

Ingredients

* 2 medium or 1 large red onion, chopped
* 4 cloves of garlic, minced or pressed
* 4 cups of cubed sweet potatoes or yams
* 3 carrots, sliced or chopped
* 2 cups of lentils, rinsed and drained
* 2 pints vegetable stock
* 2-3 tsps chopped or minced fresh ginger
* 1 bunch of fresh cilantro, leaves rinsed and chopped
* 1 bunch of kale or chard, ribs removed, leaves coarsely chopped
* Juice of 1 lime
* 1 can coconut milk
* Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
* 2 Tbsps curry powder or garam masala
* 2 Tsps cumin
* a pinch of red pepper flakes
* 2 Tbsps olive or coconut oil

Directions

1. Heat the oil over medium heat in a large soup pot or Dutch oven and saute the onions, garlic and ginger for 10 or so minutes until translucent.

2. Add the cubed sweet potatoes, carrots, curry powder, cumin and red pepper flakes and saute for another 5 minutes or so before adding the lentils, coconut milk, kale or chard, vegetable stock and most of the cilantro (reserve a little to use as a garnish for the stew.)

3. Bring to a simmer then turn the heat down a bit and cook, covered, over medium-low heat for 40-45 minutes until the lentils and vegetables are just tender. Add the lime juice and stir well before seasoning to taste with the salt and pepper. You can also add a little sugar if you like. Serve hot over rice topped with whole milk yogurt and fresh cilantro.

You might also like:

• Spiced Lentil Salad with Carrots, Currants & Capers
• Quick Coconut Vegetable Curry
• Mujadara - Lentil, Rice & Caramelized Onion Stew

For more delicious recipes, gardening ideas, foraging tips, and food-related inspiration "like" the Garden of Eating on Facebook, or follow me on Twitter and Pinterest.

Maple Sage Buttermilk Cornbread

Considering how simple cornbread is, it's funny that my cornbread track record is spotted with failures. Sometimes the bread comes out of the oven perfectly browned with a nice, moist crumb and just the right amount of sweetness and sometimes it's dense and grainy and bland and a good deal of it ends up in the compost heap. But this is the perfect cornbread - moist with a fine, consistent crumb, crispy edges, just the right amount of smoky sweetness and a hint of sage.

In an effort to ensure success, I bought a bag of locally grown and locally milled corn from Wild Hive Farm, one of the only working mills left here in the Hudson Valley. Their grains are all top-notch and I love knowing that the corn grew to ripeness in a field and was ground into meal near me rather than somewhere in the midwest.

I bought a grassfed buttermilk and used organic flour, butter and locally-raised eggs. If you don't have buttermilk on hand, there's an easy workaround you can do -- just put a tablespoon of either lemon juice or plain old white vinegar in a cup or bowl and add one cup of milk (you can make more, of course, just use that basic ratio), and let it sit for 5 minutes. That's it!

I had perused quite a lot of cornbread recipes and liked the idea of using sage to add a little extra flavor so I crumbled up some of our dried sage leaves in the dry ingredients. If I'd had some corn kernels left in the freezer, I'd have tossed those in, as well.

The recipe is simple, you just mix the dry ingredients and mix the wet ingredients and then mix together until just combined before turning out into a greased baking dish. I like to use bacon fat and put the dish in the oven while it's preheating to melt the fat easily.

The basic recipe below was inspired by a similar one by Alana Chernila whose wonderful book, The Homemade Pantry is an inspiration.

-- print recipe --
Maple Sage Buttermilk Cornbread
Makes one 8-inch pan

Ingredients

* 1 cup organic, all-purpose flour
* 1 cup fine ground yellow cornmeal
* 1 Tbsp baking powder
* 1 tsp sea salt
* 2 eggs (try to find pasture-raised eggs from a farmer near you)
* 1 cup buttermilk (try to find organic or pasture-raised)
* 1/4 cup pure maple syrup
* 4 Tbsps (1/2 stick) unsalted organic butter, melted, plus another generous smear to grease the pan though I usually use bacon fat for that purpose
* 2-3 Tbsps crushed, dried sage, stems removed

Directions

1. Preheat the oven to 425°F. Throw a generous pat of butter or a spoonful of rendered bacon fat into an 8-inch square or 9-inch round baking dish or similar-sized cast-iron skillet.

2. In a large bowl, whisk together the flour, cornmeal, baking powder, salt and crushed sage until thoroughly combined.

3. Put the pan into the oven to melt the fat. Crack the eggs into a medium bowl and beat them until uniform in color then add the buttermilk, maple syrup and melted butter and stir or whisk the mixture until it's well-combined. Add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients and gently stir just until combined.

4. Remove the pan from the oven using pot holders and turn it to coat the bottom and sides evenly with the melted butter or bacon fat. Pour the batter out into the greased pan and bake for 20-25 minutes until the edges are lightly browned and crispy and are pulling away from the sides of the pan and a toothpick or knife inserted in the center comes out clean. Serve warm with lots of butter and a sprinkling of sea salt.

You might also like:

• Skillet Cornbread
• Sweet Potato Biscuits
• Cheddar Dill Beer Bread

For more delicious recipes, gardening ideas, foraging tips, and food-related inspiration "like" the Garden of Eating on Facebook, or follow me on Twitter and Pinterest.