life.

 (a dog's life...sun on the belly after swimming in the creek)

             

...have you ever been walking down the street in an unfamiliar part of town, or sitting in the middle seat on a flight to Denver on a Wednesday, or digging a big hole in the yard for no reason other than a big hole in the yard seemed to be needed to be dug, when you find something that makes you say "hmm, I didn't know life was about that?..."

...just a question...

                           ...maybe it's just me...

A long and winding road

How, you might justifiably ask, does a goofy garden event in Eugene, Oregon in 2008 lead to lemon curd in 2015? So glad you asked, chickadees, because there's a story in there.

No, silly, that's not horrible Eugene, that's OUR garden, back in the tidy days.

Comfortable? This is a long one. You might need to lay in some supplies. Hard tack, cornmeal, dried fruit...Oops, we're not going on the Oregon Trail (Phrodaux here "...you have died of dysentery..." Phrodaux out), are we? Maybe just iced tea and a cushion. Relax.

So. Once upon a time, Phrodaux and I were much more into ornamental gardening than we are just now. These days we're just barely keeping the home (city) garden alive (F-ing climate change...how is it that it didn't rain in June? That temps got to 100 in June? That the blackberries are ripe and the farmers already have their hay in? What the $#)$*)*$?????). Farm garden is another story. Fueled by Phrodaux's ingenious drip system of 5 am watering every other day (from our well, all right?), we are enjoying kale, mustard and collard greens, lettuce, raspberries, garlic, a few potatoes, and the occasional rogue sugar snap pea, while dreaming of tomatoes and chiles and gravenstein apples.

Wait. That wasn't my story.

Editor, everyone needs an editor. Have you noticed? Next time a friend starts to tell you a story, remember FQ's advice: Everyone needs an editor.

Anyway...2008. Ph & FQ go to the hell mouth that is Eugene for the Hardy Plant Society Study Weekend. Go ahead, look it up. There we meet Fab MV, our NYC pal of PR and Green Envy fame. At first we thought he was someone's gardener. It was the Tevas and the gardener finger nails. But after a swoony weekend of new and shiny friendship, we googled him, of course, and came up with this. Oops, no one's gardener.

But based on one weekend, fast friends we were. We went east in 2009, he came west in 2011. Then in 2013 we went east again, for the trip that started this blog and included Fab MV's milestone birthday party, at which we met K & S, who became our lovely friends in L.A. There are a lot of stories in there (burned vegetables, renegade cocktails, magnums of Veuve Clicquot, a treacherous staircase and the Fairy Queen's lost shoe) but this post is already too long and we haven't even entered the same time zone as the point. So maybe later.

ANYWAY (Editor! Is there an editor in the house??)

(Phrodaux here "...you have died of dysentery..." lots of that going around)

 * * *

24 hours have passed. Where was I? It was supposed to be about lemon curd, right? Now I'm out of patience for all this meandering. Cut to chase! Through gardening, we met Fab MV. Through him, we met lovely K&S. We recently spent a long weekend with them in LA, admiring their beautiful West Hollywood bungalow,

taking in lots of groovy architecture,

Future home of Fuse Lighting and its amazing genius founder, our friend, K.

OK, so whatever about the architecture, it's a hangar. But that's the Endeavor.
It went to SPACE. Made me cry to see it.

Oh, California. It's a drought, people. Why are you adding grass in front of the observatory??

The Bradbury Building, of Blade Runner fame. So unnecessarily beautiful.

The train station. Also swanky-pants beautiful. Also in Blade Runner (look for it!)

 ...and eating eating eating good food. Highlights:

• Wurstkuche
• Ostrich Farm (no, we did not eat ostrich)
• Egg Slut (where Phrodaux had to order the dish called Slut, but I'm not sure if it was because of the name or because it was the most complicated thing.

(Phrodaux here "...you may not have died of dysentery...this time...let's say it was weasels, yeah, weasels")

And of course TALKING about good food. K&S are good eaters but don't cook too often (except for S's otherworldly guacamole, which I have had the immense good fortune to eat twice now. Capers! Who'd have thought?) On the other hand, Phrodaux and I are deep into our "let's make that" phase (gin, tonic, bitters, jam, pickles, sourdough, dinner) and are nursing a major food lab fantasy (see future blog post, I'm sure).  So, once we were back at home and K texted with the news that a friend had some Meyer lemons to share, and was I serious about making lemon curd, what could I say? Other than YES SEND THEM RIGHT NOW PLEASE. Which I mostly did. I may have been slightly more polite.

Sent they were, each lemon lovingly hand-wrapped in paper. This was a LOT of lemons.

Without Phrodaux, I trekked down to the farm on a Monday afternoon with a mission. Make some curd.

(Phrodaux here "...you have died of dysentery..." what exactly did the Oregon Trail smell like, eww) FQ: It couldn't have smelled as nice as my pile of lemons.

Let us set the stage. My recipe makes exactly two half pint jars and the curd cooks for ~9 minutes of constant stirring. I quadrupled it, which required more than an hour of constant stirring (if you stop stirring, you get lemony scrambled eggs - not often served in fancy tea shops where everyone is wearing a fetching hat). And it was 98 degrees outside. And approaching that inside. My arm may have shrivelled a little bit. There may have been whimpering and an occasional curse word. The dogs didn't care; they were already mad because we were NOT SWIMMING.

At the end of the day, there were 8 gorgeous jars of curd cooling on my table, a long swim with the pups, and a care package full of nice things to send back to the boys in L.A. (curd, jam, pickles, bitters - I'm glad I didn't have to describe contents to the dippy FedEx girl).

 
Around here we are enjoying our curd on English muffin bread (thanks, America's Test Kitchen) as well as on schlumpy meringues (I think it was too hot for height when I was making them).

Food experiments proceed, and friends are found when and where you least expect them.

This guy? I think he's saying: Relax. It's all good. Or maybe: Hey, where's my lemon curd?

(Phrodaux here "...you have died of dysentery..." Game over. Play again? y/n)

white (bianco) pizza.

      ...ok, boring title, but the first 751 "funny" topics made Phrodaux sound like a nazi racist (I refuse to capitalize "nazi" no matter what spell check says) ... well fascist, and not Benito Mussolini fascist kinda funny, but the bad kind...

anyway...

We may have mentioned that Pizza (I am more than willing, nay, borderline-fascist about, the capitalization of "Pizza").

I may be giving you the wrong impression, this is about Pizza (see above about big letters and small letters). We love Pizza around heres.

I strayed, yes, my eye has wandered a bit, there is the tried and true, the always there for me, the waiting, and always there for me (I do love you tomato sauce, and we will always have Paris...huh?)

I went white, and you know once you go white, you might as well do it again (huh^2?)

PIZZA!

(finished, not in a Finland way, who actually paid back their WWI debt, the only country that did by the educationalizm way, learnin'...)

There was a week, not long ago, a magical week, not a "sparkly vampire" or "Ginny Weasley" sorta way (don't judge me), a week that there was not one Pizza, and not one Pizza then a few days and another, but a week that there was Pizza and the very next day (yes, the one just after the first) where there was ANOTHER PIZZA!!!

give me a moment...

 Thisthatthereweek, the second Pizza was the Sunday Pizza that we may have mentioned one or 827 times, was the standard, though much happily consumed and discussed, Pizza. With tomatoes (did I mentioned, all canned, toasted at home, quite a bit grown, in our garden, thank you very much). But the bonus and illicit Pizza was Saturday. Forbidden, and a bit guiltily, Saturday Pizza bianco. (which is eye-tail-eye-eee-ean for cheezy bread).

PIZZA!

First there was the crust. The Fairy Queen makes the crust. She gives pizza, sorry, Pizza credit to Phrodaux, but really, CRUST!

This time, on the griddle (didn't work all that well, sorry) olive oil, sea salt from Mexico (there needs to be a post about this wonderful stuff, 11 nuevo pesos minus 3 a kilo), and chopped fresh rosemary from the garden. Put it all on the crust, then smear it about with a Silicone brush, smear, smear, smear... Try to get it more or less uniform.

 

(lemons are not white)

Then there is lemon, not just lemon, but lemon and preserved lemon. I used half a preserved lemon. Got the recipe for the preserved lemons from Ottolenghi's cookbook, maybe it was "Jerusalem" if you don't have all of his cookbooks, you need to stop wasting what is left of your oh so short life and get his books and cook, cook like you need to eat to live, you will be happy...

So. 

chop the half of a preserved lemon, that you have many-a-jar of in your well stocked pantry. (not panty, dirty)

uniformly distribute.

Then about 1/2 lb of Parmesan, you can use fancy, but the kinda cheap stuff is fine (well, for us, maybe you are fancy, and use "soap" when you bathe, I, for me, use trout and gravel, and occasionally cheese, but not fancy cheese). 

Then... 

A fresh lemon.

slice as thin as you can, you can do better, I believe in you, and more importantly... you believe in you. (please send a donation, your support and our special underpants is what keeps us going)

toss the first and last, those are the lemon nipples. you can use those in private, if you want... Want...WANT. (I admit, I'm not entirely sure what I mean here) 

Then, just because all white made use feel like bad people, we added fresh asparagus spears.

 

(the wine has been replaced with homemade G&T at this point)

 

drizzle olive oil over the whole thing, it will make it nice... trust. Not too much (at which point you would rightly say, "oh for f-sake, if I knew what enough was, why would I be following this "recipe", and you would be oh so correct, really pisses me off as well. so. olive oil (not Popeye's oh-so-androgynous-girl(?)-friend, Oyl, did you notice androgynous and Oyl, just saying) a table spoonish, drizzle. I may have sea salted and corn mealed the crust, but...

Cookin'! it is all about the cook'n,  that would be ~449f plus or minus 47f depending on the phase of the moon, condensation point, temperature, and number of lemon nipples present. (if all else fails, 499f is fine). Pre-heat for about an hour (yes, seems silly, but no, it really does make a difference, or 61 minutes, the beep that says the oven is at temp, it is not real, like that spoon in the Matrix, or my self esteem, a Pizza stone helps, yes, with both) Set the timer for 7 minutes, that way, if it is done "yay! foods!" if not done, it will only be a bit more, but you won't get to the point where you say "yay... briquettes... we can do graphite drawings while we go hungry... starving artist without the hedonism...boo, no fun with prostitutes or gonorrhoea... just burned Pizza...)

PIZZA!

  eat.

enjoy.

...watch Barbarella... but don't over think it. Actually, you will be much happier if you just eat Pizza, drink cocktails made with home made bitters/tonic/gin watch the movie and don't think too much... a fur bikini is optional...

 (...it is not optional).

(just because)