by Andrea | Aug 27, 2020 | Uncategorized
I mean, I AM happy! I feel so grateful. It’s so beautiful here. But it’s a lot to take in. Like A LOT. My predominant modes are overwhelm and exhaustion.
I am not complaining! I don’t take anything for granted — this is true always, but now more than ever. I acknowledge how privileged I am to have the opportunity to be here. I just need to honor my feelings. And I need to be authentic. Two weeks in I can say, this is authentically HARD.
Ok, enough whining. This is my version of what has happened in the first two weeks of Hugh and I living here:
I’ve spent at least 50% of my time working in the kitchen. I’ve organized many a kitchen in my life, not only for me but for a few clients and, for some reason, this one is coming together very slowly. Hugh thinks it’s because this one is larger than my prior kitchens. I’ll go with that because I don’t have an alternative explanation.
Working in the kitchen also includes cooking, prepping and processing food, which is VERY time consuming. First, I spent time figuring out how to source food. The local supermarket is small, and there are a number of products I can’t find there. I ended up getting a Thrive subscription, which is really weird as I never before ordered groceries online — oh Park Slope Food Coop, how I miss thee.
I located all the local farmers’ markets. Win! We will have fresh produce until late September or early October. After that? Well… this is where the seasonality of the country comes in. We are used to eating large quantities of fresh vegetables, but that is not sustainable in places with long winters, unless, of course, we become greenhouse gurus and, like those survivalists I admire in Alaska, we get to grow beautiful lettuces and arugula under a plastic tarp when it’s zero degrees out. That is not happening this year. I think for us it’s going to be lots of potato and cabbage.
Meat-wise I think we are going to be ok. This area has ample pastures and enough farmers who manage them as they should always be managed: with pastured animals. There is plenty of good quality beef, chicken, pork, lamb and even rabbit, turkey and, of course, venison and trout stocked in farmers’ freezers to hopefully get us through until we get a chest freezer ourselves and I can plan a little longer term.
I made ice-cream for the first time in at least 3 years. I was very excited that the ice cream bowl fits in the freezer as the Harlem apartment had a tiny fridge and the thing was relegated to the furthest corner of the kitchen cabinet. I still had some chocolate I got last year in Oaxaca and even though Mexican chocolate has good flavor, it doesn’t have the best texture so, it was lingering in the pantry. I applied some culinary intuition and the result was some pretty decent dairy-free, egg-free and very low sugar Mexican chocolate ice cream.
I made peanut butter for the first time in my life. I have three devices where I can make nut butter but I guess I never felt “homestead-y” enough to do it. I don’t know if I can keep it up. Hugh’s demand for PB is high.
And then we realized that the three apple trees (update: I’ve discovered another 2 apple trees!) in the property are serious about producing fruit and we started harvesting apples. The trees must be at least 50 years old. I know they weren’t planted by the previous owners — who were here for 42 years. I’d love to know the history of these apple trees. Also, I need an apple tree doctor!
So far I’ve made a giant apple pie and I started a batch of apple scraps vinegar (not to be confused with apple cider vinegar). It should be ready in a couple of months. I also grilled apples with tarragon. That needs to be a thing because they were delish!
I started a composting and garbage organization system. It’s too early to say if/how it works. All I know about composting is that it’s the foundation of food production and my intention is to develop a whole system here that takes all the compostable matter we produce and that we end up bringing very little to the dump. Because, yes. Here we pay for garbage disposal. Either we bring it to the dump — cheaper — or we get a pick up service — more expensive.
Last week flew by between client work and semi-organizing my clothes. I’ve also been talking to lots of people on the phone: internet services, burning wood delivery, oil delivery, pest management, gas delivery…the list of services that support rural living is long. I am amazed and humbled that my comfort depends on just as many, if not more, people than it did in the city, even when my intention is to become more self-reliant — the irony.
Hugh has been doing lots of things outside of the house. He installed the mailbox, fixed one of the steps in the porch that was becoming hazardous, and bought tools for various tasks: string trimmer, hedge trimmer, chain saw, ax… The learning curve is intense and he seems frustrated. Amidst all this he still has a job that requires I think around 50 hours in an easy week. BUT he still makes time to take beautiful pictures, like these…
by Hugh Siegel | Aug 11, 2020 | Uncategorized
On top of it all
I am bereft. This is a post about bereavement. To which I am no stranger. I won’t get all dramatic on you with details — you all have your own problems. But suffice it to say that loss and I are old drinking buddies, and I cling to it like lint.
It’s been going on for weeks now. Pandemic weeks, which are like New York minutes, irreconcilably fast and interminably slow at the same time. It began with the idea of moving to the country. My wife’s dream. A house with chickens. That has been a motif of our relationship since the early days. A notion I let simmer like stew in a crockpot month after month, year after year, salted with ambivalence, peppered with curiosity, spiced with hints of dread.
Though most would never guess, I am a country boy. I grew up getting lost in the woods, swimming in ice cold streams, canoeing down the river, cultivating a mostly innocent pyromania. But, raised by cultured, educated, elite parents, who listened to jazz and worshipped cinema, I always longed for cultured, urban life. After college, I moved to New York City and, with a few interludes in exotic places, have lived here for more than 30 years — a bedlamite, a sybarite.
New York has become my identity in so many ways. It’s in the way I talk, the way I walk, my postmodern polymathy, my intellectual snobbery, my flaneurish dilettantism. I’ve worked in the non-profit sector. I’ve tightroped between liberal and progressive. I two-wheeled through the chaotic streets for years as bike lanes sprouted in my wake. I lived over the best bagel shop in Manhattan for two decades and became bilingual as an adult. I would have trouble really saying that I come from anywhere else than this unfettered cosmopolis, with all its love and hate and arrogance and indifference.
And, if anything, New York has reached out to me more seductively than ever before these past few months. Months in which I have been largely cut off — as we all have been — from most of the things that distinguishes this crowded plot of earth from all others. Here I sit, on the ramshackle roof terrace (the very one that sold on us on moving to this apartment three years ago; the very one that was, for me, the dream of living in this city — with a view off to morphing midtown and a sky slashed with pink clouds every evening) overlooking an analogously ramshackle stretch of Harlem, as I have been for, what? 150 nights? More? My own glorious prison yard. And, from here, and from the tentative masked forays through the streets —on foot, on bike, by car — somehow the deftly alluring Gotham has wooed me in unexpected ways. The roars of protest marches on nearby streets, the fireworks exploding on all sides every night, the sultry darkness and breezes from the sea that touch your skin like amorous hands.
I am going to miss it. Terribly. In the marrow of my bones. Like the other great losses in my life.
But…in these final days, I’ve been feeling ready to leave. The other day, I experienced another loss. Not the kind of loss that transforms you. But maybe the kind that kicks you in the butt. Someone broke into our building and stole my beloved road bike, which I had ridden thousands of miles. I rode it countless times to Bear Mountain on sunny weekends. I spun it on three New York Centuries, and a 150-mile 12-hour ride from Penn Station to Montauk, Long Island. I once rode it from my apartment on the Upper West Side all the way to my hometown of Milford, PA in one long, sweaty day of climbing and inventing routes. It wasn’t an expensive bike, but it was a companion in my life. And the theft seems like an omen. Our neighborhood has deteriorated here. Crime and desperation are on the rise. Suddenly I feel alienated from this area that had engaged me so much for the past seven years living and working here, taking pictures, admiring drunken street revelry, at once repelled by and lost in its drama and anger and exuberance and exasperation.
Does one bereavement nullify another?
I can’t help feeling like a traitor of sorts. At this moment that the city is deconstructing itself and, in some real sense, decomposing before my eyes. I perceive that this is a moment of reformation and transformation, and it’s been exhilarating, if exhausting. And I preemptively regret that I won’t get to be a part of it as it evolves into whatever comes next. But, at the same time, something has clicked — somewhere between my lifelong sense of adventure and my attraction to a home base that embraces me. And that something is telling me that now is a good a time to head west.
I don’t mean to feel that I’m running away from it, but I guess, in a very real way, that’s what I’m doing. And it pains me. But I also feel an incipient sense of liberation starting to pulse in my veins. It could be age, the need to distance (socially?) from the chaos. Perhaps.
But, of course, it’s also something grander and less selfish and less transitory. I’ve committed myself to a relationship with a wonderful woman — a great woman — someone who has taught me so many things and who seems to understand needs that I have that I, myself, am unable to apprehend. And that love I feel for her leads me to put aside, if reluctantly and hesitantly, my more primitive ties to my comfort and my past and my tendency toward stasis. It leads me to put aside the storied childish things, and, of course, what ultimately is a kind of fear, to share in her dream — a dream that is logical and heartfelt and authentic, and one that brings tears to her eyes. And that is better than enough.
So I go. I say goodbye tonight to this home, a romantic perch above a crumbling, romantic city. And exchange it for another home, surrounded by trees and buzzing with insects. Sirens for birds, pavement for grass. There will be chickens eventually, too. And maybe by then, the view they inhabit will be as glorious as the one I leave behind tonight. (See you there.)
by Andrea | Jun 23, 2020 | Uncategorized
I don’t know why I love food so damn much. I didn’t grow up in a big family, or with any special food tradition. Growing up I only knew of basic, repetitive meals. Always homemade, absolutely. But never remarkable or particularly interesting.
I grew up in a tiny household consisting of my mother, my brother and I. My mom worked insanely long hours and my brother and I got to see little of her. She did, however, make a point of feeding us food as good as her knowledge, time and budget allowed for.
Every morning, she got up between 4 and 4:30 to make lunch. Then she squeezed enough orange juice to fill 3 glasses — in a hand-operated citrus extractor — and proceeded to try to get me out of bed. I’m the oldest, I guess that’s why I had to go first. Let me tell you that Bogotá at 5:30am in the 80’s was COLD. And we didn’t have hot water but my mom wouldn’t let us leave the apartment without taking a shower. That might explain why a breakfast without a “taza” of piping hot chocolate simply didn’t make sense back then.
Without fail, my mother served us the delicious orange juice followed by the chocolate caliente, eggs and almohábana, arepa, or some other bread product. Every. Single. Weekday. Morning. By the time my brother and I were done eating, she was gone to work.
Back home after school, my mom finished making lunch and we ate together when it was possible. Meals consisted of lentils, red beans, stews and soups, seasoned with tomato, garlic, onion and cilantro, and always served with white rice. It was solid and safe food and I always looked forward to it. Afternoons went by quickly, as she had a whole other work shift in the evenings.
As I said, nothing remarkable. Except for my mother’s commitment to feeding us at home despite being chronically sleep deprived. We got to eat out — that is, go for a burger or a slice of pizza — a couple of times a month.
It was only after I rented an apartment by myself for the first time that I started to cook. I was in my late 20’s and living in New Jersey. My mom had suffered through severe burns on her forehead from handling a gasoline stove as a child and I had got my own share of third-degree hot chocolate burns on my shoulder when I was five. As a result, she never let my brother or me too close to the pots even after we upgraded from gasoline to natural gas.
I was a kitchen novice who was getting sick and tired of Chinese take-out. Armed with a large plastic cutting board and the best chef’s knife I could afford, I proceeded to outfit the itty bit of hall space that was my kitchen and to…learn to feed myself.
This was my saving grace: I had, by then, waited tables for a couple of years, and had come to realize that, for me, the most interesting place in the restaurant was the kitchen. I had never been as engaged as when I observed the two dynamo Mexican guys behind the line “firing tables” like boom boom boom. What a show of dexterity and skill. Just two of them covered all the kitchen stations in a perfectly orchestrated choreography, from 6 to 11pm in winter and summer, without fail, putting out pretty decent food that people came back for time and again.
I didn’t (want to) neglect my job… too much, but I did spend every minute I could back there, just watching them. And I just picked it up! I learned to cook by mere observation.
My love affair with food got a notch more serious when I went to work at a different restaurant. This one was “fine dining,” which meant many more people in the kitchen and much longer to turn a table. But it also meant a whole new array of ingredients, techniques and textures, and I ate it all up with gusto and curiosity. Food pushed its way into my heart and cooking it became my main form of self-expression.
Years later, after many more restaurants and after building a whole career around cooking and healthy eating, food continues to be my foundation and cooking the darling that I go back to most every day. The utilitarian commitment to home cooking I learned at home developed into something beautiful that my mother never had time to experience. A commitment that now, as Hugh and I start this new life project, takes on a whole new meaning. I will now attempt to grow my own food.
I mean… what else is there to do for someone who is as crazy about food as I am?
What else is there to do for someone who is as crazy about food as I am?
