A Bag of Onions

Posted by Holly at April 30th, 2008

First of all, I sat down to write about our Passover Seder and looked out the window to my left to see the dogwood blooms – a deep fuschia color this year – contrasted against a steely sky that has just sent down a shower of hail stones. It is April 29th and we are still suffering the slingshots and arrowheads of winter. In fact, on the day of the Seder when the sky was, again, sending down hailstones, I thought about the ten plagues to be enumerated that night and wondered, as I have so many times, is this a message from God? Will there be some kind of admonishment on the next plane of existence that we didn’t pay attention to what he was trying to say to us? On the theory that it could be possible, I would also have to say back to him that I spent a lot of time here on the early plane wondering why he had to talk to us in parables and signs. Why didn’t he just say it outright?

Which of the four sons would I have been had I asked any of those questions at the Seder?

For the third year in a row Charlie and I were the only Jews. We were nine at dinner this year: the Evans family (with 10 month old Finn who found the Afikomen early in the evening), our neighbor Dave who grew and ground the horse radish and Father David. Quite a group.

Passover is the best of the Jewish holidays in my opinion and that of many other Jews in the world because of the food. It was only upon entering into this mixed marriage relationship that I discovered that Gefilte fish and Matzoh Brie’s may be an acquired taste. It’s true that the fish has a distinctive odor so I always try to make mine a couple of days in advance of the Seder so the house clears out. For my first Northwest Seder, over two dozen years ago, I wanted to make my own fish so I called my grandmother to get the recipe. My dad was on the extension phone writing down what she told me. I wrote it down on my end of the conversation, too. My dad asked for clarification at a couple of points in the recitation and, finally, at the end, he was so intent on getting it right that, when my grandmother said to uncover the pot halfway for the last half-hour of cooking, my dad asked which half of the pot! We laughed over that for years and years.

When he sent me his hand-written version, he wrote at the bottom: “You think it’s easy?”, referring to the difficulty of transcribing a method of cooking used by so many grandmothers around the world – measure by eye, test texture by hand and add flavors by tasting. It’s the same recipe I use today only, as I learned that year, it’s impossible to get the Brooklyn version fish in the Northwest. So now I use sole, salmon and halibut instead of whitefish and yellowfish, whatever they were. Amazingly, it still smells the same.

The menu was a little different, too. Instead of roast chicken and brisket, we served deliciously broiled salmon (marinated in orange juice) and Boeuf Bourguinon that Jim made. Everything else was traditional.

I confess that I don’t clear out all of the chametz from my house anymore. Instead, I sell it to Jim for $1. That makes commingling with a non-Jew much easier. I sold it to him on the morning of Passover while we were standing at the sink brushing our teeth. I could see he thought it was amusing but also wanted to do it for me. I bought it back a week later, no interest.

This year, I decided on a centerpiece that was a little different than the usual flowers. This was partly because there was nothing in bloom in the garden, it was so cold, save a few small flowers. Cindy brought me beauties and I used those in a pretty vase on a side table. The real centerpiece was the Red Sea parting made possible by the clever use of those little hand-help personal fans and some sheer red fabric, formerly a curtain. It worked very well.

The Seder was delightful. Charlie led it, everybody read their appointed parts. Charlie and I recalled family moments for everyone including how long it used to take to get through the Seder. That, of course, was in the days when there were 25 at dinner each night of the two Seders and also when my grandmother would buy 100 dozen eggs for the duration of the holiday. Two of her Passover specialties, breakfast treats, required many eggs and we all clamored for them every day. One is the Matzoh Brie mentioned above. This is Jewish french toast made with broken up matzoh. It’s fried just the way you would bread french toast but with a lot of cinnamon. I think it is delicious and, along with matzoh farfel cereal, my favorite breakfast during Passover. The day I made one for Jim, the last day of the holiday, he politely and silently ate until he looked up and said “Is this how leftover matzoh is used up?”

Oh, well. He isn’t perfect.

Next year, if not in Jerusalem, at least more Jews at my table.

Posted by Holly at April 30th, 2008

My orange cat, Koufax, loves me. He sits in my lap, relaxed into the crook of my arm; so relaxed that it doesn’t even seem as if there is any weight on my lap. He doesn’t weigh very much, it’s true, but he is so comfortable in my arms that there is no resistance. Every now and then he reaches up with his tensile front paws in a big stretch. Honestly, he strokes my hair or my cheek. Then he reaches up with his mouth and kisses me…two little kisses with only his lips and one nibble. His six toes on each front paw make it feel as if he really holds hands.

He should probably have been named Campanella instead of Koufax because his paws do look more like catcher’s mitts than a pitching glove. He was named by the Brooklyn-born father of the woman I got him from who got him as a kitten. Her dad was a Brooklyn Dodger fan and, maybe because of his sandy color, named him Koufax for that famous pitcher. It’s quite okay with me. I even taught him a baseball trick involving sitting on command and then waiting, with a tempting pile of catnip in front of him, for me to say four words: ball, ball, ball, strike. On strike, he was allowed to have the catnip. This he did for years until I moved on to other pleasures and stopped practicing with him. He’s going into training soon, though, now that his nemesis Gemini, the dog, is learning how to read (he lifts his paw when I hold up a piece of paper that says PAW on it. Lots of doggie cookies are involved.)

My son will tell you I owned Koufax even before I saw him once I heard that name, being a die-hard Brooklyn Dodger fan myself, still waiting for them to return to their proper home. There are a lot of us. I once worked for Prospect Park in Brooklyn, the park that Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted considered their masterpiece because of the natural terrain with which it was endowed. There’s a statistic that one in every seven Americans has roots in Brooklyn and I once had the idea that if I could raise $1 – one dollar – from even one tenth of those people, it would yield millions for the park. I used to float the idea whenever I was at a party or in some public social gathering and I would come back to the park with a fistful of dollars from enthusiasts. Once, on a Friday night at my crowd’s usual hangout, Sardi’s, I went into my shtick about the $1 and the park and one friend said he would give me five single dollars if I would dedicate them toward rebuilding Ebbets Field.

I actually own Campy’s autograph and Sandy Koufax’s on a little fold-out card, about 5 x 7. It says Your Dodger Pals on one side and Your Other Pals on the other. Campy and Koufax are on the Dodger side, numbers two and three. Above them is Ramon Jackson. On the other side is Carl Furillo, Johnny Colon, Henry Mandell and Gladys Gooding – the only person to play in Ebbets Field, Yankee Stadium and the Polo Grounds. She played the organ at the games. I don’t really know who Johnny Colon or Ramon Jackson are and Henry Mandell is not a ball player. He was the president of the Men’s Club when that organization at Union Temple, the reform synagogue in Brooklyn at which I grew up, hosted an annual Orphan’s Breakfast that my dad ran. The words in these sentences are archaic today, a throw back to a time that was both more peaceful and more opaque, in which we didn’t think about labels the way we do today and were careless in the way we categorized people. Still, the intent was sweet – give a breakfast to support a bunch of kids who lived communally because they had no families; bring the kids together with everybody’s heroes, the Brooklyn Dodgers. Sam Levenson, the great comic – and another Brooklyn kid – used to MC the breakfast.

Still waiting for the Dodgers to come back to Brooklyn gave me the opportunity to root for the team in whichever city I was living. In Seattle it was the Mariners. In New York it was the Yankees (or, the Mariners East). I’m back to being a Yankee fan, now, since I live in a state that doesn’t have major league baseball. How can that be? It’s a shocking absence, in my opinion.

I love baseball. It carried rules for life when I was growing up about working hard to excel at something, about fairness and how you were chosen to be on the team according to your ability and not everybody got a chance to play and it didn’t scar us for life. I learned about courage with the Dodgers and Jackie Robinson. Baseball is remarkable for creating memories of a childhood. We – or, at least, I – recall sweet moments with my dad who would patiently explain to me that, yes, the players on the opposing teams were really friends off the field. Something I think about whenever I see two players, today, on opposing teams exchange hugs before or after a game. Baseball crosses genders. In 1955, the magical year, my mother was the only mother who had a transistor radio when we all played on the street after school and the moms watched from their bench position. My mother wanted us all to be able to listen to the games during the year that was finally Next Year. I once commented that there seemed to be more women at Mariners games than men. I looked it up and, statistically, Seattle does have a high population of female sports fans. Growing up, there was a woman who lived on the ground floor of our apartment building, with windows facing the courtyard, who rang a cow bell whenever a Dodger hit a homerun. I wish I actually remembered what that must have sounded like the day Gil Hodges hit four of them in regular innings in one game in 1950.

It might be spring on the farm today – finally after a long and wet and cold spell – and I might be headed up into the vineyard to prune grapes, but I can tell you I wish I were at a ball game. I’ll be listening to the sound of the crack of that bat in my head all afternoon. And, later today, Koufax goes back into baseball trick training.

Posted by Holly at April 23rd, 2008

Wow. This was definitely a grape day. We have grape days and horse days on the farm and this one was spent in grape activity. First, it’s the middle of April and it’s freezing here. Reminds me of one of my favorite Jame Thurber passages, paraphrased here: The world’s at sixes and sevens…middle of July and the dogs are sticking to the sidewalk. Except it’s the opposite: middle of April and it’s so cold the buds on the trees are barely able to lift their little hats. We went to a Chehalem Mountains Winegrowers meeting last night and, while talking about how all the vineyards will be full and fruity in September for a planned event, someone said that was if we ever got bud break! Jim has had to prune the entire vineyard in cold weather. I helped on the only really nice days we’ve had. Clever.

I’m throwing around these terms quite professionally now, if I do say so myself, and I learn new ones all the time. Yesterday the word was ratchi … the spine from which the little grapes hang. This is something you don’t want to get into your pressed material in the early stages of winemaking but, not to worry, they separate pretty nicely with a destemmer. We’re way far away from that part of the process with the 2008 grapes. It’s so cold we may not see bud break, leaves and actual grapes for a long, long time. You always think a season or so ahead or behind of where you are, it seems. All through the winter, as Jim was pruning the vines, he was thinking not only about the number of branches and possible bunches he would get this year, he was trying to make decisions about which buds would become next year’s new arms. God, it was cold up there in the vineyard where the wind comes out of the west and there no trees nearby to cut its billowing path. I was glad to be up there, though, the couple of days I could stand the weather because it makes me feel a part of things. Jim has taught me how to prune – on the top arms you want the buds that are pointing upwards and will eventually cuddle up to the upper grow wires. Obviously, then, on the bottom you want the buds that grow downwards. If only the plants could read that page in the book and direct their buds accordingly. The vines and branches, however, are pretty, well, viney with twists and turns so an up bud may not necessarily look like that in real life. Nonetheless, I have learned how to make the choice and gamely nip off the unwanted buds, cutting through them on a diagonal so the node doesn’t push out another bud. Still scary stuff, however. The thought of ruining a plant is like an undercurrent in my mind at all times. We hit on a nice rhythm the last few times we were up there together with Jim doing the right side of a plant and I the left. That way didn’t feel so terrified. Still, I do a certain amount of talking to myself when facing a plant, repeating the rules to follow – top/up, bottom/down; every other bud; leave about four inches between them; four or five buds on an arm and on this side. Watch the ones near the crook as one of them will end up being next year’s new arm.

Today was so cold and rainy that even Jim couldn’t stay up in the vineyard. So we bottled last year’s Chardonnay. Bottling is way more fun than pruning and most other jobs because you get to taste and can persuade yourselves, since you’re winemakers, that drinking wine at 9:30 in the morning is okay. Last year, we bought a bottler but not the mechanized one. It is a lovely table-top piece of equipment with five stems through which wine flows into bottles. The bottles sit on a ledge that, through adjustment into notches, regulates the amount of wine that flows into each bottle. Clever and attractive. The flow into the stems begins with a siphon. The first time Jim tried it was last summer when family from California was visiting. Family is Jim’s niece and great-niece who is 9 years old and who had a friend with her. We always have a wonderful time when Michelle and Kate are here and, with the addition of Maddie, it was especially fun. The weather, then, was great so no one minded being out and doing whatever there was to do. Actually, everyone in Jim’s family is pretty outdoorsy so weather rarely stops them from anything. I, on the other hand, was raised to think the outdoors is just a way to get from one tall building to another or as a valuable view from a New York City apartment. (That’s not entirely true; I spent countless hours in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden but only knowing the security of a tall building was quite nearby.)

Anyhow, on that bottling day last summer, Jim started the siphon the old fashioned way. Not quite having the hang of the new bottler, the siphon kept fading, wine stopped flowing, Jim kept re-starting and, because he thinks he is invincible, he kept swallowing the wine that inevitably ended up in his mouth. Winemakers learn early on to spit not swallow. He was so drunk by about 11 AM that morning that it was all I could do to walk him into the house without his falling over – we kind of goose-stepped our way in with Jim tilting dangerously in one direction or the other. Never was he completely upright. He spent the day in bed, was riotously funny, doesn’t remember any of it and was mortified to learn that the two little girls were collapsed in endless ripples of giggles on the floor outside of the bedroom listening to him rant and rave at length about nothing in particular. Later on, it was a teachable moment about the perils of overdoing.

On this bottling day, today, it was a more sedate and mature process. We did taste first, of course, to decide for sure that the wine was ready to be bottled.Neither of us swallowed. We weren’t tasting very much, however, and held our own. The Chardonnay was deemed ready so we went to work. Today I was the corker of the 180 bottles we filled. The corking machine is totally hand operated. It’s a tripod. Put the bottle on a little round holder on a big spring; push down so it’s positioned right under the cork hole; put in cork, pull lever down, feel the satisfying swerp as the cork is pushed into the bottle. It’s a Ferrari and the only one I am ever likely to drive.

This wine, 2007. we will drink and give to family and friends. We’re in the middle of the bonding process right now so we can sell wine as of the current vintage presuming we get bud break, I didn’t mangle too many of the vines and future bunches, wasps and birds don’t eat all the grapes, we don’t have continuing weird weather or any other unforeseen challenges and obstacles AND we have the courage to become commercial!

Last night Jim had a brainstorm about the name of the vineyard so we’ve renamed it A Blooming Hill Vineyard. It will, more accurately, be officially renamed once the paperwork is completed to undo the old name and assign this new one. I filed the paperwork on line today and got an email almost immediately telling me there was an error and I could file. I called. The name, they said, is already taken. What? Yes, there’s a vineyard called Blooming Hills Vineyard and this is too close. But that’s us, I told them, and we want to change the name. Oh, well, in that case you’ll have to fill out a cancellation form and then resubmit the new name form. Of course, there are fees to cancell and reapply. Okay, okay. It will be worth it. I like it – A Blooming Hill Vineyard. Has the ring of a new blog name, too, so maybe I’ll do a companion piece to A Bag Of Onions!

Oh, and did I mention that Jim is putting in a second vineyard below the house where blackberries were formerly raised? Yes. And those grapes will be ready to become wine when Jim is 82….Nice, for a little retirement hobby.