The Way Back , blog – Raye S. Leonard

Sun, shade, water, weed

I planted garlic today. Four types. Georgian Fire, Chesnok Red, Russian Red, and Spanish Rojo. I know nothing about what makes one type of garlic different from another. I chose them because they all looked plump and evenly papered in their separate bins at Moose Crossing.

I’ve never grown garlic before.

There is an old tiered raised bed in the yard that suddenly gets a lot more sunlight since I had the trees along the fence line trimmed in June. I planned to scrap it, but I am glad I let it go another summer sheltering a flourish of weeds.

Former home of cat grass, catnip, and assorted weeds.

Maybe someone shared pictures of their garlic in a Facebook gardening group I belong to, and I thought it seemed easy and like a good idea.

Over the summer I stumbled upon various articles about growing garlic that confirmed it was probably a crop that wouldn’t be destroyed – not by any number of natural disasters, but by the dull scythe of my own ignorance.

See, I’m not much a gardener. For many years, I bought whatever looked pretty, read the plastic stick or the back of the seed envelope, and did whatever it said. Sun, shade, water, weed.

And then?

Grow or don’t. I was elated when flowers and vegetables blossomed, but it was nothing personal when they didn’t. I usually work all summer and I am more drawn to the ocean in my spare time, so if my landscape looked like the gardens of the dead by August, well, there was a reason for that.

I started growing sunflowers in 2020, and had amazing success.

Those pandemic sunflowers with their beautiful faces.

That’s when I started to think maybe I could be a “gardener,” and not just someone who “grows things.”

Now I plant sunflowers every year. I wait for them expectantly like relatives who live far away and only come back in August. Once their flower heads form, I check their faces every day to see if they’ve finally arrived. When they do, I kiss them all over like an ecstatic aunt.

2022 visit: Clearly, we are “sisters from another mister,” right?

I don’t know if I will have the same familial relationship with garlic. But what I do know is that carefully preparing the raised bed for something better than weeds feels hopeful.

Maybe it’s not great big hope. I really don’t have a whole lot riding on my garlic garden. There is no make-it-or-break here for me. And I will probably always lean more to the grow-or-don’t end of the gardening spectrum.

But planting something in these diminishing fall days for a future in the lengthening ones of summer feels like I have something to believe in. There is more to look forward to than turning the calendar pages this winter in the endless wait for spring.

There’s garlic!

Mulched with leaves, hope awaits its future scapes.

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I fully intended to do the Write 31 Days challenge like my last two posts suggest, even though I started it late anyway.

I began a new job as an adult education director on Oct. 3 only to test positive for Covid that night. I lost two weeks to the infection. Though I believe my case was relatively mild, it took 14 days to get a negative result (during which time I opened my blog again and started poking around).

Since I finally went back to work, I’ve been busy cramming a month of career transition and a backlog of student intakes into the last two weeks.

While I abandoned Write 31 Days, it turns out that popping a few posts up on your blog is a kind of creative self-seeding. Ideas for things to write about keep coming to me. Reflections, recollections, records of what I find interesting or meaningful.

It was also cool that when my middle son asked me for my baked mac and cheese recipe, I could say, “It’s on my website!”

November is National Novel Writing Month, and while I have no intention of trying to write a book, I do have a new daily goal of writing something.

A blog post every now and then might be one of them.

Write 31 Days: By heart (Day 2)

I made baked mac and cheese for dinner tonight remembering the recipe off the top of my head.

That’s such a funny phrase. Typically it suggests saying something without giving it much thought. You could also say what’s your knee jerk? Or your gut reaction.

It’s like the body is a consultant more trustworthy than whatever well-reasoned sentence might come out of your mouth if you took a moment to construct it. There’s your gut, your knee, or the top of your head saying or doing something totally different. And possibly more believable.

So let’s say instead that I whipped up a baked mac and cheese with a recipe I know by heart. That’s a more accurate idiom.

When you know something by heart, it means it’s part of you, like a freckle, a chipped tooth, or a fond scar. It’s more than a memory for it is not just something past. It is also present in the moment of indelible recall. And future as it calls forth its latest iteration.

Gah. What am I doing? One of my biggest internet pet peeves is wading through lots of words to get to a recipe. I could, of course, go on and on.

I know you’re all ears, but I won’t do that to you.

Baked Mac & Cheese

(A fusion of my Nan’s recipe and Emeril’s … with a little bit of my own laissez flair)

1 stick unsalted butter

1/2 Cup all-purpose flour

3 Cups milk

3 Cups shredded cheese (I use a combination of whatever is in the fridge, but sharp cheddar is excellent, and a bit of mozzarella makes it creamier)

Salt and pepper to taste

1 lb. small elbow macaroni or shells

1-2 tubes of Ritz or other buttery crackers, crunched up

3 Tbsp. melted butter

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Butter a 9X13-inch pan. Cook pasta according to package directions.

Melt stick of butter over medium heat. Slowly add the flour, stirring with a wooden spoon. Cook for 2 to 4 minutes, stirring constantly. Slowly whisk in milk, and continue stirring until thickened. Add salt and pepper to taste.

Add 2 cups of cheese and stir until melted.

Drain pasta and return to the pot. Pour cheese sauce over it and mix well. Spread in the buttered baking dish.

Mix crushed crackers with melted butter and remaining cup of cheese. Sprinkle thickly over the mac and cheese.

Bake for about 30 minutes or until bubbly and crispy on top.

Enjoy!

Write 31 Days: No bad eggs (Day 1)

I was in my late 40s before I knew that “bad egg” was not just what you might call an unsavory character. There really is such a thing as a bad egg, an egg that’s gone bad, that you shouldn’t use, and if one makes its way into a recipe, there’s no going back. You should start over with all the good eggs.

I’ve been cooking and baking since late adolescence when, on some subconscious level, I fully incorporated an understanding that the ability to turn out a satisfying meal was my ticket to doing something not just acceptable, but valuable.

But until I did an online whole foods freezer cooking class with Heather Bruggeman in 2016, I never met an egg I didn’t like.

Heather cracked eggs into a separate cup before adding them to the main mix. I knew this was a thing, but to me it was just something some people did for their own personal reasons. I was just not that fussy. Everyone has their own moves in the kitchen. Did it really matter how the egg got in the bowl?

As it turns out, yes, it did. Heather explained that the yolk of a bad egg breaks when you crack the shell. That’s why you do it in a separate bowl. So if the yolk is broken, you can toss it out. Only the best eggs make the batter.

I never knew.

How many bad eggs have I baked into cookies and cakes over the years and served to unwitting family and friends? No one ever said they got sick from my pastries. At least, not that I know of.

Is there a bad egg in these Christmas Monster Cookies?

I thought if the yolk broke when I cracked the shell it meant maybe the shell poked it on the way out.

My idea of a bad egg is a rotten one. One that smells awful and is therefore obviously no-brainer bad.

I made scrambled eggs for breakfast this morning and one of the yolks broke as it settled in the pan. I scramble hot rather than in advance because I like the somewhat separate streaks of white and yellow in my finished product.

I noted that the egg might be a bad one. I ate it anyway and survived.

I ate it anyway because if my two grandmothers never cracked eggs into a separate bowl before adding them to whatever they were cooking, why should I?

Maybe for us there are no bad eggs. Or maybe we just know a bad egg when we see – or smell – one.

I am sure nobody wasted any eggs in either of my grandmothers’ homes. I like to think that if a rotten smelly egg found its way into a mixing bowl, they would throw it out and start over. I would.

Short of that, there are no bad eggs.

Write 31 Days

Tree work completed in May at my home, which is undergoing several updates.

A lot’s been swirling around inside of me for the five-and-a-half months since I last wrote publicly. It’s not that I had nothing to say. I had plenty. But words that seemed so solid in my mind transformed to smoke when I tried to set them on the page. I gave up all but my most private writing practice and settled into a fallow time.

Lately, I’ve been trying to find a way back to writing in the world. I’ve been forgetting and remembering how to do this my entire writing life, always certain I’ve finally lost my way for good.

Fortunately, it has a way of finding me.

Yesterday the blogger of A Moveable Garden shared one of her Write 31 Days posts on Facebook. She is simply writing about what she learns each day.

I thought, oh hey, I can do that. I can pick one thing and explore it. My swirling unsettledness is mostly around ideas/beliefs/longings/musings and experiences of home. That will be my thing for the next month.

Yes, obviously, I am very late to this blog party. But as F. Scott Fitzgerald said,

“For what it’s worth… it’s never too late, or in my case too early, to be whoever you want to be. There’s no time limit. Start whenever you want. You can change or stay the same. There are no rules to this thing. We can make the best or the worst of it. I hope you make the best of it. I hope you see things that startle you. I hope you feel things you’ve never felt before. I hope you meet people who have a different point of view. I hope you live a life you’re proud of, and if you’re not, I hope you have the courage to start over again.”