The French Laundry gets reviewed...by a 4-year-old girl.

Dear Shelly,

I'M NUTS FOR THIS! LIKE SQUIRRELS. Read it! Read it now!! ::kawaii-induced tears, followed by scampering and stomach rumbles::

http://www.thebolditalic.com/articles/5607-a-four-year-old-reviews-the-french-laundry

love note

Starlings!

Dear Joanne,

I miss you!!!! I have a 2 for 1 flight deal for an impromptu trip to NYC, I just have to make my decision by September 1 and figure out who to split the ticket cost with. I TRAVEL ALONE, TWO-FOR-ONE-PASSES!!!! Maybe I'll take my sister. She's just about the only person I can travel with.

I think I could learn to travel with you, but we'd be like latin lovers, constantly fighting and then reconciling and making googly eyes over pasta.




ANYWAY the reason I am writing is that I just put a bunch of poems together and I have enough for a book. I'm making a book!!!!!!!!! I would never have even had this idea without your support.

 Can I send you a draft when I'm done?

 xoxo,
Shelly

A Love Note

Dear Shelly,

The last few weeks in California went by so quickly, but they were so uplifting and necessary. You guys remind me of who I am when nobody else can. I love you and I love our friends.  

 

I love that we are always dog-happy to see each other, no matter the setting, and that our gatherings never have a dull moment - despite always being dry because we’re so eager catching up that we forget to drink. Yes, we break the cardinal rule of late-twenties-people gatherings and still manage to have insane mounds of fun!!

 

Jane's pin says, "Being Old Doesn't Seem So Old Now That I'm Old"
 

I love that we can sit 4 hours in a Peet’s and be completely entertained by our conversation and antics while everyone else looks over and wonders, are they drinking 'shrooms?

Jason's completely innocent cookie

I love how, when we get together, whether it's once a month or once a year, it feels like no time has passed at all since high school.

 

"happy biiiiirthday to yoooou...!"

I love that every person cares about every other person in our group.
 

"Yea we're boning."

We are lucky to be in our friendships. I constantly feel like I've won the lottery when it comes to you guys.
 

Not pictured: Jason being a gentleman and taking our picture

Lastly, I love that, despite being apart, whether that's geographical distance, or distance as a result of building towards our different life goals - we still get together on Google Hangouts and share our discoveries, angst, rants, and lessons of perspective every night.

 

...the most important life lesson of all.

I love you.

...I miss your goofy faces so much!!!!!

<3

Joanne

Kimchee My Heart

Dear Joanne,

I'm sorry for holding this recipe ransom. I knew you wanted it so badly that I could get whatever I wanted.

I want this blog to live forever.

I'm so glad I got to spend Saturday with you!

We danced in your kitchen, picked out vegetables at the grocery store, collaborated on a vegan cake, ate ALL THE GARLIC and guzzled delicious fudge sauce. And that was before the party.

 My breath still smells like garlic. I totally took one of the cloves we baked to eat for myself and then ate it all in one sitting.

Norm <3 Grouper

I ate Norm with butter and roasted garlic.

How great is it that we still get together every summer? It's my favorite tradition. I hope it never ends. Think of how many things we've been through in all these years!

I associate kimchee with all sorts of happy. It is a huge part of my life and family. I don't remember a time in my life when we didn't have a jar of it in the fridge. I was making a batch at home, and my mom told me that when my grandma was young, she worked for a Korean guy in Pohnpei making kimchee.  Whenever we make it, my mom and I make a point of setting some aside just for my grandma, otherwise she won't get any before my cousins eat the whole jar.

SAFETY PSA

I don't care how many times you wash your hands, DO NOT change contact lenses or feminine products for a few hours after making kimchee with your bare hands. And should you make that mistake, do not tell all of your friends about it.

Kimchee

1 head napa cabbage

1/4c sugar

1/4c salt (maybe more, depending)

3/4c korean red pepper flakes

1 large cucumber

1c green onion

1/4c ginger, minced

6-10 cloves garlic, minced

Courtesy Jason's instagram

Step 1: Cut napa cabbage into bite-size pieces about 2X2 inches. Wash multiple times to remove sand. Cut cucumber and radish (optional, plus whatever vegetables you want to add to the mix. Radish? jicama? parsnips? I am not the kimchee police. You use the veggies in that CSA box, you great person, you.) I salt everything because salt is a preserver and I'm not adding a fermented food like fish sauce, so I just feel better about it overall.

Put all of these into a bowl, fill the bowl with water, add 1/4c salt, and let it sit for 15+ minutes

While the veggies soak, mix green onion, garlic, sugar, onion and chili paste. This mix will be a little dry, but the soaking veggies are wet, so whatevs. 

Remove veggies from salt water in whatever way you wish. Strain? Another bowl? Do you, you great person, you.

Add chili mixture to the cabbage mixture. Add more salt if it needs salt (taste both a thick vegetable like a cucumber and a thin napa cabbage leaf. If the thick vegetable isn't salty enough but the thin leaf is too salty, you have a perfect balance. The salt will spread out uniformly eventually.)  Keep stirring until everything looks red and delicious. Put into a non-reactive container, preferably glass (RED PEPPER FLAKES STAIN. YOU CAN'T WASH IT OUT.) Let sit out for a day or two, then put into the fridge. Or just put it in the fridge. Whatever makes you happy.

Enjoy your kimchee.

Dear Joanne,

I have a killer pesto recipe that I'm holding for ransom, as well. 

Love you,

Shelly

on writing, zits, and plum jam au naturale

Dear Shelly,

You see this beautiful, shimmering thing in your head. You want to pin it down, but when you put the pen to the page, a line of all-too-human scrawl blurts out of your hand. The line becomes a paragraph. Your dented e's and loopy y's recall to you personal shortcomings; the cursive letters you are rapidly generating are scrunched like uncomfortable passengers of a train car in which someone has farted after eating a wheel of camembert cheese. The horizontal blue lines maintains the façade of a calm and neat mind, hiding your schizo impulses.

Your penmanship was better before computers, you grumble, whilst picking at the scabbed-over pimple on your chin. This is only the first draft, you say, it's not supposed to be beautiful. Typos and clichés abound. Sigh. Your biggest hope in life is to wake up tomorrow and not hate what's on the page. Even Hemingway wasn't Hemingway on the first draft, you say, feebly, not really believing that.

It feels like dropping colors onto canvas from a limp, wet brush. It feels like, pop! your poised adult self is a five-year-old immigrant again, a kid with no idea about English. You are holding a pencil like you hold your chopsticks, uncomfortably new at all of this.

Lately, everything in my life has become a metaphor for writing, and meanwhile I am not writing regularly. I've been cooking though, stirring sugar and plums on the stove into jam with the kind of happy, effortless serenity that writing never affords. Why can't I put ingredients together and make essays, without the guesswork? Why can't I be guaranteed good results for my effort? I grumble, stirring jam, feeling new irritations erupting subcutaneously. The frustration of not writing, of my type-A perfectionism trying to suppress every imperfect squawk, is giving zits. ME. I DON'T GET ZITS.

If only I could stir my mood to achieve the right consistency. If only writing could be like tracing figure-eights in a bubbling jam pot with a spoon and the occasional tasting of something sweet. If only I could de-sensitize and de-neuroticize myself thoroughly; if only I could only write as I make jam, with zero worries, no existential investment and immense enjoyment. (How do I get back to pre-MFA???)

If only I could have faith in everything coming together in the end.

kisses,
Joanne

Jam requires intuition and practice, as anybody with a jam-making grandma knows. For cooked fruit to become jam - for the fruit mixture to gel properly - you need just the right balance of acid (the sour fruit, peel and all) to sweet (sugar).

I keep a box of pectin in my cupboard for forcing the fruit pulp to jell and jam, when I need to. Sometimes though, the stars align.

Jam is something more than the sum of sugar and fruit, just like writing is more than the sum of my worries, fears, cynicism, hair-wringing, hand-wringing, and complaints. I know that. When things come magically together, I'll pause and appreciate that.

Tart Plum Jam
Yield: one pint-sized jar

Ingredients

4 pounds of plums - rinsed, halved, and pitted 

1-1.5 cup of white sugar

optional: 1 packet of pectin for low-sugar jam

Equipment

A pint-sized canning jar, sterilized

Two wide spoons

Two pots (one for boiling jam, one for boiling the jar)

Place the halved plums in an uncovered pot and sprinkle with sugar. Mix until all the fruit surfaces are equally crusted with sugar. Turn the boiler to high and stir continuously. (You can pick up a book to pass the time, as long as you keep stirring.) In another pot, boil the jar and lid to sterilize.

The fruit mixture will come to a boil, slowly. When you see a few hot burps bubble up, continue stirring until the entire mixture is bubbling quite furiously. Continue boiling and stirring for 10-15 minutes, until thickened. Dip a spoon in the hot fruit mixture and wait for the fruit gel to cool on the spoon - you want to see if it's at your desired consistency. (If the mixture is runny and not gelling with additional boiling time, add the pectin). Remove the glass jar and lid from the other pot.

Ladle the jam into the hot sterilized jar, leaving an inch of room between the lid and the jam.

Screw the lid onto your jar and submerge in a boiling water bath for 15 minutes. Take out the jar, flip it upside down and cool to room temperature. Do not move or agitate the jar for 24 hours if you can help it.

Enjoy on bread, mix into yogurt or on waffles! The jam should last for several weeks up to a year if processed accordingly.