Arboretum Diary

"The swan, for all his pomp, his robes of glass and petals, wants only to be allowed to live on the nameless pond." – Mary Oliver, from "Yes! No!"







5/31


... from the beauty of the green river flow close to home to the beauty of the greene prairie across the city... There, under the mid-morning sun, wild shrubs flare up like small white fires.  A single blue dragonfly rises from the curly blaze and staggers just above the trail boards, floating on puffs of invisible wind, quickly pivots as if to guide, straight as a needle compass, back to old friend bush clover. Come inside the green underflow.  Brown thrasher off in the distance is no longer willing to hide his music, says something on the same variation, come this way up among the branches of the aging oak grub. He too then turns away to another. Sometimes it is best to stay inside the purple flow of wild lupine spires, eyes and ears tuned. I, the Karner blue butterfly, wings in unison, marching upwards, move from lavender to lavender.

Arboretum Diary

"I stood a while, listening to the small sounds of the woods and looking at the stars. After excitement we are so restful. When the thumb of fear lifts, we are so alive." – Mary Oliver, from "May"







5/27


Along Greene's Prairie, the slender boardwalk at stretches slumping below the muck line, golden circuits and blue diodes appeared from out of the fountains of sleepy sedges. The flitting of the goldfinch, rustling in the marsh alders, then off – a dash – became loud to the eye as if a projection of the Hoary Puccoon, its petals 5, illuminated like golden signals roaming for its source in the sky.  Bluet sparks rose out of the grassy circuits. On their way up, they longed to flight but held there suspended steady by the electric green tubes.  I stood now no longer moving. As I looked around the prairie I saw that the world is a light show. Where a single crane slipped through the whorl of the scene, it was the absence of blue that made the slow flap of wings remarkable.  The honk of two geese broke the static and drifted low just long enough to wake the tussock.

Arboretum Diary

"All the stocks and stakes are shouldering arms. What are they waiting for? There won't be any grapes this year and the vine leaves will only be of use for statues." – Renard, "The Vine"











5/25

The boardwalk lookout at Gardener Marsh is guarded by the cattails and marsh reeds day and night. You see them peering-in, here and there, through the railings to find who has arrived to binocular the faint wetland marshlands ahead. They too perk their ears to the calling of the red-wing or passing

geese. There is no such thing as a breeze that does not have to pass through them first, tested, then let go again. When the time strikes they stiffen to the landing of a warbler or rarely a goldfinch, and even though they may temporarily bristle, they secretly wave attention and wait for the conversation to come around again.

Arboretum Diary

"He is there, hiding in this dry, clean, narrow den which he owns and fills, completely; he's as swollen as a miser's purse." Renard, from "The Toad"












5/22


As close as five feet away, gradually, slowly having stalked to the edge of the dock at Teal Pond, sat down and dangled my legs over the side, it seems it might be a bit insensitive watching the turtle family go about their morning rituals of sunning and swimming.  In through the pond duckweed and water flower, the small ones are nearly transparent at certain angles rising up from the depths of the water, as their small flippers scoot through the muck only to shine like a great rounded jewel of brown ceramic. A little one struggles to climb the outcropping of a limb. It must be a slippery surface years in the making of green goo. Once up, here is where the above world of warmth grows. They must be thinking, from bottom up, from top down, what comfort!  Mother doesn't move a step but wrenches her stub head around to provide me a pleasant stare. A light wind scoots across the surface of the pond churning up the minutest of white caps. She raises her head to cool her neck.

Arboretum Diary

"We were within the limits of the pine-hemlock forest. On the courthouse lawn in Portage we saw a section of a huge white pine, with a bronze plate, explaining that this was a piece of one of the very last of the Big Pines of Wisconsin. In Wausau there was another section, with another bronze tablet."
           – May Theilgaard Watts, from "Camp Sites, Fires, and Cud-chewers or How the Upland Forest Changes from Illinois to Wisconsin"




5/17

Learning to read the landscape must be a cumulative science; or is it an art?  A short walk inside the Wingra Woods near the Skunk Cabbage bottoms and past the Big Spring, the novice has to make due with limited training and perhaps take more license with art than science.  Is it woodland phlox that is found to either side of the trail? Is it the eastern or western meadowlark that has casually decided to perch onto a basswood near the rim of the marsh where a fellow trail walker has recently mentioned seeing an ovenbird? What species of owl is that hauntingly whoooing from further into the wood plot just this side of the street from Gallistel?  The eye of the artist stirs in the direction of each flash of color and song chirring from behind the oak stumps.  The silhouette of a woodpecker scampers from mid-tree to plunge behind the trimming of reed grass out of sight.  Skunk Cabbage

Bridge boardwalk is not supposed to be hiked, bridge out, but back there, as the trail meanders behind the grand elephant ears of skunk cabbage plants, we have read that the Ho-Chunk used to live along the creek Rexoro Ska Nisanakra (white clay spring), and we can surmise, biology or not, that this would have been a lush convergence of food supplies including fish from the lake, slinking wetland animals, turtles, wild rice, maybe corn or squash upland.  Nearby at Mai Wago Pi we might be able to see with our historical imagination a native family settled in under an opening in the trees, their birchbark house squat and stiff, hopefully tight enough to keep the ever-present hordes of mosquitos away with the assistance of a smudge fire, the children helping skin deer hides to tan and the father, trained for all seasons, carving jewels out of choice silver or copper.  As we pass by today, we see how the fresh springs bubble up out of the sand along the trail bank and might ask what is its function? Then it was known as 'good gift spring.'

Dhaba:
The Wonderhouse

"The old man drank his coffee slowly. It was all he would have all day and he knew that he should take it. For a long time now eating had bored him and he never carried a lunch. He had a bottle of water in the bow of the skiff and that was all he needed for the day." – Old Man and the Sea






ch. 6

The grandfather rose up through rising depths of the strait and could feel much more strongly the swelling of the current which by now had started to chop at the surface.  This was the very moment that he had experienced the day before and it took him the rest of the night and inside his night's dream to conjure up the courage to come back to the same spot with Lily.  He had had enough the night before, for something comes up through the grandparent that is intensely protective and ancient.  He would not go back, not with Lily, again; it was too dangerous even with life jacket; if the grandmother knew it would be the very end of him; if his daughter knew, back home, it would be the double-end.  Yet it was Lily herself, perhaps a young adventurer, that had cautioned him to being too cautious. "It will be on the anchor and I have become a very good paddler. Here, let me show you." She had paddled herself along the shoreline of sunset beach with speed and accuracy. She followed the wake of a diving dolphin and when that was no longer in reach, she quickly turned around and scooped out the water with each paddle as if born for such things. The grandfather had reached the wreck sight quite easily again. Currant action had revealed one portion of the wooden contours of an outer edge by at least one more foot than the previous day.  He had followed the body of something large and like metal but it too, like all the rest, sunk deeper into the soft sand at an angle.  He kept one above him at all times and could see Lily's kayak bobbing.  He rose with another small piece of wood and handed it to Lily while extended his arm to the back of his own kayak for sip fun of fresh water.  "I think there is someone coming," she said, and pointed to a young man who was making his way quite slowly to a small promontory of sand that jutted out then made a very steep drop off where the two kayaks now sat bobbing. "Now, I wonder," the grandfather said out loud.  The boy swam sleek as a dolphin and made it to them before they could move or grandfather get back onto the kayak.

Olbrich Diary

"They're suddenly relaxing their springs. That's how they take exercise. They're leaping out of the grass like heavy drops of frying oil. They pose, like bronze paperweights, on large water lilies." – Jules Renard, "Frogs"








5/14


The many worlds of Olbrich Gardens like walking through a living breathing museum.  The trees, wonderfully, are not there to perform for you and me. If they are performers, they are oblivious, yet captivating, the greatest of authentic measures. We cheer to ourselves as we pass by and find the

rippling of the aspen leaves. An artist here has recently wrapped a series of trees near the frog pond in green and calls it nothing – it doesn't have to have a name – it is a wrapped tree. A shrill croak comes from the frog pond and turns the entire garden into its frogness, its sound. Suddenly it is a frog's  

auditorium and the nasal droning dominates even the car traffic outside of the grounds.  It rolls across the pond and onto the walking trails and finally drifts off at the Thai Pavilion. Maybe it dives into the placid rock pond there where the rocks now live to listen. The next world along the path offers itself without offering. Underneath the goliath ash tree, its wild branches sagging low then curling upward, we are certain they were made for our imagination.  Children giggle as they pass.  They know it is a grandmother telling secret stories to no one in particular.

Arboretum Diary

"July. Though all the windows are wide open and the blinds rattle in a breeze the heat is terrific. The inside of the trailer is like the inside of a kiln, a fierce dry heat that warps the loose linoleum on the floor, turns an exposed slice of bread into something like toast within half an hour, makes my paper crackle like parchment." Edward Abbey, from Desert Solitaire







5/13

First day out on the trail for Art Nature Journaling and couldn't be a bit more tickled that as I find my sitting spot out on a Curtis boardwalk, nestled down among the bunchgrass, that it becomes so hot a sweat forms doing nothing.  This is the moment we've been waiting for since around this same time last year – that sort of Utopian page off the yearly calendar when the sun begins to daily outwrestle sagging clouds and nightly thunderstorms and we can hear a little bit clearer the batting of the mallards wings as they cross overhead and the white moths flit as if by a state of giddiness across the coming shoots of everything green.  I'll take the heat.  The spot here, at a little crossroads of old wood boardwalks, is at the two hundred year old markers of what is listed as 'fence oaks.' If you stand at trails B1 and B3 and look down the gravel path, you can see that the old stand of oaks form a line which would have been planted on purpose along a farm fence – although no longer a fence, this is

one of those scenes that have the peculiar powers of transporting the hiker along the contours of years past, when the land would have been raw, still full of Native mounds, the savannah not yet filled in, and oaks, for better or worse, taken for granted.  Old farmer here walking his and her fence line, perhaps digging a new hole, sturdying another post, calculating the vulnerability where the herd might lazily lean as they graze across the open lowlands.  There's history in that old wood, as imperfect as it is, and partially why these ragged boardwalks seem to offer little portals back in time
as you find them out on the prairies or along the marshlines at Wingra or Gardener.  To sit on the edge of one for the better part of an hour, hidden by the spring fountains of prairie grass, there's no one there to tell you which direction the imagination is supposed to roam: does it look forward, to the recent spring burn, the restoration...the experiment? Or does it wander on backwards, slowly, to the when there was no belt line and most assuredly the territorial chortle of the red-wing swung from oak limb to oak limb without much competition in between?

Dhaba:
The Wonderhouse

"Secretly homesick, I would stop in India-owned newsstands on the way back from class, lingering over the magazines and quietly listening to the owners speaking in Gujarati, just for comfort." – Meera Sodha, from Made in India







ch.5

With Sanja, or "Little Chaat," like all others from around the world, the making of the young chef had very little to do with choice or the thinking that this fine craft was a privilege; but more a habit of duty, often nurtured by the role of a mentor.  It had become a mere fact at The Wonderhouse that

Sanja was now in charge of all of the chicken meals, from the purchasing, to the storing, preparing, and finally -- his favorite part -- the preparation, which, when all of the preceding steps had been perfected he realized still, after hundreds of meals, that this particular plate was to be the very one to base his, and others', opinion on.  The very moment, he found out quickly in his duties, that the chef makes a decision to cut corners or to over-do a chicken leg, it would inevitably be that customer who would be most devastated by the poor quality.  It had happened to him the day, in fact, that he met

Lily and her grandfather and which led, so ironically, to the eventual founding of the treasure.  It was Mum's Chicken Curry, a simple staple of the Dhaba, butter, oil, cumin, ginger, green chilis, and all the rest, that he had realized his chicken legs had not properly defrosted and as they came out of the giant shrink-wrap, were still mildly frozen. To defrost these in a microwave was a disgrace to the animal, so he he quickly poured lukewarm water over this batch in hope of defrosting.  He rushed his cumin seeds and cinnamon sticks; the onions never received the time in the pan that they should have received.  He remembered that day that he had looked up out of the Dhaba kitchen and could see that

the tide had risen and was now churning across the strait between Captiva and the North Island, and that it looked strangely as if a kayak was standing in the water not moving, a very odd sight indeed, especially against the wind and the drift of the current.  "Mother, look out this there, isn't that a kayak floating still?" The mother was at her station rolling for the day's chapatis.  She knew that the rhythm had been off with the chicken. "You have more important things to consider right now, don't you?"
"This is nothing. The chicken is just a little cold."
"The cold will effect the tomatoes when you put them in.  You know this, yes?" Atman was out front creating the day's sign which they placed at the beginning of the little dirt road which led to the tiki hut and the Dhaba behind.  He had been watching the water as well, as all do there at the Sunset. "Sanja, why don't you go see what is happening out there at the end of the beach, I will take your chicken. I don't imagine you want to be blamed for this plate anyway, am I right?" Sanja was now at the age where all of this fuss over one single plate of chicken had only partially dawned on him as being this urgent.  He took considerable natural pride in all of his cooking, yes; but to let one plate create such a wake of attention made him sometimes feel like he was living inside a very unusual school of sorts. Sanja wrapped up his apron, quite interested in the scene unraveling at the water.  It had been only the week before, directly outside of the main harbor, that an old time sailor had capsized his 40 footer and the metal mast still poked twenty feet out of water at a forty-five degree angle.  The captain had claimed that it was a manatee at leeward that forced a bad turn and then to a sinking process that was witnessed by a hundred tourists as they sat in their beach chairs sipping gin and watching the passengers casually jump into six feet of water.  "Tell me your plans for the chicken Little Chaat."
"Don't call me that, I've outgrown it."
"Not according to the look on your mother's face."
"Where is Cecilla? I notice that she is not getting reprimanded for doing nothing."
"Homework," said the mother, flipping the stack of chapatis, as she looked over her shoulder for the arrival of new customers. "Let's finish the dish, should we?" she said as only a mother can, both kindly and with a strong hint of tenured will that probably should not be wrestled with.

Sanja waded into the cool water with goggles on and swam slowly along the shallows of the beach, watching the cloudy rush of incoming water knock around the layers of white and pink-hued shells.

Arboretum Diary

"Butterflies and butterflies, (taking the place of the bumble-bees of three months since, who have quite disappear'd,) continue to flit and fro, all sorts, white, yellow, brown, purple – now and then some gorgeous fellow flashing lazily by on wings like artists' palettes dabb'd with every color." – Whitman, from Specimen Days







5/10

Fairly early by morning, 8:00, the turkeys out carousing Arboretum drive, their green felt like feathers nearly twinkling by an unexpected morning sunshine.  Deeper in, thrushes and oven birds, the blue jays off in the May-crowding oak canopy setting off the alarm of the woods by the false tune of a roving hawk – all the songs, squeaks, twinklings and drawn strumming can't be seen but fill the Wingra Marsh as if by a master cue.  Over the railing of the lookout at ancient open springs I see the clover fill in like a green beard over the planted rocks.  Here is the lushest, the brightest, most mesmerizing of woods in the Arboretum, where the unexplainable happens, bubbles rise up from the sheer guts of the mantle under our feet and seep out under the crawling roots of the grandmother oak. Every little bird haunts here at the underbrush staking out a small claim of the crossing water spider and the wiggling worm, as if a little path of oxygen that breathes out into the open lung of the pond and slows again to the deep world nobody sees.

Riverside Ovens
Test Kitchen: Blondies

Revelations are always to be had for the experimental baker.  That is one of the great things we come to find out as we move through the recipes in Dorie Greenspan's masterpiece Dorie's Cookies.  There are always add-ins and take-outs suggested by the Beurre & Sel cookie company baker and owner who, in the case of the Blondie, shows us we can use the muffin tin to create a new style of cookie.  After trying the results, the experimental baker is left to wonder if virtually any recipe might not increase its allure by the muffin tin?  As Dories says, the ingredients here are fairly standard fare: your sugars, your egg, your vanilla, your bit of chocolate, your butter, but the add-ins of coconut and

pecans add the co-texture with the chocolate chunks; but most importantly, it the scoop of dough that is dropped in the cup of the muffin tin, then just barely pushed down to dimple, that allows for an eventual crunchy exterior and a marvelously gooey center.  Her own Blondies had called for small muffin tin, but I had only what I would call a medium sized muffin tin, which made for a larger scoop and maybe 2-3 more minutes in the oven.  I watched for the browning of the edges, yet all the while the middle could be seen as moist and melting.  Because my batch was bigger than recommended there was no way to know how these would hold up. I let them cool long enough to contract from the tin enough to pull them out of their case.  A knife through the center revealed a brown edge but near dough-like texture in the middle -- the kind of the texture that usually means a batch won't last long on the plate.  With a little more experimentation, one could see the rest of the recipes fitting nicely inside the tin of choice, depending on just how gooey you like it.

Arboretum Diary

"I sat there on the end of the point, my senses all but fused with enveloping silence, I gradually became conscious of a soft undercurrent of sound like the coming of a wind from far away or something long remembered." – Sigurd Olson, from "The Whistle"









5/9

Because there are so many, it's far too easy to pass by some of the big and little gems of the Arboretum. Through the east entrance, off of Haywood Street, which then quickly scoots along to Vilas, the road is long, winding and slow, often thick in jogging traffic, and there is virtually no parking to left and right because this is Gardener and Red Winged marsh – the water nearly reaches the road at points.  But I would suggest that when the day does come when the first small parking lot affords a place to park, take it, walk across the road and seek out the little two-rail board walk.  Throughout the Arboretum, you might find board sections placed down in the walk for the assistance of the adventurous hiker who does not want to stop in Gallistel Woods on the way to Lost City, or who most certainly doesn't want to have to stop mid-way at Greene's famous prairie at the Grady Tract.  But only two places that I have visited offer the boardwalk continuously for the entirety of the destination, here at Gardener and over at Wingra Savannah.  There is something very magical about a

long board cutting and curving through raw woods; maybe it is the illusion of human safety against a natural environment, or maybe it the simple knowledge that your shoes won't get dirty, but I know that I would follow this yellow brick road of sorts across the country if it were offered me the chance.  Through the approaching marsh thicket and peat soil, the boardwalk heads straight out to a look out over what we could call, here in a larger city anyway, a large marsh, one that was donated back at the inception of the Arboretum by a local bakery owner who wanted to make sure this swatch of backwater stayed as it was supposed to be.  The first lookout allows the willing – and maybe brand new – viewer a good indication of a cattail marsh and slough.  The redwings, as they tend to do in habitat, flit about and cry out to each other, standing at their posts momentarily, then off to the next brief sentry duty.  This was the place that Leopold wanted to once turn to wildlife and waterfowl refuge, replanting around its edges to screen from any other non-native infringements.  Take the boardwalk to the small sister wooden lookout, where there are no other viewers, and take a seat in the old wooden cut-out of chair and marvel at the total envelopment of invasive cattails, which create

such a morass of beige burly headed foliage that only the courageous researcher might try to pass with chest waders.  The thicket, and its untouchability, though, is what likely makes this one of the most productive habitat types known.  The marsh serves a filter of overflow; its deep thick peat teeming with organisms; small mammals find the invincibility of the cattails, most certainly, as workable privacy.  Unlike other portions of the Arboretum, you are not bound to find much evidence of human activity out there in the marsh and because of that it preserves, without trying quite as hard as the prairie restorations or oak savannah maintenance, what Wisconsin was pre-settlement.  In that chair, time turns to a few other things than miles on tires or deadlines set by reminders on a phone – it moves by the scrub of the cattail stalks against one another, the chortle of the fidgety red-wing, the two geese calling out, maybe for no reason at all, as wings slap slowly over the uplift of warm air rising from the engine of the marsh.

Riverside Ovens
Test Kitchen

The format of the famous Cook's Illustrated Magazine is a wonderful one to both read and just look at.  The format goes something like this: some 60 members of the test kitchen, located just outside of Boston, decide that it is high time to take another look at a classic food type or a classic recipe and

put it to the test in the kitchen by re-evaluating the process of cooking.  A classic lead-in goes something like this, an article from the newest installment, concerning carrots, "We all should eat more carrots. They're nutritious, inexpensive, and available year-round, and their cheery color brightens any plate. But if eating carrots means roasting them for 45 minutes or grating a pile of them for a salad, most of us are unlikely to prepare them often."

The article continues on a step by step experimentation in ways to prove the beauty of the cooked carrot, as long as the cooking of them are both simple and tasty.  Another lead-in from another article in the same magazine talks about the truly perfect way to cook those very thick pork chops which, if not handled properly, almost always give home cooks headaches because they are a difficult dish to prepare without becoming dry on the inside or burnt on the outside.

The solution in this case is to use a cast iron pan, pre-heat the pan up to a full-tilt 500 degrees, then set the chops in for some serious searing, turning back and forth so not to burn the exterior, but all the while continuing to sink the heat deeper and deeper until the temperature reaches some just beyond 125 degrees.  Let the chops sit under foil for another 10 minutes and they will continue to cook up to the necessary 140 degree mark.  The key: you want deep cooking quick, and you want to time the extra cooking the chop does after it comes off the pan.  Both of these are common enough recipes and full of pitfalls; by reading through the articles, now we have standard processes to follow and either too-crunchy carrots or leathery thick chops don't happen as often as they might have.

The Riverside Ovens Test Kitchen would love to try to test the tests -- the one great advantage the test kitchens have is the time to try multiple processes for cooking.  For the chops, the tester tried a variety of thick chop styles and eventually realized that he wanted to go ahead and buy a pork roast and cut his own chops in order to keep shape and thickness uniform. He tried multiple pans and multiple heats.  For the carrots dish, "The Easiest Carrot Side Dish," the tester tried a variety of mixtures of salt in the boiling water.  When you are cooking at home, though, you have to take the parts of the test recipe and make them happen as quickly as possible for the sake of as much success as possible.

When I made both of these dishes, I had already had some luck with certain experiments with carrots and thick chops so was able to apply the new to the old, hoping to find what I would call a signature, or a way that makes sense for the home cook. I really liked the idea of cast oven pan -- it seems more and more magazines are trending int he direction of these thick, durable and even cooking machines, but I don't happen to have. I do, however, have a very powerful large top burner on the stove. By letting the pan sit on low for a considerable amount of time, I was able to both deeply pre-heat the pan and also secure against an initial burning of the surface of the chop.  If I would have pre-heat my non-stick thin pan on high, for example, the chop would have exploded over the oil and almost certainly the sear would have been a burn.  As I began to cook, I raised the temperature up to medium, which is closer to medium high on most stovetops.  The idea from here on out would be to continue to flip the chops as many times as necessary to get rid of the visible pink line in the center, all the while not blackening the surface.  I took these off of the pan and let them rest for only around 5 minutes: I either don't have the patience to let meat rest a full 10-15 minutes, and I have always felt that I prefer to eat a thick chop when they are hot not lukewarm. This batch was a perfect combination of seared to a crust veneer but that was actually quite soft from the oil, cooked all the way through, moist, but hot.  As we all know, as a thick chop over cooks, at least half of its positive, inherent taste is lost and it begins to pivot to taste like something else entirely, like shoe laces.

Carrots are one of the easiest vegetables in the world to make good.  You can boil them and simply continue to poke them to see if the texture is the way you want them.  I found the key in this batch to be the addition of a little extra salt to the boiling water, as the recipe suggests. The salt boosts the flavor and also reduces the cooking time, according to the tester, by at least a minute.  Uniformity of the chop, as always, will help with the success of cut vegetables.  I always like to cut the cylinder of the carrot in 2-3 inch chunks, but then cut those in half length-wise, allowing for an interesting texture when cooked and soft.

The simple addition for flavor was some freshly squeezed lemon, as much butter as you see fit, and a dash of chives.  The combination of the large piece of white pork meat, and the very soft and juicy carrots was a nice signature dish.

Riverside Ovens
Test Kitchen

"We arrived in the late afternoon, with the September sun tilting across the vines and bathing the chateau in a flattering way of pale gold; not the Pichon-Longueville needs any flattery. It was built in 1851, a period in architecture when turrets were all the rage, and Pichon (it's nice to be on first-name terms with a chateau) could be the model for a fairy-tale castle, suitable for princesses or damsels in distress." from Peter Mayle's French Lessons, "A Connoisseur's Marathon"








It's deep February, Wisconsin turns to an ice cube, sometimes a white ice cube, but sometimes dreary as a squirrel's fir, and so naturally the very season for taking the great imaginative leap away from this place and arrive, one hopes anyway, somewhere to the south of France where there are celebrations for frog legs, marathons built upon the premise of as many stops for wine tastes as the body and mind can muster, and long rounds of outdoor boules.  Here at the Riverside Ovens Test Kitchen, lights shining full tilt, fire place burning its fake logs, and the great sun stamped art out in the courtyard trying as hard as it might to sparkle, it might as well be the Chateau Mayle talks about in French Lessons.  The Chateau is not much unlike the great cozy French restaurant just a mile away from here, La Kitchenette, a little one-roomer, 12-tabler, where the back wall is a hand

sketched blackboard and the waitress, French as Aix en Provence, doesn't speak a word of English. Here is where the imaginative French edible garden flourishes in its well-tended bunches and a Pastis or two by siesta is no national crime but something more like a remedy shared by farmers themselves just now walking in from the coarse fields for the daytime meal that matters most.

Here at the Chateau, Cashew Chicken Stir-fry by Blue Apron is on the menu. Ingredients include

chicken tenders, jasmine rice, scallions, Napa cabbage, Tango mandarins, garlic chives, roasted cashews, sesame oil, ginger, soy glaze and cornstarch.  All of this had been recently collected at the

town market, fresh as morning, diced, sliced and peeled, leaving a small kitchen smelling of ginger and cabbage.  While cooking the jasmine rice, add minced ginger, celery and scallions to heated oil in a pan, add sliced cabbage and let cook at a medium temperature for five minutes, place on a plate, then re-oil the same pan and prepare for cornstarch coated chicken tenders, cooking 8-10 minutes. A

fairly simple dish in many ways, once the rice is boiled, the vegetables sautéed, and the chicken cooked, its time to assemble: add the vegetables to the pan of chicken, add soy glaze and 1/4 cup of water, let cook before finally adding sesame oil, raw garlic chives and segmented mandarins over the top, toss cashews over and...voila...a rich stir fry, crispy by the cabbage, rich by the soy glaze, and filling by the coated chicken.  The meal is completed within an hour, the creases in the doors of the Chateau release rich pungent aromas of cabbage and soy; the waiter, unfortunately, still working on his French.

Riverside Ovens
Test Kitchen

"Bastille is one of the legendary dishes of Morocco and something that the French have adapted infinitely to make their own." Dorie Greenspan, from Around My French Table











A few inches of snow in mid march might inspire the would-be test kitchen to try to transport itself to a more Mediterranean climate, like, maybe, Fez Morocco -- that should be far enough down in the hemisphere to imagine oneself gathering recently gathered local large onions, sweet garlic, saffron threads, pinches of ginger and lemons as big as softballs.  So away we go... Fez is of an ancient branch North African cities, sometimes considered the Athens of Africa and its primary university considered the oldest running in the world.  Along its ancient stone corridors, no doubt street vendors under its namesake, Fez hats, tanned by all time, and beating the heat by nothing more than tea or lemonade.  Gather here a recently butchered chicken, eight thighs in all, as mentioned large onions, garlic, ground ginger, coriander, cinnamon, saffron, a few eggs, honey, cilantro, fresh almonds (maybe these were plucked from the other side of the hill, facing the sea?), and don't forget to find something that will resemble philo dough for what is to be sweet dough.

Remembering that the Sultan de Fes would have taken his sweet chicken (probably pigeon) very seriously, to the point of hiring a very competent Spanish chef to prepare, you must marinade the chicken first with the onion, garlic, spices for at least an hour.  This will eventually come to a boil until falling off the bone tender; strain and cut to cubes, if possible.  To the broth, three beaten eggs,

which will form the chicken sauce. Prepare your dough for cover; sprinkle a handful of diced almonds to the sheet then spoon the chicken and sauce over, then the second dough sheet over creating your pie.  Sprinkle with cinnamon and bake for 20 minutes.  As the snow continues to swirl from the rooftops down onto the courtyard, the smells inside the house should by now smell of sweet cinnamon joined by rich chicken, and the sliced lemons that go along side might remind you of Fez, Morocco and the French chefs who, over the years, have co-opted the rich pie for their own.

Riverside Ovens
Test Kitchen

The real Chicken Lo Mein meal, originating from Cantonese cuisine -- one of eight official Chinese preparation styles -- is a complicated but rich and rewarding dish.  First, you have to come to accept the Enoki Mushrooms.  As with all mushrooms, it might be wished for to not look at the fungi's

Enoki Mushrooms

bizarre shapes and fanned undersides until they are diced down and cooked, at which point they seem to make one of the great transformations in all of cooking.  The Enoki is a thin stemmed bunch with a very small terminal cap. When first picked up as a bunch they look something more like an unusual plastic candy, white, almost gooey, and as uniform as they are at the top.  Once you cut off the stem of the clump, all those strands separate and become more easily cookable.  The rest of the Lo Mein

includes many of the expected usual suspects: scallion, carrots, celery garlic, wonton noodles, baby bok choy, chicken and both sesame oil and soy glaze for that final richening sauce that gives Asian food its very distinct charm.  In essence, all of the vegetables get diced and reduced down, including the Enoki, while the wonton noodles quickly boil. Add some of the noodle water to the vegetables to soften, then finally the noodles themselves, a large clump that fills the pan, and all that is waiting is

Baby Bok Choy

for the soy and the oil.  At this point, you can begin to test which of this dynamic list of ingredients stand out.  At every bite of the Enoki mushrooms, a strange and exotic flavor arises, similar to other mushrooms in their earthy bounce, but because of the texture of their thin-ness, even more distinct.  The obvious second highlight is the baby bok choy, a great treat to add to almost any type of stir fry.  The noodles and the chicken speak for themselves in a familiar way.  One of the great secrets of Chinese food, is that they have found a way to pull together some of the more healthy ingredients imaginable, but by adding noodles and sauces turn what might be a light meal to something very sound and filling. In this way, a great family weeknight meal.

"Flow on, river! flow with the flood-tide, and ebb with the ebb-tide!
Frolic on, crested and scallop-edge'd waves!
Gorgeous clouds of the sunset! drench with your splendor me, or the generations after me!" – Whitman, from "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry"









Tenney Park, Spring


A day along the Yahara, a day along the bridges trail
where the locks under spring construction still flow
and the men in hard hats steady crane hooks
that carry new pipes over the ragged railing floor.
Wild the pier that juts out into Mendota waves!
Wild the wind-gliders as they board in thick suits
over the broken glass waves of a cool wind day!
How many generations have walked Tenney shores?
The same cast of mind in spring did they leave
their homes to follow the river oaks to lakes?
To leave behind the hours of grit and office?

"Peak-tip
Moon pressing tight,
Remembrance rises
In the night." – Hsi Chou, from "Farewell to Wei Feng, Going to
Far-South Mountain"









At Rutledge and Riverside
a thousand casual friends
cross the street over the bridge.

Sun has finally set onto
a thick prong of riverside limbs.
A wide boat slowly
wades the flow of river waves.

Good friends come and go.
Waves move to open water.
Fish strike the surface without
knowing it is a lure bobbing.
The wise man loves the world.

Some day soon I will be crossing
over a mountain meadow.
A last patch of June snow will remind
me of wide eyes as a child.