Cheese And Fruit
a worthy food tradition

Everyone knows that apples and cheese pair well together. Cheese-and-fruit is a classic combination but I confess I rarely eat my cheese with anything fruity. I was working on a project for someone and she was suggesting good food pairings with wine. For one of them she suggested a cheese with a blueberry compote. I thought this sounded like one of those combinations you might come up with to help the Blueberry Commission sell more blueberries to the fancy crowd.

Even though I thought eating cheese with a blueberry compote was about as appetizing as eating goose fat on a cracker, I prepared a cracker with Dutch Fontina cheese and some of my blueberry lime sauce to take a picture of it. The glossy purple sauce was striking against the pale cheese and photographed well. When I was done with it I couldn't bear to throw out a perfectly good slice of Fontina and decided that I must eat it regardless of the blueberry weirdness.

Apparently my prejudice against eating my cheese with fruit has been denying me a world of pleasure. The sweetness of the sauce (with that delicate hint of lime) set off the nutty creamy Fontina so well I'd almost be willing to believe that they were developed specifically for each other.

My food education is a slow deliberate process. I am selective in what I will try. Because I don't eat meat, there are a ton of things I will happily never put in my mouth that are surely better put in yours. However, it is wonderful when these moments of discovery happen unexpectedly that open a whole new food vocabulary for me.

Now I can't help but wonder what unexpected food peaches can be paired with? Any ideas?

The Great Wide Sky

One of the things I love best about Oregon are the gorgeous skies. California doesn't have them like we do here. Vast skies of clouds and blue and always moving, shifting, changing, and breathing. It makes my breath spread out farther and go slower. Especially when I'm on farmland and I can see so far all around me.

Picking fruit and vegetables is meditative. Rhythmic. I like doing it with friends but last summer I found that I liked doing it alone best of all. Alone in the tall bean rows with the sky talking to me above. I like to bring my headphones and listen to music. I let my thoughts do what they like to do best: live a life all their own. I have an obsessive mind. It can be a great weight on me at times playing the same tapes over and over and over until I want to rip them out of my skull. Often times, though, when I let my mind wander it's like my dreams. It says what it needs to say without filtering or trying to cover up its irrationality.

It usually runs through old unsatisfactory conversations or situations and comes up with new endings, better endings. A frequent activity in my head is letter writing. I don't write letters much anymore in actuality but I write them constantly in my head. I also have these great long monologues, stories that the universe keeps waiting for me to tell. Sometimes I speak so eloquently in my quiet reverie of picking fruit that I wonder who is really speaking and I know I'll never speak so eloquently when I race home and try to recall the perfect words.

Sometimes I want to sing along to the words in my music out loud. I wish I was the only person in the entire world. Because if I was then there would be no one to question me or wonder if I'm on enough medication.

I miss playing my favorite game. My favorite game is dress up as another version of myself- who I could have been, who I might become. My whole life has been one long dress up session in which everything I do becomes a separate life: when I was a costumer I was a poor dressmaker working 14 hour days to make beautiful clothes for rich patrons that I would never myself be able to wear. I had needle holes in my fingers from hand stitching corsets* and I imagined myself hunched over candle light in a bare stone walled room to stitch gold bullion trim to the hems of gowns.

I dressed the part and my life unfolded accordingly. When naked I want to crawl out of my own skin. I have never felt I belonged in a body at all but when I dress up I can do anything, be anyone, and shine. I didn't love my body or hate my body for its faults or virtues. I never really had body issues exactly. I mean, like any young person I would complain about my thighs or my sizable ass which even when I was at my thinnest never disappeared. But I did always appreciate that I could dress my body up well and become invincible.

It isn't an acting bug either. This is something else. I hate acting. Trying to get me to do some "fun" improvisational acting workshop is like trying to pull teeth from a giant agitated steaming buffalo. There is nothing I want less than to dress up to go on stage. I have never wanted to literally play roles. The enjoyment for me is that we all play roles in life anyway and I enjoy dressing the part for them. Making an occasion out of the ordinary. I have always appreciated the ambiance and the story one garment can tell. I am never not me when I dress up. I am always myself; a self amplified perhaps, but still the same self.

I have always enjoyed watching others to see if they see behind the curtain. If they see that today I am a poet of rare grace. I wonder if they see that today I am a spirit wandering the ragged moors of my imagination in a gown gathering moss and fragile fibers of earth behind me like reluctant ghosts. I wonder if they see that I am a baker in a small town with flour on my cheeks and skill in my hands, I wonder if they can smell the warm yeast and taste the crust in their own mouths as I walk by. Does anyone actually ever really see me?

Now there is nothing to see. I have become ridiculous. I have made a disaster of my body; breaking my bones and becoming too large for any dream but one of being the bearded** fat lady which holds no romance for me. No aura of interest and no hidden treasures wait there. I know there is a reason I have come to this point and until I figure it out I will not be able to exit this nightmare that my own shell is. I have made dressing up impossible. Which makes me feel lost.

In spite of these reflections I did feel answers stirring as my hands reached again and again for more berries. I commune with the plants and become like a branch myself. covered in fruit. I'm not sure sometimes if the trees and grasses can all hear me. I think they do.

*I really did, as a matter of fact.

**My "beard" consists of five chin hairs but I suspect that there are more waiting to sprout. I bet I'll get one new one each birth day until I look like a real treat.

Smith's Blueberry Flats

Blueberry season is here in earnest and I missed it last year so this year I am not letting it slip past me. I took a ride on highway 240 yesterday morning where all cars are going 70 miles per hour (note to traffic cops: you may want to show up every once in a while.) on a two lane highway whose highest legal speed is 55 miles per hour. It's a beautiful road and even though I was fully able to keep up with the speeding traffic, the cars kept insisting on passing me.

It made me angry. What the hell is everyone is such a goddamn hurry for? And why do they feel they need to be ahead of me just because I'm on a scooter? It actually brought out the testosterone in me and made me want to show them what a bad-ass my little scooter is. But this is the kind of behavior on roads that makes road-kill out of people. So the next time I'm on that pretty road I'm going to go the speed limit and let everyone pass me dangerously. (There's no shoulder to pull over on to let people pass).

People are annoying.

There were some people picking blueberries when I arrived. One couple was just finishing up picking forty pounds of them to freeze. There was one other person picking who engaged in some awed conversation with the couple and their forty pounds.

Man "Wow, that's a lot of blueberries."
couple "Yep. Forty pounds."
Man "What are you going to do with them?"
Couple "Mostly we freeze them."
Man "Cool. So how do you do that?"
Couple "Freeze 'em on cookie sheets in the freezer and then bag 'em."
Man "But you wash them first, right?"
Couple "Nope. The water will make them all stick together."

Thoughtful pause.

Man "So you wash them when you're ready to use them?"
Couple "Nope."
Man "So you never wash them?"

After the people left I was alone out there with the crickets and the hot sun for about an hour and a half. I can't say my thoughts were restful or pleasant, but still, there's something delicious about time spent industriously by one's self in the middle of nowhere.

Hell, it wasn't the middle of nowhere, it was the middle of the Blueberry Flats! I picked twenty pounds.

That's a lot of blueberries. My kitchen kind of smells smurfy now.

I always eat a lot less jam than I think I will. When Max was under two and still eating peanut butter and jam sandwiches we went through at least a jar of jam a week. I was eating a lot more jam toast back then too. I always thought that it would be great to make all the jam I could possibly use in a year which I calculated at around 52 jars. I wanted to never buy jam again. Unfortunately I haven't bothered to reassess that goal since neither Max nor I are eating much jam these days. So I still have lots of blackberry jam left from last year.

I certainly want some blueberry jam because I've never made any, but I finally realized that I need to make less jam. I'm more likely to use a sauce that I can put over yogurt. In spite of this new goal, I managed to make nine half pints of blueberry lime jam (very good!), and six and a half pints of plain blueberry jam which was supposed to be sauce because I didn't cook it to the jelling point, yet somehow, it is thick enough to be called jam.

I also prepared a batch of blueberry lime jam to make Chelsea's way: you cook your jam only for ten minutes then let it sit over night, or over many nights in the fridge, until you have enough energy to heat it up again and process it. Not boiling it to death before processing really helps to preserve a fresher flavor. Letting it sit for a day helps to develop the pectin or something, because this process tends to help the jam be a little thicker.

So I'm going to end up with over twenty jars of blueberry jam. Shit.

That was just using about twelve pounds of blueberries. So with the rest of them I'm really going to make sauce. Which means being careful not to boil for more than a couple of minutes. Sauce is great for pancakes, ice cream, yogurt, or to pour over something exotic like cheese cake.

I'd love to freeze a bunch of them but I still don't have an extra fridge or freezer. So no freezer space. Which is too bad because blueberries freeze very well and are great for using in smoothies or for tossing frozen into muffins or coffee cake batter.

Anyone else taking advantage of blueberry season? Tell me how!!