Fleur-de-Planted

In the past week or so, many of you have encouraged me to bloom where I’m planted. I don’t think any of you meant face first.

I blame it on the ghost in the machine, but some of you can write comments on the blog and others cannot, and so you send emails. Either way, I’m glad you are staying in touch. I just wish I could make it easier for you but I haven’t been able to figure out the details of blogdom.

When I moved to State College, I decided it was important for me to take the time to do something for ME … and my knee. Since my knee surgery in January, I’ve been a little stiff and arthritic. I decided bicycling would get me out and about, and stretch any of the kinks in my joints. And, we have wonderful bike paths around town.

The one closest to my mother’s house connects to Slab Cabin Creek Park where, during the winter, there is a tobogganing hill and marshmallow roasting fire pit. I started out with short excursions, early in the morning.  Unlike other summers when I would make elderberry or blackberry jelly at the farm, this summer I’m making jelly legs, thanks to all the hills on the bike path.

Then came Sunday. It was a glorious morning. I stashed a camera in my knapsack and was headed to my favorite bikeway bench with a stunning view of Mount Nittany. I coasted down the first hill and then noticed my watch was upside down. I reached over to fix it … and next I knew I dove into the asphalt, face first.

The only pain I felt was that of embarrassment. I didn’t want anyone to see me. So I stood up, retrieved my water bottle, lifted up my bike and pushed it home. I was bleeding, from my cheek to my knee, but my lips were the worst. In a matter of minutes, I looked like a poster child for Botox Gone Bad. My brain was working in slow-mo – “Ice pack,” it told me. So I held one to my mouth and drove to Mount Nittany ER.

For the first half hour, a couple dozen nurses and aids quizzed me on the details of my accident: I was riding a bike. Yes, I was wearing a helmet. I tried to adjust my watch and crashed.  Two hours later, X-rays showed a cracked cheekbone A follow-up the next day in the dentist’s office yielded good news – teeth and roots are OK, a little bruised, but OK. If this only happens once every 57 years, I can take it. Yes, I was wearing a helmet. On the ER pain scale of 1 to 10, I gave myself a 4. The only question that stirred a little concern came from a rotund RN who asked, “Were you riding a stationary bike?”

Too many years ago, a fellow told me he knew why I became a swimmer: “You’re the clumsiest thing on two feet.” Now I can add, “Two wheels,” but honest, what do you take me for? It was a regular mountain bike with spinning tires, annoying seat, the whole nine yards … not a stationary bike.

I am a novice bicyclist and still grind my way through the handlebar gears, but my problem was not bicycling; it was multi-tasking. So I’ve made a pact with myself: No more multi-tasking while biking. Sure, I can breathe, and think, and wipe the Neosporin-laced sweat off my chin, and occasionally break into song, but that’s it. When I’m biking, I’m biking. And, in the meantime, I’m healing. With a gentle pat on the arm, and somewhat gentle words: “Your face is really a mess, but it will be OK,” Mother Marie is taking care of me. Laurie Lynch

As Promised: Oh the shame! Called out in the Fleur-de-Lys blog! Argh! Sorry I didn’t get this to you sooner …

Garlic Ice Cream, Kutztown Style

2 cups of cream*

2 cups of whole milk

1-2 cloves garlic, crushed

1 cup sugar

1 T honey

1 T vanilla

In a saucepan, mix together the cream, milk, and crushed garlic. Heat well, but do not allow to boil. Remove from heat and stir in sugar. Allow to cool. Add honey and vanilla. Refrigerate until thoroughly chilled. Stir, freeze, and enjoy!

*We use cream from Jersey Hollow Farm in Kutztown — it’s so thick you can turn the jar upside down and the cream stays put! Also, the milk we use is the top of the raw milk, so it’s basically light cream. Call it what you like. Lisa

Slow Food, Soft Food:  Monday morning, battered face and all, I had commitments in Allentown. I went into the Master Gardener office wearing a surgical mask to hide my bruises and swelling but Dear Diane said the mask was scarier than my face, so I continued the day au naturel. I had a half dozen errands and ended up at dinner with two friends. They knew about my road burn accident and figured I couldn’t open my mouth wide enough for a veggie burrito and probably didn’t want to be seen in a restaurant. So, we “ate in” and they made an assortment of “soft food” – tomatoes, mozzarella, and basil salad, hummus, and something called “Skillet Squash Sandwiches” minus the sandwiches:

Saute one or two each sweet onion and summer squash/zucchini in olive oil. Add 1-2 tablespoons red wine vinegar and chopped or dried tomatoes.  Saute until vegetables are the way you like them. Sprinkle with mozzarella cheese. In separate bowl, mix 1/4 cup mayonnaise, 3 cloves crushed garlic, amd 8-10 chopped basil leaves. Serve sautéed vegetables and place a dollop of mayo mixture with each healing helping.

Local Food, Famous Food: The other day nephew and culinary-nutrition graduate Wille took the bus from Providence RI into NYC to sample Watermelon Gazpacho and peruse menus of his favorite restaurants. Chef Thomas Keller (The French Laundry on the West Coast and Per Se on the East Coast) listed on his menu: “Salad of Eckerton Hill Farm Cherry Tomatoes” (Tim Stark’s place near Lenhartsville). Cool beans!

Written on Slate: “When I go biking, I repeat a mantra of the day’s sensations:  bright sun, blue sky, warm breeze, blue jay’s call, ice melting and so on.  This helps me transcend the traffic, ignore the clamorings of work, leave all the mind theaters behind and focus on nature instead.  I still must abide by the rules of the road, of biking, of gravity. But I am mentally far away from civilization. The world is breaking someone else’s heart.”  — Diane Ackerman


Fleur-de-EatDrinkStink

Last week, after pulling garlic from the field at Fleur-de-Lys and nestling the harvest in the bed of my pickup truck, I had a vague plan – very vague. I had 13 bins brimming with 13 varieties of heirloom garlic, each carefully labeled. Then the rains came. Luckily, a friend’s carport sheltered us (the garlic and me) from the first storm. The same friend convinced me to place each label in a plastic Ziploc – to avoid losing years of careful nurturing and monitoring by preventing the names from bleeding into unreadable ink spots – and helped me tuck everyone (the 13 garlic families) under a heavy-duty tarp.

I was barely out of Berks County when the downpour came, windshield wipers slapping from the Susquehanna to the Juniata, and then up over the Seven Mountains to Happy Valley. I backed into the “cart shed” with my precious cargo and recruited my son Richard and sister Leslie to help me unload.

I grew up just behind the second tee at Centre Hills Country Club, in the house where my mother still lives. This location created a youthful enterprise – Sugar and Spice Stables – where my four sisters and I rented spaces for golfers to store their golf carts. We bought our first pair of llamas, Paco and Suzette, with the proceeds. My mother still rents spaces for three golf carts and, after several generations, has one llama left (Belladona).

My vague plan was to somehow hang the garlic from the cart shed rafters … but serendipity prevailed. There, amongst the boxes of my life in storage, I spotted my antique shoe drying rack. My Italian grandfather, Abele, came to Pennsylvania from the Old Country with few belongings and a trade that served him well over the years – he was a cobbler and shoemaker. For years at 440 Hottenstein, this rustic wooden rack was used as a telephone shelf and storage place for my endless piles of paper. There it was, empty. The perfect place to cure my garlic – plenty of air circulation and racks for stacking the labeled garlic bins, and a few knobs to drape tied bunches of special garlic. Somehow it seemed especially fitting that the “roots” of my garlic found a home on a shoe drying rack amongst all of my earthly possessions.

Settling in has been a smooth adjustment. Our tomatoes and peppers and shallots look great, but the garden is overrun with brazen groundhogs and voracious bunnies who mowed down the green and purple beans, zucchini, yellow squash, and Poona Kheera cucumbers. I brought pots of chocolate mint and a Fleur-de-Lys fig, and spent a morning repotting Mother’s Day gift plants of avocado, guava, and Meyer lemon. (More on the tropical leanings of Fleur-de-Lys Central in a future blog.)

My mother loves having company and running errands to interact with people, even if she gets a bit perturbed with her eldest daughter. And vice versa.  She absolutely deplores my Fleur-de-Lys fashion, or lack thereof, and her favorite questions about my attire are: “Aren’t you going to change?” and “Are you going to wear stockings?”  It’s like I’m 15 all over again.

So, we stop at the neighborhood bank, and no, I didn’t change, and I wasn’t wearing stockings.  We walk up to the bank manager (“the handsome one,” she always points out) and my mother has already complimented him on his tie (as she does on every visit). He takes one look at me and says, “Eat, Drink, Stink?” Well, yes, it has been 90+ and humid as a rainforest but … then I look down at my chest. I’m wearing an Easton Garlic Festival T-shirt emblazoned with the motto: Eat, Drink, Stink.

I mumble something about being a farmer without a farm, with a shed full of garlic, drivel, drivel, and his eyes light up. “I love garlic!” I asked if he grows it or just eats it – only the latter. I asked him where his ancestors were from. “Italy, of course.” And I told him I’d be back with a gift.

A few days later I bundled up and labeled some soft-neck Chet’s Italian Red and some gorgeous hard-neck German White, stuck them in a paper bag and we were off on a road trip to the bank.  The conversation in the car went something like this:

 “Why are you taking garlic to the bank?”

I retell the T-shirt story.

“He’s so handsome. Are you flirting with him?”

“Mothhhhhherrrrr, he’s married.”

“How do you know?”

“Because every time you compliment him on his tie he says that either his wife or his daughter bought it for him.”

“Well, he is cute but I don’t know why you’re bringing him garlic.”

“I’m bringing it to him and all of the bank tellers because they like garlic.”

“Well, it looks kind of messy with those stalks sticking out of the bag.”

“I thought it was a good way to show them how garlic grows.”

“He is really handsome. Do you think he’s married?”

Ah, life at Fleur-de-Lys Central, where I’m just spreading the holy grail of garlic, one bank at a time. Laurie Lynch

Good Eat: Once there was the Egg Lady, now there is the Chicken Wing Man! Richard won the Hartranft Hall Chicken Wing Eating Contest the other night. Magic number? 32. While we were moving, Richard took one look at me: sweaty brow, pitted out T-shirt, etc., and said he knew where his sweat genes came from …  I’ve never eaten “Wings” – too boney for me — so I can’t take any of the credit for his culinary appetite genes.

Good Drink: I’m still waiting for my buddy Lisa to send me her recipe for Garlic Ice Cream … but until then, I’ll share this cooling tip I borrowed from the Dynasty Restaurant in Tiburon, CA, when Richard and I visited my mother’s dear friend and college roommate Trig. The waiter carried a water pitcher that was stuffed with mint leaves and then filled with ice water. So refreshing.  I’m doing the same (in an old juice bottle), filling it with chocolate mint leaves and adding water to keep in the frig. Give it a try.

Good Read: “The Novel” by James Michener. Made the easing out of Berks County and the Lehigh Valley a little less abrupt and less painful.

Good Escape: To get away from the stifling heat my mother, sister Larissa and I went to see “Midnight in Paris.” Yeah, I loved it, and I bet you will too. Great scenes of a beautiful city and fabulous concept for fellow bookworms.