Claudy’s Life-Affirming White Bean Galician Soup

I can’t take credit for this amazing soup, Caldo Gallego, except for the intention. The recipe itself is from “The Cuisines of Spain,” an exquisite cookbook by Teresa Berrenechea. My aim was to make a soup to say yes to life.

It’s cold again-slash-still in Santa fe, not minus 15 degrees cold as it was last week, just snow-flurry and gray clouds cold. The only word for the morning sky today was dreary. I thought I beat the winter blues 25 years ago when I left the East Coast and rolled off the dumb-luck truck in the Sunbelt. This year, they’re back.

I spent most of Sunday morning flipping through Barrenechea’s cookbook, picking out a soup before losing myself in travel fantasies and questions about various regions of Spain. America’s diverse (though rapidly homogenizing) ethnic regions sprouted, like mushrooms, more or less simultaneously in our relatively compressed period of foreign conquest. Spain’s provinces developed as independent kingdoms over centuries, with their own languages, dialects, customs, foods and culinary traditions. A trip even through a Spanish cookbook is a geographic and historic journey.

I found Galicia on the map, the province in the northwest chunk of Spain just above Portugal. For linguistic reasons, the adjectival form of Galicia is Gallegos. There’s so much I want to learn about this world.

You can start anything with soup. This morning before starting work I walked to Ziggy’s International Market, about a half mile from our house, where I picked up a package of Spanish chorizo, chatted a bit with Maria, the cashier, then walked across the parking lot to the little Mexican-owned grocery for greens.

“Excuse me,” I said twice to the man in the grocer’s apron, who didn’t even register hearing me. “Perdoneme,” I then said hesitantly, “tengo una pregunta, por favor,” and pointed to the sign for turnip greens. They wouldn’t have any ’til tomorrow, he said, so I grabbed a bunch of kale.

I walked home under the dreary pre-snow sky with my bag of kale and chorizo, aiming to hedge the blues with a stockpot.Last Saturday I volunteered at the Souper Bowl, the Santa Fe Food Depot‘s big fundraiser, where 30-some local restaurants give tastes of their best soups. I was physically tired and just weary emotionally. There were many good soups there, but a Roasted Garlic and Winter Vegetable soup brought tears to my eyes and joy to my heart. Maybe someday I’ll write a book about soup as a spiritual practice.

Caldo Gallegos (White Bean Soup with Greens and Meat)

1/2 pound dried white cannellini beans
1/2 pound bacon (in one piece, if available)
1# turnip greens or green cabbage, chopped (I substituted kale)
About 6 oz. Spanish chorizo (note: this is not the same as Mexican chorizo)
1# potatoes, cut in large chunks
1 teaspoon salt

*Rinse the beans and soak them 8 hours or overnight.
*Drain the beans, put in a stock pot, and add bacon and enough water to cover by an inch. Bring to a boil; lower heat to a simmer and cook uncovered for an hour.
*Add the greens; cook another half hour, adding water as necessary to cover the beans.
*Add the chorizo, potatoes and salt; cook another 30 minutes or so until the potatoes are fork-tender.
*To serve lift the bacon and chorizo from the pot and cut into small pieces. Put the meat in warmed soup bowls, ladle the soup on top, and serve immediately.

El Niño Gets a Bug

(written last year, but remembered this week when Ariel got a cold)

Nurse Misty at her station

El Niño emailed from Spain last week. This is our latest nickname for our son on account of his major in Spanish literature, and on account of the occasional resemblance between a strapping college boy and a periodic global  weather system that disturbs the planet.

This time the storm was viral.

“I woke up yesterday very cold and with fever and stomach cramps,” he wrote Monday morning. “My fever broke last night and today it’s just the stomach cramps that’s got me pissed with life. I can’t keep water in me. I’m going to the doctor.”

This is how it is when you’re the mom of a child who loves to travel. He gets you out of your cubicle; he gets you to other parts of the world and your head. But the truth is your pitch rises, just a wee bit, from the effort to disguise your anxiety when that child gets sick far from home. You can’t make the chicken soup, the chamomile tea, the dry toast. You can’t quite remember, out of context, the advice your own mother gave you (Bananas are binding? An “A” for applesauce?) when your stomach went off when you were young. You’re off your mom game.

You go on faith; he’s an adult after all. He’s across the world. You can’t protect him from everything. You remember for maybe the millionth time the adage that Parenting is About Letting Go, and you remember for infinity-plus-one that you’re entwined for, like, ever.

So you make the metaphoric cup of chamomile tea to calm his choppy stomach (like Peter Rabbit’s mom did), and you squeeze in a little symbolic lemon and drizzle some hypothetical honey, and you pass it across the coffee table, I mean ocean, to the boy sprawled on the couch under the fuzzy red blankie watching a video with Misty curled at his feet, the cat who already comfortably sprawls the territory between the actual and the mythic, and you wait and believe….

“I have a virus and my body will kill it on its own, the doctors say,” El Niño wrote on Tuesday. “They gave me some meds to treat the symptoms and they are helping a lot. I still feel weak and without energy, and my body still isn’t down with H2O, but I’m getting better.”

When he forgets to log onto Skype at the time you’d arranged on Wednesday, you smile, recognizing this as a sign that he’s getting back to normal.

You tell yourself you weren’t really that worried, and you mean it, pretty much. You remember this is the kid you saw kiss the bottom of his own bare foot when he stepped on a thorn as a little boy, and you know this is how it’s supposed to be: moms take care of kids; they become adults who take care of themselves. You tell yourself, once again, that parenthood means letting go, and you basically mean it. As for the roiling swells of protectiveness you feel inside, that can be your own little secret.

I said God, not Dog

From an earlier snowshoe trip

Things got complicated. New Year’s morning, Hanna confronted Ariel about things he did with his friends the night before. He wished she hadn’t brought it up in front of us, but I admired her courage and sensed a need for support. It weighed on me heavily, so I passed on brunch with mother-in-law the next day and headed up the mountain to go snowshoeing. I needed some solitary time, to move my body and sort out my thoughts and see if the universe would maybe throw me some guidance.

I was halfway up to Big Tesuque before I realized I’d left my snowshoes on our patio. So with a few well-chosen curses I turned the car around at Black Canyon and drove home for them, and a fish sandwich from McDonald’s. It’s only time, I thought, dazed by a headache I’d been fighting all morning.

I found a parking spot right in front of the Big Tesuque trailhead (the angels were with me, Marsha would say) and strapped on my snowshoes and daypack. A few people were sledding down the little hill near the parking lot. A young woman slid down on a yellow saucer-sled with a long, gleeful shriek.

“That’s the kind of equipment I need,” her boyfriend said, pointing to my snowshoes and poles. “Oh I don’t know, I think that looks fun,” I said, imitating the woman’s shrieks. We all laughed.

Aspens in the snow.

From there I had the trail to myself. I crossed the creek, which was frozen and snow-packed, and hiked up the trail on its left bank. The length-adjuster for one of my poles was jammed, which made it contract when I leaned on it, so I had to carry that pole and just use the other. My head was still hurting and I couldn’t gather much energy. I kept peering around the bony aspen branches, looking for the gray electrical box on the forest service road that would be my turn-around point, but it seemed twice as far as I remembered.

At last the trail leveled off onto the forest service road. I walked over to the electrical box, slowing down to catch my breath, and felt my worries catch up with me. “I could use your help here, God,” I said softly.

just a public-domain Black Lab in the snow!

Just that moment I heard a bell in the distance behind me. I turned and saw a dog coming down the forest road – a small Black Lab, smaller than our old dog Emily – with a woman in a parka following several paces behind. The dog had a bell around its collar, not the little kind we put on Misty’s collar to give the birds an edge, more like a sleigh bell. I half expected a chorus to start singing Jingle Bells.

“I said ‘God,’ not ‘dog,’” I said under my breath, breaking into a smile. We passed one another as I headed to the trail on the other side of the creek. I was grinning goofily by then, but the woman passed without even making eye contact.

Before heading down the trail I stopped for a sip from my water bottle, and noticed a rustling in the trees up the hill, maybe 20 feet to my left, and saw a young man carrying a snowboard making his way out of the woods onto the road.

“It’s the Abominable Snowboarder!” I called out, startled by his sudden emergence through the trees.

“I took a wrong turn up there at the ski area and got lost on the mountain,” he said, flustered and tangibly relieved. He must have bushwhacked a few miles through backcountry and was lucky to find his way to a trail. “Can you tell me how to get back up to Ski Santa Fe?”

“Sure,” I said, “just follow this road maybe half a mile and it’ll take you to the main road to the ski area.”

“Is it downhill?” he asked with a trace of pleading.

“No, but it’s pretty flat. If you really want to go downhill you could take this trail down the creek. It’ll also take you to the main road, just further down.”

“I better not,” he said. “I don’t want to risk getting lost again.”

I offered him luck and assurance and headed down my trail, grateful to have been pulled out of my head for a moment by someone else’s need for help. I climbed carefully over the few fallen trees on the trail, pondering the random confluence of the dog, the snowboarder, God and me. Can you tell me how to get back to Ski Santa Fe?… I could still hear his anxious query. It was an easy pitch, but still, I was proud to have popped it. Sometime in my 25 years in New Mexico, I became someone who can give directions in these mountains once in a while. Somewhere in my 20-some years as a mom, I learned some things about helping young people find their way out of the woods.

A few new sledders were at the trailhead when I got back to my car. Back at home, Hanna and Ariel were out, using the gift certificate for a hot tub and foot massages that we gave them for Christmas. Charles and I went to the mall to see “The King’s Speech” (which we loved), for a little foretaste and reminder of activities that will fill our empty-nester life again soon.

Friday Night Dinner

Friday Night Dinner

Ariel and Hanna, co-chefs

That Friday, a week before Christmas, we made a traditional Syrian Jewish Friday night dinner, all four of us, for my cousin Denise and her husband Ken. Ariel generally enjoys making Syrian dishes with me, but now with Hanna here for the holidays from Germany their combined interest was strong enough to postpone a trip to Albuquerque to see a big American mall and some of Ariel’s friends.

Roast chicken with eggplant & potatoes

This wasn’t “just a little something we whipped up.” It was an all-day, full-house endeavor. I went to the grocery store in the morning and got back while Ariel and Hanna were having breakfast. We sliced three eggplants and started broiling them, in batches, for roast chicken and eggplant. I put two chickens in the oven in the big roasting pan. We cubed several pounds of yellow potatoes, tossed them with a little oil in a casserole pan and put them in the oven. We’d arrange them later with the eggplant slices around the chicken for a final cooking in its juices. I usually don’t cook chicken with both these veggies at once, but when Ariel asked with “please, Mommy” eyes if we could have some of those yummy potatoes, I was not inclined to say no. 

Ariel and Hanna flipped through our “Aromas of Aleppo” cookbook to pick out something else to make. (I call this the “cookbook of record” of the Syrian Jewish community, as the New York Times is America’s “newspaper of record.” It is more than a collection of amazing recipes; it’s a culinary anthropology of a culture.) They picked out a vegetarian version of yebra (stuffed grape leaves filled with tomatoes, rice, mint and pine nuts). We didnt have grape leaves so they made a run to Whole Foods.

Ariel and Dad, chocolatiers

After they came back, Charles led us through the final steps of our chocolate-making project. To the invert syrup we made the day before, we added tempered chocolate that we infused with various flavors: one, lavender and vanilla; another, Earl Grey tea. Hanna made a salad of baby greens, pomegranate seeds and avocado. Denise was bringing rice and hamud (a traditional broth of lemon, garlic, mint and vegetables, served over the rice) with some of her mom’s kibbehs (stuffed meatballs) that she had in the freezer.

La Nina rolling grapeleaves

We cleared space on the table and I showed “the kids” how to roll grape leaves (flatten out a leaf, put a little “finger” of filling in the middle, fold one side over, then the other, and roll it tight). “Look how much neater mine are than yours,” Hanna said. She was a little jetlagged, just her third day in New Mexico, but not too tired to tease her boyfriend. We finished making them at around 6 o’clock and put them on the stove to cook. I was relieved Denise and Ken were a little late so we had a few moments to rest.

As someone who has accidentally-on-purpose found herself thousands of miles from her family-of-origin, I have come to appreciate the special pleasures of being around people whose heritage and memories coincide with mine. These foods are as familiar to Denise as they are to me, if not more so, and Ken has enjoyed an immersion course for about two decades now. Denise’s mom brings them a freezer-bag of kibbehs, sambusac and laham b’ajeen when she visits, and they go to New York for holidays a couple times a year. I don’t know anyone else within a thousand miles who calls these particular smells and tastes their own.

This dinner wasn’t just for me, however, but also to bombard Ariel and Hanna with the energy of the otherwise long-distance side of his family. I’m sure on conscious and subliminal levels he feels commonalities between these two curly-haired, short, thin, Jewish women. “Wow,” Hanna said when Denise and Ken closed the door behind themselves and the noise level dropped down again. “That was intense.”

And seeing someone who has known me since I was a kid also points a little mirror on myself. “You all seem to be in such a good place,” Denise e-mailed the next day. “I am most happy for you. Can’t wait ‘til lunch!” (We sent them home with leftovers.) I was glad I’d made the second chicken – plenty for the weekend. Somehow this stuff always tastes better the next day, after the juices, reflections and memories have had time to co-mingle.

Waiting for La Niña

Roses for Hanna

Ariel’s on his way to Albuquerque to pick up Hanna, whose flight arrives at 8. He was so excited today you could feel the vibrations all over the house. After hours yesterday cleaning his room, and the bathroom (the. bath. room. that’s right.), he stopped at the grocery store today to get her flowers, banged out the dents in his car door Charles’s sledgehammer, then headed down to Albuquerque. I’m SO happy for him. “Don’t text and drive; don’t talk on your cell phone and drive; drive like people who love you are depending on it. Now get outta here.” That’s how I express love at this point in El Nino’s life (well, one way).

Charles is in the kitchen making invert sugar. For his birthday earlier this month I gave him a year’s subscription to Recchiuti’s monthly “Classics Club” (we discovered an amazing chocolate shop in San Francisco in October) with their book on making chocolates. Many recipes start with an invert sugar syrup, basically sugar heated until it breaks down into glucose and fructose, which makes for a much smoother consistency. You can buy this syrup but it’s not hard to make, and Charles took it upon himself to learn how. He went to two cooking stores to get things we need, including an immersion blender and a new instant-read thermometer.

“I love this, it’s so cool,” he says. “You stick this bad boy in there and it tells you what you need to know.” For the moment all I need to do to help is say “mm-hmm” and “wow!” once in a while and keep him company. We’ll do the real work together tomorrow with “the kids.” There will be a second one here soon. “208,” Charles says. “We’re almost there, honey.”

I have dinner cooking for Ariel and Hanna, an ad-libbed chicken and green olives and some spaghetti al limone, which smells delicious. Hanna may be too tired after a day’s travels to want to eat much, but Ariel’s never been too tired to eat. We’ve got clothes racks near the wood stove temporarily to finish drying, Charles at the stove announcing the rising temperatures of his syrup, Misty sleeping on the warm floor near the fire, chicken hissing in its juices in the oven, and peach-colored tea roses on the kitchen table for La Hanna. I feel like Eloise at midlife: “Oooooooo, I absolutely LOVE domesticity!”

Cheers / Prost!

El Niño Returns

Ariel sets up the tree while...

‘Twas a week before Christmas…

Sometimes at this time of year we’re busy packing to go somewhere warm and far, but this year we’re the destination. El Niño just arrived, blowing in with high spirits, jokes, new music and allusions to South Park episodes. I’m referring of course to our son, Ariel. Because, while perhaps there’s not so much resemblance as there once was between our charming lad and a major global atmospheric-pressure disturbance causing floods, droughts and extreme temperature swings, his arrivals and departures nevertheless bring changes in the barometric pressure of two parents settling deeper into our lives as Empty Nesters.

...La Misty supervises

This evening after dinner, he stuck his iPod in the player on the kitchen counter and put on an Argentine tango/reggae band he thought we’d like. Then he and Charles set up the artificial Christmas tree that Charles had just bought, while I loaded the dishwasher. Now, I could take or leave a Christmas tree, but this is something the guys love. And this one’s cute, a ”Colorado White Pine” that came out of the box with colored lights already affixed to the branches. Misty kept watch as they set it up in the corner between the woodstove and our Picasso poster of birds. One year back in her kittenhood Misty actually tried to climb a live Christmas tree, but this time she just supervised from couch. I guess the smell of fresh-milled polyvinyl choride doesn’t float her kitty boat.

Charles and I have had a lovely fall together, so maybe it was the barometric change of Ariel’s impending arrival, or the holidays, or I don’t know what, that had pulled us down the previous few days before. I’d been struggling for a larger mind, all up about what I wanted to do and not do for the holidays, while Charles was visited by Ghosts of Christmas Past. I could feel the energy lift as soon as the boy was back in the house. He was veritably bubbling over with excitement, from finishing five exams in a week, from being home, but mostly from anticipation of seeing his girlfriend, Hanna, who’d arrive a few days later from Germany. They met last year on exchange programs in Spain. They assumed they would have to split up at the end of the year when they headed back to homes on different continents, but that hasn’t worked out.

Ta dah!

So now instead of running off with his usual band of rogues on his first night home, he spends hours cleaning his bedroom to get ready for Hanna’s arrival, removing boxes of junk and give-aways, hanging pictures. I was almost too tired to stay up long enough for him to show off the results, but I did, and was duly impressed. The next day I helped him pick out a present for Hanna for Christmas, a lovely gold lotus-silhouette necklace and matching earrings, beautiful and unique. The saleswoman and I gave strong approval, but this was all Ariel, eyeing what he liked and talking it through. The store radio was blaring rocked-up Christmas songs and I was sweating about my parking meter, but there I was biting the insides of my mouth to keep from crying, so moved was I to be privy to watching my son decide how to show love.

You know that Rodgers and Hammerstein song, “You’ve got to be taught to hate and fear, you’ve got to be taught from year to year, you’ve got to be carefully taught”? Well, having this fresh warm breeze of youth in the house, I remember we’ve got to be taught how to love, that it doesn’t come out of the air, that tenderness reaps tenderness going forward and back. When Hanna didn’t feel well one day when they were in Spain, he told us, he downloaded Beatrix Potter stories to read her, the same ones we read to him once upon a time. I see them now carrying forth in their own ways the lessons they learned about love. And now I feel his joyous, gentle, kind and accepting spirit opening my own heart muscles, like sails, like butterfly wings, like petals of yellow tulips. You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late. You’ve got to be carefully taught.

Recharge and Precharge

I’m off for a night in Jemez Springs, New Mexico, a little writing and sola time. Wondering, again, why it is that for someone who considers herself happily married, I sure like a lot of time sola. Perhaps, the voice inside asks, I’m not really as happily married as I think?? No, that’s not it. Sometimes I just need to get out of my context as wife and mother to get back in touch with myself.

Two years ago, working on a long manuscript (not yet a book), I discovered Jemez Springs as a place for an easy getaway. It’s about two hours from Santa Fe, up in the beautiful Jemez Mountains, with a couple of unpretentious and inexpensive motels. The town has a few shops and galleries, good hiking trails and, now, an incredible bakery/cafe.  A very unglitzy (this is good) city-run bathhouse with private baths and spa perks at prices Santa Fe hasn’t seen for eons. No cell phone reception. Great public library.

It’s time again. Just this week, my fifth week home, I’ve been noticing my Spain feeling slipping away. For the first few weeks I was keeping it – making Spanish soups and tapas, taking time off in the middle of the day, pouring a tinto de verano at (by US standards) odd hours. 

These past several days I’ve been waking up at night, not feeling so refreshed in the morning, noticing something slip the spiritual rails. The great expansiveness I felt for a month in Spain and following has been shrinking back: too little writing, too little sunshine, too much computer.

Sure, this transition is to be expected after a long trip, but I don’t want to settle for it entirely either. I’m in  Tumbleweeds busy season (my fall issue comes out in a few weeks), but the other factors are more personal, to do with the lovely, frustrating entanglement of self and family. Ariel’s home for a month. My parents are coming to visit this week. My month of sola time in Spain sequed into couple time with Charles, now family time, soon extended-family time.

Last night I dreamt I was sitting behind my grandfather’s giant desk, the massive piece with hidden drawers that intrigued me as a kid. This morning I remembered a conversation I had with Iman in the middle of my trip, when I was starting to wonder how I’d keep my traveling feelings, that wonderful joy of newness and discovery, when I got back home.

“When we’re traveling, we’re foreigners,” I remember her saying. “We’re more ourselves; we give ourselves permission to be freer.”

“I know,” I said, and if I kept the whine out of my voice it was just by luck. 

“But we’re always travelers,” she said, a feeling I don’t always consider in my well-worn footpaths at home.“Soy extranjera en el mundo,” she said. I wrote that one down. I’m a foreigner in the world.

I’ve been feeling too familiar in my world, boxed in by something in my own mind. So while the opportunity presents I am off again for a night and a day sola, to tap back into feelings I reach more successfully alone. A moment to remember myself as a foreigner, before reconnecting with the people in the world who feel they know me best.