For the love of dandelions

by June

Warning, warning to all delicate ears! I am about to utter something (apparently) shocking: I love dandelions.

I had no idea mine was a love that dare not speak its name. Then, I was invited to a barbecue in a neighborhood that prides itself on smooth grass lawns that cascade from every front porch down to the street — a street (I might add) that looks as if it is swept for the pleasure of the children who scoot around the cul-de-sac on their trikes and bikes. I didn't know many people at the gathering, so I was engaging in one of my favorite social activities; I was eavesdropping (or as little Fern used to call it "earsdropping").

A man with a beer says to his neighbor: "You know what I found in my lawn?"

The neighbor shakes his head. Uh-oh. He knows what's coming and doesn't even want to hear it.

"Yep," confirms the man with the beer, "A dandelion."

"Did you call The Guy?" the neighbor asked.

Oh, he called The Guy all right. I gathered that The Guy was responsible for the care of the lawns (which tells you how far I was from my comfort zone, a zone where I am responsible for nagging Birch to mow occasionally). I felt sorry for The Guy. He promised to get that filthy weed out of there and to redouble his chemical efforts to make sure another one didn't pop up its downy head anywhere near the cul-de-sac.

Really? Really? I mean, it's a sunny-bright flower that gives the bees something to buzz about long before the rest of the blossoms wake up to spring. Then it turns into a puffball — a puffball! — which happens to be one of the most amazingly engineered seed delivery systems on the planet and the best natural toy ever.

And the chickens look beautiful pecking insects on a stretch of new green tufted with yellow buttons.

Not to mention, dandelions are food! Food! Dandelions are one of the earliest greens after a long winter; they were prized by our grandparents who didn't have Whole Foods down the street. Just ask Laura Ingalls Wilder. Dandelions can be soup, salad, even wine.

The dandelion's long taproot digs way down, even into clay, breaking up the soil like a little tiller, and then it sucks those minerals up to the surface where other plants use them to thrive. I read somewhere (but can't remember where) that it's great to compost dandelion roots; all those beneficial minerals end up in your garden. (I'm assuming it had better be a hot compost or the roots might start growing again, but maybe one of the real gardeners around here will comment and make us all wiser.) And — I have this on the authority of my sweet daughter Blossom — you know that white milky stuff that oozes out of a dandelion stem? That stuff makes warts go away! Blossom has the wart-free big toe to prove it.

Okay, I understand that dandelions can get into places where a gardener doesn't want them. I have one under a rose bush that seems bigger than the rose bush. And the rose bush has thorns, and I have to go through the thorns to get to the dandelion. So the dandelion wins.

But I am not going to poison the thing. We live on a river we love, a river where our children float twig boats and paddle about in the deep pool. It's a river filled with trout. Great blue herons nest along it. Blossom and I once got very still in our shared innertube and watched a heron scoop a fish from the current and swallow it whole.

We do what we can to protect our river, and we know that anything we might spray on the dandelions is going to end up there.

We call it our river because we hear it at night when we're falling asleep and because we hike to its waterfalls with picnic lunches and because we float on the current and watch the birds. We call it ours, but really that river belongs to all of us — you and me and the children who aren't here with us yet. It's such a small, precious planet we share. These days, we're reminded of that in heartbreaking ways. The weather is weird. Oil gushes into the Gulf, threatening life and livelihoods far beyond where the leak is. Just last weekend, we gardened in the gloom of smoke from forest fires in Quebec -- a day's drive away.

We are all neighbors — me and you (wherever you are) and that man with the dreadful dandelion in his lawn. I wonder sometimes how it happened that we have transformed good things (like dandelions) into bad things that we combat with truly bad things (toxic chemicals) that in turn threaten other good things (the water we depend on for life itself).

Fern was riding in the car recently, watching the world go by. It was when spring was new and suddenly green. Some of the lawns had dandelions scattered merrily in the grass. Some didn't. "I miss the dandelions," she said as we swept through a manicured neighborhood. "It doesn't look natural."

It isn't natural. Dandelions are adapted to be wherever their seeds can drift. So maybe we all should let ourselves love them as we did when we were little: Pick a puffball, pucker up, blow. And if one of those little seeds drifts off and starts to grow in a place we just can't abide, let's promise one another, as neighbors, that we'll fight it with something just as natural as the plant itself. I hear boiling water works every time.

Savoring the harvest: Radishes two ways

by June

Radishes are supposedly the lickety-split vegetable, the seed you poke into the ground when you want to impress a child with the whole cycle -- seed to seedling to munch-munch. But the child in me and the children around me too are impatient for even the hastiest radish. We tend to eat radishes tiny and bead-like, at least early in gardening season.

This spring we are enjoying them two ways.

Cherry Belle radishes

The first is roasted. One rainy day, we were preparing a meal that was almost entirely from our garden: overwintered-leek-and-should-be-seed-potato soup sprinkled with watercress. We needed a little nibble to hold us, and we just happened to have harvested a handful of the most beautiful Cherry Belle radishes. So we lit a fire under a cast-iron skillet and whirled some olive oil around until it got hot. We sizzled the radishes (leaves and all) in the hot oil, then popped the entire skillet into a 400-degree oven. We roasted them for about eight minutes, topped them with a squeeze of lemon, a pat of butter, and a grind of pepper, then sea salt.

Cherry Belle radishes roasted

They were small as gumballs and still chewy and zingy in the middle. But the leaves -- oh, the leaves! -- were snappy and crackly. They were gone lickety-split!

French Breakfast radishes

Our other favorite radish preparation is either a French breakfast or a Midwestern farmer's lunch. We could happily eat it every meal of the day. We use French Breakfast radishes (again, on the small side), and we slice them into translucent little rounds. We butter some of Birch's daily bread, layer on the radish slices, then sprinkle with a lot, a lot, a lot of Malden's flaky sea salt.

French Breakfast radish sandwich

It is a feast on a hot day (such as today when the thermometer has hit 88 degrees, which is not cool by me -- in Maine, in May?). The radishes and salt look icy, but their crispness has a spicy-sour verve that gets gentled down by the sweet butter.

Who wouldn't be impatient for the radishes to grow when the eating is so delicious?

Welcome home!

by June

One minute, it's just Monday. Granted, it is better than most Mondays. It is full-blown spring. And Baby G is here to play. Then it becomes one of the best days of all, a day we dream about and plan year-round. Our chicks arrive. This year, they are six Rhode Island Reds.

Monday becomes enchanted.

Monday is a great day for falling in love.

The back-porch garden

by June

Spring has released us out into the sunshine. It's the season for supper on the back porch. And since we're lazy sorts, we've planted good nibbles right here. What wonderful synchronicity that the most delicious greens sprout early and come on strong in the cool weather, just when we are happiest to soak in the sunlight that pools near our back door as day goes down.

The garden planter closest to the kitchen almost made it through the winter with buoyant mache and arugula and spinach. Those greens all but glowed in contrast to the snow and the dead-stick honeysuckle toughing it out nearby. But then a two-below wind ripped the greenhouse plastic off one night and...whoosh! Just like that, everything was freeze-dried. Lucky for us, the spinach merely hunkered down for spring, and the mache too came back as soon as the weather warmed. I had underplanted everything with more mache and arugula seeds. Those germinated in February.

By March, I was able to plant more seeds in the empty planters I had prepped in the fall with fresh compost. They are now providing us with lettuces like Tom Thumb and Lollo Rosso and Forellenschluss, as well as Wrinkled Crinkled Curly Cress. Radishes are plumping up. (Why is it that radishes are supposedly the fastest vegetable, but when you're waiting for them, it takes a lot of waiting?) The Melting Mammoth peas are twining up the twig supports.

From out here on the porch, we have a view of the chickens pecking in the shiny new grass and the leaves unfolding on the trees. The birds sing, and we grow still, listening for the cardinals, the swallows, the orioles. Ducks fly over on the way to the river. When the pizza oven is burning, we can watch the fire.

Most of all, we can see up close the miraculous stirrings among the plants: Peas reach for a place to grow. Lettuce bundles up into tight mounds. A garlic chive seed sprouts a little thread that does a kind of yoga on its way to straightening up.

Here's what I savor most as my children tend the seedlings and sniff the cilantro and sneak a curly cress leaf (or three), I savor knowing that it's all right here in the middle of our lives: growing our food, preparing it, sharing it with one another. It's the slowest food imaginable, and it slows us down to enjoy life. It's so local it's intimate. Like our back-porch garden planters, our food is right here in the center of our lives.

If you were a girl who really really really wanted a goat...

by June

If you were a girl (or two) who really really really wanted a goat (or two), you would start a little business selling eggs. You would go out twice a day -- rain, snow, or shine -- and you would pamper your hens because happy hens lay lots of eggs.

You would call your business Daisy Family Eggs, and you would make little labels for the egg cartons. You would ask all your friends if they wanted to donate to your cause in exchange for farm-fresh eggs from happy hens.

You would faithfully collect the eggs from the nesting boxes and wash them -- even when they were extremely poop-covered. When you squabbled with your sister about who had to wash the most poop-covered eggs, you would sit down and write out an egg-washing policy that involved flipping a coin to see who got to choose the first four eggs, then alternating every four eggs after that and keeping track from day to day. Happy hens must have happy keepers.

You would track how many eggs went out and how much money came in using a ledger designed especially for you by your grandfather. You would open all Valentine cards with one eager thought: How much can I add to the goat fund? When you were doing your history lesson, you would hear about the Virginia Company and that would make you ask questions about stocks, and you would find out about something called the stock market. You would insist upon trying the stock market out for yourself and would invest birthday money from last year. You would do research and choose your own penny stocks based on things you like (Google and Apple computers), and you would watch your stocks tick up and down and up and down. You would cheer when it was up. You would pout when it was down.

You would count your money often. You would balance your ledger carefully. You would check out the Nigerian dwarf goat farms online that were showing off their newborn goats. You would ask your mama, Is this farm close to us? Is this one?

You would get your daddy to stop by one of the farms. You would meet two baby does there. You would fall in love. The next day, you would go back with a one-hundred-dollar bill as a deposit for those twin baby goats. You would name them Buttercup and Clover. You would hold them and smile and wish you could take them home right that minute.

You would. And you did.

In June, Buttercup and Clover will be coming home to live with two girls who really really really wanted a goat (or two).

Shall we shimmy?

by June

This morning, we woke to an April shower. It was a S.N.O.W. shower. We did the only sensible thing; we stayed in bed with our books and trusted that even snow showers will bring May flowers. Early signs already abound...Full-bloom spring is shimmying this way.

new grass

bare-tree shadows

eager peas

kale that made it through the winter

a star magnolia

a bee finding the first blossoms

our favorite spring snow: the weeping cherry

Just in case you're in need of a good book to keep you cozy and happy during April showers, we recommend the ones that kept us happy this morning. I'm reading Major Pettigrew's Last Stand. Oh, how delicious it is! Fern is gobbling up The Seven Wonders of Sassafras Springs. Blossom is savoring every moment of Cheaper By the Dozen (even though her sister blurted out some of the highlights when she read it first).

Birch? you ask. What was he reading? He got up and made the coffee and ginger scones. Somebody had to!

Food makes the family

by June

Ten years ago today, in China, we became a family. In many ways, April 10, 2000, and the weeks that followed are a blur now. We four were groping for one another through the fog of all we didn't yet know. For Birch and me, it was a time of many questions: How could we comfort these baby girls when we didn't even have a common language? How could we express our love? How could we let them know we meant no harm?

What those early days were like for the eight-month-old babies, I still quake to imagine. When I see photographs from the first day, I can't look for long. Fear radiates from their eyes. They were so confused.

One memory remains vivid. Birch was gone. I was sitting on the edge of a bed with a baby in each arm. They were crying. I was singing and jostling and talking to them. And they only cried more -- brokenhearted, all-is-lost wailing.

So I started crying too.

And that's how Birch found us. Fortunately, he ushered room service in the door. He rolled the cart between the two beds, took a daughter on his knee and handed me chopsticks. It was a feast: Noodles and egg custards and greens melted to a sweet tenderness. We began to feed the babies and ourselves.

The babies ate eagerly. We did too. We dangled the noodles from the chopsticks, and they gaped for them like baby birds. Fern got one noodle by the end. She slurped. It slapped and whirled and sucked right into her red little lips. Then...she laughed. And so did we. We ate more noodles and laughed some more.

Later we would all cherish the fact that a noodle was there in the moment we really became a family. Birch and I soon understood that we did have a common language with our daughters: food. We saw how they were soothed by ginger and rice when they were sick. We saw how avid they were for pork buns and dumplings and noodles, noodles, noodles. We recognized ourselves in their appetites.

We embraced Chinese cuisine as a gift we could give our daughters. We taught ourselves to make noodles the Chinese way and steamed buns and green beans with charred garlic and... We discovered Barbara Tropp, whom I consider the Julia Child of Chinese cookery. If I had to leave my burning house with one book in hand, it would be my signed copy of Tropp's The Modern Art of Chinese Cooking. (Especially now that I see a new one could only be had for $216.66...for shame! for shame! Somebody, please, bring this book back into print.)

Our Chinese New Year's gift to one another this year was David Chang's Momofuku. Making a meal of pork-belly buns affirms the family we have grown to be (especially since the Jewish papa could never have imagined himself eating pork let alone pork belly).

Birch fires up the outdoor oven for the barbecued pork.

I whir up the Kitchen Aid to churn out the bun dough, and Fern sets up the bamboo steamer in the wok so we can turn the burner to full blast and steam the buns over boiling water.

Blossom makes Chang's quick pickles out of sliced cucumber, a tablespoon of sugar, and a teaspoon of kosher salt.

We still laugh when we eat. We laugh almost as much when we are eating as when we are cooking together. Food makes our family. Food is love.

Beautiful spring at last: All in one salad

by June

The days are longer. The light pours down from the sky (when rain doesn't). And the grass is coming up green. So it's time for us to push past the dark season and into the sunshine ourselves.

To those of you who missed us, we thank you for your kind patience. We missed you. We'll be skipping right over to visit your way too.

Winter and its darkness we consign now to winter. Be done. We are grateful this moment for spring of the year and its seed packets arriving by mail. We are grateful for birdsong when we wake each morning and also for falling asleep at night to the sound of rain tapping against the window glass. We are grateful that the hens are laying bountiful eggs, and that Fern and Blossom's egg-money savings has now mounted up to $171.35 cents, which is maybe half-way to their dream of welcoming home a goat (or, dare I say it, twin goats). We are grateful that it is the season of matzah ball soup and bright eggs hidden on the garden gate (and soon enough in nests along the honeysuckle hedge).

To celebrate this season, we're sharing a couple of recipes that make the most of early spring's delights. Here is Lidia Bastianich's Scallion and Asparagus Salad, paired with some Pennsylvania Pickled Beets. (Please note that my eggs were only dipped in the marinade for an hour or so because I wanted a pink color rather than a red.) Garnished with fragrant dill, this dual-salad makes any table feel as though family and friends are gathered.

Enjoy! And please do tell us what you love most about this spring. We're so happy to be back in our nest here, catching up with you. So what's new?

Happy Year of the Tiger!

by June

A fresh beginning is just what we need, and here it comes... Welcome to the Year of the Tiger!

Preparing for the new year, we've cut our hair, swept out the old with the dust from our corners (well, sorta), and organized our seeds for the growing season. The Chinese New Year celebrates spring, and who isn't ready for that about now?

Traditions abound in celebrating Chinese New Year. Ever since the children were little, we've been creating our own traditions that pivot off vibrant books, festive decorations, delicious foods we often prepare with friends, and dances we dance. Our ways may not be authentic in every detail but instead honor not only where our daughters were born but who we are as a family.

Here's a little peek at Fern and Blossom dancing with the girls they have grown up with in their beloved Chinese School.

Next we'll be sharing books we love and a recipe for dumplings and another for noodles. This is a time of joy for us, and we would love nothing more than that our traditions might brighten your winter too.