It's been a bit stormy around here of late. No thunderstorms, though I wish I could point fingers. No, the rumbling and flashes have been compliments of yours truly.
Truly, the weather's been sort of awful. Endlessly overcast, for one thing. But mostly deceptive. For some reason, I thought it was fall. I guess the great honking V's of geese overhead and the annual back-to-school head cold triple-header and the drifts of golden honey locust leaves on our driveway fooled me. I'm gullible that way. I'm also mistaken. Because it's been in the high 400's all week, which is clearly not end-of-September weather.
Oddly enough, I just checked my facts, and discovered weather.com is also mistaken. It claims the mercury hasn't inched much past the mid-70's all week, which is patently false. Maybe it's a vast dot-com conspiracy. Or maybe it's the humidity.
It's been humid. Wait, let me try that again. It's been H-U-M-I-D !!! If you could just get your hands around the air over here and give it a good squeeze, you could irrigate the Sahara. Possibly the Gobi as well. My car is a greenhouse. We're all wearing our shiny noses. Walking barefoot on our wood floors, you'd swear a band of rogue Oompa-Loompas snuck in straight off the cotton candy line and held an all-night polka party in our living room. Without washing up first. Sticky, sticky, sticky.
Heat makes me grouchy. Humidity turns me into a caterwauling mad-banshee-woman. I know this, because I survived June in Paris once. I was insufferable, even worse than the weather, but back-to-back movies on the Champs-Élysées and daily pints of Le Häagen-dazs spooned straight from the carton saw me through. For a variety of reasons, this proved impractical this week.
It's possible that runnning the oven round-the-clock to coax juice from those last 30 pounds of tomatoes didn't help either. Neither did my to-do list.
Apparently, I planned to accomplish everything right after the boys got back to school. Not everything everything; I'm delegating America's aging infrastructure to someone else. But everything under the "Little Moving-In Loose Ends" general header. Like finally getting the boys' night lights up. And going through those last two unopened boxes under the eaves, and also the three skyscrapers of photos/letters/South Dakota sunbonnets that represent my family's entire history. Also, hanging those 83 pictures propped against every wall, and building custom shelves for that awkward broom-closet-turned-microwave-station, and stitching up chic-retro-mod-elegant curtains for the windows that don't have them yet. Which is all the windows. There are a few dozen of them. Also, I don't sew.
I wish I'd communicated this little list to everyone else. I wish I'd communicated it to myself. But it was sort of just there, in my brain, or maybe underneath it. I think they call that part your reptilian brain, which seems fitting. My mood was about that evolved.
I moped. I pouted. I think I snarled, more than once. It wasn't pretty. Even I have a hard time putting up with me sometimes.
Still, snarling leaves two hands free to paint a room. (Did I not mention room-painting? There I go again.) Most of the house is already pale shades of lovely, but Zoë's room needed help. The old paint was cracking and openly spackled, and also ugly. It should have been yellow. It could have been yellow. But it wasn't yellow. It was -- to borrow a hue I once heard in my youth, and have encountered many, many times since -- 'baby poop brown'. A faded shade, from an often-washed onesie. But still. It had to go.
So out came the drop cloths, which, when I think about it, sort of serve as our own family's history, dribbled with fudge-colored stain from our first deck and creamy ocean green from Max's nursery and a colorful tracery of every other room I've painted this millenium. Maybe I'll skip the photo albums and just pass these two tidy canvasses down to my kids. I painted like I imagine any mother does, a little haphazardly, in thin minutes and wide open hours, half-crazed and wholly elated.
And by mid-week, all four walls are the color blue is when it whispers. It's the color of clouds tiptoeing, puddles sighing. Of robins' eggs, not their pale dreamy outsides but their still-paler insides. Just right with that great Gatsby-era pillow Mamo brought in May. Just right for a little girl who's usually all tousled chestnut, but sometimes seems topped with spun copper.
It looks like fresh air. And it feels like a fresh start. Especially with the two night lights and three pictures that, somehow, also made it up since Monday. I even picked up the newly-tuned Bernina from the shop. Next stop: remedial sewing. All in all, once the cranky cleared, it was a pretty productive week.
Even the peppers, which were inquiring all week as to where they featured on my cock-a-mamie to-do list, got their day in the flame. Dirt cheap and sweet as candy, peppers are at the top of their game right now. It's hard to beat a ripe, just-picked pepper, crunchy and crisp, simply sliced or shot through a lime-soused corn salad. But roasting takes peppers in a smokier, silkier direction I find addictive. Slipped loose of their charred skins, dribbled with olive oil, and scattered with handfuls of salty feta and sharp basil, these peppers taste of a dreamy late summer day. Though even with paint under the nails and two feet stuck to the floor, they're pretty terrific.
Roasted Red Pepper Salad
It would be wrong to say we picked the house we did because the gas stove is so fine for roasting peppers. But it did help. Peppers can also be roasted under the broiler or on a barbecue. Do not substitute jarred peppers here -- this dish is all about that fresh, smoky sweetness, which, sadly, can't be canned.
Fresh oregano or marjoram are equally, differently delicious in place of the basil.
3 Red Peppers, Roasted, Peeled, Sliced (see bottom of recipe for roasting instructions)
1/2 cup feta, preferably sheep's milk
1-2 Tbs. olive oil
1 Tbs. basil, slivered
1-2 tsp. balsamic vinegar, to taste
Slice roasted, peeled peppers into wide strips. Cover a plate with pepper strips, then season with a drizzle of olive oil, a shake of vinegar, and a hint of salt. Repeat, until you've used all peppers. Sprinkle feta and basil over peppers. Serve at room temperature, within 2-3 hours of assembly.
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Roasting Peppers: The goal, whatever the heat source, is to completely char the peppers' skins which saturates their flesh with an intensely smoky flavor. Think baby back sweet peppers. Once blackened, you'll place them in a bowl and cover them with plastic wrap for an hour or more. The steam will loosen the skins, which you can then rub off. Like hazlenuts, little bits will be left behind, which is fine.
On a gas stove: Turn flame to high, place pepper(s) directly on flame. As each side chars (4-5 minutes), rotate pepper with tongs and continue, until all sides are blackened. Cover and peel as above.
Under a broiler: Move oven rack to within 3" of element, top position. Turn broiler on to high. Cover sheet pan in foil, and load up your peppers. Broil peppers 4-5 minutes, then check. Rotate a few times, as needed, until all sides are blackened. Cover and peel as above.
On a barbecue: Place peppers on grate. Grill until first side is blackened, then rotate, as needed, until all sides are blackened. This moves quickly if the charcoal is newly-lit and the peppers directly over the flame. Alternatively, let them linger over the dying embers of some other dinner while you clean up, rotating as you think of it.