The Ice Cream Man
New York winters are just long enough to allow you to forget everything you've learned about New York summers. As soon as the first cafe chairs are hauled out of the basements and onto the sidewalks, the official sign of the end of winter, I huck myself into spring with a reckless, sunscreen-free abandon, forgetting that my pale shoulders have not seen the sun for months and that a Super Sundae Cone has 410 calories. I run straight for the first sidewalk ice cream vendor that I see. And even though I know full well that, at least for the first few weeks, the fruitsicles and ice cream sandwiches that they are selling have been in a deep, deep freeze since they were packed up last november, I cannot be stopped.
Which is why, exactly two years ago today at the southeast corner entrance of Central Park, TC had to carefully and patiently lick me free from the strawberry Froz-Fruit that had welded itself to the underside of both my upper and lower lip.To say that we drew a small crowd would be an understatement. When my tears had dried (mostly shed for the embarassment of having my picture taken at close range by a non-english speaking bystander during the frantic extraction) and the bleeding had stopped, TC demanded to know why I had not at the very least allowed it to melt a little before trying to eat it. "Couldn't you see the mist coming off it? It looked like a freaking fog machine!". I tried to explain. "I just couldn't wait."
Ice cream trucks just bring something out in me, they have since the first time I saw one from across a crowded parking lot. I was a buxom (chubby) blonde of 19 and visiting friends over the summer in a sticky suburb of Boston. It was a simple truck, nothing fancy, with a small window and a big cardboard cut-out of a Klondike Bar mounted on its roof. I sprinted through the crowd towards it, mouth gaping open and eyes wide and crazed, like a pre-menstrual Ellie Clampett sans crude rope belt. Maybe not my proudest moment. As much as my friends teased me for being the only full grown woman running after the ice cream truck ( "It wasn't even moving", added my friend Angela), I still haven't figured out a way to control myself in like situations.
My sister has lived in a dreamy suburban permanently-summer California town for so many years now that she has forgotten the depravity of our childhood, and when the ice cream man drives through her neighborhood (TWICE a day sometimes!) she reaches for her purse calmly, as though there is no reason to hurry. Only her youngest and I are running for and then flailing against the screen door like crazed moths as soon as we hear The Music. Her older girls have never known a world without a truck that pulls up in front of your house and gives you perfectly cold treats, they know that if they don't feel like getting up or off the trampoline that they will have another chance later. I find their apathy difficult to understand. "Your mother and I used to ride our bikes five miles down a mountain on dirt roads with bare feet for icky popsicles when WE were your age." I explain to blank stares. "Why?" was my niece Quinns response. The youngest is pretty cool about it too, actually. I think he's just afraid that if I get there first there won't be anything left. Once, with all of us in her minivan, my sister caught the eye of the driver of the car behind her and gave a wave into the rear view mirror. I turned to see who it was and was shocked to see an ice cream truck right behind us. The driver, who is actually a woman, exchanged smiles and waves with the kids. I was beside myself. Then, and I swear this is true, she actually mouthed my nieces name. I looked at Mattie and said, with my outside voice, "SHE KNOWS YOUR NAME????" Mattie, who has been rolling her eyes at me since she was about ten minutes old, looked at me with a level of sympathy that you would not expect from a tween. "You're sort of like Nell sometimes" said my sister absently, almost as though she wasn't aware that she was saying it out loud. This sort of thing happens to me all the time in suburbia, exposing myself for the rube that I am and always will be. Oddly enough, it happens less in the city.
Melanie, my editor and dear friend, has in my opinion the best of both worlds. She lives in lovely Beacon NY, just within commuting distance of the city but in the heart of the Hudson River Valley, and squarely on the route of an ice cream man. Her house, which was where a lot of the photos for Weekend Sewing was shot, is a solid and gorgeous old thing that has that amazing quality of light that you only find in homes that were both built before the advent of electric lighting and for a socio-economic class that could afford to heat rooms with high ceilings. This is always the sort of old house that I develop serious and potentially marriage threatening crushes on. TC and I visited her last weekend and I was secretly hoping the whole time that the Ice Cream Man would cruise by while we happened to be on the front porch. Instead, on our way out of town, Melanie took us to a small and perfect and perhaps semi-permanent ice cream shop on Beacons Main Street called Zora Dora. Zora Doras owner, Steve, is to ice Cream what Alice Waters was to lettuce. If arugula seemed like an odd thing to put in your salad twenty years ago, then imagine ordering a popsicle made with cinnamon, rice, cream, and currants. TC's had mint and basil in it, which was delicious. The only odd combo was Chris's selection, which to be perfectly honest tasted a lot like what I imagine eating a frozen curry dish without first thawing or heating it. Still, we were hugely impressed. One of my favorite things about the shop is the windows, decorated with dozens of Popsicle portraits by one of Beacons artists, Erica Hauser, who also hand-painted the lettering on some of the walls in Melanies house, including the Babe Ruth quote "Never let the fear of striking out get in your way" that appears above her sons bed in the Pajamas for Everyone photo on page 79 in Weekend Sewing.
I fell in love with the painting (at top) that hangs in side Zora Dora of a grown man holding a Popsicle. Steve told me that he bought it on Ebay. It made me think of Mexico, where I lived for a little while after college and where ice cream vendors are very, very common. As I stared at it when I was in Zora Dora, I realized something. I almost never saw children buying ice cream from street vendors in Mexico, at least in the town where I lived. Children there didn't often walk around with money in their pockets. Vendors set up their carts in bus stations in the afternoons, or near busy building sights, where they could intercept their customers on their long mid day breaks. Their patrons were almost always grown men, hardworking and with cash in the pockets of their worn work jeans, many of them older than anyone I have ever seen chase down an ice cream truck in suburban america. Not counting me. It never occurred to me then, when I would walk by them and think them to be very sweet with their grown-up bodies and their shirts off and stuffed into the backs of their trousers, proudly holding melting Popsicles with rough hands in the late afternoon sun, how lucky they were that The Ice Cream Man still came to find them.
More Ice Cream Inspiration here.
Photo Styling and Bitey Little Horses.
One of the photo shoots for Weekend Sewing was at a place called Warrups Farm in Redding, Connecticut. As I walked around the grounds during my pre-shoot scouting visit, I was introduced to Abby, a spotty little miniature horse whose reputation preceded her in the form of a handwritten sign stapled to her fence. "PLEASE STAY BACK" it warned, "FEMALE HORSE MAY BITE". The crooked lettering seemed to send a foreboding message of its own, as though its author had just lost a few fingers and was frantically trying to warn others by penning the sign with his teeth or toes before losing consciousness.
Not believing for an instant that Abby meant any harm at all, I made this sketch. It shows the shot that I hoped to get for the Town Bag project, and implied that the best of purses could double as a feed bag on a weekend.
When the day of the shoot arrived, this was one of the shots I really looked forward to getting. Sadly, like many many seemingly solid ideas for photo shoots, it did not work. Abby, apparently, prefers leather goods to fingers. My first mistake was putting actual grain in the bag, which as any good photo stylist will tell you, was not at all necessary. I think that Abbys sign should be re-thought, perhaps to read something like "IF GIVEN THE OPPORTUNITY, THIS HORSE WILL EAT ANYTHING THAT SHE CAN PULL THROUGH THE CHICKEN WIRE THAT WE HAVE FRANTICALLY TACKED UP OVER HER FENCE, WHICH IS A LOT MORE THAN YOU MIGHT THINK POSSIBLE." Or something like that.
It became clear to us that we needed to rethink this shot. We broke for lunch and I sketched this (below), thinking that we could get a nice shot of the scrawly sign and Abby's maniacal little gaze through the fencing. What I had not anticipated was Abby's level of commitment. I would hang the bag and take two steps back, she would make a dash for it and I would have to wrestle it from her little bared buck teeth. I gave up after two or three tries.
I imagined having to explain the situation to Melanie the following week when she got the pictures from this shoot. "Where are the Town Bag shots?" she would ask. "The Town Bag has been eaten by an adorable but alarmingly ferocious miniature horse." I would say. And the long silence that followed would be the sound of my photo styling career ending.
Which is how we ended up with this:
Tomatoes rarely bite, and are always ready subjects.
Here are a few more sketches from our shoot at Warrups Farm and the shots they led to:
To see more images from Weekend Sewing, visit the gallery here. To see a picture of Abby and her barnyard friends, go here.
Bag Lunch
My mother is one of those women who sort of forgets to eat. I, on the other hand, would be more likely to forget to put pants on before leaving the house. In all the school years that I lived with my mother, she packed me a lunch exactly once. I really have to stress here, in my mothers defense, that I would not have been appreciative or deserving of bag lunches, no matter how carefully prepared. By the time I was in the tenth grade I had developed a mid day addiction to anything salty and lived almost solely on small bags of sour cream and onion potato chips, bought with the dollar in change that I swiped from my mothers tiny purse as I bounded down the stairs to catch the bus (which I mostly missed) on the way out the front door. This was both my breakfast and lunch system, designed to allow as much time as possible for the all consuming task of blow-drying my hair into an enormous mass and cementing its shape with a sticky cloud of Aqua Net. I used so much hairspray in high school that my chemistry teacher, Mr. Jones, put my name on a list of flammable solutions that hung on the science room wall and instructed my lab partners to never ever allow me to approach the bunson burners. Actually, I don't think I was even allowed to hold that little metal sparky thing that was used to light them. This was a brief and awkward phase, brought on by having lived during my junior high years in Santa Cruz, California, (which at that time was neck deep in the Valley Girl phenomenon and a sea of opalescent lip gloss and eye make-up) before returning to rural Vermont. Eventually, I readjusted to the frozen north and was dressing for survival by the time I went to college. Unfortunately, it was not soon enough to spare me from the Facts of Life themed pastel horror that is my senior picture.
Anyway, you can imagine my surprise on the one day that my mother made me lunch. It was a single piece of pale leftover barbequed chicken wrapped in an emptied plastic bread bag, and she drove forty miles to deliver it. It wasn't, after all, something I would have left the house with by choice. She dropped it off with the school secretary, Mrs Leonard, who announced over the loudspeaker during my applied geometry class that I should come down to the office because there was something waiting for me. She did not even try to disguise her disgusted joy as she handed it to me with two fingers. I should mention that neither I or my mother were strangers to the school office, and that Mrs Leonard and I actually liked each other very much, even though we both did some pretty awful things to each other, and exchanged evil little moments like this one regularly. If there was a reason or a logical explanation for this sudden fit of maternal care on the part of my mother, I don't remember what it was. I do remember walking away from that office and from a snickering Mrs Leonard clutching my naked little piece of chicken (I feigned glee, as though they had obviously misunderstood that it were somehow a special piece of chicken, but none of us were fooled) with the acute awareness that A) my unusual mother and our unusual way of life held the compensatory promise of an unusual future that my classmates could not even imagine, and B) I had to carry that freakin piece of slimy chicken all the way to the end of the hall before I would be able to throw it away without Mrs leonard seeing me do it.
Now, if you are thinking "Wow, that must have been your most embarrassing moment ever", you are wrong. That distinction, barring anything else that I may have blocked out completely, belongs to the time that my mother picked me up for a doctors appointment in the middle of a snowy day in front of the school and in plain sight, through every classroom window, of the entire student body of Enosburg Falls High School. Our car, at the time, was a rusty Datsun with a random starting problem that, according to the mechanic called Bucket Bob who we bought it from, was best remedied by crawling or sliding underneath the car, lying flat on your back, and using the end of a 9 inch steel wrench to connect (via conducting metal) two bolts that were somewhere on the cars undercarriage. Somehow, this caused the ignition to ignite and the engine to turn over.
To make sliding under her car easier, my mother kept a bright red plastic sled in the backseat. It actually worked very well and by mid-winter she was sliding in and out from under the car with the efficiency and grace of a mechanic from a Midas commercial. I must give credit where it is due, however, and tell you that the sled was Bucket Bobs idea. He pointed out that cold weather would likely exacerbate the starting problem, so the sled was a foolproof solution. “nine times outa ten, theres gonna be snow on the ground, so get yourself a sled!” I remember he said this with a tone of “of course.” and “why didn’t you think of that on your own?” I don't know why this was so acceptable to us, exactly. I think a new starter would probably have been another, better, solution, but since I was the one who had caused my mothers other, better car to be wrecked, which is how we ended up at Bucket Bob's shop with only $650 to buy another one, I kept my mouth shut. The bright red plastic sled cost us $11.99 at the Ace Hardware store. We paid for it with a pile of change that included no less than thirty pennies, all counted out with mittened hands.
Every time we got into that car I would pray that it would start without incident, and almost every time it did. But not that time. I sat there in the passenger seat, with my giant bangs smashed between my forehead and the Datsuns drooping ceiling, staring straight ahead through the filthy winter windshield and feeling hundreds of eyes on us. I can imagine how it must have looked from the classrooms above. Our little rusty car sitting in the school bus bay surrounded by dirty snowbanks, my mothers work boot clad feet poking out from underneath the front end. I heard later that a ninth grader sitting in math class had looked out the window and screamed, thinking that I had run her over (I don't know how I could have managed that, since I was obviously sitting in the passenger seat, but it did get me a respectful nod or two as I passed through the seniors smoking section on my way to 1st period the next morning) and unfortunately drawing a crowd at the window just in time to see my mother shoot out from underneath the car on her little red sled, pick herself up, toss the sled into the back seat, and drive away.
Anyway, I digress. While I like to think of myself as a very good cook (my diet is largely organic and local now, I haven’t had a sour cream and onion potato chip for a very long time), lunch has never really been my thing. In fact, its sort of amazing that I was able to get organized enough to develop a crippling addiction to coffee, considering my general lack of daytime meal planning. Thankfully, I work at home, making lunch an easy routine of reheating leftovers or putting butter on something. TC, on the other hand, goes to work every day in one of those massive office buildings on Park Avenue. If during his lunch hour he was so inclined to, say, buy a new tuxedo, tennis racquet, or Maserati, he is in a very convenient neighborhood. Likewise, if he would prefer to stand in line with four hundred other nervous financial industry employees for an eleven dollar take-away salad that may or may not be the one he actually ordered and then fight off an exceptionally competitively minded crowd for a sticky table already populated by strangers who are all trying to convince their bosses that they are still at their desks via their blackberries... well, you get the idea. He actually tells me that none of these things is the worst part. The worst part is walking past the Maserati dealership on the way back to the office.
So, traumatic history be damned, I decided to try packing bag lunches for TC. As with most things, I initially went completely overboard. For the first two weeks, I baked fresh bread. Heres what you should never have at home if thats where you work: freshly baked bread. After eating an entire loaf while it was still warm minus the two slices I used for TC's sandwiches in one afternoon, I decided to start buying it from the bakery down the street. All told, I experimented with maybe ten different sandwiches and five versions of my already quite good soft peanut butter chocolate chip cookies (whole grain flour, raw cane sugar, and protein rich peanuts make this the best possible afternoon sugar fix) and took copious notes during the process. I am happy to report that I have it down to a rather simple and affordable science: One shopping list, four unique and delicious sandwiches, and some pretty amazing cookies. I got things moving so quickly by the last week of the month, I even had time to illustrate the lunch bags. And, even though I spend way too much money on groceries in general, we balanced the books last night and found that we had saved about $200. And just in case anyone wants to give it a shot, I packed it up for you here. I am only sorry that I cannot deliver it by hand to your secretary.
click here to download all four sandwich recipes plus the cookie recipe
click here to download or print a shopping list (for everything, even the cookies!)
click here if you just want the cookie recipe. I don't mind. In fact, if you make just one of the things from this post, it should be the cookies.
Oh, and if you are looking for some really great cooking blogs, here are my three favorites: my dear friend Domenica, Smitten Kitchen (some great sandwich and budget meal ideas), and Delicious Days.
Sample Yardage Has Arrived....
Heres the thing about me. I can't keep secrets. I have huge amounts of respect for the blogger designers who leak out tantalizing bits of information, I really do, but I am not capable of such self control.
Its a good thing that Claudia will be in the studio helping me sew next week because I have major plans for this pile of Far Far Away sample cuts. Still no word on when exactly the goods will be available stateside, but I will let you know when I hear something...
I am so very excited about the fact that Far Far Away will be offered on both a linen/cotton double gauze and a cotton sheeting. Hats off to Kokka, they do such beautiful work! This double gauze is the most perfect fabric for -ahem- a summer blouse perhaps? Here is a peek on how the line looks now.
Made in America
Our dining table was made by hand from a single plank of thick pine by an anonymous Yankee at least 200 years ago. It eventually, as all things inevitably must, washed up on Craigslist where I stumbled across it. I then managed to convince Denyse to drive extremely far in the middle of a snow storm to help me collect it in a rented car that was so small that we had to slide it between the front seats to get it home. Luckily, my table was made in a rare style that I believe antiquarians would call “Early American Tinker Toy”, with peggish legs that can be put in and out of place easily (but sometimes with a bit of squeaky twisting), otherwise Denyse would have had to lie down between them in the back of the car on the way home, which would have made it much more difficult for her to push cookies into my mouth and to distract me from the cars that kept sliding of the road in front of us as I drove home at 32 miles per hour in a blinding sleet. I love that it has no nails or glue. When we set it up in our dining room I looked at TC and said: “This thing will last forever”. Still raw from the recent loss of his prized but wrecked-with-petrified-cheese toaster oven, he nodded sadly, eyes closed.
I like to imagine my great great great great great (great? great? great?) grandfather having made a table just like this one. He lived for quite some time in a cave, according to the Scituate Rhode Island history books, which also claim that he “fought off wolves” (the original tenants of said cave, I’m guessing) and walked into town for flour and whiskey monthly. On one of these walks he convinced a neighboring girl from a nice family to marry him and move into his cave with him, so obviously he must have had a very nice table, and since we know that he wasn’t into nails or glue (see “lived in cave”, above), it was probably a lot like mine.
This is the most amazing thing, to me, about being an American: That each and every one of us can trace ourselves, through one branch of family or another, to someone who was exceptionally brave in the face of poverty, wilderness, or war. One of your relatives, odds would have it, made their own dining table, chopped their own wood, grew their own food, walked miles into town for hootch and other necessities on a semi-regularly basis, and managed to avoid being eaten by bears or wolves while doing so at least long enough to procreate. Another of your sturdy lineage likely grew entirely self reliant through the Great Depression, sewed all of her own clothes, mangled a chicken or two by hand, brewed her own moonshine, and survived long enough to humiliate you by wringing out her tea bag and putting it back into her purse during your wedding reception. Things have gotten much more convenient, to be sure. My mother certainly doesn’t have to make her own liquor. She does so anyway, with mixed and sometimes permanent results, but you get the point. We all have it somewhere within us, as my niece would say, to DEAL. To make do. To get by with what we’ve got. We all have that in common.
My grandmother, an American by choice rather than by birth, makes an annual batch of baklava with a nut-grinder that has survived three wars, fifty-five christmas cookie seasons, 7 daughter in laws, and a (alleged) clepto-maniac next door neighbor without as much as dulled blades. My uncle has his grandmothers blender, which I covet to the point of threatening, unless he leaves it to me, to announce at his funeral that he regularly wore womens underpants. He and his blender will likely survive me, but I need to cover my bases. You could make a soup out of forks with that thing. So why is it that I have just thrown out a toaster oven that was just a few years old?
They have this stuff because it was meant to last a lifetime. Their generation survived the last miserable round of depression and recession, and forever afterwards made careful purchases. They bought things that were meant to last forever. Its these things that, especially lately, I am obsessed with: Those american brands that grew out of and long survived eras of depression and woe, that survived wars and natural disasters and a population that consumed nut-grinders at a rate of one per half century, and they are still here today. How Inspiring.
My list of favorites is as follows.... and I would really love to hear your favorites too.
I first came to love Sees Candies shortly after moving back to California at the age of 23. A San Francisco Icon, Sees has a kiosk at the airport there. I became so accustomed to eating a half a box of dark chocolate caramels between unboarding and baggage claim that it got to the point that the sound of any pilots voice announcing any descent into any city would make me drool a little bit. My favorite thing about Sees is that it was a company born during the depression, yet thrived. There is always a place in the budget for chocolate, I suppose.
(pictured above) I have had two pairs of Frye boots in my lifetime, both continue to look better with age. Some of their styles are made overseas, but the classic Campus and harness styles are still made here in the US. I am not sure what it is about these boots. Western without being country, bold without insisting upon themselves. They hold their own in almost every social situation. I've wore them to dinner in Mexico, drinks in the West Village, and while shopping for a vintage cowboy shirt in Santa Fe, and never once felt like an imposter. I felt that way even before I knew that these boots were worn by both Union and Confederate soldiers during the civil war, and by those wagon train wives and their families when they pushed west. They are truly a little bit country, a little bit rock and roll... but aren't we all?
I have always loved Pendleton blankets, even more so now that I have seen their recent special edition design based on a painting by American artist Fritz Scholder. These blankets are incredibly warm, really beautiful, and come on about a million patterns and colors. The baby blankets make an especially wonderful gift. Fritz Scholders amazing paintings are on display in both NY and DC this winer, and really worth the trek.
My Kitchenaid mixer is not only the prettiest thing about my kitchen, its also the most useful tool I own. With it I can make pizza dough or bread without taking my rings off, thanks to the dough hook that kneads and kneads and kneads..... And these things do last forever. I gave my sister a vintage one and it works perfectly, even though the guy I bought it from claims it sat in his garage for twenty years “makin’ spiders happy”.
