An exercise in two perspectives.

I
On those rare nights when we stay out late, arriving home to pitch blackness, I find myself stubbornly dragging out the short walk from car to house. The little animal inside me perks up then, flinging its eyes to the sky and taking big hungry gulps of stars. It is not enough, it says. I want more darkness, more smallness under the vastness. Which is why on those nights, after we retreat back back into the warm closed-ness of the house, I find myself resenting such a fine shelter and say, Honey, do you remember that one night on our honeymoon when we slept in the sage bushes? And you remember of course and go there with me again because you know how badly I need it.

I guess I always thought it would hit like a thunderbolt. Something so brazenly loud that I would know then and there that it had happened. A Sign. The Vision. Moses’s Burning Bush. It wasn’t until today that I saw that it just might not be that way for me. My way might be covered with decomposing leaves that needed a broom to reveal the path underfoot. Or it might be born slowly, like a high pitched whine that grows imperceptibly louder day after day until one afternoon before a nap your ear hears nothing but it. Or maybe it’s more like the dripping faucet at the far corner of the yard that goes unnoticed for years until suddenly one day in August you wonder why it’s so darn green over there.

Some projects just get away from you. We started the garden haphazardly, forced to pull up the brick pathway to make room for the new wrap around steps on our front porch. Then we decided to pull out the grass. From there I suggested, hey, if we are doing the front yard, why not take the opportunity to put in the retaining walls on the side yard and do both projects at once? Mama mia! Story in pictures below.

We walked the narrow alleys around Tsukiji fish market, drawn not to the entrances but to the back doors of the dozens of small eateries that crowd the outer market. Many were missing a back wall, or had doors flung open, begging for a breeze. A glimpse inside revealed a stark contrast to the orderly, spare and pristine front face of Japanese spaces. As a restaurant chef, my first thought was: No way these guys have health department inspections here! What clipboard wielding bureaucrat would give a pass to a commercial kitchen more akin to a claustrophobic apartment, complete with foot tall stacks of newspapers, wooden shelving, dorm sized fridges and low lighting.

Three trains and one ferry ride later we found ourselves riding electric bicycles on a small island called Naoshima in the Inland Seto Sea. The route from the port to our beachfront Mongolian yurt wound us over a quiet, hilly road filled with birdsong and sweet smelling trees. Toto, we are not in Kyoto anymore.

Apparently I have turned into one of those Japanophiles. Every evening I slip into my yukata, burn aloeswood incense and eat pretty much anything with chopsticks. In 35 years of travel I have yet to love a destination as much as I loved Japan. Now, just another creepy groupie, the haze settles over my eyes as I fall into a trance and answer, "How was your trip?" with all manner of adulations, venerations and punctuations. It is difficult to pinpoint exactly why this country affected me so strongly, only to say that it's as if a cottony veil has been lifted from my brow and I see the world differently now. Ya, sounds pretty corny, don't it?

I sit here still buzzing from a week spent in LA cooking with my friend David Wilcox at his restaurant Journeymen. The time away came right on the heels of the 21st anniversary of my mother's death on April 1st, and it turned out to be one of the most difficult April 1st's in recent memory. A few days before I unearthed a pile of letters she had sent to her parents between ages 19-25 and reading those brought out an intensity of the depth of loss that I had yet to experience. She wrote from the beach of Montauk, about how she got her first job as a cashier in a restaurant run by "two of the biggest queens around". I had never heard these stories, never even knew she had lived in New York or what her first job was, and with her gone by the time I was 13 there was still so much to talk about. It hit me like a gut punch how much had been lost, how much about her I would never know.

I wonder if there can be too much of a good thing when it comes to eggs and greens and their endless combinations. They have not as of yet served me wrong and I never seem to tire of them. They figure high in great success stories, such as when I wooed my husband with a breakfast salad of arugula topped with an egg fried in a pile of leeks. So it should not have been surprising that after devouring Samin Nosrat's drop dead cool cookbook Salt Fat Acid Heat , the recipe that jumped up and bit me was for a Persian dish called Kuku Sabzi. I have made this recipe at least five times in the past few months. We have had it for breakfast, taken it on a picnic, slathered it in hot sauce for dinner and both been caught sneaking cold bites from the refrigerator door with a fork. Just the murmuring of kuku...gets my husband excited. Yup, it's that easy.

We are in the midst of a serious fake out here on the West Coast. After a two week long heat wave we were plunged back into Winter, with below freezing nights  in our valley and very cool days. Plum trees have already burst into flower and our peach tree is unfurling as well, and while who can deny their beauty, I hope this doesn't spell disaster for the fruit farmers. Farmer's market has begun to turn green, with asparagus, tiny artichokes and green garlic. But the squash are still hanging on and have yet to loosen their grips on me.

As our short winter is already fading here in California I can smell a whiff of the open road in the air. The last time we popped our tent was in a friends driveway, so it is clearly time to get the rig on dirt again. There are so many choices when it comes to how to camp in the wild with your vehicle, and we chose the Autohome Roof Top Tent in the Columbus Variant for a few reasons:

I was sick in bed with the flu last winter with a house full of construction workers, which meant I basically had to lie there and listen to their bantering all day long. Two guys were doing the framing on the wall outside our bathroom, which was the first project we did and so was completely done when the rest of the downstairs ripped down to the studs. Their voices carried upstairs, "I mean, I don't think I would pick that color, but it does look kind of cool." Thanks buddy.

I have long been plagued by a sensitive stomach. Could there be a worse predicament for a chef? Too much butter, pain. Too much meat, pain. Too much cheese, pain. Luckily wine does me fine or else it would be a sad life! I find that I eat mostly vegetables, eggs, whole grains, nuts, and bits of meat. Yeah yeah, sounds really healthy and all, but do you know what a huge pain in the ass it is to go out for an epic meal and feel like you want to curl up into a ball afterwards? And pay good money for all that stomachache? 

It has been five months solid of cooking in our new kitchen and living in our newly opened up living space. And man does it feel good. Real good. Still pinch me am I dreaming good but comfortable, like it is truly ours and something magnificent that we created together. It's pretty trippy to look around at every single detail and remember the moment we made that choice, or the debate that went in to such and such...and it all came together better than we could have imagined. Our amazing architects COA had these beautiful photos taken so I just wanted to post them here because why not look at beautiful things on a Wednesday?

I am writing this on the fourth straight day of firestorms that are ravaging our beautiful countryside and towns of Northern California. The destruction has been massive and swift, leaving behind entire communities stripped of home, employment, everything. Our hearts are heavy as we do what we can, donate food, volunteer, open our homes...none of it seems like enough or anything really. In the meantime we also go about our own daily lives thirty miles to the south of the flames, cook dinner, exercise (indoors), run errands. It seems a bit surreal.

On Friday afternoon we hopped a plane to Burbank to go out to eat. If we were back a few forty years when air travel was actually fun, I may have done it just for the heck of it. Now, in this age of cattle herding and no leg room, the only thing that could get me to do back to back flights is David's cooking.  David Wilcox, my former mentor and one of our dearest friends, has been floating ever since he left MV Beerworks a few years back. So when we got the news that he had found a space and was going for it, we started counting down the days.

We just returned from two weeks of total and complete freedom. The wilds of Oregon, Idaho, Nevada and glorious Montana fully embraced us, let our bodies relax, turned off our minds, opened our hearts. Nothing to do but make camp, eat food, have a little run. While I always enjoy the excitement and boundary pushing of international travel, to me nothing compares to our self-sustained, off the grid trips in the Landcruiser. We sleep in our own bed, cook our own meals and most importantly are outside all day and what can feel like all night with the rooftop tent flaps wide open, staring at the stars, awash in the night breezes.

Sometimes we just pinch ourselves. To reach the end of this project and have it come out even more beautifully than we had imagined feels like a total miracle. Every step along the way was a push and pull with all of the various builders and designers, constantly holding our ground to stick with our vision, which was often more complicated and certainly very different from what most of them had ever done before.

When we bought our house in Woodacre two years ago we knew we wanted to do some work to it. Take a few walls down, put in a new kitchen, bump up the ceiling...see how casual and easy it all sounds? We now know that the lightness of those ideas does not reflect reality in any way, shape or form. After a year of planning, demo began in September of 2016. Nine months later, broken and broke, we are finally using our new space. I won't say it's done, because all the little details will likely drag out through the summer, but it is fully functional and glorious.

All it takes is one week of sun for me to become Impatient Chef. No matter that at market I hear from the farmers how their fields are still buried under water, how they haven't been able to get even a quarter of their crops in the ground yet. I grab a case of asparagus, some beautiful leeks, a few bunches of green garlic, and mouth foaming, look around for more. But that is IT. No mas. No delightful fruits, cherries or stonefruit bursting forth. No English peas. Nada.