Farewell, Country Village

It was only 36 years old, but it felt like a step back in time to a slower, more connected world (actually physically connected, not just Internet-connected).

Country Village in Bothell, an assemblage of little shops and restaurants stitched together by meandering trails, will soon be bulldozed to make way for yet another drab collection of ticky tacky boxes.

This quirky little place was constructed by one family starting in 1981. I first visited in the early 1990s when I worked in Bothell, and my co-workers and I dropped in for lunch and Christmas shopping. 

In the following years I'd visit with my daughter, who loved riding the little train and watching the chickens and ducks roaming the grounds. 

My daughter grew up, as daughters tend to do. By and by, I sat by the pond with my mother during her final summer, watching children play on the big pirate ship.

But the wrecking ball will soon take a swing at it all, and only memories will remain. 

I visited Country Village during its last weekend to snap a few pictures, stroll the grounds, and reminisce. 

It was filled with other visitors who'd come to pay their respects, many of whom had played there as children themselves. 

A shopkeeper told me that the day before, he met people who'd flown in from out of state to say good-bye. Many tears were shed.

On this beautiful sunny Saturday, children dashed from playground to playground. A gaggle of teenage girls crowded into the crow's nest of the pirate ship for a photo, no doubt recreating a scene from their childhood.

Groups waited patiently  to take pictures in front of the cart-horse statue.

And, of course, the giant chicken.

I asked one shopkeeper if there was any chance that the developer was going to keep any of the beautiful trees or quaint features or the 1901 farmhouse. 

The shopkeeper sighed and just extended his arm to indicate the condos already built in an area sold several years ago that used to be a pasture. I sighed, too, when I saw the gray monoliths.

Yes, I know people need places to live, but surely it's possible to build housing without destroying everything that's quirky, fun, beloved, or interesting about a place and replacing it with cookie-cutter housing and the same chain stores over and over again. 

Driving around the area nowadays, it's sometimes hard to know what community I'm in because they all look alike--a series of mall parking lots connected by roadways, all boasting the same stores.

Country Village provided a nice "third place,"  where people can gather other than in homes or  workplaces: a town square in New England, a pub in Ireland, a coffee shop where everybody isn't wearing earplugs and riveted to a screen. 

I recall a lovely coffee shop in Seattle that closed up due to a rent increase in a neighborhood I once lived in. 

When I told the barista that I was sorry to see her shop go, the woman in line behind me huffed and puffed. She pontificated about how stupid it was to be sorry about things leaving because "progress must go on"! 

Progress? 

Just how the disappearance of a nice coffee shop that had only been in place for three years (only to be replaced by a useful but dull office that could've been located anywhere) was equivalent to "progress" was beyond me.

(Not to mention it had won an award for Most Beautiful Bathroom in some local newspaper survey. Believe me, it deserved landmark status!)

I once heard someone blandly say this phrase back on Long Island, where I grew up, to talk about an ugly building that was constructed smack-dab in the center of a pretty park view. 

"Congress must go on," she said flatly (and not ironically), even though she'd just been shaking her head in dismay about the structure.

Which just goes to show how stifling pat sayings can be--so shallow they're not even repeated correctly.

Sure, Country Village had its share of twee shops, and its demise isn't on a par with the societal problems dominating our headlines today. 

But it was a nice little sparrow, and now it has fallen, and I shall miss it. 

(How's that song go?)

"Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes made of ticky tacky
Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes all the same."

               --Malvina Reynolds

Boxcar that houses a shop

Run, chicken run

A tree I wish they'd save. Maybe there's hope as it is by a pond.

Workings of a windmill

It was fun to take a child on a walk around the place to look for details like this.

This is next to another sign that says nothing happened here in 1897. 

This was a fun store, like an old country shop that had everything you needed and then some.

Seriously the best chocolate chip cookies I've ever eaten. The shop, Doll House Baked Goods, will still be open throughout April (check their website for more info as well as online orders: http://www.dollhousebakedgoods.com/ but they don't have a new storefront yet. Sadly, up here in Woodinville people would love a good bakery and coffee shop, but the rents are too high for sweet places like this one or the lovely tea shop that is also shutting down due to Country Village's closure.

Speaking of tea shops...I had hoped to enjoy a final cup of tea at the tea shop, naively thinking it'd still be in operation despite the imminent closure. It wasn't. Instead, they were selling off their wares. So I rescued this chicken tureen. Because our home was seriously lacking a chicken tureen.

You're welcome. Wish we could.

Rueing Rhubarb, Stewing Rhubarb

Thumper and Tiffany (at right).

I should hate rhubarb.  I really should. It is probably the wicked plant that did in my lovable pet bunny rabbit, Tiffany.

Tiffany was a big, friendly white rabbit with brown ears, a rakish brown patch on one eye, and a sprinkling of brown spots on his back. Yes, his back.  Tiffany was named Tiffany when I thought he was a girl.

When Thumper, my female Dutch rabbit, gave birth to four little bunnies, it was a major clue that Tiffany must be a boy rabbit.

His hefty size and pleasant nature should have been a tip-off.   Buck rabbits tend to be more easygoing, while does are a bit more wary and territorial. Thumper was downright aggressive--she growled, attacked my gloved hand, and pivoted to keep me in her line of sight when I had to reach inside her cage.  The Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog had nothing on her.

Tiffany, on the other hand, was a doofus. Which was probably why he nibbled on a toxic plant in the first place. Wild rabbits would know better than to dine on rhubarb leaves. But I was in my early teens  and didn't know any more than he did about rhubarb.  I had never tasted rhubarb pie; I couldn't even describe what rhubarb was. But a rhubarb plant was growing in the fenced pool area, where I often set the rabbits free to romp, and I should've educated myself about poisonous plants before letting Tiffany loose in there.

Though maybe it was the rhododendrons he ate, in which case I am still responsible for his demise, but I can at least love rhubarb without any pangs of guilt.

Because if no deceased rabbits are involved, rhubarb is simply splendid. It grows easily, is one of the first vegetables in the garden to spring to life after winter, and can be transformed into tartly sweet pies, jams, jellies, coffeecakes, compotes, chutneys, syrups, and wine.

We have several rhubarb patches in the yard, though one of them is now consigned to be For Decoration Only. That's because last year, when the resident teen tripped over a bucket of motor oil drained from her truck, the patch was inundated with the nasty runoff.

Rhubarb flowers

This year, somebody else nearly backed over the plants; for weeks, they stood in a shrieking row at the lip of the deep tire rut, looking like Victorian ladies who've seen a mouse.  They will be allowed to live out their lives in peace, flowering at will and flaunting giant green leaves.

The first of this year's crop, taken from the stress- and oil-free patches, made its way into a chicken-rhubarb dish. The next harvest became an upside-down rhubarb coffeecake, using this recipe from The New York Times:
https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1013611-rhubarb-upside-down-cake

When I got to work on that recipe, at first I thought, well, how fussy. "Line the bottom of a 9-inch springform pan with parchment paper," it said.  "Butter the paper and sides of the pan. Wrap two layers of foil under the pan, and place it on a buttered baking sheet."

This was a cake I was making, I thought. I'm not roasting plutonium. I decided my grandmother's reliable springform pan wasn't going to leak, so I ignored the layers of containment. (I also used regular flour instead of cake flour, because I didn't have cake flour.)

Well.  The harsh fumes surging from the kitchen told me that there was a reason for all the containment, actually. The cake calls for a thick sugary syrup that's poured into the pan first, then topped with the rhubarb mixture and finally the batter. That syrup? It likes to ooze out of the pan and across the cookie sheet and onto the oven floor, it turns out.

A quick clean-up of the oven floor and replacement of the cookie sheet with a sturdy rimmed baking sheet saved the cake, which turned out delicious, despite missing its layer of caramelized syrup. I'm still wondering how the cake would have any of this glaze on it at all, even if you swathe it in layers of foil, because wouldn't that process just yield a delicious cake along with a pile of gooey foil? I guess this calls for making another cake.

Other great rhubarb recipes that are mainstays at our house:

Rhubarb Pecan Cake, page 44, Bundt Cake Bliss
Rhubarb Crisp Pie, page 51, Pies and Tarts (Williams-Sonoma Kitchen Library)
Strawberry Rhubarb Crunch, page 25 (and just about every other recipe), The Joy of Rhubarb

And don't forget we Washingtonians live in the nation's leading rhubarb-producing state, and you can even visit Sumner, the rhubarb pie capital, to enjoy the Rhubarb Festival.

Old willow ware viewed through windows in rhubarb leaf chewed by slugs.
Which apparently can eat rhubarb leaves without harm.

Boy Howdy, Plum Pandowdy!

It's been so hot around here that one of our fans finally conked out from exhaustion and was replaced with three new ones. The Pacific Northwest spent June and July smashing high-temperature records (13 days with temperatures of 80 degrees or warmer in June...8 days of 85+ in June...plenty of 90+ days...new record high recorded in Walla Walla on June 28 of 113 degrees...that sort of thing).

Thanks to this scorching, it's looking a lot like September around here, with parched brown lawns and trees shedding yellow leaves and mountain ashes already flaunting bunches of orange berries. And it surely must have something to do with our ornamental plum tree producing a bumper crop of plums, probably for the first time in its life.

Ornamental plum trees are not bred to produce luscious fruit. They're just supposed to look pretty decked out in their frilly pink spring finery. Perhaps some quirk of timing in when the tree bloomed this year due to the heat caused more of its flowers to be pollinated, because it's pumping out plums by the bucketful.

The plums are perfectly edible, which is not the same thing as perfectly luscious. We haven't felt terribly inspired to pick them.

For one thing, our tree's branches are up very high, and we don't have the right sort of ladder to boost us safely up into the branches. For another, the fruit, while copious, is scattered throughout the crown, not easily situated for picking.

And gathering up the fallen fruit is a tedious and unproductive activity. The only way to do it without constantly stooping and looking like one of those drinky-bird toys teetering around the yard is to crawl on hands and knees, inspecting each grape-sized fruit for worms. Any that aren't infested with worms are bound to have burst open, because they hit the ground like water balloons. You can hear them crash from across the garden.

All that effort garners a few cups of puny plums, which, though resembling red grapes, lack that fruit's snap, pop, and zing.  They're mealy and mushy, with a seed that takes up about a third of the interior. Fine for jam, but pretty blah out of hand.

But I did have a nice bowl full of yellow plums from a friend. It was way too hot to bother making jam, but it's never too hot to make a fruit dessert to serve with vanilla ice cream. I flipped through the recipe books and settled on a plum pandowdy.

"Pandowdy" is one of those words that's fun to say but has murky origins. The recipe book claimed that the name came from the way the pastry was laid across the cooked fruit and then chopped into squares and pushed down into it--an action called "dowdying." I haven't been able to verify that anywhere. Though perhaps if you smash something that's literally an upper crust to bits, it becomes dowdy...?

I never got to the "dowdy" part, though, because I was impatient and made the classic mistake of not reading the recipe through before assembling it, so I ended up dumping some dry ingredients into the pastry that weren't supposed to go in because they were for the filling. Oops. There was no way it would ever roll out under a pin, so I just crumbled it into blobs and dropped it on the filling. Even dowdier than the original plan.

The end result was an extremely tart caramel-colored plummy dessert with mediocre chunks of pastry in it. Filling definitely needed more sugar, which could've been supplied by putting on a crumb topping instead of pastry--but a nice dollop of vanilla ice cream offset the tartness, so the pandowdy was history in a respectable amount of time.

It didn't inspire me to crawl around the garden scrutinizing fallen plums and collecting them for another recipe, however. I'm leaving them to the birds (robins particularly love fruit, and it's fun to watch them stab the orbs and shake them around before swallowing them), and to Luna, who's been joyfully hoovering them up for weeks. She is transported with joy that we have a snack-dispensing tree in the yard.

But for the resident humans, walking across the yard is like tramping around on a giant sheet of bubble wrap, and it'll be that way for a few weeks yet, judging by how many plums are still dangling from the branches. I must say, this ornamental tree looks extremely proud of itself.

Of Comfort, Cookies, and Casseroles

The most frightening phone calls tend to come in the dead of night, ripping you out of the cradle of sleep and dropping you on the floor.

The effect is only slightly less jarring when the phone call comes in early evening, because at least you're awake, but there is still the same sensation of life-as-you-know-it falling overboard.

Never mind that, in the end, everything turned out to be fine, and nobody is sick or in hospital, and life went on pretty much as before. For that moment, when you see an unfamiliar number on your phone and answer it and it's your husband and he starts by saying "I'm fine, there is nothing to worry about, but..." and reveals that he went into the emergency room a few hours earlier with chest pains and has to stay overnight for observation, your vision suddenly narrows to a pinpoint and sounds are muffled and the world seems to be contained within a bubble made of the thinnest glass, ready to shatter at the slightest motion.

Most likely the cause of this event was stress ("only" stress), of which there has been an abundance this year. Everybody gets a serving of this time and again in the feast of life.

And that's where the comfort, cookies, and casseroles come in, brought by friends and family who assemble like firefighters in an old movie with a big tarp stretched out between them, ready to catch you when you jump out of the top story of a blazing building.

When my family was gathered at the hospital for several days a few years ago, existing in that strange timeless place one inhabits when a loved one is in the ICU on the threshold of death, friends stepped in, unbidden, to relieve us of all responsibilities for everyday tasks. A friend with a key to our house made sure the dog got let out, walked, and fed. The child was picked up from school, fed, and cared for. The refrigerator seemed to fill up magically with food, with casseroles and other dishes that needed only to be reheated. Mail was collected and milk taken in.

Coming home after each exhausting marathon of anxiety and despair in that time was like starring in a production of "The Tailor of Gloucester," in which the desperately poor and worried tailor, sick and feverish, takes to his bed knowing that he will never be able to finish making a wedding coat for the mayor by morning and will therefore be ruined, only to wake up and find the coat exquisitely completed thanks to the hard work of an army of grateful mice who toiled all night, unseen.

Though this most recent event was short-lived (and hopefully just a wake-up call and not a general alarm), the firefighters that are friends and family immediately began to stir. Siblings called to let me know they were on hand for anything. Two friends appeared in the ER with homemade meals and treats to take home with us so we wouldn't have to worry about a thing. Other friends weighed in on social media and via email with advice, shared experiences, and concern.

The custom of showing up with a casserole may seem sort of quaint and funny to people who are still in the immortal stage of life, but when the going gets rough, it's immensely reassuring to have someone show up with one, even if it's just tuna wiggle. "Food has the power to heal, to comfort, and to convey care and affection," writes chef Joyce Goldstein in her introduction to the cookbook From Our House to Yours, which was published to benefit San Francisco's Meals on Wheels program.

I certainly don't mean to infer that the bringing of food is appreciated only in dark times. Having meals show up when you're taking care of a brand-new baby is a lifesaver, too. (And anybody who wants to bring me food when absolutely nothing of any importance is going on is quite welcome to do so.)

One of my favorite casserole scenes appears in  Lars and the Real Girl. Lars sits in the living room, tensely waiting for news about his beloved Bianca. Women show up with knitting and sewing projects to sit quietly with him. "We brought casseroles," says one. Lars thanks her and wonders aloud if he should be doing something. He's told, "No, dear. You eat." Another chimes in, "We came over to sit." A third woman adds, "That's what people do when tragedy strikes."

Tragedy, however, didn't get us this time, and we went on to have a perfectly lovely weekend, complete with a lazy morning cup of coffee and a sunny-afternoon walk on the Tolt Pipeline trail. With plenty of warm minestrone soup and garlic bread to come home too, and a pot of lentil sausage soup to look forward to (the chocolate chip cookies are already pretty much history).

We've done our share of providing comfort food, too, and life being what it is, will no doubt be on both the giving and receiving end of this tradition many times in the future. As Garrison Keillor says regarding living a good life, "do your part, and bring a hot dish when it's your turn."

Red, White, and Blueberries

It's the Fourth of  July, which means, of course, that the 80- and 90-degree, relentlessly sunny, azure-skies days that we've enjoyed for a week have abruptly ceded the stage to gray, overcast, low-60s weather. Fingers crossed it brightens up a bit. (Nice weather is scheduled to return--natch--after the weekend.)

But! Still in the works are the other joys of summer, aside from sun and heat, namely the holiday's signature RED...in the form of fresh Rainier cherries...

and white (in the form of marshmallows that will later be smooshed in S'mores over a backyard fire--Jet-Puffed, of course, because they are apparently "America's Favorite")...

and BLUE, in the form of locally grown blueberries (which admittedly look more purple now because they've been baked into the Blueberry Yogurt Coffeecake, made using a recipe from the wonderful cookbook Dungeness Crabs and Blackberry Cobbler).


No, really, it WAS hot the past week, and not just "Oh, you Seattle-ites think a 70-degree day is roasting" hot. Really, 80s and 90s. MID-90s! Proof: here is the sign put on a fence up the street by an enterprising girl who was busy plying the thirsty multitudes with beverages. Note, please, the parched dragon.

If overcast skies persist, we might not see much of the colorful fireworks, but by then we'll be working on the colorful Rhubarb Marionberry Crisp, shown here before it's gone into the oven while a bloom of frozen condensation still rimes the berries (from the Phinney Farmer's Market) nestled among the rhubarb grown in the backyard garden.

Even if we don't get to see any fireworks, we can always find a rainbow somewhere, such as this celebration of the Supreme Court's recent ruling on DOMA as exhibited by Adirondack chairs up the hill.

Cold Nights, Hot Dishes, & One New Recipe a Week

Temperatures have dipped below freezing for the past few days. The car locks are frozen solid in the morning. Every leaf and grass blade is fringed with white. The Anna's hummingbird who rules the side garden perches in the bare plum tree, waiting for me to blow-dry the frozen sugar-water-filled feeder so he can have his breakfast.

These are fine days to stay inside and make good on a New Year's resolution to cook at least one new recipe each week.

The kitchen shelves creak under the weight of yards of cookbooks and bins of recipes clipped from magazines even though, week in, week out, I tend to plonk down the same routine of pasta and sauce, meatloaf, macaroni and cheese, hastily tossed-together stir-fries, and roasted chicken with rice and broccoli.

Not that it's a bad routine, but those cookbooks are looking sort of resentful and making me feel kind of guilty.

So: the first week of 2013's new recipe was...roasted chicken.

But not just the usual "throw in oven, turn up heat, cook til done" roasted chicken I usually make. I took the time to brine two chickens and roast them according to the instructions in the America's Test Kitchen Family Cookbook.

The friends we'd invited for dinner brought the side dishes (spinach salad, couscous with cranberries).

Having guests--a rather rare event, sad to say--inspired the try-out of a second new recipe: a dessert of Apple Bundt Cake, taken from the pages of Bundt Cake Bliss by Susanna Short. Served with powdered sugar and a dollop of fresh whipped cream on top, it tasted what like living inside an apple tart might be like. Which I mean to sound like a good thing.

This week's freezing weather has been offset by roasting pork loin, again using the brine-and-roast method from the Family Cookbook, which yields a succulent roast that cozies up nicely with red cabbage, egg noodles, and peas.

Sadly, there's no bundt cake to round out this meal. After all, there's that other pesky New Year's resolution--the one having to do with getting in shape--to uphold.

Crafty Cravings and Cratered Cheesecake

Advent calendar not made by me.

Crafting-wise, I am called on the carpet every year on the eve of the first day of Advent. November 30th is when I remember, "Oh. Yeah.
I was going to make an Advent calendar for my daughter and maybe even my niece and nephew across the country."

November 30, however, is a bit late to start working on something that is to be used early on December 1.

And then I remember that I had once planned to make an Advent calendar for my sister. Decades ago. She is now all grown up and the mom of that niece and nephew I mentioned.

It's still not too late to make all those crafts I intended to give as Christmas gifts, but give me time. I am ahead of schedule for being behind schedule on those.

Fortunately, it is much easier to go to craft fairs than it is to make crafts (or it is if you go to really good craft fairs, not the events that my friend F. dubs "crap fairs"). There's no shortage of excellent craft fairs in the Pacific Northwest, and two of them fall on the first weekend of December (when I have given up hope of ever making those Advent calendars, anyway).

The first one I enjoyed this past weekend was the Phinney Neighborhood Association's Winter Festival and Crafts Fair. Jewelry, clothing, pottery, toys, ornaments, journals, cards, hats, candles, prints--the variety of arts and crafts is mind-boggling and inspiring. And it's all displayed in a blue wooden building that dates back to 1904, as well as a 1918 brick building, both of which once served as schools. If you weary of crafts, you can park  yourself near the bake sale and take in entertainment that includes belly dancing, marimba music, Morris dancing, and the Ballard Sedentary Sousa Band.

I was tempted by oh, so many things and constantly forgetting that I wasn't supposed to be buying myself Christmas gifts. Luckily, I came across a beautiful display of letterpress prints by Ilee Papergoods in one of those moments of forgetfulness. And so it was that I came home with this cheerful picture of a rooster perched on a coffee cup shouting "Good morning." I figured with somebody that enthusiastic about getting up at the break of dawn waiting in the kitchen, any day would be off to a good start.

On Sunday, I went with my friend F. to the Urban Craft Uprising at Seattle Center, which I'd long  heard about but had never attended. There was a distinctly different vibe to some of the crafts here; lots of jewelry, cards, and other items had a sort of hipster or Goth or steampunk or other aura to them. I use these terms loosely because please note I am not remotely cool and hence am just borrowing adjectives here.

But there were plenty of the more whimsical and playful things I like, such as the adorable felted animals holding human (doll) heads in their jaws made by Moxie, and we stopped to snort and giggle at the weird juxtapositions of naivete and danger in the cards produced by the folks at the aptly named Unusual Cards.

One of those whimsical, playful things beckoned to me and implored me to take it home, and I wish I hadn't had to resist its high-pitched little voice out of a sense of Duty and Responsibility to the household budget and buying stuff for people other than myself. It was an absolutely precious pink chenille animal that I guessed (correctly) was a sheep with a very bunny sort of charm (which makes sense, as it was a creation of Hasenpfeffer Incorporated).

I went back to take a second look just as somebody else was scooping it up and purchasing it. Sigh. Well, at least I know where to find one of its cousins (that would be here).

Upon returning home, I felt inspired to do something more creative than loading the dishwasher. Hmm. Couldn't do needle felting because the last stupid needle broke last week and the new ones hadn't yet arrived.  Not inspired enough to draw. But baking? Oh, yes. In fact, that would be easy: the resident teen had made cheesecake for Thanksgiving, and there was virtually a bucket of cheesecake filling left because we'd made too much.

So it'd literally be a piece of cake to make one--just smash up some graham crackers (such a satisfying activity) and make a crust and bingo; easy as pie. The Thanksgiving cake had developed huge cracks as it baked--which didn't mar its taste at all--but this time I'd turn out a picture-perfect one.

Which I did--but the effect was pretty much destroyed when I set the cake on the counter to cool, opened a cabinet, and reflexively ducked as a heavy bowl dropped like a bomb from the top shelf and landed right on the cake. So instead of exhibiting cracking worthy of the San Andreas fault, the cheesecake boasted a large caldera. Which I totally intended, of course.

Peaches, Pie Birds, and Summer Slipping Away

Forms, files, appointments, commitments, emergencies, and chores have abruptly moved in with the arrival of September, rudely shouldering aside the languid days of summer. But fortunately the weather has been much kinder and more considerate, blessing us with lovely, lemony early-autumn sunshine and temperatures in the high 70s and mid 80s.

Such weather is glorious, at least, on this, the rainier side of the Cascades; fierce wildfires are devouring the eastern portion of the state, and the people there are longing for rain. The smoke smothering their landscape drifts westward to paint ruby and apricot sunsets.

Soon the relentless drumming of rain will drive us indoors for months on end; we'll wake up in darkness and return home from work in darkness, the garden will be a foreign, soggy place viewed through a scrim of water on the window, the sky a wrung-out rag of gray.

So we're scurrying to take advantage of these lingering summery days and the chance to sit in an Adirondack chair in the garden, reading and sipping coffee (morning) or wine (evening) and savoring the bounty of summer fruit still spilling into farmers' markets. The most recent batch of peaches and raspberries went into a fat, sweet pie.

The P-Patch is still gifting us with tiny alpine strawberries and plump raspberries (summer in a thimble!) while their stolid neighbors, the turnips, are just settling in next door to them, muttering to themselves about how nice the garden will be when the frivolous berries leave the neighborhood for good. But mums, asters, and other hardy flowers are steadfastly keeping up the summer fiesta for now.

The dog, lucky her, is blissfully unaware of any emotional entanglements with the change of seasons. It's all fine with her. For Luna, "life is a glorious cycle of song, a medley of extemporanea" (and dog food, treats, walks, fetch, naps, pats, squirrels, and more treats).

 

 

Just not ready to have the sun set on summer yet!