sweet potatoes baked with apple butter

Sweet potatoes are all very well, but this time of year they need all the help they can get--there's a lot of competition around the holidays for truly festive food. So here's what I'm doing with sweet potatoes this year.


Get yourself  bunch of sweet potatoes (I have a big family, so I've got eight monsters lined up).


Boil gently until the spuds are just tender,  maybe 20 minutes. Don't overdo it or you'll get mush, which will mess up the next step.


Let them cool off just long enough so you can handle them, or wear mitts, and peel the skins. They will usually just slide off the sweet potato with very little coaxing.


Slice the partially-cooked spuds about 1/4 to maybe 1/3 of an inch thick


Use some of that Pam-for-baking stuff or your usual shortening to grease a deep baking pan, and then put a layer of slices in there. Salt lightly, sprinkle maybe a quarter-teaspoon of lemon juice around, maybe a bit of pepper, maybe some nutmeg, and then top with a fairly thin layer of apple butter. Use the thick, brown, yummy kind. 


Repeat the layering  and sprinkling until the spuds are gone. Top with pats of butter (don't get too carried away) and bake about 25 to 35 minutes at 325.  


You can make this the day before the feast and reheat it in a 300 oven until hot clear through. It may look a little messy on the plate, but it's yummy.

A hole in the water

The mountain, unmoved

Ever since early October, the so-called music room in our house  has been filled with deck cushions, boat hooks, charts, logs, cruising guides, throw life rings, chafing gear, dock lines, bumpers, life vests, deck brushes, fishing gear, electronics, and even a large non-skid  mat that normally covers the floor of the pilot house. 

It gets worse. Underneath all these items is a very large blue plastic chest, a sort of monstrous Tupperware container the size of a Shetland pony. I don’t remember what it’s full of and it’s too late to find out now—there’s too much stuff piled on top. 

This minor mountain has been sitting there six or maybe seven weeks, ever since  a big Nor’easter came through and forced our boat (and many others), out of the water and up onto what’s known as “the hard.” (I’m charmed by this usage and deploy it in a showoffy way whenever I can. Like now, for instance.)

Of course we talk every now and then about putting  this great tangle of gear in the loft of the barn where it belongs, but we can’t seem to do it—for some reason we like it right where it is. 

It’s said that a boat is a hole in the water into which you pour money, and maybe that’s true. I have to add, though, that a boat, once purchased, costs quite a lot less than a horse, and the boat hardly ever goes lame or needs shoes more expensive than the ones I wear, and mine don't wear out every five to seven weeks.

I’ve also read that, when people are asked to name the one purchasing decision in their life that made them utterly miserable, buying a boat is invariably at the top of the list. 

I understand that—boats make you work hard, and you are often wet and anxious, sometimes hungry, and always  a long way from any sort of internet connection. Boats also attract insects at the dock and repel bass when you’re away from it. We have a fish finder, so I know this to be true. This instrument displays fish with great accuracy as they light out for the territories, and these vanishing edibles show up on the instrument display looking exactly like those little Pepperidge Farm cheese snacks; all that’s missing is the little baked-in smile. 

And yet we cannot move this pile of gear. 

It’s not laziness—we’re talking about two people who spent most of the past summer moving things in and out of storage boxes and up and down steep stairs to accommodate a major kitchen renovation. And it’s not sloppiness, either—my husband is as tidy as a cat, and the sort of person who unplugs toasters, alphabetizes sheet music, and folds laundry so swiftly and neatly I’m shamed by my lumpy halfwit efforts. (I do cook and wash dishes, but it seems inadequate penance.)

Here’s the honest truth: This mountain fills a hole in both of us, and the dimensions match  almost exactly the length and beam of Clancy's Jig. It seems likely that the mountain will not move until the boat comes off the hard and displaces the clean, sweet water of Champlain  again.

The Ziggy experiment

Haflingers are a breed of horse named for a village, Halfling, that's now in northern Italy, although it used to be in Austria and most of the people who live there speak German. Things like this happen in Europe--I read once that the Dutch national anthem, "Het Wilhelmus," declares allegiance to the king of Spain.

Anyway. I bring this up because, for the past three weeks, I've been doing groundwork with a rugged, clever Halflinger named Ziggy, full name Sigmund Freud. Ziggy is a school horse, and like a lot of school horses he has some issues with the way he is ridden and handled--he is  nibbly, pushy, a pain to lead, and unfortunately knows his own strength, which he uses to snatch at hay bales and get in some unsponsored, stubborn grazing. Even for fairly skilled people, he's a major pain in the neck to handle, and a few years ago he dragged an inexperienced handler out the barn door and broke her collarbone.

His endless, anxious chewing means his reins are a slimy, toothmarked mess, and he's probably munched any number of cross ties down to a frayed nubbin. Plus sometimes when he's asked to pick up the right-lead canter he runs away, very fast, and scares the bejeezus out of his rider. 


But I can't help it. I like him. He is obviously intelligent and has figured out how to make his life easier with his rapid-fire resistance and his heavyhanded leaning and shoving. It's hard for me not to admire his resilience and his commitment to results, since one of the main outcomes is that no one really wants to ride him. He gets to loaf, which from his perspective is a pretty good arrangement.

But there's also more to Ziggy than I knew: Groundwork has let me feel and see his ferocious anxiety about whips and his defensive posture toward people in general, but at the same time I can also see he wants to trust, wants to be a contributing partner in a horse-to-human relationship. I think maybe he trusted once and still remembers--when I use ground exercises the right way and can get his attention and admiration, he becomes soft and yielding and instantly beautiful. We trot together, halt together, pivot, back up, set our safe boundaries, fool around with poles on the ground, and generally talk about what to do with pressure and how to make pressure go away. He's in the game and interested; I am convinced that Ziggy sees the point of the experiment and the value of what I'm trying to explain.

Today, about halfway through my session, my groundwork coach, Betsy, suggested that I could try gently manipulating Ziggy's tail while he was resting between exercises. I've never really monkeyed much with any horse's tail except to braid, so I carefully felt under his dock and noticed right away how tucked and stiff his whole tailbone was. With help from Becky, I slowly loosened the muscles around the bones so his tail actually arced slightly away from his haunches. As soon as this happened, he dropped his head, mumbled, and then made that little flutter noise that horses make when they have let go of something that worries them. 

Good boy.

talking to imaginary friends

One of my longstanding bookmarks takes me to a plot bank--this is a collection, not really of  story lines, but more like a random, weedy compilation of prompts that might trigger a story. 

I go there when my head feels unusually empty--I like to scroll down the list and just pick something more or less at random to write about for an hour.  It's a low-stakes game but one worth playing: If the writing stalls out it's not my fault, and, if it flies, I'm a genius after all. 

Today, though, I started getting interested in the list itself, not as prompts but as legitimate discourse that just happens to be in random order.

Listen:

  

Back from prison with some new vices,  

there's more to him right now than meets the eye.  

Grandma is convinced he's in some kind of cult. These days,

it looks  like he lives out of his car.

He sees the face of Christ in a anthill

and tries to make the car into a work of art;

He says, "The fumes from the new asphalt are too much,"

and starts assuming the role of a dead sibling.

Then he starts confessing to old sins, and we all notice,

that the puppet show plot is very close to his real life.

This is what it is like when a family disapproves,

and when a close friend begins talking to an imaginary one.

Selections from Hatch's plot bank, reconfigured.

handy dandy

I have just finished sweeping up after yet another kitchen catastrophe--I dropped a favorite mixing bowl while making stuffing for fish. 

That's probably the third glass bowl--I got a set of them as a present--and all three go into the same debit column as the two wine glasses, the blue-and-white creamer, and the nicer of my two teapots. And then there were all those Christmas ornaments last year, some of them old and lovely.

It's always the right hand, and I suppose that's the upside--I'm left-handed--but where does it end? Will I soon be typing with a little stick taped to the end of my nose?

A good hurt

Today, for the first time in a very long time indeed, I rode a horse.

The back story: In 2005, I had an accident that injured my neck and spinal cord; this led to a botched surgery in 2005, a corrective surgery in 2007, and, just last fall, a third surgery that we hoped would improve my grip and balance and ease at least some of the chronic pain. As you can perhaps imagine, I am heartily sick of doctors, neurologists, and pain specialists, although I love my surgeon, a rider herself, who has coached me and motivated me through the worst five years of my otherwise fairly cushy and comfortable life.

None of that matters today. It's not behind me, but it doesn't matter.

This morning I rode Prince, the lead character in my book, Conversations with a Prince, and, thanks to a set of adaptive reins and a patient teacher, I was able to produce an almost-acceptable twenty-meter circle. This doesn't sound like much, I know,  but Prince is a squirmy, amiable mess, so this was an accomplishment.

At first I couldn't find the the sweet spot--I felt like I was hovering in the right general vicinity of a real seat, but my crooked, weakened body would have none of it. My coach Jeannette talked me through that part in her way, and Prince talked me through that part in his. Slowly, I was able to balance on my seat bones and get my midline in the middle of my horse; I doubt there is anything nicer than that quiet moment when you feel yourself find   physical harmony with a strong, trustworthy creature who speaks a little human and you speak a little horse. And using my cripple reins--reins I  could actually hold onto--I felt for the first time in a long time that light buzz of contact electricity that, for me, signals the arrival of complicated joy. I rode at the walk and rising trot for half an hour.

Now everything hurts--neck, shoulders, arms, and (weirdly) the bottoms of my feet. But it's a good hurt. I am also dirty, covered with a sheen of silvery-yellow hairs. But this is good dirt--after I got home I spent several minutes just smelling my ratty black schooling gloves.

I've seen dogs show this same kind of focused, olfactory interest in my riding clothes, so dogs and I agree--horses smell nice, a complex mix of ammonia, dust, sweat, and something else--cardamom? Marzipan? I've never been able to identify the sweetness, but it's something you would gladly put into a batch of cookie dough.

The musical horse

One of the unexplicated mysteries in riding is why horses like human music and why so many horses have specific tastes in music. 

Big Band for a big horse

    I had a big spotted mare when I was growing up who was a fearless jumper but who otherwise unpredictable and often quite cowardly. Scatty, unfocused, and  prone to  panic, she liked Bach--I found this out quite by accident one year when I was teaching at a summer camp and brought her with me. The only station we could get on the radio there was a sort of light-classical mix, pure mayonnaise, but each Friday morning from ten to noon they played Bach. And, as it happened, Fridays morning was when I would usually work her on the flat, with Bach in the background. She would settle into the music and stay on tempo, her ears flopping to the sides like a donkey's, completely relaxed. She was my  first horse.


My last horse, before all these neck surgeries put a stop to riding, was a huge Dutch Warmblood gelding (above) who had nothing whatsoever going on between his ears. This was nice sometimes, when a spectacular lack of imagination made my life easier, but it also made schooling him up both boring and frustrating--we could work on transitions and brightness off the leg on Wednesday, and by Thursday morning he'd simply forgotten everything we'd talked about. It was as if he'd done a full system dump overnight, and all I came back to was a blank screen and a blinking cursor. 


He liked big band--String of Pearls, Parade of the Milk Bottle Caps, Walkin and Swingin, stuff like that. And like the spotted mare, he set himself inside the tempo, flopped his ears, and danced. And the four horses I have had in between all did exactly the same thing, once I stumbled over (and learned eventually to hunt for) the music that liked best.


It's easy to dismiss this phenomenon and say of course horses like music because music is beautiful. But that assumes that horses share our opinions about beauty, whatever beauty is, and these's no real evidence that this is true. I've never seen a horse admire a painting or get caught up in an interesting movie or play, for example, and I'm quite sure that the stories horses tell to themselves and to each other are very different from the stories we tell about them or, for  that matter, the stories we humans find beautiful and describe as literature. 


I've been thinking a lot about this lately, and wonder if musical preference in horses is linked to their individual body music--their natural tempo and their individual nuances of gait. One of the things that make horses so interesting is that they are all so  different--they trademark themselves, and elaborate along a consistent theme. They know who they are in a purely physical, very specific way, and their reliance on tempo is far more advanced and complicated than a cow's or or a pig's or any other domesticated barnyard creature. Pigs are very intelligent, and I'm a fan of pigs, but horses trump every species but our own in this one dimension.