Vacation Timelines

There are things I need to write. I've been postponing them. I only made the space to write what other people asked for.

There are things I need to build and do, books I have to read because I promised myself.

But I am on vacation for a bit.

Which seems a little odd since I am not at a regular place of employment. But I'm just a silly human. Vacations are about different spaces not different definitions of work.

School counts as work too. I'm not being fair to myself. I should step back and allow myself to be an observer.

But maybe, I can be an observer up close.

OK. Vacation.

Then I'll get back to all the jumbled words and see about sorting them out.

Do you guys need this ball back?

What I Did on My Summer Vacation - Table of Contents

Vacation

This puts the What I Did on My Summer Vacation series links in chronological order so that you can read it like a story.

Also it allow you to find the Mushroom Soup recipe really quickly . . . .

1. The First Cup of Vacation

2. Coffee and the Beach

3. Drinne's Big Adventure

4. Vacation Soup - The Longwood Gardens Mushroom Kind

5. Vacation as Inverted by the Go-Gos

6. The Last Cup of Vacation

The Last Cup of Vacation

When the last full day of vacation rolls around, you usually have to spend that day preparing for it. Which we did a little bit.

But not the usual way.

There is a ceremony at the end of Shabbat where you light a candle and sing a song and pass a beautiful spice box around the room and everyone inhales deeply. The Sabbath is separated from the rest of the week by the lighting of candles. It is the sanctification of Time, which is a very odd concept, since most religions sanctify people, or things, or and mark that sanctification with Time.

The idea behind the spices ( called besamin) is that the Sabbath is fragrant and sweet and invisible, like scent. So when we inhale the scent of the spices it is to have a sense memory that we can reach for to keep a little of the Peace and sanctified Time with us during the rest of the week. This ritual which is done at home is called Havdallah

So our last full day of Vacation we treated like a Havdallah for the Vacation. We came to find peace and separate ourselves from our workdays and learn to see with different eyes.

We took our different eyes out for a hike to the observation point.

We walked along the road that was next to the beach to start. It's New England, it's not a commercial beach and it's not the same as California beaches or southern beaches. It's beach then forest. I wonder if it's a little like Ireland.

It's the way I grew up expecting beaches to be. It's the type of shore in Poe's Annabel Lee. I know most people like Caribbean beaches, they are beautiful and warmer but there is so much beauty and variety of color here where no one is allowed to touch it and make it something to sell.

Poppets are way too short to see this view. However, poppets have a great deal of color on the beach at their own level.

We walked along the beach and studied and enjoyed the passage of time. It was clear and crisp, a beach day for hard work and sailing.

A day to breathe in scents to keep when you are back in the work year to remember that time can run at different paces.

A scent to remember when you walk the same beach next year and see the same scene, but the young man will be a different height, and a slightly different person, and you will be too. But the scent will be the same, and the dog will still be there waiting for The Boy to throw the ball into the ocean before we are permitted to continue on our way.

And slowly, the walk turns from beach into the houses at the outskirts of the beach, and then again into forest. This is what our different eyes can see on one side of the observation post.

And this is what they can see on the other:

Strange things grow in the forest.

There are wonders if you look at all the levels

And on the way back you can stop and look closely at the things you noted on your way, and think about the difference between the forest and the beach. Between the vacation and the work year, between one decade and the next.

And then you can think about the difference between the land and the sea, and celebrate them by submersing yourself in both, and if you are really, really lucky the clouds will part on your havdallah day of vacation and you will see your Very Dearest Friend and the dog in blue sky an illuminated cloud and consider yourself lucky for all of it, because you get to breathe it in with the scent and hold on to it when you get home.

And then, in the lunar calendar the day ends with sundown. Unhurriedly you prepare for the trip home on wheels and gears and electricity, and with the morning light you and the Coffee Poppets perform the real, final closing ritual of Vacation.

Good to the last cup.

Vacation as inverted by the Go-Gos

This Entry is a little rambling, like the end of a vacation. If you missed the post about the Mushroom Soup, I highly recommend you check it out. The whole recipe is being demonstrated by the Coffee Poppets.

You see I was thinking about the Go-Gos.

Did you know they were a punk group?

Yes they were. Really.

But this silly song, made with a silly video, made them a pop girl group.

It's very hard to say "no" to material success, but you can't really lie about yourself.

I wonder what would happen to them now.

Everyone would have known that they were hard core punk, because they would have a facebook following and a rating at Pitchfork.

The video of them being quite drunk and obscene would not only have come out in realtime, it would have probably made them more popular.

But only with their niche. No crossover success. I wonder if it would have been better.

The chorus is a rousing

"Vacation, All I ever wanted.

Vacation, had to get away.

Vacation, meant to be spent alone."

But the rest of the song is someone who couldn't enjoy herself because she's pining away for some jerk. So she isn't really doing anything for herself at all.

And yet, I see the song sung as a kind of ode to vacations.

I think they're doing it wrong.

Alone time is best punctuated by time with friends.

We've had some latecomers to the house.

Poppet and Cthulu came up with the second shift.

Did you know that the Cthulu stories and Miskatonic U. and such have a bit of history in Massachusetts?

The Shadow over Innsmouth takes place in an area further north than the Shipwright's House but the landscape is the same.

Poppet and Cthulu were able to find a number of locations pleasing to their sense of style to continue their reading.
This location was right in front of the house. It's been a rather damp summer here.

This Mushroom was not harmed in the preparation of the Vacation's Mushroom Soup.

I don't know what kind it is and Cthulu likes it so it's most likely either deadly, dangerous or just Not A Terribly Good Idea.

However it does give a kind of Mushroom Theme to our vacation.

The Most Adventerous Red was able to collect a number of Poppet sized Seashells.

I believe that some of these shells will find their way into Poppetropolis.

Maybe that will be the Most Adventurous Red's new way of sustaining his adventuring lifestyle.

He really doesn't seem to spend any time in Poppetropolis. It would be useless for him to have an apartment there. He'll just stay with friends. I can't really see him endorsing the Go-Go's song for vacationing.

The Steampunk Poppets also came with the second shift and they spent some time investigating the antique tools of the time honored New England Tradition of a Well Stocked Bar.
There was a vacation several years ago where all the new recipes that tried that summer were mixed drinks. I'd never been a big drinker but I was doing a lot of party planning.

It was the most logical place to try this since it was the only place we knew that had all of the bartender oriented implements mentioned in the drink recipes. They belong to the house. I believe they are younger than the house, but I'm not completely sure.

It does amuse me to no end that this is the place where one is most likely to hear nothing being ordered at a bar besides Gin and Tonics.

We did find a recipe for the earthling varient of Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters that summer, but it wasn't worth recommending. Obviously it just isn't the same without that Ol' Janx Spirit.

So our time away winds down, but I've been away enough that it feels like it's approaching slowly.

It's at the right pace. As a matter of fact the pace is so relaxed that we are writing about it in current tense when we've all been back for a couple of days. But it refused to be rushed here in the Dreamtime. We are just as relaxed about the vacation coming to a close as we are about being on the beach. The second shift came later into the vacation and they are leaving earlier, but the Poppets who came with them are staying the full run.

There's one hike out to the observation point still to go, but for today's post it's good just to think about how much easier it is to let time pass without thinking of the things you intentionally left alone.

That's why you go on vacation, not to forget or avoid the things you left behind, but to give them and yourself some space.

I would not have wanted to be a Go-Go, defined by a song that is forever branded as upbeat by those who aren't thinking very hard. It's like they're trapped in amber until Gen X has passed and time can leave them alone.

Which may be all they ever wanted.

I will try very hard not to forget what I've learned about time on this vacation.

I have high hopes, after all I learned how to muddle during the summer of many mixed drinks and I haven't forgotten that.

Vacation Soup - The Longwood Gardens Mushroom Kind

When I am on vacation in Massachusetts I cook.

I have my Very Dearest Friend who will eat the foods with me that let me make cooking a celebration of feeding people and art and experience.

From a very early age I have desired to be the one to feed people. I always want to feed the artist. My mother is an artist and I wanted to be like her, nurturing and real. I wanted to feed her, because cooking for someone is the type of love where you don't have to feel all sentimental and mawkish. Each recipe has a story, but this year the Big Recipe's story was mentioned here.

It is of a piece of the year and a perfect centerpiece recipe. It is the Longwood Gardens recipe for Mushroom Soup. I had to learn things along the way and the Poppets helped.

Here we go:

First you have to make the Mushroom Stock:

Mushroom Stock Recipe

Ingredients:

16 ounces of white button mushrooms,

chopped

These are the regular kind that you can buy in almost any store. For the stock you get to use the whole mushroom. But its a lot of mushrooms to chop. This is what about 4 oz of mushrooms look like when they are chopped

1 leek, chopped

Leeks are an adventure. The first time I knowingly had leeks was a chicken in leek and truffle sauce at Butler Terrace and it was incredible. My boss took me there for my 21st Birthday, I also had my first glass of non-religious wine.

So yes, my 21st birthday blowout was an exclusive gourmet restaurant and one glass of an excellent sommelier recommended red.

I may have been an actor, but starving wasn't really the issue. But eating with the rich adults I worked for was a waaay better introduction into the land of the grown than the benders my friends barely remember and I can still taste the succulent interplay of the crisped chicken and the truffle sauce at the edge of my tongue when I think about that luncheon. That and the way the flavors deepened and changed with a sip of wine in the middle of the afternoon.

I will never understand anyone who drinks to excess. It kills the taste.

But then I did not know what part of the meal was holding the leeks, and though I have had many things that claimed to have leeks in them I still did not know what they were.

To make this soup I found leeks and discovered they were actually a little complicated.

They are long and tube like with long green stalks and then a section of white celery looking area, and I wasn't sure which way to chop them or which parts to chop. So I prepped other things first and my Dearest Friend looked it up. It seems that the green parts are of limited use and only for things like soup stock so I chopped up 1 leeks worth of greens and saved the white for use in the soup proper.

1 onion, chopped

Should have been easy really, but the Dearest friend buys his green things from a farm collective and the onions were small, but flavorful locally grown reds. I used three.

1 stalk of celery, diced

1 sprig of tarragon

1 sprig of thyme

1 1/2 gallons of water

The Less Caffeinated Coffee Poppet thought the Tarragon was very pretty, a little like laurel leaves.

My Very Dearest Friend's mother lives next door at the third house from the beach and has an herb garden so the sprigs were plucked washed in plopped immediately into the pot.

Place ingredients in a tall saucepan. Add water, and bring to a boil. Simmer for an hour.

Strain. Refrigerate leftovers

Then there is the Soup itself.

Longwood Gardens Mushroom Soup

Ingredients:

1 teaspoon of vegetable oil

1 tablespoon of butter

1 leek, washed and diced

Remember the leek had the white part at the bottom? Well this is it.I was expecting it to be tubular and celery like but it was tubular and more like an oblong onion.

I have a pretty strong reaction to onions that can sometimes cause me several hours of painful eyes so please believe me when I tell you I was unprepared for the leek basically being a celery looking onion. Apparantly when I announced the similarity, squinting elegantly, my Perfectly Normal Husband said - "Of course it is, why didn't you have me do it?" Well dicing is different than chopping and since I had never done this particular object in a diced manner I needed to do it once to hand it off so I could know what it looked like.

This is what it looked like. Next time I will wear my steampunk goggles.

2 shallots, diced

Shallots. Shallots I know. I learned about them making flashed green beens with crispy shallots on a another Massachusetts Vacation. Once again it's important to remember that diced is not the same as chopped.

3 stalks of celery, diced

Celery looked and behaved just like celery. It was something of a comfort really.

1/4 cup of chopped thyme

I wasn't sure, since I had just harvested the thyme whether or not to chop the stems. I opted not to. I strafed the leaves off the stems and chopped the leaves. I probably should have taken more pictures of that process but this is what the leaves should look like when you''re done.

Now for the many types of Mushrooms. There is a very fancy gourmet store called Sid Weiner's and we went there and shopped like we were still in boom times. It's vacation!

1 cup of shitake mushroom caps, julienned

I have before and after pictures of each mushroom because I learned a while ago that people don't know some old school cooking terms like "fold" or" Julienned"

To pop out a mushroom stalk and just get the cap you kind of wiggle it firmly between your fingers and the stalk kind of pops off the cap. It's messier with the shiitake mushrooms, but it still works.

Julienned means sliced longways and evenly with the slice next to it. I guess a bunch of you probably know that anyway, the same way that you know that dice means cross cut evenly into the closest thing you can get to squares, but all the same when you have to take "fold the bluberries gently into the batter" and replace it with "stir slowly and gentley" on the commercial stuff I figure better safe than sorry. Because folding is related to stirring but not the same at all and I'll bet there are a lot more broken blueberries in muffins now.

1 cup of crimini mushroom caps, quartered

Crimini mushrooms were new to me. I'm sure I've eaten them before, but they were cooked and I did not know it. They look like button mushrooms' older more sophisticated sisters, who've been to exotic places and come back with really chic hairstyles.

The picture at the top is a Coffee Poppet seeing if "Mushroom Cap" works literally.

Here is what they look like when they are quartered.

1 cup of oyster mushrooms, julienned

Oyster Mushrooms look like fleshy alien shambling mounds have invaded your kitchen. I have never seen them in natural bunches before and I was worried that they would break apart and how the heck am I supposed to julienne them? And will they take over my brain if I try?

It ends up I had seen them separated in packages sometimes . I flipped the mound over on it's belly and started lifting one sort of flap looking thing at a time and separated them into individual mushrooms.

They looked like this when the poppets and I were done.

Then I was wondering since they didn't really have clear stalks if I should julienne the stalks too, but when you julienne them they become frilly and you just keep julienning until it doesn't look frilly any more.

1/ 2 cup of sherry wine

2 quarts of hot mushroom stock (see above)

1/2 cup of heavy cream

1/4 cup of chopped tarragon

The tarragon gave me some trouble in the long run because it's slightly chop-resistant when fresh. If I had my knives at home this wouldn't have been an issue. But I strongly recommend sticking with fresh tarragon because it's the real flavor contrast to the mushrooms for this soup.

Truffle oil

Salt and pepper to taste

When all your ingredients are chopped and diced and julienned and quartered and ready for the cooking part they will look like this:

Now you start the cooking part.

Directions:

Sautee the shallot and celery in the oil and butter until the leeks are translucent:

Add thyme, salt ( about a teaspoon to start) and pepper.

I made sure to have a pot big enough to do the sauteing in so that I didn't have to transfer from a pan to a pot and possibly lose some of the seasoning.

Add mushrooms. Cook until mushrooms wiltand release their liquid.

Add sherry wine and then reduce by half.

I think in this case reduce by half means the volume of the mixture and not

the heat, but I did not reduce by half I reduced by about a third since I wasn't sure.

Add hot mushroom stock and bring to a boil.

Simmer for 10 minutes.

Add cream and tarragon.

Let simmer for five minutes.

Season to taste with salt and pepper.

Finish with truffle oil.

If you stop there you will get a delicious but more broth-like mushroom soup. I wanted the thicker cafeteria version from Longwood so I kept it on low non-simmer heat for another two hours.

Then I added more salt. It was delicious.

When I do this again I will change three things. I will be adding more cream, I will be using a better grade of sherry (and perhaps a bit more of it) and I will be using more butter on the sauté.

When it was done I had this:

Now I can make Mushroom Soup from scratch. But I think it will only be for special occasions - like having lots of time and mushrooms.