I have not a single broccoli recipe in my recipe index. This is criminal, atrocious, and completely unacceptable because:

a) broccoli is delicious.

b) we love broccoli.

c) we eat broccoli fairly frequently.

d) we eat broccoli not frequently enough.

e) there are countless ways to prepare the vegetable.

f) broccoli rocks.

On Saturday, I bought two bushels of gorgeous broccoli from a local farmer because I have learned that it is easier to buy gorgeous, wormless broccoli from a professional than it is to plant it, weed it, cut it, and then pick each and every worm out of it myself. Unless someone can convince me otherwise, I don’t think I’ll ever grow my own broccoli again.

But first, Saturday. Saturday was a weird day. Let me tell you about it.

1. I woke up to a thick blanket of snow covering my potted plants and tomato cages. The sprinkling of yellow, red, and orange leaves on top of the snow made the early snowfall that much more wronger. And then I got grumpy.

2. Of course, I hadn’t yet gone through the kids’ winter duds BECAUSE IT WAS STILL FREAKING OCTOBER, so my husband climbed up into the attic and handed down all the garbage bags which promptly exploded, spewing boots and woolens and snowpants in all directions.

3. So I went to town for a meeting and left them to sort things out.

4. On my way to my meeting, I stopped at the farmers’ market for my bushels of snow-covered broccoli. I dumped them into two wash baskets I had brought along for the express purpose of broccoli carting.

5. When I got home (after a second meeting, grocery shopping, and errand running), the family (plus two kids who were staying the night) was all at my brother’s house and the power was out. So much for my afternoon plans of blanching and freezing two wash basket loads of broccoli.

6. The kids came home and threw six sets of soaking wet snow clothes hither and yon.

7. We ate stale crackers, peanut butter, apples, and cheese for supper. The kids said they were still hungry. I said tough.

8. The boys did a power dance around the kitchen, but the lights stayed off.

9. I played piano by the light of the flashlight.

10. The boys drug the outdoor cookstove from the barn to the porch and popped popcorn.

11. We sat around by the fire and talked about the sort of things 12-year-old boys like to talk about. (The girls were hiding in their lair.) My husband and I drank Root Beer in mugs without the kids knowing, one of the pluses of life in the dark. (Hm, I wonder what else we could get away with in the dark, on a lark?)

12. The power came on and we screamed and yelled and jumped up and down and then wildly ran around flushing toilets, washing dishes, getting baths, and vacuuming the floors.

So. All that to say, it wasn’t until Sunday afternoon that I got around to blanching and freezing the broccoli.

We froze all of it except for what we ate, plus a large container that I stashed in the fridge to combat the upcoming candy overload. Some of it I tossed into a stir fry and the rest went into a broccoli potato soup.

I love broccoli soup, but I often have problems with it curdling. This is probably because I don’t really follow a recipe, instead just throwing in the ingredients every which way. This time, however, I took care to follow a process—one that I made up in my head—and the soup turned out deliciously creamy and smooth.

My kids aren’t thrilled by it (but they eat it anyway, and with minimal complaining). They declare my friend’s broccoli soup to be the best ever (hers is basically broccoli in a cheese sauce, yum), but I like to add other stuff to my soup, stuff like potatoes and onions. Plus, I use a light hand when it comes to the cheese.

This soup is plenty creamy and rich even without tons of cheese and cream, and it has a hefty dose of nutrition, thanks to the vegetables and several cups of homemade chicken broth. I just had a bowl of it for lunch and it made me very happy.

How do you like your broccoli soup? Do you puree your soup into a creamy green smoothness, or do you keep it chunky? Do you drown it in cheese? Do you add other vegetables or fancy spices? 

 Cheesy Broccoli Potato Soup

Proportions are flexible: it’s the method that’s key.

3 cups chicken broth
4-6 cups chopped, peeled potatoes
4-6 cups chopped, blanched broccoli
1 large onion, chopped
1 bay leaf
5 tablespoons butter, divided
½ scant cup flour
2 cups milk
1 cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese
1-2 cups good melting cheese (I used Provolone)
2 teaspoons salt, plus more to taste

Saute the onion in 1 tablespoon butter till translucent. Add the potatoes, broth, and bay leaf and simmer until fork tender. Add the broccoli and heat through. (If you want the broccoli to be super-soft, add it sooner to the potato-broth mixture sooner so it can cook along with the potatoes.) Remove the bay leaf and stir in the salt.

Melt the remaining 4 tablespoons butter in a separate saucepan. Whisk in the flour and then beat in the milk. Heat till hot and bubbly. Remove from heat and stir in the cheeses. Stir several scoops of the broccoli-potato mixture into the cheese sauce to thin it out before adding the cheese sauce to the pot of vegetables. Stir well (do not let boil), taste to correct seasonings, and serve.

This same time, years previous: sweet and sour lentils, lemon squares, blessing hearts

The wind was blowing, the leaves were falling, and I had just read a post about using a fan to boost the interest factor when taking pictures. So I grabbed my youngest daughter. “Hey, I’ll give you a piece of candy if you come outside and let me take pictures of you,” I said. She jumped at the chance to earn a piece of yucky hard candy and hurried to throw on my Guatemalan poncho.

Then she just sat there while I took pictures to my heart’s content.

Why did I not think of bribery before?

We’d hear the breeze roaring through the trees down across the road, and I’d ready my camera.

She’d lift her chin and face the wind.

And then she’d start to smile.

“Feel the wind!” I yelled, and she grinned harder.

“Come on. Smile bigger! Show me your teeth!” And so I got this:

Serves me right.

This little girl is a work of art, let me tell you. She goes through spells where she’s highly irritable, spitting venom with every breath, defiant and argumentative. After one particularly bad day, or series of days, rather, I said to her, “You’ve been having a hard time lately, haven’t you?”

She nodded sullenly, and I said, “What should we do when you get like that? Do you need to go outside and play? Snuggle with me? Be alone in your room? What helps, huh?”

“Listening to music,” she said, quick as a wink.

And it’s true, the girl loves music. She will listen to tapes for hours on end. She picks out melodies on the piano. She loves the songs from My Fair Lady and The Sound of Music. Music feeds and soothes her.

I’ve started giving her piano lessons, but I think she needs more. I think she needs to sing. Perhaps I should look into getting her into a choir? I’ll have to ponder this more.

I also need to ponder why it is that at our all saints’ day church service, she lit a candle, not for her dear friend’s deceased father or her great grandmother, but for Sally, her big sister’s dead guinea pig. It added an element of hilarity to an otherwise somber service.

And I need to ponder how it is she managed to get such gorgeous golden ringlets. The girl has no idea how lucky she is. And the curls will probably all disappear with puberty, or, if not puberty, then with childbirth. My hair used to be stick-straight, but then I had kids. Same things with my complexion: it used to be creamy smooth…until I had kids. Having kids has changed me from the inside out.

It’s been totally worth it.

When my older daughter caught on that her sister was posing for candy, she demanded her turn.

Or maybe I asked her, I forget which. In either case, she was eager to oblige.

Candy is a tool that must not be underestimated!

This girl will be a teenager all too soon. When my husband saw this picture (a pose she pulled off all on her own), he actually gasped, “Teenager! She looks like a teenager!”

She’s starting the bursting-into-tears-at-the-drop-of-a-hat thing. (Door slamming was already commonplace.) She likes to attach an old portable phone to her jeans, put on the headphone/mouthpiece thingy, and sashay around the house talking valley girlese. It drives her father batty. In fact, just the other night he roared, “Don’t talk like that! I can’t stand it! It makes you sound … dumb!”

He’s never one to mince words (he once mentioned that a soup we were eating at a friends’ house tasted “moldy”—he has yet to live that one down), but his outburst didn’t slow our girl down, oh no. She just went up to him and yakked louder.

Seriously, this girl doesn’t stop talking. Her mouth goes and goes and goesandgoesandgoes. At least a half dozen times each day I find myself squeezing my eyes shut and screeching, “Do not say another word!”

“But—,” she presses.

“Stop it!”

“But—”

“DO! NOT! SPEAK!”

Such theatrics buy me approximately 8.5 seconds of silence. It’s a losing battle.

See how her chin is lifted here? It’s how she goes through life, kind of rammy. She’s a lot like her father. He gets her. Which is good, because, well, lets just say, I love her to smithereens, and I respect her and adore her and think she’s the bomb, but I don’t get her.

This is what’s so amazing and unique and strange about raising children. They are people. I mean, duh, right? But no, really! These children, these people who came from me, exhibit behaviors and thinking patterns and tendencies that are so completely not me. It’s fascinating, challenging, intriguing, invigorating, and baffling.

Partway through the wind and her brother throwing rakefulls of leaves on her, my girl, ever the resourceful one, plucked a long green grass and tied her hair back.

And then when I told her to kneel, because I wanted to shoot some from-above pictures, she went all devout on me.

I never even got around to playing with the settings on my camera. But after last night’s traipse around town, I have enough candy to fuel a gazillion photo shoots, so I’m not worried.

This same time, years previous: why I’m spacey, Greek yogurt, oatmeal bread

“What’s wrong with Stayman?” my husband asked over the phone. There was a fruit stand close to where he was working and he had stopped by to pick up some apples for me.

“There’s nothing wrong with them,” I said, “but according to my notes, we like York best for storing and Fuji for eating.”

“Okay, I’ll get some,” he said, and hung up. I didn’t hear back from him, so several hours later I gave him a ring.

“Did you get the apples?” I asked.

“Let’s not talk about it,” he mumbled.

“What do you mean? Didn’t they have any?”

“They had them.”

“Then what’s wrong?”

He exhaled heavily. “Let’s just say we’re never going back there again.”

“Um, hon?” I said, finally catching on, “how much did the apples cost?”

A brief silence, and then, “Twenty-five dollars.”

“Twenty-five dollars a bushel?” I yelped. “And you bought them? You dingbat!”

And then our barely-limping conversation tumbled rapidly downhill. Ugly, it was. When he came home and parked the two boxes of apples on the picnic table, tempers flared all over again. But he’d agreed to pay the 14 dollars—the difference in the cost between apples from my favorite local orchard and this overpriced stand—out of his personal money, so I shut up.

The following morning I lugged the apples down to the cellar and transferred the Yorks into one of our bushel crates—I needed the cardboard box to store my newspaper-wrapped sweet potatoes—and was dismayed to discover that the apples only filled the bushel three-quarters of the way full. Bushel containers are different sizes and there’s a chance ours was larger, but my favorite orchard gives us bushels that fill our crates, and for much less money, too, humph. The steam started to puff out my ears all over again. 

And then I noticed the apples were bruised. Squishy spots everywhere! So much for long-term storage.

I stomped upstairs and called my husband. “I’m taking them back,” I hotly announced.

He sighed, “Is it really worth it to drive all the way back just to save a few dollars?”

“Yes, it is. This place is ripping their customers off and I will not stand for it.”

The woman who answered the phone quickly handed me off to her superior.

“Yes, this is Loreen. May I help you?”

“Yes, my husband bought some apples from you yesterday, and I’d like to return them, please.”

“Can you tell me what’s wrong with them?”

“Well, yes. They’re overpriced, which is our problem, I know. But also, the bushels aren’t filled the whole way, and the apples are bruised.”

“Our apples are good quality,” she said defensively, “and it’s not our fault that they cost more than other places. That was your choice.”

“Yes, I know,” I said, immediately regretting I mentioned the price. “But we got the apples for long-term storage and they won’t last, bruised as they are.”

She then attempted to convince me—via a detailed explanation of their grading system—that the motley, not-full bushel of bruised apples was the best out there.

“So can I bring them back tomorrow?” I said.

She took my name and number and said she’d get back to me later on that evening.

“Maybe they’re dirt poor, barely hanging on by a thread,” my mother said. “Maybe your fifty dollars is what’s saved them.”

“Whatever, Mom,” I snapped.

Loreen still hadn’t called back by the time I had to leave for my evening church meeting, so I coached my husband on what to say if she should happen to call. “Her name is Loreen,” I said, not wanting him to be caught off-guard and accidentally give up the apple battle.

A brilliant idea hit me as soon as I slipped into the driver’s seat, and I was dialing my home number before I was even out of the driveway. My husband (bless his overpriced apple-buying heart) answered.

“Hello, this is Loreen from the orchard!” I blared in a southern, hickville accent (which is quite different from Loreen’s real voice, but he didn’t know that now, did he?) “There is no way in hell (except I pronounced it ha-a-ill) we is going to take back them apples!”

Silence, and then a shocked, “Excuse me?”

“I SA-A-ID,” I hollered, barely able to keep my voice steady, the giggles bubbling up from my belly like hilarious little hiccups, “THERE IS NO WAY IN HA-A-ILL WE IS GOING TO TAKE BACK THEM APPLES!”

“Um… okay…”

“Honey, it’s me!” I screamed, bouncing up and down in my seat and laughing so hard I could hardly see the road. “I love you so much! Hahahaha, heeheeheehee! Did I get you?”

“Wha—? Oh, man, that was rude. That was so rude. That was so rude!”

I called the fruit stand the next morning. (“She’s not going to call you back,” my husband had correctly forecasted.)

I cut straight to the chase. “Can I return the apples this morning?”

“The owner is out of town until Monday and I’m pretty sure he’ll say you can’t return them,” Loreen said, her voice hard. “Your dissatisfaction with the price is not our problem—”

“No, the apples are bruised,” I said slowly, clearly, my voice equally steely.

“Well, your husband had every opportunity to open the box and look at them.”

“Sooo,” my speech slowed to a crawl, “you are not concerned with customer satisfaction?”

“Um, yes, but…” her voice trailed off.

“Are you really saying you won’t let me return them?”

“No.”

“Okay. Well, thank you. This is really interesting and helpful for me to know, especially in how I relate to others in the valley.” Which is my pathetic version of a veiled threat.

Only later did I realize what I should’ve said. I should’ve said, “Well, Loreen, this has all made a very interesting story. Are you sure this is the ending you want?”

Dear Bowman’s Orchard,

You broke my heart, my consumer confidence, and my bank account. We’re through.

Love,
An Apple Lover

At least I got to be Loreen for a little. That was fun.

This same time, years previous: dusting the dough, light-as-air hamburger buns and sloppy joes, how to freeze pumpkin