I’m bordering on being obsessed with my fire escape garden now that the seedlings are becoming full-fledged plants. As the resident green thumb for Brooklyn Based (well, I’m calling myself that anyway), I got to investigate a kind of new “victory garden” in the form of artist Leah Gauthier’s Sharecropper, a summer-long public-art-meets-farming project here in New York. Seventeen gardens across all five boroughs–fire escape, rooftop, windowsill, etc.–will each get one crop and with the help of volunteer gardeners, will become a piecemeal urban farm come harvest time. Tastings, discussions, soup kitchen donating and other corresponding events will be sprouting up all summer. Oh! And you should read my Brooklyn Based on Sharecropper and another endeavor Gauthier’s involved in called Windows Brooklyn.

When I was working on the above, I got inspired to cook something with my garden’s herbs, which I’m having more luck with than any other year in New York. Must be that Holland Tunnel traffic off in the distance! Rarely do I get inspired to make those salads that combine potatoes, macaroni, etc. with a soppy mixture of mayo and who knows what, but looking at my furry dill and billowy parsley turned on a light bulb–> it’s potato salad recipe invention time! Don’t these salads tend to taste really bland to you? Even if they aren’t a soppy mess, it seems like they never have enough flavor. I set out to to make an overwhelmingly tangy and herby one and I’m pretty happy with the results:

Not-a-soppy-flavorless-mess Potato Salad

Ingredients

3 medium red potatoes
1/2 cup light mayo
1 tbsp lemon juice
1 tbsp Dijon mustard
1 tsp spicy brown mustard (I used Whole Foods German mustard)
1 tbsp white wine vinegar
2 tsp vegetable oil
salt and pepper
2 scallions, roughly chopped
2 tbsp dill, finely chopped
2 tbsp parsley, finely chopped
1 tbsp tarragon, finely chopped

1. Cover the potatoes with water in a pot, bring to a boil and cook until soft, or about 20 minutes.
2. Drain water and run cold water over the potatoes in a colander until cool. Cut into 1-inch cubes and set aside.
3. In large bowl, combine mayo, lemon juice, mustards, vinegar and oil.
4. Add salt, pepper and all herbs, and mix until well-blended.
5. Add the potatoes and mix. Done!

-I highly recommend baking the above, a honey almond cake with lemon zest, a recipe I found in Vegetarian Times. Can you tell I’m still going through a beekeeping-honey-obsessed phase since writing this Brooklyn Based? Well, I am! After a 24-hour headache, this was my way of self-medicating: “My head is KILLING me–I shall bake a cake!” Perhaps I’ll make this for the Big Bee Bash BBQ coming up…

-making my own Fire Escape of Dreams next door to the Ghostbusters firehouse (I hope I don’t get in trouble). Planting this garden also achieved what I consider very important for feeling a sense of belonging to a neighborhood: befriending the people at the hardware store. The smell of hardware stores alone gives me a sense of comfort, so much so that I’m always looking for excuses to buy eye screws and such. And one of the employees recognized me on the street the other day! Mission accomplished.

-sewing capes for Only Make Believe, a non-profit that puts on interactive theatre performances and shows at hospitals for kids. My logic went something like this: Sometimes I’m jaded with internet jobs and their disjointed-from-reality nature–I should volunteer as a Cape Crusader at Only Make Believe, i.e. sew capes. I even made a cape for Safety Cone, lest he feel left out of the fabric fun. I’ve been sewing so many capes that I actually wake up sore from foot-pedal-cramp. Haha.

-I participated in Tofu Takedown, did not win, but experienced my first food competition–I like it! I considered doing Cupcake Cookoff the following day, even making these Burnt-Butter Brown-Sugar Cupcakes for it, but decided to eat ‘em instead…and bring some to “the office,” where my motivation for going there is heavily influenced by a desire to be Mother Hen. It’s a win-win for them, when you think about it. “I like going to the office because I get to bring you all cupcakes.” Hmm.

A week ago when the stress of realizing the following–that I have not been healthy since January, that I am overworked, that I never have money, that I have headaches every single day, that I don’t sleep well because of crazy amounts of steroids and all of the aforementioned–I felt as I usually do, on the verge of cracking into little pieces. When I can’t find immediate solutions to any of these, and more often than not I can’t, I look for small and quick doses of happiness in the form of escapes, if anything just to have happy memories to balance out the less than happy ones. I grabbed a similarly-feeling friend and went to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden’s Cherry Blossom Festival, one of those jaw-dropping explosions of sights and smells that reminds you that all is not bad, that not only are these blossoms bursting forth, but I am here to see them, ignored work and responsibilities notwithstanding.

By the time I got home to Manhattan, my head was throbbing, and throughout the night I’d wake up feeling the same. The next morning was the first that I noticed the blood literally drained from my face as I remarked to someone, “I don’t like today.” I put on makeup so that even I wouldn’t have to look at me and tried to go back to sleep. When my phone rang and I saw that it was my mom, my intuition kicked in: this won’t be good. My grandma on my dad’s side had passed away that Wednesday morning at the age of 92. It was then that I cracked. And cried about her, and being sick, and everything else I felt weighing down on me, just as I was feeling that a mere feather could crush me.

As I dragged along too much luggage and one needy little air plant, I was thinking that while I was not happy to be going home under these circumstances, I was happy to be going home, desperately in need of home and a break. Driving across Pennsylvania was the usual scenery of mountains, now green and dotted with red buds and I felt that sense of exhaling that comes with leaving New York, like I can finally breathe. That feeling of finally being by myself that I wish I didn’t love so much.

I read and re-read a letter my grandma wrote to me two years ago, in response to one I had written to her, inquiring about family history, something I regretted not keeping up, as she was hard of hearing, but so good at writing and remembering. It had that anachronistic feel to it, the parts about my great-great-grandfather leasing a forest and making charcoal in Italy, owning a theater, butcher shop and shoe store there, and chucking it all when he realized his employees were stealing. Later in the US, she writes: “For 2 years I ran the store myself and took care of four small children. My dad was in Florida. My sister was in Connecticut. My brother was in Korea. Your dad was 2 weeks old when your grandfather went into a sanitarium.” I really wish I had kept writing. Seeing different photos of her at the funeral home only made me wish this more. Pictures of her looking 1940’s glamorous, playing the trumpet, smiling at the camera.

Among the tears and familiar faces and unfamiliar faces at the funeral home, I met one of my aunt’s friends, Jim Hughes, a retired Child and Family Studies professor and friend of Fred Rogers, the latter of whom of course lived and worked in Pittsburgh as well. He had heard about my “work” endeavors (and my sister’s!) from my aunt, and I’ll never forget hearing him say, “I’m convinced that people like you must have had an unbelievably creative childhood.” I went through some of my “work” experience, saying that I had never done a 9-5 desk job and hope to keep it that way. He said, “Well, I have yet to do that too, so it’s possible!” That got me thinking: not that I’m unaware that I had a “creative childhood,” but I do take it for granted sometimes, that we were always making things, creating, building, baking, going on adventures, gardening, hiking, exploring. That, “can we make our own playdoh?” or “can you teach me how to sew a purse?” or “can we make jelly from scratch?” and every other variation were always answered with a “Yes.”

My sister and I went through some of our childhood things–primarily coloring books, notebooks and toys–and got into fits of laughter over seeing the particularities of our personalities via crayon markings and the like. My sister was incredibly diligent and perfect in all of her drawings, colorings and sketches, to the point of being…anal? Maybe. (But they were all amazing!) She was admiring her detailed seashell pictures when I ran in with one of my coloring books, where I crossed out images of Bert and then randomly pasted pieces of paper on other pages. I thought her stamp collection, perfectly organized and arranged, of course, was still something to be made fun of, until I found evidence of my own OCD tendencies…I mean, systematic ways of being creative. One good example: a birthday party I planned, probably around the age of 10 or 11, where I wrote down the names of everyone coming, menu ideas sometimes accompanied by drawings and cookbook page numbers (and divided into categories of “Dessert,” “Snacks, and “Drinks”), everyone who could conceivably eat cake (i.e. I subtracted small children who didn’t have teeth), and then I drew out a picture of my cake and exactly how we would have to cut it in order to feed everyone with a good-sized piece. Whoa.

On top of that, I found really detailed “work schedules” based on soap operas we used to watch, that broke down every (pretend) day into meetings, photo shoots and such, down to the minute. Also, wills that I had written and then “voided.” What I didn’t find but remembered is how I played “school” in the basement and actually wrote out grades (percentages) for my pretend class, for every single subject and did all the averaging at the end of the semester for each student. So much math! And that at some point, I wrote out this really complicated plan in the event of a fire: I made lists of exactly what I would take out of the house, if I had so many number of minutes (5, 10, 15, 20), taking into consideration where I was in the house at the time and how badly the fire was, and prioritizing based on all these factors. The plan fails to take into consideration the fact that, well, if there was a fire, I’d probably be running OUT OF THE HOUSE? And not searching for these lists and abiding by them. Um, yeah.

Long story short, with this flood of memories came a flood of ideas about spending more time in Pittsburgh, writing down stories, learning about family recipes, teaching my cousins how to crochet, or in other words, surrounding myself with the people who helped make me who I am. It was one of those, “Wow, my family is amazing” moments. I felt somewhat renewed going back to New York because of this, and yet utterly spent at the same time. I understood perfectly when one person said to me, “There is such tiredness in your face” and another said, “There is such energy in your voice.” Perfectly.

Last week I got to speak at the Boerum Hill Association’s Annual Greening Meeting, the theme of which was “Victory Gardens,” aka “food gardens,” which were planted during both World Wars. I forgot how much time and energy it takes to plan out a “talk,” especially one where I had to teach myself Keynote (the Mac’s Powerpoint-like application). Luckily, what I had to talk about was closely related to the small-space veggie/herb garden article I penned for Brooklyn Based, so, some of the work was already done. Phew!

Working on this brought back so many good memories of both childhood in Pittsburgh, where we planted seeds and gardened every year, and the year or so when I worked at the New York Botanical Garden in Children’s Education and Public Programs. In regards to the first, when I was little, in early spring, I remember being SO excited to check on our seeds before school, impatiently waiting for them to germinate; I tried to grow corn every year to no avail; I remember hearing that if scientists could figure out how to make tomatoes square-shaped, packing/delivery would be so much easier! I quickly set my mind to work. Can you imagine?! I was probably 8-years-old, with a few years of elementary school under my tiny belt, attempting to grow square tomatoes–I really believed I could do it! Ah to be a kid…

One of my favorite teaching-at-NYBG memories was the class we did on parts of the plants–we conclude the lesson by making a salad, consisting of all the parts (lettuce=leaf, celery=stem, carrot=root and sunflower seeds=seed). As you can probably guess, little kids aren’t ridiculously excited to learn they’ll be eating SALAD on a FIELD TRIP. Almost half of the kids (all from The Bronx) said they had never eaten salad before. Never. So, they were quite skeptical. But, guess what? As we assembled the salads and talked about the parts, the kids got into it and all but one ate the salad in its entirety, and I had kids running up to me, “Ohmygod, I’m gonna tell my mom to make this!” and “Ms. Kachmar, this is sooooo good!” Their teachers were astounded and thrilled–you really had to be there to feel the fulfillment of teaching such a lesson, to see the change that occurred in the kids over just a half hour. Goosebump-inducing and amazing.

I meant to tell that story at the Greening Meeting, but forgot. I did, however, get to talk about childhood and my green thumb parents. And I achieved my sort-of-silly goal: to get the biggest laugh by telling a story. I don’t know why, but I can’t teach/talk without trying to make it humorous and anecdotal. The above is one of my parents’ tomato bar graphs and charts for their prolific tomato container garden on the front porch (picture above the graph). When I got to this slide, the “biggest laugh” of the evening, I said something like, “So, when you have a mom who grew up on a tree/plant nursery and is a teacher, and a dad who likes math and worked with computers for 30 years, it means you make tomato harvest bar graphs and charts.” In 2005, they harvested 5,642 tomatoes!!! On our porch, in the city!

Suffice it to say, it was nice to be back in Brooklyn, talking about plants and telling stories.

During my last semester at Smith College, it seemed like everyone getting ready to graduate was lining up jobs, filling out graduate school applications, and in general, “making plans,” a phrase that sent shivers down my spontaneous spine. Even though graduation signifies both an ending and a beginning, it didn’t occur to me to ever think beyond the next few days that last semester, but eventually I got self-conscious about answering “no idea” when people asked me what I was doing post-diploma-in-hand. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was doing something wrong, that maybe I should pay the Career Development Office a visit like everyone else. (I eventually did for the first time–I lasted 5 minutes, overwhelmed by all the career binders. I never went back).

Because of self-induced pressure, I apathetically applied to the New York City Teaching Fellows program for that summer and following two school years, telling myself, This sounds responsible and practical. It doesn’t matter that I don’t really want to do it. I’ll apply, won’t get accepted, but at least it looks like I’m doing something. I wrote a humorous essay for the application that included a story about “playing school” in my basement as a kid, thinking there’s NO way they’d accept such ridiculousness. The joke would be on me, that’s for sure.

When I got the first acceptance letter, I was floored. And mad! I actually said, “No, no, no” in the post office, jaw having dropped to the floor. But, I decided to keep moving forward with the application process, because it felt like I should. There were five hours of interviews in New York, a few one-on-one’s and then a group interview/activity with fellow “Fellow” contenders. I never came prepared to any of the interviews. I felt completely out of my league looking around at everyone with laptops and notebooks and pens–I’d only realize upon entering these rooms that maybe I should have slept more than three hours, maybe I should have gone over my “relevant experience” and “education” on the bus ride from Smith instead of reading Faulkner and staring out the window. What are you doing, Alicia? Really, what are you doing? My sample lesson involved math and a generic bag of Runts candy that I found at 2am that day in a Brooklyn bodega. I still remember counting candy on the floor of my sister’s apartment and scribbling down notes and thinking, this joke of a math lesson will get me the boot for sure.

But it didn’t, and eventually I was in–I couldn’t believe it! I looked at the Ivy-League-like acceptance rates for the program and shakily reasoned that if they chose me after all of that, I guess I should do it. I didn’t know what I was doing, but surely they did? Sure.

I was suddenly facing arduous 14-hour days of training, teaching and grad school, without any pay to show for it. I picked up a thrice-daily coffee habit, I wrote lesson plans at all hours, I fell asleep during the long subway ride every morning even if I was standing up. I made friends in my program seemingly over night: we unwound at happy hours paid for by credit card, we wandered unfamiliar streets together afterwards, we wondered how we’d pay the rent, we laughed so much. Once with $36 to my name and dark circles under my eyes, I examined the grocery aisle of K-mart, looking for the most cost-effective food choice, adding up calories per dollar and finally choosing one of those pancake mixes where you just add water. I don’t remember finding this funny or sad, but rather, just what I had to do until the Department of Education decided to pay me (They had to, right? I signed a contract?) It wasn’t how I envisioned life in New York, and it still felt like I was doing something wrong, but I was slowly falling in love with the city, one deli coffee and cold pancake at a time.

The PEEPS folks are highly protective of their Copyrights, as they should be, so last year a bunch of us Etsy sellers making PEEP-like items had to take down our items, even if we weren’t using the PEEP name. Waaaah! But I understand. Of course we complied, but luckily, even if we can’t sell these items, YOU can make them! In my case, I had designed these crochet bunnies. (So, you know, make them as gifts for yourself or others, but don’t sell them).

Pattern ahead:

Supplies:
F hook
Any worsted weight yarn in bunny color and brown (I use Red Heart 100% acrylic)
Needlepoint needle
Polyester fiber filling

Abbreviations:
Ch: chain
Sc: single crochet
Sl: slip
Hdc: half double crochet
Dec: (decrease) pull up a loop in next 2 sc, yarn over (YO) and draw all 3 loops on the hook

Instructions:
Ch 2; 6 sc in second ch from hook; join (6 sc)
Ch 1; 2 sc in same stitch and in each sc around; join (12 sc)

This forms the bottom circle of the body. The top half is worked by moving across and turning at the end of each row.

Ch 1 (do not turn; right side is facing you) sc into next stitch, 2sc into next,
sc, sc. (5 sc)
Ch 1 turn; Sc across row. (5 sc)
Ch 1 turn; Sc, dec, sc, sc. (4 sc)
Ch 1 turn; Sc across row. (4 sc)

Turn the work so that the right side is facing you without making a Ch 1 turn.
Ch 5 (ear); sc, hdc, hdc, hdc, sl stitch into next sc on the top of the body (head)
Ch 5; sc, hdc, hdc, hdc, skip the next sc and sl stitch into the last sc. Finish off.

This is the “front” of the bunny. With a brown yarn and needlepoint needle, make two eyes and a nose. There’s no exact way to do this, but I made each by coming up with the thread and going down vertically in another spot very close by. It took me a couple tries to get it right. You could also use beads to make more uniform eyes and nose.

Repeat the above instructions for the “back” of the bunny, except do not finish off. Place the wrong sides together:

For the body, single crochet into the inner loops to give the bunny some depth. When you’re working the part of the bodies that aren’t the circles, there are no inner or outer loops; single crochet here.
For the ears, slip stitch together.

Stuff the body, but not the ears, when he is about 2/3 stitched together. Finish off.

I can’t remember the first time I learned about Coney Island–whether it was from my sister who moved to Brooklyn for college or if I stumbled upon it in a book–but I do remember being drawn to the sound of it. Coney Island. In high school, before I had ever set foot in New York City proper, I was intrigued by seaside towns with a boardwalk and/or amusement park. Perhaps because so many of them were “has-been” resort destinations. It was like they were clinging to some far-off dream like a Fitzgerald character–there was still hope that some kind of beautiful transformation could take place, even though deep down one half-heartedly knew it wouldn’t materialize.

When I was 16-years old, I took a photography class where we used fully manual cameras, and processed, developed and printed our film. When I got a “Landscapes in Black and White” assignment, I decided to spend my spring break in New York to complete it, thinking it was the perfect place to shoot my first ever black and white photos. It was also the beginning of something else: the uttering of what would become a common phrase in my mind and mouth, “I have to go to Coney Island.” I think I’ve said this at least 10 times in the past 5 years here, and probably have acted on it at least half of them.

It still felt like the dead of winter when I got there in mid-March, and it actually snowed on the day my sister and I took the subway out to Coney Island. The coldness of it all only made the stark sight of both Coney Island’s closed-for-the-winter scene and the enormous, jam-packed cemetery on the way there more profoundly sensed. It really did feel like we should be seeing all of it exclusively in black and white. And in some ways we were, it being a hazy-shade-of-winter day with overcast skies and snow that made everything blurry. Not a pink cotton candy puff in sight.

I’m not sure if I ever wrote about that trip, but I recall being struck by the strangeness that is Coney Island and trying to make sense of it without historical context. Was it beautiful or disgusting? Worth saving and remaking? This was way before I would read up on its 20’s and 30’s heyday era or happen upon Ferlinghetti’s A Coney Island of the Mind, “The pennycandystore beyond the El is where I first fell in love with unreality.” It was one of those New York places that was both comforting and craze-inducing with its anachronistic bits and gritty pieces and I think that’s why I felt drawn to it, when feeling such antithetical things in my heart and mind.

Back to the present, I’ve been having that Coney Island kind of feeling lately, a mix of opposites, loving New York and hating it, feeling ecstatic and then feeling sad, feeling comforted by some people and not at all by others, and wanting to hop on my bike or jump on the train to somewhere, anywhere, practically everyday. (Coney Island itself, is in a state of flux, of course to make further comparison). For what it’s worth, Coney Island always felt like an escape, I suppose because it’s all the way at the end of the earth so to speak, where land meets ocean. As if there, maybe maybe maybe I’d get some clarity, when in reality, I would get too distracted by hot dogs, salty air and ferris wheel screams to really “think.”

When looking for writing I did about it, I did find something I wrote 5 years after that initial Coney Island trip, the spring of my college graduation and impending move to New York, a stretch of weeks which can be described as a similar jumble of internal uncertainty and conflict:

What can I say? I freaked out on the corner of 2nd Avenue and 12th Street. I bought books from a vendor, sat on a curb and cried. I saw a grocery store where I imagined myself buying fruit on a sunny day and it made me cry even more. Everything was so beautiful and yet felt so terrible…I finished Big Sur the other day, which seems appropriate, the counting down to craziness and losing it. Dealing with everything, beginnings and endings, it’s all too much…when I closed my college bank account I thought I might vomit…I lost it at my apartment. My apartment. I cried all the way down the stairs, all the way down 9th Street, through the Holland Tunnel and most of New Jersey. I would stop to catch my breath but every time I saw something remotely beautiful–a fountain, a night-time softball game, a church–I started up again. I’m really scared of going back to New York.

On to happier things, I guess it was just one of those days this week where I felt propelled to go to Coney Island. I was wearing striped tights and Mary Janes, which put me in an amusement park mood, even though everything is shut down not only for the season, but kind of indefinitely. I got it in my head that I should take black and white pictures before it was “too late,” and also because I had always meant to go back with this purpose and see what I could find using the monochromatic setting on my camera.

It was bittersweet to walk around thinking about all the people I’ve been here with, recalling snippets: there’s where I ate too much friend food with a friend during a 30-mile bike trip, there’s where I tripped on a boardwalk plank, there’s where I saw a concert in only a half-alive condition, there’s where a homeless person told me the history of Child’s Restaurant, there’s where I laughed with someone I loved. Nonetheless, I took picture after picture and tried to burn the memories I do have of this place further into my brain, making notes here and there in case particular visuals go the way of the wrecking ball. To be continued…

We may over-utilize the word “best” to describe our number-ones in life, but there are two recipes of mine that I truly feel earn this superlative: my vegan chocolate cake which happens to be the BEST chocolate cake I’ve ever had (and many others agree, though it’s hard to believe, I know!) and now the best breakfast muffin. These muffins are simply spiced and airy inside, and for someone who likes to eat breakfast within 30 minutes of waking up and brewing coffee, this recipe falls just under that time requisite, from start to finish.

**Recipe**

Ingredients

1 egg
1/2 cup milk
1/3 cup butter, softened
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 cup sugar
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp nutmeg
1/8 tsp salt

For the topping:

1/4 cup sugar
3/4 tsp cinnamon
2 tbsp melted butter

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Either by hand or by mixer, beat egg, milk and butter together. Stir in the flour, 1/2 cup sugar, baking powder, nutmeg and salt just until blended. In a 12-muffin cup pan, either fill with papers or grease, and spoon batter equally amongst the 12 cups. (They should be about 2/3 full). Bake for approximately 20 minutes.

During the last 5 minutes of baking time, while you’re sipping your coffee and staving off a hungry tummy, prepare the topping ingredients: in one bowl, melt 2 tbsp butter; in a second bowl, mix together the sugar and cinnamon. As soon as the muffins are done, plop them out of the pan (carefully! they are HOT) and with a potholder or towel on hand, dip the tops into butter and then into cinnamon-sugar mixture. Eat ‘em warm, and no, four muffins for breakfast is NOT excessive at all!

I received this email the other day from a guy at Oxford, in response to the hospital post and the pomegranate post, and as you will see, it was definitely an uplifting one:

Dear Alicia,

Thanks for the beautiful writing. Keep it up, and best wishes to both of you

Safety Cone: Hi, I’m Snow-Proof Safety Cone, or Safety Cone for short. Hehe, I’m short too. What’s your name?
Pi: Hi, I’m Pi!
Safety Cone: Pie? You don’t look like a pie.
Pi: Oh, not a pie you eat, but Pi. The number?
Safety Cone: Oh. What number?
Pi: 3.141592653589…
Safety Cone: um…
Pi: 7933238462…
Safety Cone: er…
Pi: 643383279502…

This went on for a looooooong time. No wait a minute, it’s STILL going on. Okay, Safety Cone just ran away from Pi and into my hand.