Author Archives: Paula Spencer

I’ll be up front: I’m no stealthy nutrient-pusher, a la Jessica Seinfeld. You remember Jerry’s wife, and her book about getting vegetables into your kids by lacing their mac ‘n cheese with cauliflower puree and their peanut butter cookies with carrot mash? Partly my objection to this way of cooking is my own sheer laziness: I hate fiddling with Cuisinarty appliances, even plain old blenders. And partly it’s principle: I think good food should speak for itself without concealment.

(I mean, I love peanut butter cookies and I adore carrots. But together? They’re no heavenly Reese’s-style collision waiting to happen! Chocolate chips in the batter, yes. Carrots? Yikes!)

That said, I have one sneaky dish that I make every fall just to see if anyone notices. Well, and because I adore it.

It starts with this humble, homely ingredient:

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Ever feel stuck about what to say? For somebody who goes through as many words in a week as I do, both written and spoken, you might be surprised to learn that I’m often a big blank. Either I can’t think of anything worthwhile to contribute, or I have so many different wisps of things to talk about that I can’t latch onto just one to grow, or maybe I’m feeling too private about certain details – good tale, bad timing.

Whatever the cause, I can’t get going. (And yes, I’m talking about a way of being as much as a way of blogging. )

So what do I do in tongue-tied times like those?

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Show me a handmade quilt and I’ll show you a happy Paula. I’ve been known to covet friends’ family heirlooms, swoon over intricate versions hanging in museums, and, yes, buy a treasure or two that called to me in an antique shop. I love many mass-market quilts too — in fact I sleep under one every night — but I hold a special place in my heart for those hand-stitched works of art.

So why am I having twinges of quilt guilt?

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When a dog is incontinent, blind, deaf, and a bit demented – but still wags its tail and cuddles, is there still dog left in the dog?

How do you decide?

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At the risk of sounding very retro (and not in a cool, cheeky pinafores and rolling pins kind of way but a jeez-she’s-an-old-fogey kind of way), I’m just going to point out that for all the bemoaning of the loss of newspapers thwacking on the front porch for Fido to fetch, and for all the grousing over the rapid disappearance of corner bookstore and of, well, books whose pages don’t glow in the dark, one other one sort of paper experience has already practically vanished without a trace in the digital age.

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It’s the social grease of back fences, front porches, and stitching bees. Or, more locally, of book clubs, school parking lots, walking routes, and wherever else two or more women gather. Gossip: Automatic sin? Or one of the great grey zones of female communication, that dicey – but navigable — intersection of entertainment, information, and, sometimes, just plain mean injustice?

I ask as someone who’s passed along her fair share of tidbittery about her fellow man (and, er, woman). And yet, now that I’ve recently been on the subject-matter end of some very snarky gossip of the worst kind – fiction – I’m feeling a little less cavalier about the topic.

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I admit it. I think about food pretty much all the time. Always have. Probably always will. Much as I envy those lean, food-nonchalant aliens who look at the clock in surprise and declare their sudden hunger because gee, they haven’t eaten in hours, this has never happened to me. No matter how busy I am, I tend to be perfectly aware that it’s 11:30, 11:45, 11:50, 11:55, 11:56…oh good, noon, time for lunch!

The silver(ware) lining is this: Where I once thought constantly about food in a less-than-healthful way, like a plump raccoon frantic for scraps — what can I nibble? what can I nab? how many calories? is this a “fat” day in which I can’t eat much or a “normal” one in which I can? — now my food-think is calmer, happier, healthier.

Why?

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It’s summer and I’m welcoming dinner guests who have just moved to my Southern town so – of course! — I decide to make peach-blackberry cobbler. I once had a whole peach tree in the yard to pull the sweet gold from, but now I have to hit the Farmer’s Market and pay for them. Luckily I do own another key ingredient: a magical pink recipe card on which a friend’s mother, a native North Carolinian, once wrote down for me the best fruit cobbler recipe ever.

My problem is that I am a slipshod follower of recipes and a hopeless improviser.

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When the strawberries and sweet corn are ripe, charcoal grill smoke fills the air, and days seem lazier just because they’re longer, I think more often about a particular kind of relationship. It’s less analyzed than the one with your parents or your menfolk, more fragile than the bond with your sibs (who, love ‘em, hate ‘em — or both simultaneously – tend to boomerang back at you your entire life), and yet potentially more enduring than ties with even the best of friends, because with this relationship, there’s blood involved.

Summertime has me thinkin’ ‘bout cousin time.

Have you noticed how a little-discussed byproduct of scattered families is scattered cousins?

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The best feature of my new rental house is one that didn’t even appear on my list of search requirements. (That would be the list that consisted of exactly three items, none of them aesthetic: enough bedrooms, in current school district, and affordable.) The bonus feature I now can’t live without?

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