Back from the lake with two more stories
Dear friends,
Two more stories to read this month! I'm having a good year, and it's not over yet.
The first was in Kaleidotrope. It's called Transits of Other Lands, and I wrote it at the height of lockdown (yeah, the publishing industry doesn't tend to set your land speed records) when I was desperately homesick for other people's public transit. One of my favorite things about travel is riding around on other people's public transit, finding out what their subway sounds like, what font they use on the informational placards, all of that. I have a little pouch of transit cards in the back of a desk drawer--the Montreal Metro, the T in Boston, the T-bana in Stockholm--and it makes me happy to know they're there. To know I can go back to Chicago and take the buses and the El but also to know that they're rattling around without me, full of people going about their lives, listening to music and podcasts on their earbuds, reading a book, leaning against the window tired, doing the thing.
Astute readers may notice that this is the second thing I published on this topic from that period, with the first being a poem. I really really like other people's public transit. I had more than one thing to say about it.
The second story I have out this month is Three Drops in the River in Beneath Ceaseless Skies. It's a puzzle story with a bridge and a lion and some other stuff that just...came together with the character's voice. I get notes from some of you saying that one of my stories made you cry, and this is definitely not going to be one of them--because sometimes we just need fun stories, that the author wrote because they were playing around having a good time.
I went on a writing retreat at the northmost tip of Lake Michigan last week, and it was great. I got a ton of stuff written, I got some actual rest (whaaaaat), and mid-October was the absolute perfect time to drive across Wisconsin. Not gonna lie, I make my fair share of Sconnie jokes (...maybe...slightly more than my fair share...look, if you're not using yours, I'm not going to have it go to waste, okay), but the leaves were absolutely glorious for six hours of driving. Hooray.
The driving is part of the process for me. I get that time to myself to belt along with the music in the car and think about whatever project I have set up to work on. In this case, I got past the muddled middle and well into the stage of novel where I can just sit down and write the next bit, reliably, daily. I love that feeling. It's one of my favorite feelings, and a writing retreat can be a great way to jumpstart it into the rest of my life.
And! A writing retreat means that you get the kind of recipe that I make for myself when I'm all alone and writing all day, which means that it's very low-effort, makes a ton, and takes forever--but in the "let this simmer basically forever while you do something else" way, not in the "you will be in the kitchen doing intensive for hours" way. Very savory, good for fall, what a good time.
Excelsior,
Marissa
White Beans and Greens
This is not going to include any startling steps if you've made dried beans before, but the specific details worked out really well.
Soak a pound of white beans. I used cassoulet beans (Tarbais beans). This should be fine for whatever white beans you like--gigante beans would probably be nice, for example. Bigger beans, longer soak/cook; smaller beans, shorter soak/cook. Soak them for several hours. You want the water a couple inches above the bean line. I started them soaking right around lunchtime for a legume-laden supper; longer soak means shorter cook for tender beans, but honestly you can adjust those proportions however. You can start them boiling without any soak if you want to, they're just going to take longer to get tender.
Okay, so: with about 1.5-2 hours left to go before I wanted supper, I started the beans simmering. I let them simmer for maybe half an hour and then put in a tablespoon of vegetable Better Than Bouillon and a parmesan rind. Kept them simmering.
What if you don't have veg BTB: you can use similar amounts of regular veggie bouillon probably, that should be fine. You can also dump out the water you soaked them in and just cook them in vegetable stock/broth from the start, again you'll want two inches more in the pot than beans. Will this work with meat stock/broth: absolutely, and it will taste like meat. If you want that, do that.
All right. So you've got the beans simmering, and they're starting to get tender and you're starting to get hungry, and the liquid is really starting to cook down. So what you're going to do here is mince about half a head of garlic. You're going to get out a skillet and melt 3 T butter in it, or if you don't want to use dairy olive oil will be just fine. Don't skimp on the fat, though. It's going to be dispersed through an entire pot of beans. You can go 4 T if you want to, even. Right. Cook the garlic in that.
While you're cooking the garlic, you fish around in the pot of beans--which is still simmering on the other burner--and pull out what you can find of the parmesan rind. It won't kill you if you eat some, it's parmesan rind, not toxic waste, but it's nicer if you can pull it out--and in a minute you're going to do something that makes that harder.
So you take a bunch of arugula and you throw it in the pan with the garlic to wilt. The container I had was 5 oz, it could probably take twice as much if you wanted a lot of greens, life would not be sad if you'd made a salad with some of it already and you didn't have quite 5 oz. This is not a precise science. It's going to be fine. So yeah, you just wilt that in with the butter and garlic, just a quick heat on it.
What if you don't like or can't find arugula: okay. See above re: precise science. Use some other green--but arugula has a specific flavor here that really just melds in with the garlic and parmesan and white beans. If you don't like that specific flavor, maybe you'll like another? But probably one that'll stand up to it, these are not decorative greens, they're there for the taste.
Then you check to make sure that the beans are only a little brothy--we're not making bean soup, we're making beans and greens. Bean soup is great. It's a different day. So you've got most of the liquid cooked off, and you throw in the arugula and garlic and stir and let it cook a couple minutes, and hey, you're done, go team. I ate this with a side salad of roasted eggplant, tomatoes, and basil, because that's what time of year it is, but you put it with whatever you like.
Why did I say that you should pull the parmesan rind out first? Because I didn't. And the arugula tangled with it. And it was still good, but I lost some lovely pieces of arugula because they had formed an impenetrable mass with the parmesan rind. If you're not picky you can just eat that, but it's not as nice. If you're super picky you could put the rind in a cheesecloth bag to make it easier to fish out later. The things you think of after the fact. See, the revision mindset helps us always, not just in fiction!