My mind has been in the past a lot this week--maybe because my present has been so hectic. The other day I heard a brief report on NPR about the recent riots inGreece and the bus and tram strikes. As I listened I thought immediately of my grandparents, and I imagined what a burden this would be to my Grandmother. No buses!
In that same second that I wondered about the impact this strike would have on them, though, I remembered thatmy grandparents are no longer alive, and the snippet of conversation I imagined I heard in mymind's ear--my mother and grandmother on the telephone, clicking tongues in frustration over the strikes, would not happen. It belonged to the past, to my childhood, to Sunday mornings when I'd skip about the house and listen in on my mother's phone conversations with her parents. When I was little I used to imagine the telephone wire stretching taut across the miles, across the vast expanse of the blue Atlantic, twanging and singing with news saved up from all week long. It seemed so amazing and improbable to me that at the other end of that wire were my grandparents, and their apartment with the cool marble floors, and the alley cats begging by the back door, pink tongues curling and flashing, and the sour plum tree in that shady corner of the front garden.
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This week too L.'s been deeply engrossed in this latest read he scored from his teacher's classroom earlier in the week. Yesterday, as I was driving him to T.'s school to pick her up he emerged briefly from his deep, angry, post-school funk and piped up suddenly from the back seat:
"Can we make spaetzle again? You know, like we did for Mozart's birthday?"
I had been deep in thought as well, my mind perhaps still in those hazy Sundays of the past, and his mention of our feast for Mozart jarred me. I'm always thrown a little when L. brings back a recollection that I had forgotten about. His short term memory is terrible--he won't remember where he set down his glasses, for instance, but he has a phenomenal long-term memory. He can recall the details (the color of a certain chair, for example) from years ago, yet not be able to tell you what someone asked him to do thirty minutes before. There, suddenly, in the car, the memory of that late January day exploded in on me, like a burst of color, shaking the muted memories of the past. L. read me a passage from the book about a meal the character--a young boy--was looking forward to eating: spaetzle, potato dumplings, sausage, sauerkraut, plum kuchen.
"I can make spaetzle!" I said, jumping at the L.'s expression of interest in food. "What about any of those other things?" I held my breath and imagined--insanely--L. asking for sausage, or sauerkraut.
"Just the spaetzle," he said. Then he paused.
"And how about that kuchen thing? What's that?"
So this is why my plans for a simple spaghetti dinner were set aside in favor of a steaming bowl of spaetzle, hot rolls, cabbage salad and plum kuchen for dessert.
It's a good start to the weekend.
Plum Kuchen (adapted from here)
1 1/2 cups all purpose flour
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1 1/2 teaspoons cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon salt
8 tablespoons Earth Balance margarine, melted
2/3 cup plus 1/4 cup sugar
Ener-G egg replacer (equivalent to 2 eggs)
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1 teaspoon almond extract
1/2 cup almond milk
1/2 cup sour cream, or vegan yogurt (coconut milk yogurt worked well)
3 large plums, halved and cut into wedges
Preheat oven to 350. Butter a 13 x 9 x 2 inch baking pan. Or, you can do what I did and "butter" two rectangular pans, realize they were too large, and then settle for a glass pie pan, which I then promptly forgot to "butter."
Sift flour, baking powder, 1 teaspoon cinnamon and salt into a small bowl.Melt the Earth Balance and mix in a large bowl with the 2/3 cup of sugar. Add Ener-G egg replacer, and then the extracts. Whisk until well-incorporated. Mix in the dry ingredients and sour cream/soy yogurt. Spread batter into pan.
Arrange plum wedges on their sides atop the batter. Mix 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon and 1/4 cup sugar in a small bowl. sprinkle over the plums. Melt 2 tablespoons Earth Balance and drizzle over the entire kuchen.
Bake the kuchen until a tester inserted in the middle of the cake comes out clean, about 40 minutes.
