Guestronomy, Part One
comida e divertimento
Four sets of guests flowed in and out of the month of June on a river of pastel de nata and glasses of vinho verde served with a view. After uninterrupted weeks on the fazenda I found myself in Lisboa twice in a week at multiple restaurants with tablecloths, feeling very much like a Beverly Hillbilly in the big city.
The h and I had to eat out a lot when we were scouting for a place to live in Portugal, and when we first moved into the Brokedown Palace (aka the palaceta) without any refrigeration, water or electricity. Once we graduated from the period of needing to eat out, we were delighted to be cooking again. Now, we generally save going out for meals when guests are here.
It feels like we’ve been doing nothing but eating. Whole baked fish. Barbecue from the churrasqueria. Six of us getting cheeseburgers on the patio at Cotorinho They probably think Americans are really stuck on eating familiar American dishes like cheeseburgers but the fact is, most places here don’t have a good burger. Only Cotorinho gets it, serving it bistro style with bacon and cheese with crinkle cut batatas fritas.
We had FoFos de Belas because when you’re in Belas you have to have fofos. We had pastries from three different shops including the pastelaria connected to the grocery store, which is a key player in our origin story here in Portugal. We visited it every day for eight weeks to have breakfast and recharge our electronics using the sole outlet in the cafe.
Don’t those ladies ever smile? asked my guest of the cafe workers and in fairness they never really did smile much during our eight week close acquaintance with them - if one of them did, I’d excitedly report it to the h. Maybe they were afraid we were going to try to make them speak English. I noticed the cashier’s eyes widen in recognition when it was my turn to order, and when I asked Tudo bem? she smiled briefly before getting down to business. I miss that cafe, and those busy, efficient unsmiling ladies that run it.
We’ve eaten a tsunami of fresh fruit - peaches and purple plums and tomatoes and avocados with basil. We ate cherries and strawberries and figs. And more plums, yellow. And lemonade from the billion lemons from Alberto. A polka dot hail of blueberries because everyone in the house- the guests, us, Jake and especially the four orphan hens loves blueberries. The orphan hen babies think blueberries are flies and scream in excitement, hopping up and down on the kitchen floor when I start cutting them up.
It was gray and misty for a few days, the sun barely breaking through during the weekend. I walked into the breakfast room and found Princess Leia and the three amigas - Yella Amarella, Black Haired Cher, and I Dream of Jeannie - sitting calmly in a narrow shaft of sunlight coming through the window.
Princess Leia is going through another growth spurt, or rather concluding one. She is roughly at the age her mama would leave her to fend for herself, no more sitting under mama at night, she’d be expected to roost or take her chances hiding on the ground. We’ve rescued a number of chicks hiding behind tall weeds at the edge of the driveway, directly below where there mamas were roosting high in the tree. They couldn’t help peeping affrightedly whenever we walked past them at night, so they were pretty easy to find, though challenging to catch.
We’ve seen for ourselves how difficult survival is for chicks joining the not-quite-as-feral-as-it-used-to-be flock, and have decided to integrate Leia to the flock slowly, and only when the other three orphans, her amigas are ready to take the leap of independence with her. Fox-proofing the coop and investing in netting that hides the babies from being spotted by sharp-sighted birds of prey are the priorities now. The fig tree provides plenty of roosting opportunities away from snakes.
We went to one of our favorite cafes with outdoor seating enabling Jake to come along. He was super happy to be in the company of old friends while bouncing along saying hi to all his new friends on the way there and the way back. The butcher held his arms out to Jake, calling “Entrem!!” then said a flood of Portugues that I’m pretty sure meant Hey did you see that he was looking for me! Which Jake was. The butcher, and his wife, are so sweetly affected by Jake’s cheerful, set-your-clock-by-it, unexpected and touching loyalty.
I made the sixteenth 4a call to mom in her dark Illinois bedroom. A couple of times I surprised her by having one of my guests sit in on the call, a woman who happens to be a friend from kindergarten, and who happens also to be named Sandra. We are Sandra-not-Sandys to the rest of the world, to each other we are The Other Sandy. Look who is visiting me in Portugal mom, I say, and we both wave and mom says Oh hi Sandy! and we all laugh at that.
Mom says how wonderful it is - she means it is wonderful that after all these years, the daughters of Ruth and Lenny and Denny and Duane are still friends. She means, that we are in Portugal. She means, that she can see us here, together, in Portugal, while she is there, in a house in the middle of Illinois, on her iPad. She means, that she is 86 and happy to be alive to see all of it. I smile at the genuine happiness in her voice though I woke her from a sound sleep in the middle of her night.
How are you doing, The Other Sandy asks and my mom says Well I can’t complain too much for an 86-year-old, I guess. It suddenly struck me that by almost anyone’s standard my mom is an old woman. It seems like it happened all of a sudden. I hope that I can be half as good a sport as she’s been about this whole aging business.
The four orphan hens perch all over us and our guests, often napping. Everyone took a billion pictures of them, they. are unbelievably cute. If I sit with my legs crossed they will line up on my shin. They like to pile onto the h’s chest while he naps next to Jake on the couch, the six of them sailing a sleepy sea together. They especially like to perch on the lid of a laptop but I don’t let that stand for long - too risky that they will plop a big blueberry poop on the keyboard.
One of our guests had a car and was generous offering to haul us all around. Just tell me what do you want to do, he says. I ask the h, where should we go? It’s hard to say, the h says. I mean, I’m pretty content. Me too, I say as we entered the house where Jake was snoozing on the couch, where a feathery little troupe of troublemakers runs around on the floor from 6a to 6p.
In the distribution of bed linens The Other Sandy scored the Dream Blanket. What is the dream blanket you ask? A blanket the h bought seems to cause very vivid dreams the same way that lady’s cooking in Like Water For Chocolate caused people to feel the emotions she felt while cooking. It’s a dreamy blanket - all soft and furry without feeling fakey acrylic-y. It’s warm but not heavy weight. The Other Sandy confirmed she did in fact have vivid dreams. I think I’ll start a Dream Blanket Journal for those who lie beneath it to record what they see.
The h and I both have experienced dreams under this blanket. At first I thought it was just a shared delirium at finally being truly warm, but every guest who has used it has brought up the subject of their dreams before knowing the blanket’s history.
Once, while sleeping under it, I had a dream that I could see beyond the weft and weave of the blanket to the past, to where a person/entity was weaving the blanket.
On the property things are bopping. Growth is everywhere. My first blue nile lily came in back in the heavily shaded Picnic Flats. And I see the bud of another in the courtyard garden. They are really pretty when they grow in profusion. I think we’re going to be naming the strip of land above he horta but below the upper row of olive trees the Blue Nile, because it will flow with these lilies. They grow well in the public garden right around the corner with the same sun exposure and soil conditions. Another case of purple following me.
Speaking of purple the purple morning glories the h planted a month ago started coming in. The h picked the first flower and put it in a tiny vase on my desk but in true morning glory fashion come aftermoon the flower closed up, refusing to bend the rules.
In the end Steve drove us all to Mafra, just 20 minutes away via a narrow two lane road bordered by ancient water-stained, time crumbled walls on either side. The road wound around through farmland and tight little villages. Front doors opened directly onto the road. We learned that next week is the Mafra bread festival. We will definitely return for the pao and to see the singer advertised as the Portuguese Tina Turner.
Mafra is a World Heritage Site, a town that takes a lot of pride in looking fantastically trim and clean and neat, with baskets of rose madder petunias hanging in orderly rows from the lampposts on the streets bordering the great central square.
I bought some lavender sachets and a ceramic spoon rest with a Portuguese tile design. The Other Sandy bought a little trio of black ceramic sparrows. I reflected such things seem to be made exclusively to be sold to women. How much of the world’s stuff is made just to sell to ladies on vacation, I asked the h. He thought about it. Twenty percent, he said.
We ate at a nice restaurant, very crowded. They seated us though we didn’t have a reservation, the place filled up quickly after opening for the afternoon. We had halibut and rabbit and chicken, house specialties that are all classics of Portuguese cooking. We had desserts and coffees, and I mostly spoke Portuguese with the server though she spoke a bit of English too. I am gaining more and more confidence speaking.
While we were eating dessert a little boy from the table next to us waved at us. Hiiiiy he enunciated. He must have heard our English. He was sitting at a table of adults and kids under the age of ten. A birthday was being celebrated.
Ola! I said. Tu tem bolo? (Do you have cake?)
Sim, he says with a charming sideways smile beneath brown bangs. He climbs up to stand on the rungs of the chairs. Alto alto! he giggles. (See how tall I am). He steps off the rungs and I pretend I can’t see him, scanning over his head, exaggerating how far down I have to look to find him.
Nao alto! I say. He giggles wildly and jumps back on the rungs. Alto alto! His mom directs his attention to the cake but he keeps an eye on me and grins and waves whenever he catches my eye. His mom and I exchange smiles and he high fived me as we left.
I am still waiting for my residence card. It is just three months, today - the maximum amount of time one is supposed to wait. I checked in with the Yellow Book, a sort of national letters-to-customer-service escalation portal where particularly intractable bureaucratic snarls - mostly, extended waiting - are solved. Send totems, spells, energetic intent, black magic (not really), whatever. In my experience, this is the point in the Portuguese bureaucracy where if you follow certain rituals (for example, call the helpline daily though you know it is only answered 1% of the time), ancient gods will intervene and the hopelessness will unsnarl in a matter of minutes and disappear like an unpleasant odor and just as quickly evaporating from memory. Let’s hope.
The Other Sandy harvested a bunch of beans and the h cooked them up with mushrooms and garlic and we had them that same night for dinner with a Greek Salad I made of a fresh picked cucumbers, some tomatoes, goat cheese and arugula.
Alberto brought over a tea service, a gift from Rosa. No want to polish anymore, he says. The set is beautifully tarnished but it will be fun to polish it to a killer shine. I have plans for a Tea Room, upstairs next to my writer’s garret, an invitation-only spot where much tea will be had, and spilled. The set includes silver candle holders and two pleasingly heavy-in-the-hand bud vases plus all the usual suspects - creamer, sugar bowl etc, all on a silver tray accented with gold leaf.
I can be as taken by the next new thing as the next person - you should see the cool matcha green tea latte maker we bought Sophia for her 22nd birthday - but what I really like is giving old things new life. This silver set is going to really add to the Christmas vibe when the time comes - the garrett being the one place in the house that will for sure be decorated TO THE NINES for Christmas, a place that is *mine* and therefore a place where the h can’t scroogily gruntle and grinchily grumble that all Christmas decorations will end up as landfill.
Of course the h is right, the Christmas decorations of the previous owners were quite literally landfill - I found some buried a few feet under the surface dirt in the Secret Garden (and definitely re-usable, btw). If it were up to ME, I would love to wrap the palm trees in front of our house in candy cane stripes, or twine sparkly lights around the trunks so it looks like the gate sits between the legs of a giant lady wearing sparkly stockings. The h will never agree.
I am happy thinking how this Christmas is going to be so different than last Christmas, when we slept with coats and hats and huddled under a down sleeping bag in the evening, when it was too cold and damp to use our phones more than a few minutes at a time before our fingers got too stiff to type. The rain! The wind! The flooding kitchen! One of the first sentences I could say confidently was que tempo frio!
Whereas this winter we will be sleeping in a bed with the Dream Blanket, in the next room a heater and hot shower. I will be able to walk to the bathroom barefoot at night and not worry about rusty carpet nails, ancient slivers of wood waiting to jam themselves beneath toenails, concrete dust from where tiles have been chipped from the walls, or house centipedes. It will feel so civilized. Especially when I can wash my face inside at a sink, something we don’t have at any of the houses as yet.
The h is installing the cabinets in the quinta kitchen. Then it, the garden floor of the quinta, will be almost done - just install a sink in its cabinet and wall shelving where we sealed up a bizarre window that used to look out from the tiny kitchen to the bathroom. Maybe it served some purpose back when the house was a chapel.
The day before The Other Sandy left, Alberto came hallooing to the backdoor with a big box bulging with lemons and yellow plums, topped with a half dozen rolls - milk, wheat, a few other. We ate the milk rolls with our dinner. The only day of the year we got rolls like this was Thanksgiving or Christmas, I noted, and Sandy agreed. The h, who grew up much differently than we two poor Catholic church mice Sandra-not-Sandys, was puzzled. Why? Because Bunny bread was cheaper, we explained. There’s something to be said for shared experiences.
The Other Sandy asked for a tour of his garden and Alberto obliged. Then she and I went into Lisbon to have a glass of wine at the rooftop bar of a popular hotel and where the sun was absolutely blazing hot. Then we went on a sunset sail of the Tagus River, looking at Lisbon from a picturesque distance.
The h made his famous three bean salad - that sentence really cracks me up because it makes him sound like an 89 year old guy in golf pants he hikes too high, carrying a covered Tupperware bowl, and not the long-haired MacGyver Renaissance man extreme skier guy that he is. Everyone has a go-to dish when you have a barbeque or bring a dish to a barbecue or just want a simple supper and the bean salad is ours. It’s a recipe from Everyday Cooking, a really excellent cookbook of elegant one-pot cooking. If you want the recipe just ask and I’ll post it.
While we were eating grilled chicken one night The Other Sandy noticed that the china she was eating on was the exact same china as her former mother-in-law’s. That made me remember - my mom gave me *her* wedding china. One day my friend Linda - who has also been a guest here - walks past the pantry and notices the dishes. Oh I have the same set, my mom gave it to me, she says. These little touchstones we share. Do people still get china for their wedding, and pass it on to their kids?
Mom told me that she hardly ever used it. Maybe you’ll have more occasions to, she said. I can tell her, my whole life is an occasion for more dishes. We have at least six buildings on the property that will need to be outfitted with dishes. The dish triggering The Other Sandy was part of a set I found way back in a cabinet. We’ve found easily more than a hundred plates around the place, and another hundred glasses and mugs - often buried in dirt or in a pile of household detritus. After a few weeks of soaking in a vinegar solution and boiling water the decades of grime came clean and I find I like this mistura fina of old and new, formal and informal, classic and modern.
Before, I missed my cats, The Other Sandy said. But now I’m going to miss this. She gestured, meaning: Jake, the house hens, the flock of roosters, harvesting veggies from the garden, Alberto hallooing over. What’s funny is how temporal this all is - the renovation goes forward in inches some places, leaps and bounds in others. The next time she visits there will be an all new all this - a fountain fountaining, a swimming pool reflecting the yellow eye of the sun, a pool house for lounging and watching swimmers from above…. not to mention indoor sinks and faucets and showers and flushing toilets. And don’t forget, beds that aren’t mattresses in a tent on the wooden floor of a bedroom the color of the wallpaper in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story.
Later, The Other Sandy texted me a photo of her cats twining around her feet. My babies! said the message. I glanced over in the living room where the sleeper couch where The Other Sandy slept has resumed the shape of a sofa, and where four little hens sit nodding in the sun. Soon they will parachute off the couch to climb one by one up my or the h’s legs to perch together. Reliable as clockwork, about 4p every day.
It’s an inborn instinct clearly as between 4p and 7p the flock starts going to roost, the hens among the first, the young bachelor roosters and old campaigners last. It is during this period a hen and her gallo will try to coach little chicks to fly up to the wall, from which they can launch themselves to the lowest branch of the nearest tree and on up. If the babies are too small or lack a Tinkerbell force in their life that makes them really really believe they can do it, they will spend the night huddled in any weeds they might find in the driveway or the sidewalk, which is where I’d swoop in, and bring them in the house for the night to sleep in a basket of hay with a towel over the top. None of those chicks made it in the end - they just disappeared after some extremely cold rainy nights. I cried, of course, even though I knew the odds of them surviving were low.
This is another thing that will be different this year - a chicken coop that is predator proof and houses hens that know us as their parents, have a big space to call their own to scratch around, nesting boxes for laying eggs and even a building to have and nurture chicks to adulthood, instead of relying on me and the h and the living room that is for now the chicken nursery.
What a beautiful life! I’m happy you’ve chosen to share it. And, yes please to sharing the bean salad recipe!
Thanks for sharing a little bit of your life. It's fascinating. And the Fofos de Belas look divine!