Adventures in Real Estate

Daffodil Cottage

Regular readers may have wondered at my recent uncharacteristic silence. (In fact, a few of you wrote to ask whether I was all right, which was very sweet.)

I have indeed taken a break from writing lately. My whole family has been busy helping my mother get ready to sell her house in Millburn, New Jersey.

For several years now, she and I have been traveling from Massachusetts (my home) to New Jersey (her home) to Virginia (my brother’s home) and then back to New Jersey and so on.

Frankly, living in three places has been exhausting and confusing for me, let alone the almost 92-year-old Jan!

So this spring she decided to put the New Jersey house on the market. She and I spent a couple of weeks at the house (known as Daffodil Cottage) in June de-cluttering and making sure that all the little repair jobs we had been saving up got done.

We then turned the place over to our realtor, the amazing Wendy Drucker.

Recently, my friend Peter asked me for advice about choosing a realtor. I sent him a long letter, and OF COURSE I can’t find it now. The gist of it was that the ideal realtor understands the unique features of one’s home and looks not just for the most money but also for the best fit for the house and its owner.

I also suggested that the best realtors were rooted in the communities in which they sold property.

Peter told me I was brilliant. Well, of course, I am—but my description of the ideal realtor had nothing to do with my brilliance and everything to do with Wendy’s.

She is cheerful, knowledgeable, and competent—and she cares about my mother, me, and the past and future of Daffodil Cottage. She has found a buyer who wants to bring up his children in Daffodil Cottage. The closing will take place next week!

Whenever we have been in a jam—locating a repairman while out of state, trying to figure out how to get rid of decades’ worth of garbage, looking for a real-estate lawyer who would reassure my mother that selling the house was indeed the right thing to do—Wendy has come through.

She and her terrific husband Chris have spent more time in Daffodil Cottage lately than we have. Chris and my nephew Michael bonded when Chris stopped by to help my brother David install a fire extinguisher in the kitchen.

We call Chris Our Hero. We call Wendy a Goddess. (She is actually Goddess Number One. Number Two is my sister-in-law Leigh, who has been acting as the family organizer and archivist.)

What with all the sorting and packing, we haven’t had much time for cooking. We have eaten some yummy takeout, about which I’ll write soon. But we did invite Wendy and Chris over last week for a quick pasta supper.

We served the simple sauce below over whole-wheat rigatoni purchased at one of Millburn’s best places to shop, Mia Famiglia.

This little Italian deli sells tasty sandwiches and soups, aged Italian cheeses, and crusty breads.

Naturally, we prepared the sauce with Mia Famiglia’s own sausage, which is flavored with tons of fennel. If you can’t shop there (we won’t be able to soon!), you may make it with any Italian sausage you like (I’d mix hot and sweet if you don’t have the natural spiciness we enjoyed)—even vegetarian faux sausage.

Jan and I will be embarking on more adventures in real-estate soon: another experienced realtor, Carol Cooke, is looking for an apartment for us in Virginia. In the meantime, here is the sauce we served to Wendy and Chris.

You don’t actually have to sell real estate to enjoy it.


Daffodil Cottage Pasta Sauce

Ingredients:

12 ounces faux (or real) Italian sausage, cut into small chunks
2 to 3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil (use only if using faux sausage or if your real sausage is quite lean)
2 to 3 cloves garlic, minced
another 2 to 3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
1 large can (28 ounces) Italian tomatoes, crushed by hand or with a gentle knife
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon black pepper
2 pinches red pepper flakes (or to taste)
1 teaspoon oregano leaves
fresh, chopped basil to taste

Instructions:

In a frying pan brown the sausage chunks, using oil if they are made of soy or are very lean. Drain and set aside.

In another large frying pan or a Dutch oven sauté the garlic in the olive oil just until it turns golden brown.

Add the tomatoes, salt, peppers, oregano, and sausage. Cook this mixture down for at least 20 minutes, uncovered. Stir occasionally. The sausage gets richer and denser if you simmer it for up to an hour; if you want to extend the cooking, make sure you cover the sauce almost all the way after it begins to thicken.

Toss in the basil just before serving over pasta. Top with aged Romano cheese from Mia Famiglia. Serves 4.

Goodbye, arts-and-crafts living room of Daffodil Cottage!

Oat Cuisine

In my New Year e-mail to friends I mentioned that I was working on an article about oatmeal. The response was enthusiastic.

“Oatmeal is our friend,” e-mailed Carol Cooke, a realtor from Alexandria, Virginia. Just as passionate was Sheila Velazquez. Along with her family, Sheila is working hard to resurrect the old Rice farm on Pudding Hollow Road here in Hawley, Massachusetts. They are basically camping out (brrr!) while nurturing their children and chickens, reconstructing the historic house’s interior, and reading seed catalogues as they dream of the garden they will plant in spring.

Sheila wrote that on chilly winter mornings she enjoys oatmeal almost every day. She buys organic oats in bulk and cooks them with water, dried fruit, and cinnamon. She throws in a little salt at the very end. “So good and also a good way to use up fruit that’s getting past its time,” she added.

Sheila offered me a recipe for oatmeal pie, which she termed a sort of “faux pecan” concoction. She said of oatmeal in general, “It seems that some of the most delicious foods are also the least expensive and best for us.”

I don’t eat oatmeal every morning. Unlike the noble Sheila I always add at least a little brown sugar or maple syrup to my morning porridge. I do yearn for the warmth and comfort of oatmeal at this time of year, however. I’m apparently not alone. More Americans eat oatmeal in January than in any other month, a statistic that prompted Quaker Oats to name January National Oatmeal Month.

Of course, Quaker had a vested interest in creating a month devoted to its signature product. I forgive the company because oatmeal is indeed the perfect food in this dark and cold season. The old cliché that it sticks to one’s ribs turns out to be true. Whole grains like oats take longer for the body to process than many other foods.

The best oatmeal for health purposes is a long-cooking type such as steel-cut oats. If you’re in a hurry, old-fashioned oats take only five minutes to prepare and are still very good for you. Avoid the small packages of instant oatmeal, however. They tend to go overboard in adding salt and sugar.

Oatmeal always appears on lists of super foods. It is good for cholesterol and blood pressure. It also delivers several nutrients, as well as some protein.

Best of all, it is versatile. Broccoli is also a super food, but there are only so many ways a person can disguise broccoli. Believe me, I’ve tried! As well as making a tasty breakfast cereal, oatmeal can be tucked into fruit crisps, cookies, breads, muffins, and meatloaf. It can even be used to construct a facial mask. (Take that, broccoli!)

In this post and the next few I’ll share recipes to boost oatmeal intake this month. If you’re looking for a basic oatmeal cookie, you can’t do better than the formula for Vanishing Oatmeal-Raisin Cookies on the inside of the Quaker Oats box top. Dan Turner of Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts, told me how to get the best consistency with these cookies: use a Crisco stick instead of the butter or margarine called for in the recipe. You’ll find that the cookies really do vanish quickly.

The Rice Farm in Hawley, Massachusetts

Rice Farm Oatmeal Pie

Sheila Velazquez says that she originally found this recipe in Farm Journal’s Country Cookbook, published in 1972. At one time she managed a farmer’s market, where the pie was a best seller. Sheila explains that the oatmeal forms a chewy crust on the top of the pie.

Ingredients:

1/4 cup (1/2 stick) soft butter
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 cup dark corn syrup
3 eggs
1 cup quick-cooking rolled oats
1 unbaked 9-inch pie shell

Instructions:

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Cream together the butter and sugar. Add the spices and salt. Stir in the corn syrup. Add the eggs, one at a time, stirring after each addition until all is blended. Stir in the oats.

Pour the mixture into the pie shell, and bake for about an hour, or until a knife inserted into the center comes out clean. Serves 6 to 8.