By Boolar, on December 20th, 2008%
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Masonic Weapons
I like being snowed in.
While Bradley juiced some pink grapefruits, I worked on a brussel sprout & buttercup squash scramble with fenugreek, basil and more, and dished up bowls of oatmeal with coconut, pumpkin seeds, apricots, and barberries, with flax seeds, butter, and honey on top, doubleplusgood.
Fuzzy logic rice cookers rule. I put all those treats in the rice cooker last night, set the timer, and presto! next morning we have deliciously creamy Oatmeal-Plus! kept warm until we are ready to eat it. Slow cookers are great for whole oats and other grains, but nothing beats the fuzzy logic.
Genome brought up the question of the aluminum cooking pan in rice cookers. I was under the impression that they had debunked the whole Alzheimer’s-aluminum connection and that it takes an acidic food to leach it out anyhow (it is also worth mentioning that China and Japan, both heavily rice-cooker dependent, have lower AD rates than the U.S.), but I’ve been looking into alternatives.
The most promising one I found? A rice cooker with a clay insert! Yes, clay. It hasn’t been around long enough for me to drop the dollars (I wait until the reviews are in), but you can be sure that I’ll be keeping my eye on it… I am a huge fan of clay cookers, like Romertopfs, and of stone baking ware, too.
I guess we all have to eat that peck of dirt before we die; might as well cook it up in a pot of earth, no?
By Boolar, on December 19th, 2008%
It was dark and cold when the phone rang last night. “Blocked Call,” the phone said. “What the hell?” I replied, and answered anyway.
It was Jeff. No, not Jeff from Azure Standard, who would be delivering boxes and boxes filled with hundreds of pounds of organic foods, mostly dry goods, in the morning (which he did), but Jeff from Persephone Farm, who would not be bringing the 25 lbs of onions, 25 pounds of yellow finn potatoes and five pounds of white garlic I had ordered to the farmer’s market on Saturday because there is no farmer’s market on Saturday.
That’s right, the last farmer’s market of the year has been canceled due to the gorgeous weather we’ve been having.
I s’pose it’s for the best; I usually end up in tears by the end of the last market of the year. How can you banish me to the grocery stores for three long months? I moan at the farmer’s whose faces and manners and veggies I’ll miss until April.
But Persephone Jeff had good news to top the bad. He had my produce, it was already picked, and he was willing to bring it to my house, which he has now done.
So here I am with a couple of hundred pounds of food in my living room. To make it worth his while, I added some things to my order and called a few of the food club ladies to let them in on the deal.
Here’s what we are getting:
red and green cabbage, $0.70/lb, 40 lbs
storage onions, $0.88/lb, 75 lbs
romanesco, $1.50/lb, 15 lbs
beets, $1.30/lb, 10 lbs
brussel sprouts on the stalk, $4/stalk (about $3.20/lb), 8 stalks
winter squash, $0.70/lb, 60 lbs
fennel bulbs, $2 each, 5 bulbs
turnips, $1.50/lb, 5lbs
farm fresh eggs with orange yolks, $6/dozen, 17 dozen
I found this article on storing veggies in the suburban home and now I wish I’d gotten a few more stalks of brussel sprouts.
I am also now the proud owner of 50lbs of epsom salts, a fact which I will certainly appreciate more right after I finish up chopping the veggies for a few gallons of kraut tonight and start thinking about a warm bath.
I guess I’m just about done squirreling food away for this winter. Well, maybe…
By Boolar, on December 17th, 2008%
To fill the hour, that is happiness; to fill the hour, and leave no crevice for a repentance or an approval.” –Experience, Ralph Waldo Emerson
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No-Key Suare
I really do not mean to beat this subject to death, but it is on my mind. In the absence of both my guru and my most trusted confidante (mind you, neither of these people suspect the real way I feel about their opinions), I have nobody but everybody with access to the internet to confess those things I feel the most need to confess. Here I am going to take the opportunity to mention that the bad taste from adding yet more poor-to-mediocre writing to the already bloated world wide web has gotten worse in my own mouth lately, but here I am adding more by the moment and feeling little to no guilt. For shame.
There we have Bradley filling his hour by strumming a twelve string guitar. I ought to record it straight into the mac-top and put it here for you, but you’ll have to imagine something like Sandy Bull crossed with Roy Montgomery on a snowy evening in our living room (you understand that it isn’t snowing in our living room, right?).
And here you have me, still wondering what I have to lose.
See, when making music, there really isn’t anything to lose. I do what I want and what I feel because the act of making music is for nothing other than to fill my hour with something that brings me joy and peace and sometimes relief and other times pride, among other pleasant emotions. If I end up with a well recorded track that stirs pleasant emotions in others, too, well that’s even more pleasant, isn’t it? It isn’t going to hurt anybody else, surely it can’t.
But I’ve got this idea in my head, and it is such a big idea and there is so much to lose, I feel. And I don’t like to feel as though there is something to lose that isn’t worth risking, except my life, except my life, except my life. I just mean that there isn’t any real risk in writing a song, or making a meal, or writing a blog entry, or keeping a journal, or drawing a picture, or spending a weekend crocheting little hexagons that I will probably never turn into an afghan (yes, I did this recently). A few hours, a few dollars, all worth it for the privilege of filling an Emersonian hour or two.
I’m trying to convince myself that there really isn’t much difference between a few dollars and a few hundred thousand dollars, a few hours and a few years. If I go into this thing, I’ve got to make myself believe that it is worth trying even if I fail miserably.
“Go out on a limb; it’s where all the fruit is,” said Aunt Sophia with a smile. I want to believe she’s right, as frightened as I am of heights.
By Boolar, on December 16th, 2008%
Not long since, a strolling Indian went to sell baskets at the house of a well-known lawyer in my neighborhood. “Do you wish to buy any baskets?” he asked. “No, we do not want any,” was the reply. “What!” exclaimed the Indian as he went out the gate, “do you mean to starve us?” Having seen his industrious white neighbors so well off,–that the lawyer had only to weave arguments, and by some magic wealth and standing followed, he said to himself; I will go into business; I will weave baskets; it is a thing which I can do. Thinking that when he had made the baskets he would have done his part, and then it would be the white man’s to buy them. He had not discovered that it would be necessary for him to make it worth the other’s while to buy them, or at least make him think that it was so, or to make something else which it would be worth his while to buy. I too had woven a kind of basket of a delicate texture, but I had not made it worth any one’s while to buy them. Yet not the less, in my case, did I think it worth my while to weave them, and instead of studying how to make it worth men’s while to buy my baskets, I studied rather how to avoid the necessity of selling them. The life which men praise and regard as successful is but one kind. Why should we exaggerate any one kind at the expense of the others?” –Walden, Henry David Thoreau
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Holland Days
Maybe my friend down the hall remembers it, the part she played in the paper I wrote on Walden that first and only year I was at Mount Holyoke. It was this time of year. That hill outside my window might have been covered in snow. It started one of the many existential crises I had during the long three-quarters of a year I spent as a student in New England. I just could not write the paper. It was supposed to be many pages long, I can’t quite remember how many, but I couldn’t even imagine starting. Not because I didn’t love the book; I adored it, and still do.
I don’t remember all the details (I so often don’t), but I do remember the feeling of calm and the sense of purpose I finally had when I decided to write my paper (with the approval of that friend who surely wouldn’t have done the same herself, but was willing to try the experiment through me) on why Thoreau should not like me to write my paper, using Walden itself as my evidence. It was about a page and a half long and definitely included a line about planting beans.
I had never so anxiously awaited my grades, not since my junior year of high school, when I had convinced Mr. Milam the Algebra II teacher who wore his straight-fronted, flatly pressed slacks at the waist like a military man that if he really thought that his exams accurately reflected what he wished his students to learn, he shouldn’t count homework toward the final grade (unless it would help, of course). The deal we finally made (it took a few days to break him) was that I didn’t have to do any homework if I got no less than an A on each and every exam. You might be able to guess which student got 89% on the third exam. By my calculations, I would have gotten a D in the course if he held me to our arrangement. I held my breath, but I didn’t bother doing any homework.
In both cases, I was rewarded for my… what would you call it? moxie?
Ten years later, instead of using it only to avoid jumping through hoops I’d rather not, I’m trying to use this skill (or affliction) to get myself into something. It’s really a much more difficult position.
Instead of biting my nails while waiting for my grades to come in and prove that I have pulled it off again, I’m having my first migraines and wondering if it just won’t be enough, this moxie of mine.
Maybe not. But it is still worth trying, right? I know that my friend down on the opposite end of the hall who once agreed would probably do so again. I’m actually counting on that belief, though the hallway between us has grown to cover half the globe.
For a long time I was reporter to a journal, of no very wide circulation, whose editor has never yet seen fit to print the bulk of my contributions, and, as is too common with writers, I got only my labor for my pains. However, in this case, my pains were their own reward.” –Ibid.
By Boolar, on December 7th, 2008%
By Boolar, on December 7th, 2008%
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push play to hear “The Father of Everything”
It is still Fall (and what a lovely Fall it has been). Winter doesn’t actually start for another two weeks. And though it will certainly be much colder, the days will start getting longer!
I never got around to answering MHT when she asked why I had so many eggs in my fridge (so many being around six dozen), so I’ll do so here. Eggs are seasonal. Yes, silly, like tomatoes and apples and celeriac and asparagus and pretty much everything else that we eat, eggs have a time and a place.
You’d never know it, and neither did I, growing up in the Industrial Age of food production. You go to the store and you buy eggs. The store is never out of eggs. There are always enough eggs, whether it be December or June. Same with milk and cheese and flour and beef and cheese. Always enough for those with the money and desire to buy.
But it’s only because they force chickens into cages and then trick them with lights and hormones and other tricks into producing eggs all year long, eggs that have pale yellow yolks (from the annato coloring in their feed, not Vitamin A) and not so much flavor or nutrition (but, hey, they are cheap!).
The eggs I buy are from a small family farm. The chickens live outside for the most part. In the winter, they don’t like to lay eggs, and nobody forces them to. These eggs have yolks that vary from blazing orange (in Summer when there are bugs and green foods a-plenty) to just orange, but never yellow, and never, ever pale yellow.
Long story short, since even the most expensive eggs (and these ones are, at $6 per dozen) are a very inexpensive source of excellent quality protein and other nutritional delights, we rely on them heavily in our diet. And since we are about to lose them until Spring, I’m stocking up.
While the sticker price seems high, eating in season is actually less expensive. Right now, we are eating all the organic apples we want because they only cost 50 cents a pound. Biodynamic organic carrots, local, small, sweet and crunchy? 70 cents a pound. Potatoes and onions, kinda spendy at $1.00 a pound, wouldn’t you say? Greens are free, they come out of the garden.
Go to the grocery store and price a pound of tomatoes, conventional or organic, or grapes from South America, and you’ll see what I’m talking about. Front page of the major national grocery chain near my house’s weekly specials lists ten pounds of conventional apples for ten dollars, or twice what I pay for organic, so I’d hate to see what they charge for something not in season…
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