Breathing is Fundamental

I had to wait until I couldn't breathe and for my husband to notice and say "Why not open your new inhaler." Why am I such a Yankee? Is my breath not worth having. I opened the new box took two puffs of my puffer and could breathe deeply for the first time in weeks, and I slept soundly.

Secret Cupboard

When we first moved into our house the previous owners had forgotten to empty one cupboard in the kitchen. It was a great surprise when we discovered a treasure trove full of glass baking dishes. There were stacked glass loaf pans, custard cups, and casserole dishes with matching lids. Thank you Dora! We say each time we take one out.

This NYT story made me think of it.

On the Fly Inventions

I like to do things quick and lazy but healthy. When I am in a froth of hunger I sometimes invent things on the fly that I decide I will repeat on purpose next time. Last night I took Pecorino Romano cheese we get cheaply in big bags from Price Rite and I mixed some with my homemade buttermilk and added freshly ground black pepper and poured it over whole wheat squiggle-shaped pasta and ate it with black oil-cured olives and Francine and Jeff's freshly sliced tomatoes, and raw onions, of course.

Granola Kitchen

I am baking more granola. We get oats in a 100 pound bag that we store in our chest freezer and we fly through them. I like my granola formula because it's not too sweet. The unmeasured recipe is corn oil, JAR Baker's Supply brand dark molasses, Kosher salt, Job Lot real vanilla, a sprinkle of sugar, all combined and warmed until melted. Then add to rolled oats stir and taste. If the mixture is right, scoop into shallow pans in a 300 degree oven. Check every 10 minutes and stir. You'll know when it is done. The smell will tell you and the oats will be toasted. When the granola has cooled off store in a big air tight container or glass jar on your kitchen counter. Carry granola for quick snacks. It is great with dried fruit + also you can add your favorite nuts + seeds. I love it in homemade applesauce and yogurt. It is easy cheap and fun to be healthy.

Lately I bake mine at 250 because half the time I am in my office upstairs and can't always stop-- so I need to bake the oats SLOWER and LOWER so they don't burn!

Got Culture?

Yesterday my yogurt came out so perfectly I decided to try making buttermilk with the last 1/2 cup of cultured buttermilk in my fridge. It was so easy it was the same as making yogurt without the heating and cooling of the milk. I will do it today as I am hooked on cultivating culture. I should learn more about microbiology like the cheese nun. I have never liked butter but today there is an article in the NYT about cultured butter. Here.

Last night I noticed all of Pepe's peaches had fallen in the wind and rain. I grabbed a few for my Little Red Riding Hood basket, picked out the bruised spots and ate them on my way home. They were juicy and sweet. Lily ate a pit!

I woke up with this thought: If I am so psychic why can't I find the mop? Woke at 4 but got out of bed at 5 made coffee, started the laundry and hung the sheets and clothes in the dark. Just me and the squeaky pulley, lit up by the house lights. Why do I love these things?

The New Dominican American corner market at East School Street and Rathbun Street has a bright blue ATM sign, a spotlight all night and a multiphase OPEN sign. Digital neon! I love it. Maybe we can parade for them next year. They are a terrific store with 4 plantains for a dollar.

If I had this level of energy all the time I would be an actress in the theater. Yet I am an actress, in the theater of life. Theater, poetry, music, painting, dance are the magnifying glasses that teach us art is everywhere.

I was thinking what would I miss about my city. All of the characters!
Mothers wearing pajama pants taking their kids to the bus stop. Apartment windows covered with bed sheets and blankets pinched into the storm windows. The teen boys with jeans deliberately hanging low, waddling, swaddled in coolness. The house painter and carpenter vans, ladders strapped to the roof, tooting for their worker buddies at 4 AM. The post office parking lot full of workers at 3:30 AM. Diners open at 4AM. French Canadian old ladies commenting in dialect to each other. The public works guys waving and asking about Lily. Jackson the scrap metal guy asking for my sourdough bread. The friendly homeless guys who stay at the shelter and live at the benches, or under the trees at the library one has his gray-haired green eyed cat on a leash.

Yesterday I found a bunch of 100 dollar over sized play money bills on my granite stairs. The gods are trying to tell me something.

Hey, the radio just told me it's my hero actor Tony Shaloub's birthday today! Happy Birthday Tony, we adore you.

You never know what you'll want to write until it starts writing itself in your head. -Jill Ker Conway

There's a whole language out there, and one's role as a writer is to stumble around in it. -Ciaran Carson

I like good company, but I like hard work still better. -Camille Saint-Saens

I long, long, long ago thought the finest thing to be is an entertainer, with tons of funny things to say. If people find lots more in my work, that's great, but if they just read and have a good laugh, that's fine for me. -James Howe McClure


Number 20
by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

The pennycandystore beyond the El
is where I first
fell in love
with unreality
Jellybeans glowed in the semi-gloom
of that september afternoon
A cat upon the counter moved among
the licorice sticks
and tootsie rolls
and Oh Boy Gum

Outside the leaves were falling as they died

A wind had blown away the sun

A girl ran in
Her hair was rainy
Her breasts were breathless in the little room

Outside the leaves were falling
and they cried
Too soon! too soon!

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, from A Coney Island of the Mind. © New Directions,1968.
source

Martin Lersch

A pinch of salt for your coffee, Sir? source
by Martin Lersch

A small sprinkle of salt will suppress bitterness – and in some cases it can benefit the overall coffee flavor. I’ve tried it with an espresso and somehow it works, but it’s difficult to describe the flavor.

I prefer my coffee black, and politely decline when offered milk and sugar. However, if offered salt I would probably smile and say “Yes, please!” Salt???! It turns out that adding salt to coffee is not as weird as it may sound at first. There is a tradition for adding a pinch of salt to coffee in Northern Scandinavia, Sibir, Turkey and Hungary. And when available, such as in coastal areas where fresh water from rivers mixes with the salt sea, one would simply use brackish water when preparing coffee. This water typically has a salt content of 0.5-3%, which is lower than the average 3.5% in seawater. This results in a more intense taste and more foaming. And if living far from the sea, the Swedish food blogger Lisa Förare Winbladh let me know that in Northern Sweden one would deliberately add salt if using melt water from glaciers for making coffee. But tradition aside, is there a scientific explanation of this widespread tradition of preparing coffee with addition of salt?

The first thing that comes to mind is that salt reduces bitterness. And to be more precise it is the sodium ion (Na+) that interferes with the transduction mechanism of bitter taste. But interestingly the mechanism behind this is not fully understood! One of my very first blog posts was about tonic water and how one by adding salt can suppress the bitter taste and make tonic water more or less sweet. It’s a fascinating experiment that you should try at home. Expect to use about 1,5-2 g salt for a glass with roughly 1,5 dL (150 g) of tonic water. It’s a good idea to start with a little salt and taste it as you go.

Try adding a little salt to tonic water – the effect is quite surprising: The characteristic bitterness from the added quinine disappears!

Bitterness is an important flavor in coffee, but under less-than-optimal extraction conditions it can be too dominant. Generally bitter tasting compounds are less water soluble than other coffee flavors, hence the bitter compounds are extracted towards the end of the brewing. High temperatures (close to boiling) and long extraction times also favor bitterness. In that respect the coffee percolator is known to produce rather bitter, over-extracted coffee due to near boiling temperatures, and such coffee would most likely benefit from a little salt! And before the percolator came the ground coffee was just put into the boiling water and then left to settle. I can really imagine how brackish water could actually benefit

But the salt need not be reserved for over-extracted coffee. I’ve tried using salt both in a drip coffee maker and in the filter basked when pulling an espresso. The tests were very un-scientific, but the tiny amount of salt does dampen bitterness and change the coffee taste (but the coffee does not have a salty taste). Since I lack cupping experience, I certainly lack the language to describe how salt influences the taste, so I leave it up to you to try it out! And maybe some baristas with cupping experience can fill me out on this and do some tests?

In stead of just using plain salt with coffee, cured ham would signal rafinesse if served in central Europe, whereas in Northern Sweden there is a tradition for serving dried meat with coffee. The Swedish author Mikael Niemi describes this in his novel Popular music from Vittula:

“… and then the pièce de résistance among all the sweetmeats: a hard, brown lump of dried reindeer meat. Salty slices were cut and placed in the coffee, chunks of coffee-cheese stirred in, and white sugar lumps were held between the lips. And then, fingers trembling, we all poured the coffee mixture into our saucers, and slurped our way to heaven.”

With cured ham, apart from the salt-coffee interaction, one also has the combination of meat and coffee. From previous flavor pairing rounds TGRWT #1 and #5 (chocolate/coffee and coffee/meat respectively) we have seen that coffee and meat in some ways approach each other and are actually a good combination. A secret tip BTW is to add a little coffee to your beef stocks for extra depth and richness – this works because coffee shares many impact flavors with browned meats due to the Maillard reaction.

Now I’m curious – are you aware of coffee-salt combinations in your own country? Please tell me about it! And if you try a pinch of salt in your coffee – how did it taste?

Update: Read about my tests of coffee with salt at Tim Wendelboe’s coffe shop

–
Some articles that discuss the role of sodium ions (Na+) in suppression of bitter receptors:

Breslin, P. A. S; Beauchamp, G.K. “Suppression of Bitterness by Sodium: Variation Among Bitter Taste Stimuli” Chemical Senses 1995, 20, 609-623.

Breslin, P. A. S; Beauchamp, G.K. “Salt enhances flavour by suppressing bitterness” Nature 1997 (387), 563.

Bresling, P. A. S “Interactions among salty, sour and bitter compounds” Trends in Food Science & Technology 1996 (7), 390. (free download)

Keast, R. S. J.; Breslin, P. A. S. “An overview of binary taste–taste interactions” Food Quality and Preference 2003, 14(2), 111.

In addition to suppression of bitterness, salt can enhance sweetness at low concentrations and umami flavors at higher concentrations (more about this in part 5 of “Practical tips for molecular gastronomy”).

Waking Up

Waking up to smoke a cigarette is as bad as waking up to climb into a car, the prosthesis of the masses, destroying our communities.

Ray Bradbury

It had started with the arguments, and then the flesh, and then the pictures. They had fought deep into the summer nights, she like a brass trumpet forever blaring at him. And he had gone out to eat five thousand steaming hot dogs, ten million hamburgers, and a forest of green onions, and to drink vast red seas of orange juice. Peppermint candy formed his brontosaur bones, the hamburgers shaped his balloon flesh, and strawberry pop pumped in and out of his heart valves sickeningly, until he weighed three hundred pounds.
-Ray Bradbury, The Illustrated Man

Map of France

Why is pie crust when rolled out, always a map of France?

Yogurt as Mayo

My favorite sandwich is my multi-grain sourdough bread spread with mayo, yogurt cheese, raw onion fresh tomato, kosher salt and freshly ground pepper.

I usually try things in the kitchen and then google to see if anyone else has done the same thing. It's a fun game.

I also like to incubate my own yogurt from local 2% milk, from Wrights Dairy Farm in North Smithfield, RI.

Here's an article full of tips:

Yogurt can replace mayo, sour cream, but use with care

By Sharon Maasdam, Seattle Times January 15th, 2003

Newhouse News Service

Yogurt out of the carton is a favorite for breakfast, lunch or a snack, but there are many uses for both plain and flavored yogurt.

Nonfat or low-fat plain yogurt can be substituted for buttermilk, sour cream or mayonnaise to lower fat content in recipes.

(Low-fat yogurt has 9 calories a tablespoon, versus 99 for regular mayonnaise and 30 for sour cream.)

However, yogurt does have some limitations, especially when cooking with it.

Cooking and baking

Yogurt is sensitive to heat, so use low temperatures. High heat may cause separation and evaporation of liquid, resulting in a curdled appearance. The flavor, however, will not be affected. If yogurt is mixed with other ingredients, such as in a casserole or stew, use a lower heat to cook, or bake at 325 degrees.

Yogurt can be substituted for sour cream in sauces and dishes such as stroganoff, Swedish meatballs or cream soups. Have the yogurt at room temperature before adding. To help keep the mixture thick, stir 2 tablespoons flour or 1 tablespoon cornstarch into each cup of yogurt before adding to sauces. Stir a small amount of the hot mixture into the yogurt first, then combine with the remaining hot mixture. To avoid curdling, add yogurt at the last minute, heat slowly and do not let it come to a full boil.

When substituting yogurt for sour cream, some combinations work while others may not be satisfactory. You may need to experiment to find the right combination.

Yogurt can be successfully substituted for buttermilk or sour cream in baked products such as cakes and quick breads (corn bread, muffins, etc.).

Storage and handling

Yogurt should be stored in the refrigerator at 40 degrees or lower to maintain peak flavor. It will remain fresh for at least 10 days after the sell date. Let taste and smell guide you. Plain yogurt keeps longer than fruit-flavored yogurt. Yogurt can be frozen, but it will form ice crystals. Eat it frozen or thaw in the refrigerator.

Gently mix in any liquid that may have collected on the surface of the yogurt; this is the milk whey, which contains valuable nutrients. However, since stirring will thin yogurt, do not stir it if you're going to use it as a garnish. Instead, gently spoon dollops of it from the container.

Uses

Flavor plain yogurt with sugar or artificial sweetener, jam or preserves, or fresh fruit. Add a dash of vanilla.

A cup of plain yogurt with a teaspoon of mustard and salt and pepper to taste makes an acceptable alternative to mayonnaise, with fewer calories and less fat.

In coleslaw and tuna and chicken salads, try yogurt in place of mayonnaise, or use half mayonnaise and half yogurt.

Use yogurt as a dressing for vegetable or fruit salads (vanilla or lemon-flavored goes nicely with fruit). If plain yogurt is used, blend it with salad dressing or mayonnaise to cut the tartness.

Plain yogurt can be substituted for at least half the sour cream in many recipes without sacrificing taste or texture. Use yogurt instead of sour cream on Mexican or Indian food. Because of the strong, spicy tastes of these foods, yogurt complements them well — and you won't miss the creamy flavor of the sour cream.

To make a base for dips, blend a mixture of half yogurt and half low-fat ricotta cheese or cottage cheese in a food processor. Season to taste with herbs and spices. Or use 1 cup yogurt and 2 tablespoons salsa for a piquant dip for raw vegetables.

To make a dip for fresh fruit, mix 2 cups yogurt with 1/2 cup chutney.

Yogurt cheese

The creamy cheese that forms when the liquid whey drains from yogurt is called yogurt cheese. Yogurt cheese is all-natural, rich in calcium and low in sodium and lactose. Nonfat yogurt cheese has no fat and only 17 calories; low-fat yogurt cheese has 0.6 gram of fat and 30 calories per tablespoon.

Yogurt cheese has a rich taste and can be used in many ways. Use it instead of cream cheese on bagels; try mixing in a teaspoon of jam or spreadable fruit.

Split an English muffin in half, toast it, and spread with sweetened yogurt cheese. Sprinkle with cinnamon and heat under the broiler until bubbly.

If you mix 1 or 2 tablespoons yogurt cheese with 1 tablespoon mayonnaise, the yogurt cheese takes on a mayonnaise flavor. For a baked-potato topping, add chives or an herb mixture.

To make yogurt cheese, put plain yogurt (read the list of ingredients to make sure it has no added gelatin) in a strainer over a bowl. Or use a coffee filter, a piece of muslin or cheesecloth, or a paper towel in a small sieve over a bowl. Cover with plastic wrap and let it drain in the refrigerator for 12 hours or overnight. After 12 hours, it becomes quite firm and the small lumps disappear, which makes it ideal for use in sauces.

The liquid whey drains into the bowl, leaving thick, creamy yogurt cheese. Add salt and pepper, if desired.

source

Steve Macone

A tradition is a habit whose logic has faded. A silly thing you keep doing even when you can’t remember why, like bringing a tree inside in December, or continuing to visit family.
-Steve Macone

. . . high tea suggests it’s available only to people whose families remained loyal to the king in some long-ago war.

Our tea came, then the waiter brought our food, on a three-layer silver tray with a dome on top, like a wine rack that had mated with a statehouse. We served ourselves, one of those times pretending to do the work yourself is a privilege, like going to a dude ranch or finding a spouse.

On the top level were scones — ingenious edible serving utensils you use to pick up something called clotted cream, which is what would happen if you mixed the best parts of butter, whipped cream and childhood. The tray’s bottom layer was all business: tiny, adorable sandwiches — cucumber and cream cheese, salmon and egg — stacked together tightly, as if a fancy mouse had packed an emergency shelter. All with the crusts trimmed off, supporting my theory that rich people are just little kids. And in the middle were cakes: lemon and praline mille-feuille, passion fruit gugelhupf.
-Steve Macone

source

Traveling Soul Foods.

My husband and I are often on the run commuting by car or on foot. So we pack portable and home cooked foods: my bread toasted, pumpkin pancakes, raisins, sunflower seeds, apples, peaches, plums, pears, bananas, sliced and sauteed salted plantains, granola, applesauce, yogurt, iced coffee, hot coffee, kale soup, coleslaw, pasta salad, bean salad, German potato salad, popcorn. Traveling soul foods.

Light and Fluffy Pumpkin Applesauce Pancakes

2 cups whole wheat flour
1/4 cup rolled oats
1/4 cup cornmeal
1/4 cup sugar
1 Tablespoon dark molasses
1 teaspoon baking soda
1-2 teaspoons kosher salt
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon ground ginger
1 teaspoon vanilla
1/2 teaspoon ground cloves (optional)
4 beaten eggs
2 1/2 cups of buttermilk (our local price rite sells it)
1 cup pumpkin and or applesauce puree (I used both)


These came out great-- the buttermilk and applesauce and pumpkin made them light and fluffy! I gravitate towards grain blending and experimenting. You can make these with all whole wheat flour if you prefer. Thin the batter with buttermilk if necessary.

Raining Peaches

Today Lily and I will walk over to Spud's sisters house for peach picking at their grandfather's hill around the corner. It's raining but thats okay, it means we won't have to rinse them before we eat them!

Sammy the Monkey Boy Cat

Sammy has suddenly discovered the basement pipes. To him they are branches of a tree and he is hunting for birds. He jumps on the old defunct enamel gas stove and leaps over to the top of the boiler and then he's off and running. He used to jump on the wooden fold out clothes rack occasionally taking bites of our dangling clothes, back when he was a kitten. Thankfully he out grew that habit. His favorite toy is the pillar covered in hemp rope that simulates a tree trunk. We have wooden stick that we rub against the rope and he goes bananas chasing and biting it. I've made a fishing pole from the leftover wooden handle of a back scrubber. I've attached a long string and an old cotton loop from a pull shade. The bouncing loop is the fish, bird, toy. We walk around the house and he bats it, bites it, chases it, and leaps for it. I am not sure who has more fun me or Sammy.

Bread Alive

The bread is alive! The sourdough rose overnight, it has pushed off the round wooden cutting-board covering the bowl. Now I will grease my 6 small (two-egg size) cast iron frying pans and place round blobs of dough in each one. They will rise and bake at 450 degrees. They are the size of Mae Wests Breasts. Mae West must have been a tiger or a lion or a house cat to have six breasts.

The Baker, The Baker's wife, and The Baker's Boy

From Writer's Almanac today:

It was on this day in 1789 that women in Paris led a march on Versailles. Throughout the fall, the price of grain had been rising, and there was a shortage of bread. Ordinary people were starving, and anger was high. On October 4th, the press reported that there had been a huge banquet a few days earlier at the palace of Versailles to celebrate a new group of officers. According to reports, the banquet had been decadent, with an abundance of rich food and good wine. Even worse, they reported that the drunken officers had trampled on the tricolor republican cockade, and that it had been done with the approval of Queen Marie Antoinette (which was probably not true, since the royal family had departed the feast long before any revelry began). This news was the last straw for Parisian women who were struggling to get food on their families' tables.

On the cold, rainy morning of October 5th, a group of women began to march across the city, from the markets in east Paris toward the city center, the Hôtel de Ville. A girl started off the march by beating on a drum, and soon churches across the city were ringing the tocsin, the alarm bell. More and more women joined the march, about 6,000 by the time they reached the Hôtel de Ville. The women had armed themselves with whatever they could find, from muskets and swords to pitchforks and broomsticks. Most of them were regular workingwomen — laundresses, fishwives, or market women. According to false accounts written at the time, the crowd was composed largely of prostitutes and cross-dressers, a report made up because people didn't want to believe that normal women would do anything so radical.

A few men joined in, including a national guardsman named Stanislas Maillard. He had been an active participant in the storming of the Bastille in July, so he was respected by the women. The women were planning to burn down the Hôtel de Ville and hang several government employees, but Maillard convinced them that their real issue was not with these city officials but with the royals at the palace of Versailles. There, he said, the women should demand that the king and queen return to Paris to be with the French people, rather than stay removed in their beautiful palace. So the crowd turned and marched 13 miles in the rain to Versailles, a journey of about six hours, gaining more and more marchers as they went. About 20,000 members of the National Guard decided to follow in support, and once the crowd reached Versailles, they found even more supporters waiting for them.

The marchers arrived at Versailles in the evening, and a small group of market women were allowed inside to speak directly with King Louis XVI. He agreed to supply them with food, but the crowd wanted more. Throughout the evening, the king agreed to more and more demands, but the marchers remained unsatisfied. At about 6 a.m. the next morning, they found their way through a small unguarded gate and stormed the palace. A royal guard shot a young woman, and in return guards were attacked. Two were killed and their heads placed on pikes. For hours there was total chaos, with the king and queen locked in a bedroom. Finally the royal family appeared on the balcony and agreed to one of the original demands of the women: to return with them to Paris.

That evening, a crowd estimated at 60,000 people marched back to Paris. The king, queen, and their young son were at the front of the procession in a carriage, surrounded by women carrying laurel branches. Then came the National Guard, with wagons filled with grain and flour, and finally thousands more women, still carrying their weapons. Walking in the rain and up to their ankles in mud, the women chanted that they were bringing "the baker, the baker's wife, and the baker's boy."
-source

A Population Betrayed

Editorial
A Population Betrayed
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
Published: October 3, 2013 New York Times

It is outrageous that millions of the poorest people in the country will be denied health insurance because of decisions made mostly by Republican governors and legislators. These people will neither qualify for their state’s Medicaid program for the poor nor for subsidized coverage on new insurance exchanges that are being established in every state by the health care reform law.

Their plight is a result of the Supreme Court’s decision last year that struck down the reform law’s mandatory expansion of Medicaid and made expansion optional. Every state in the Deep South except Arkansas has rejected expansion, as have Republican-led states elsewhere. These 26 states would rather turn down incredibly generous federal funds that would finance 100 percent of the expansion costs for three years and at least 90 percent thereafter than offer a helping hand to their most vulnerable residents.

As Sabrina Tavernise and Robert Gebeloff reported in The Times on Thursday, two-thirds of the country’s poor, uninsured blacks and single mothers and more than half of the uninsured low-wage workers live in those states. The reform law originally sought to help poor and middle-income people through two parallel mechanisms. One was a mandatory expansion of Medicaid (which in most states cover primarily children and their parents with incomes well below the poverty level) to cover childless adults and to help people with income levels above the poverty line. Those with slightly higher incomes would be eligible for federal subsidies to buy private policies on the new insurance exchanges.

That approach fell apart when 26 states decided not to expand Medicaid, at least for now. There is no provision in the law to provide health insurance subsidies for anyone below the poverty line because those people are supposed to be covered by Medicaid.

The Times report, based on an analysis of census data, found that eight million Americans who are impoverished and uninsured will be ineligible for help of either kind. To add to the insanity, people whose incomes initially qualify them for subsidies on the exchanges could — if their income fell because they lost a job — end up with no coverage at all.

There are no easy solutions to the difficulties wrought by the Supreme Court decision and the callousness of state officials who seized on that opening to victimize the poor.

States like New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Tennessee that are still flirting with the idea of expansion should do the right thing and expand. States that have adamantly refused to expand should relent and take the generous federal funds. And if Congressional Republicans ever give up on their obsession to destroy the health reform law, Congress could surely find ways to make certain that the people most in need of help get it.

Health is Wealth

I woke up with a killer headache that even was being discussed in my dreams. I even took generic excedrin in the dream and it fell apart in my mouth all chalky. When I got up I took antihistamine and decongestant and waited until I had something in my tummy before I took the generic excedrin. I thought about Jeff a friend who has chronic pain from kidney transplant. I took a hot shower and got dressed at 5 AM. I was hurting so bad I was nauseous. I feared I would vomit and faint while in the basement and nobody would find me. I tried to go back to bed but the pain was worse when I lay down. I sat on the steps hugging Lily sniffing her face. That helped. Then Lily and I sat on the couch together. I thought of the time I had excruciating pain in my abdomen and called Susan, years ago. It is terrifying to agonize alone. Thank God for Lily and Sammy. I got up and had applesauce and yogurt and excedrin and I am all better now.

Crazy Good

I started throwing things together in the big skillet :
freshly smashed garlic, sliced salted and drained eggplant , sliced sweet potato, pumpkin puree, habernero fresh and sliced, onions, sliced semi ripe tomatoes, brewed black tea, salt, olive oil, raisins, water, and it is a gloopy African mess. I put it on my whole wheat oat corn sourdough pumpkin cranberry toast for lunch.

War and Baked Beans

Maybe our leaders, who seem so quick to threaten violence or shut down the government, should spend some time with dairy cows. They are ponderous ships of milk. There are infinite births to attend. They slow time. They are female.

It’s the young people who believe in the better future. It’s the young people who have yet to lose their minds, their imaginations, their wonder, their intent to give life rather than take it.

-Robert Olmstead, War and Baked Beans NYT

Read

Lazy Sourdough Pumpkin Bread

I was too lazy to replenish my whole wheat flour container by going down into the cellar chest freezer to scoop it, so I made bread with the amount of flour I had left in the kitchen. I took my two wide mouth mason jars of refrigerated super soupy sourdough starter and emptied them into my big green mixing bowl, I added two cups whole wheat flour, about one and a half cups coarse grind cornmeal, two cups of rolled oats, one and a half cups of pumpkin and a cup of dried sweetened cranberries. I mixed it with a tablespoon of kosher salt, and let it sit overnight. It rose a little. This morning I shaped it and set it to rise in my assortment of five greased tiny cast iron frying pans. I baked them in my preheated oven at 450 for 35 minutes. They were dense resembling Irish soda bread, as I suspected they would be but toasted up fine. This bread is good with the usual suspects: margarine, peanut butter, jam, honey, chicken salad, eggs, apple sauce.

My latest craze is fried plantains. They are three for a dollar at the Dominican market and they are fast and nutritious. I don't deep fry them, instead I slice them and stir fry them. They turn to gold coins, and blacken quickly. Delicious! I salt them. They would be great with collard greens and kidney beans. I'll try that next.

The Macoun apples are to die for. I ate one when I got into bed to read last night (at 7:30PM).

Tara Autsen Weaver

What the tea Leaves Said.
Read.

Fried Plantains

I like fast simple healthy foods. We bought plantains three for a dollar at Price Rite and now they are ripe. I just sliced and gently fried one in a bloop of oil in my cast iron skillet. I added kosher salt. Yum yum.

Green Chile

by Jimmy Santiago Baca

I prefer red chile over my eggs
and potatoes for breakfast.
Red chile ristras decorate my door,
dry on my roof, and hang from eaves.
They lend open-air vegetable stands
historical grandeur, and gently swing
with an air of festive welcome.
I can hear them talking in the wind,
haggard, yellowing, crisp, rasping
tongues of old men, licking the breeze.

But grandmother loves green chile.
When I visit her,
she holds the green chile pepper
in her wrinkled hands.
Ah, voluptuous, masculine,
an air of authority and youth simmers
from its swan-neck stem, tapering to a flowery collar,
fermenting resinous spice.
A well-dressed gentleman at the door
my grandmother takes sensuously in her hand,
rubbing its firm glossed sides,
caressing the oily rubbery serpent,
with mouth-watering fulfillment,
fondling its curves with gentle fingers.
Its bearing magnificent and taut
as flanks of a tiger in mid-leap,
she thrusts her blade into
and cuts it open, with lust
on her hot mouth, sweating over the stove,
bandanna round her forehead,
mysterious passion on her face
as she serves me green chile con carne
between soft warm leaves of corn tortillas,
with beans and rice–her sacrifice
to her little prince.
I slurp form my plate
with last bit of tortilla, my mouth burns
and I hiss and drink a tall glass of cold water.

All over New Mexico, sunburned men and women
drive rickety trucks stuffed with gunny sacks
of green chile, from Belen, Beguita, Wllard, Estancia,
San Antonio y Socorro, from fields
to roadside stands, you see them roasting green chile
in screen-sided homemade barrels, and for a dollar a bag,
we relive this old, beautiful ritual again and again.

-Jimmy Santiago Baca