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

Fruitarian Vegetarian

My husband could easily be a fruitarian and for me, a vegetarian. There isn't a vegetable I don't like. I wish I had the patience of a farmer. I do have farmer's patience in the kitchen; baking, drying, canning, incubating, grinding, marinating, but not out in the blazing sun. I never minded a hot kitchen and I bake breads all summer but I can't handle the sun's rays for more than a moment. Being a fair-skinned, blue eyed person with left-handed red-headed genes is part of the reason.

Hairy Eyeball

HCP Dishes! source
Recipe of the Day:
Give ‘Em the Eyeball, Homemade Halloween Candy

Give 'Em the Eyeball Halloween is just around the corner (can you believe it’s already October?), so here at the HCP we’re gearing up for candy and other sweet treats. Of course, we’re always ready for candy and sweets, but Halloween makes us even readier. If you are feeling creative this year, get into the Halloween spirit by trying Dede Wilson’s Give ‘Em the Eyeball Candies from A Baker’s Field Guide to Holiday Candy & Confections. You can either pass these out to trick-or-treaters on the big night, or just keep them all for yourself! Hey, big kids deserve candy, too.

Give ‘Em the Eyeball Candies

When we say, “Give ’em the eyeball,” or, more usually, “Don’t give me the eyeball,” it usually carries a negative connotation, one of giving someone a look of disapproval or disdain. Here it is perfectly acceptable to hand someone one of these candies, which is a peanut butter “eyeball” decorated with “bloody” red-tinted chocolate. My son Freeman came up with this idea.

Okay, these are not health food, nor do they feature fine expensive chocolate or other ingredients. They are best made with the white chocolate coating, as suggested, as it is easier to work with. And this candy is all about the look, although if you like peanut butter, you will thoroughly enjoy the taste.

Yield: 20 eyeballs
Ingredients

* 1/2 cup hydrogenated peanut butter (such as Skippy)
* 3 tablespoons unsalted butter, cut into pieces
* 1 1/4 cups confectioners’ sugar, sifted
* 6 ounces white chocolate coating (see below), finely chopped
* 20 round brown candy-coated chocolate candies (such as M&Ms)
* Red paste or gel food coloring

Directions

1. Line 2 jelly-roll pans with aluminum foil, smoothing out any wrinkles. Coat foil with nonstick cooking spray.
2. In a large bowl with an electric mixer on medium speed, beat peanut butter, butter, and confectioners’ sugar until creamy and smooth.
3. Roll into 1-inch balls between your palms and place on prepared pan; freeze for 30 minutes.
4. Melt chocolate coating in a double boiler or microwave and stir until smooth. Dip balls into chocolate one at a time until completely coated, using your fingers, 2 forks, or chocolate dipping tools. Remove balls from chocolate, let excess chocolate drip back into pot, and place balls back on pan. Press 1 brown candy into each ball; these are the eyeball’s irises. Chill until firm, about 30 minutes.
5. Tint the remaining chocolate coating with red coloring. Scrape into a zipper-lock plastic bag. Snip a small opening in a bottom corner of the bag and pipe bloody squiggles onto each eyeball. Chill until red chocolate is firm, about 15 minutes.

A variation: You could use any color of the candy-coated chocolate candy for the “iris.” I just think the dark brown adds to the sinister look of the bloody eyeballs.

A word on chocolate coating, or confectionery coating: This is a chocolate-like product that comes in white, milk, and dark varieties, but it does not contain any cocoa butter. Its fat content comes from various oils instead. It does not have the rich flavor of high-quality chocolate made with cocoa butter, but it is very easy to melt and use, does not need to be tempered, and has practical uses in child-friendly confections.

3:33 AM

All living things have circadian clocks which our bodies program without the use of external sources. Waking up at 3:33 am is a timed occurrence that the body is familiar with. For example going to sleep at 9pm is part of the circadian clock because leading up to 9pm the body starts to unwind, relax and drowsiness occurs.

Reference:
www.nigms.nih.gov

Dreams: Awake and Asleep

I spotted the VFW motorized Navy Seal wheelchair and heard Roland's booming voice when I walked by. I wish I could join them. My 80 year old boyfriends at Nagla's, Moonlight House of Wieners having breakfast. I'd have a vegetable omelet and sit at the round table with them.

I am thinking of making my own publishing house, to publish my friends writings. Box Elder Books or Ghetto Palace books.

DREAM: I was at a party Mick Jagger was there. I was joking and flirting with him. He said, "I am not shy!"
I said. "I am!"

Man Cakes

I made my own version of a man cake yesterday and it was a dense cake resembling a hamburger with rolled oats, sunflower seeds, coarse yellow corn meal, whole wheat flour, Francine's home-harvested pumpkin puree, my whole wheat sourdough starter, low fat buttermilk, 2 eggs, a pinch of salt baking soda, and sugar too. We carried them with us on our walk and didn't get tired all day.

Apricots Grow on Trees

Today is a miracle. At 2PM taking a walk with Lily --the usual route up Rathbun to Ethel street and first left we go straight. At the house diagonally opposite lovely Sandy was FREE sign--three cases of glass canning jars with lids etc. We took them and stashed them with our friend former neighbor Philomena and her mom across the street (next to the Millerville Men's Club). We told them about the big green metal parrot yard ornament they might like. We kept walking and took Lily swimming at Harris Pond and I harvested apricots off the ground on Champlain ave. Then we came back with the car. Philomena's mom had adopted the metal parrot for her yard and the trash-pilers had put out a big black and white lidded enamel stock pot too. So we picked that up. I am ready to can-can! I need to ask my friends grandpa the apricot man if he is abandoning his harvest. The trees are dumping apricots overflowing and falling to the ground, on the verge of rotting and rolling down the hill.

Life is good.

If I had a way to keep warm I might be happy all winter. Someday we hope to put a wood stove in the back room (Bill's office) for cooking and heating.

George Orwell

One strong cup of tea is better than twenty weak ones. All true tea lovers not only like their tea strong, but like it a little stronger with each year that passes.
-George Orwell

Kiss the Bread

The Jews have a thing about kissing the bread that has fallen to the floor.
Read.

Holiday Bread

At Christmas and Thanksgiving I like to make a cashew, raisin, apricot and dried cranberry sourdough whole wheat bread. I get the toasted, salted and broken pieces of cashews and dried cranberries at job lot. I guess this is my version of a fruit cake. One year I added pumpkin puree and it was excellent.

Sometimes I make a poppy, flax, sesame seed, chick peas, soybean, mixture to blend with my six grain bread blend: oat rye millet wheat rice corn quinoa.

We can live on my bread. In fact, we do! My husband packs toast for breakfast and lunch along with fruits, seeds, chocolate and coffee.

Buttermilk Apple Corn Oat Pancakes

I used to hand grind all of my flour as a multi grain (and seed) mixture in my grain mill and let the batter sit overnight (to soften) and make these in the morning to arouse sleeping guests. But now that our ceilings are falling down and we can't afford to heat our home above 45 degrees, we encourage people to stay elsewhere.

1 cup whole wheat flour
1/4 cup cornmeal
1/4 cup rolled oats
3 tablespoons sugar or favorite sweetener
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 cups low-fat buttermilk
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
2 large eggs
chop apple into thin slices and place a few on raw side of pancake.

Combine flour sugar, baking powder, baking soda, and salt in a large bowl. Combine buttermilk, oil, eggs, stirring; add to flour mixture, stirring until moistened.