respectful foods

2011-12-02T15:11:00.000-08:00

The Physiology of Taste or Transcendental Gastronomy, Jean Brillat Savarin. Philadelphia, Lindsay & Blakiston 1854 348 pp

This edition was an English translation written twenty eight years after the original French-Physiologie Du Gout. Savarin was something of a polymath but earned his keep as a lawyer and politician when those were not the best things to be during his life. He essentially was part of the “Ancien Regime”. Those were the one’s whose heads rolled. He came to America during some of the worst years.

He was quite the intellectual knowing many languages and rubbing elbows with great minds and the rich and powerful. He created for himself a persona as a food expert. This particular book has been in print for all of its one hundred and eighty six years. This attests to the staying powers of his ideas and influence on food writing. (I chose to read the version that I did because it could be found on Google Books).

Savarin also fancied that he was presenting a scientific discussion of food, drink and the people who participated in dining. He made experiments and presented data. Should you read the book you will see that even the mildest skeptic will note the scientific flaws but that is not really what is important. He writes about styles of eating, suggests diets, recognizes problems of eating disorders and does it all in a very readable way. He has a considerable number of humorous anecdotes and often this reviewer wondered if the entire book was written tongue in cheek.

I appreciated his attention to problems of obesity and anorexia primarily because he wrote about them so far ahead of his time. Likewise his suggestions about eating wild and free range meat over farm bred. It was easier in his time to practice that than it is now but again he was ahead of his time.

Savarin has a cheese named after him and he wrote a very delightful book. We would not want to take his science very seriously as it was very personalized and he wrote a long time ago. We have much more information today and many suggestions that he made would be gainsaid by dieticians today but he was not coming totally out of the dark. He did have his methods however flawed and his opting to talk about food in the way he did. His subjects were interesting and his story telling more interesting.
It was a good book about food and gourmands and filled with humor. I’ll end this with one of his quotes.

“Take a raisin?-“
“No thank you; I do not like my wine in a pill.”

The end of the Garden

2011-10-29T07:18:00.000-07:00

I haven’t spent enough time in the garden this season. Certainly it was more than last season but that is not saying much.

I liberally shared the fruits of this year’s plants with the local wildlife yet still reaped enough for myself. I even canned about half a gallon of tomatoes. Mostly I ate them as they appeared. Stews, sauces and omelets were the primary ways of using my harvest.

The peppers did less well but not horribly so. I used enough and wish I had a few more. Sauces and grilled cheese sandwiches were the largest donees of their jalapeno benefactors.

In the front yard, thyme takes its time and the basil and rosemary flower and bloom as if they could withstand radioactivity. That is fine with me.

As much as I wanted a big garden and as much time I put into developing it I think 2011 was the last year for this man’s vegetable garden. Next year it will be largely sunflowers and milkweed so that I can attract butterflies. No the few vegetables that I will till will be from large containers that will be decorating my front porch. I will better be able to provide the TLC they need. The furry interlopers and the multi legged invertebrates will have to fend for themselves.

The onset of the 2011 Garden

2011-05-01T12:09:00.000-07:00

April 30th and the garden is all in. It really looks good too. I made some structures for vining tomatoes and zucchini they are not so pretty but they ought to be very functional. Today is May 1 and it is raining so I am not keeping up with the maples seeds that are all over the garden. Yesterday I weeded and cleaned the helicopters out but they are coming down as fast as the rain.

So here is what is out in the garden. Two Jalapeno’s and one Cayenne for the heat of summer. Two Roma Tomatoes, two Beefsteak and one “tomato” whatever that means. I have two zucchini as well. Around the edges are numerous garlic plants popping out of the mulch.

This year I overturned all of the dirt since the clay that has been hoed and mixed with sand continues to reconstitute itself over every off season. Then I layered about an inch of leaves and about three inches of fresh topsoil. That set for a month or so as the process started about March 1. Then I weeded those early bloomers and rendered about three inches of mulch-it really looks good.

As you may imagine when the soil is really prepped for a good garden it is likewise a healthy environment for weeds and windswept tree seeds (which of course are weeds since I am not attempting to grow a forest there. I took some photos and decided to take some every weekend that I am here in order to gauge the progress even though there is not really much reason to do that. I am just obsessed with classifying and charting almost everything.

Last summer was disastrous for the garden due to the unusual heat and the intensity of my job. I expect things to be improved this year and I have a renewed devotion to making this year’s harvest a great one.

Two food books by Ruth Reichl

2011-04-29T14:23:00.000-07:00

Tender to the Bone: Growing up at the Table by Ruth Reichl, New York, Broadway Books, 1998 282 pp. ISBN: 0-7679-0338-2

Comfort Me with Apples: More Adventures at the Table by Ruth Reichl, New York, Random House, 2002 302 pp. ISBN: 0-375-75873-9

Reichl has built quite a reputation over the years. She has been the food critic for a number of publications. These two memoirs are tales of how she got to be such an august figure in the annals of food writing. They detail her life from a fairly young girl up to about age 40. It is rich with stories about the characters in her life both noted figures and college friends. She writes very well and keeps the reader interested and she explains her gift in the introduction of Tender to the Bone. She is less interested in the facts of the story than she is with the story. This is a commendable admission.

The book is written as “chick lit” and though there may seem to be some misogyny in that statement, remember that we all know what it means and regardless of our politics, we know it when we see it. There is nothing wrong with appealing to the rather mundane side of feminine interests. I read both of these back to back and enjoyed them as I did. It was impossible to recognize them as gospel after her early admission and so they were read more with eye for fiction.

I love food books and while reading them I imagine the odors of a kitchen as the descriptions are being prepared. I go to the store too often to purchase ingredients that I have not thought of. I admire the combination of flavors and bolster my own technique. While reading a book about food it is that subject which is almost always on my mind. Both of Reichl’s books temporarily sated that appetite in me. She filled that need quite well.

The chronicles of some 20 years (college to her 40s) of her life brought her from a rather mindless acceptance of new age philosophy about eating to an exquisite gourmet. My own interests are in the middle. I remember the Elmer’s Glue-like casseroles (I am three years younger than the author so we are contemporaries) that may have been chevron’s of righteous thinking in 1971 but they were unpalatable. Vegetarian cooking has come a long way since then. She also experienced haute cuisine which may delight my tongue but needs to be feted upon me as I won’t pay for it.

The notion about cooking and dining that threaded through most of her stories however was keeping it simple. This is the essence of cooking and entertaining and she lauded that many times. Grand feasts are best when the right combinations of simple foods are brought together. Dining is not meant to be garish.
Reichl and I both haunted Ann Arbor during a few years and her tales of life there were compelling to me especially her description of the only fish and chips joint in town and its proprietor-the Englishwoman-Hilly. I ate many a fish and chips meal wrapped in newspaper while doing my laundry in a house cum laundromat cum fish and chip joint. I was always served by an Englishwoman perhaps two and half time my age. I like to think that Reichl and I ate at the same place.

No book about dining and cooking would be worth its salt if it did not include a large number of recipes and Reichl provides many. Some are off my list because they are too sweet or expensive. Others are off my list because they are too detailed for my interests but probably half of what she provided will be tried either in their entirety or in some portion of it. These books will not line my regular bookshelf but instead will sit on the row where the cook books rest.

Yes reading about food makes me monomaniacal about food and writing about it does too. It is time to hone a few knife edges and dirty up the kitchen.

Two For The Road

2011-03-26T10:36:00.000-07:00

Two for the Road by Jane and Michael Stern. New York, Houghton Mifflin 2006 292 pp. ISBN: 978-0-618-87268-8

The last time I read a book by the Sterns was about 35 years ago when, enamored of popular culture, I picked up Roadside America. There are a lot of similarities between the two books; each is a tale of the couple’s back road travels in this case searching for regional food. It was light and entertaining.

Often it reminded me of the wonderful little books that Calvin Trillin proffered many years ago about his food experience. I remember Trillin’s listing of types of restaurants to always avoid (no cute names like Kate’s Kozy Korner for instance). The Sterns opine on that subject and it mirrored Trillin nearly to a tee on page 19. That was disappointing but it could be that their experience brought them independently to the same conclusions.

There is also a hint of William Least Heat Moon’s Blue Highways. Moon suggested as he travelled on the small roads around America that we ought “Be careful going in search of adventure -- it's ridiculously easy to find.” This book by the Sterns shows that they agree with Moon.

Their gambles and gambols focus on foods and the people who create, serve and share them. They are of regional cuisine from every corner of the nation. The company of diners and the personalities of their wait staff is the meat (excuse my choice of words) of this text; it is all about small town culture. There is no haut cuisine found here.

As pleasant as their accounts were (I admit to eating more than usual during the day I read it) they also are egregious in their self indulgence. They brag about often eating 12 meals a day. Virtually none of the food they gobbled was close to healthy. I felt fat just reading the book.

Yet I did revel. I remembered some of my most entertaining dining experiences such as traveling through Maryland’s eastern shore late one summer afternoon. Feeling underfed my companion and I guessed that we would find suitable dining but found only elegant restaurants or Hardees. We thought we would have to wait for hours to get to some sort of suburban environment and something at best tolerable. Instead we found handmade road signs inviting us to barbeque. Following the signs a few miles off the highway, we came upon what looked like a Mennonite colony slowly smoking pork shoulders, boiling potatoes and sauerkraut and stirring potato salad. For a pittance we were served huge portions for this fund raising event. We were sated and I am sure the Sterns would have been proud of us.

Mixed into the stories of gastronomical adventure, were actual recipes from their regional collection. It is unlikely that I will every make any of them. They are largely designed to make food that will kill someone my age and yet, the Sterns are older than I.

Fish, A History from the West

2011-01-21T17:10:00.000-08:00

Fish on Friday: Feasting, Fasting and the Discovery of the New World by Brian Fagan, NY, Basic Books, 2007 338 pp. ISBN: 978-0-465-02285-4

On the whole this was a very interesting and compelling read. He gives us a history of fish and fishing through many eyes. From prelates to yeomen and craftsmen to vendors we are drawn through about 1200 years of western fishery. The book is well referenced making it a very useful guide to further research and that is commendable. It is not without some shortcomings but in all it is a good and readable history. It is worth mentioning that amongst his many images (not very good in black and white) he also provides a large number of recipes some ancient and others not so; all tested created and eaten in recent times. My copy will now rest on the shelf with my other cookbooks.

He uses religion (primarily Catholicism) as a thread to his tale. It was religion that influenced fish eating which tethered it strictly to economics. When the western Catholics wanted fish they got it. It was at times a luxury and at other times a food for the poor and hard working people. Of course different types of fish had different status and as such, some types eaten by the rich and powerful and others by the commoners and monks.

As it turns out, fish husbandry goes back a long way and with some sophistication. As far back as the 11th Century, Europeans were flooding meadows to cultivate Carp. Despite the proliferation of this fish, it still was a expensive commodity.

Other downsides to this industry include poaching but more critically, land wars occurred resulting from disagreements between fishers and plant farmers as to the use of land. It also meant the redirection of natural streams, diverting them toward the Carp pond and away from plantings. This sort of misappropriation of a natural resource continues to ignite violence today.

Fishing generated many different economic phenomena some of which require us to borrow from Chaos Theory to explain trends. For instance during the 8th century there were a limited number of Catholic saints to which feast days are required. In the 16th century there were many more. This influenced the supply and demand of various fish-Sturgeon for the gentry, salt cod for most everyone else. Also when there were shortages of certain types of fish (or for that matter meat), new Catholic non-meat eating days were authorized. Fagan makes an excellent case for the church’s sway on the economics of the fishing industry.

He also gives us several examples of technology’s influence on the industry. New curing methods-mostly using salt, were always being worked on. Europeans appreciated their tasting of the product differently. The French preferred “wet” salting and the Spanish liked “dry salting”. The improved methods styled by coopers also helped preserve fish for the market.

Salt was a bigger issue and harsh salt taxes imposed often seriously impacted the cost of the fish when they hit the eager markets. Fish was often plentiful but not always cheap. This had an effect on supply and demand of course but even with high prices there was the right demand from the right market.

Another important factor to fishing was the improvement of the ships that did the fishing, the ones that did the transporting and others that had specific roles in making the industry a success. Not only does he provide a historical sequencing of ship adaptations he gives us some specifics. Fagan also is personally interested in being a participant observer (maybe he was an active seaman) in fishing re-enactment. He has sailed many of the same waterways in newly constructed models of old fishing boats. He has a 20th century feel for what may have been endured under the less sanguine days of yore. Those asides provided a very curious addition to an otherwise well told tale.

It was fishing and not spices Fagan explains, that brought Europeans to the New World. They came here with their devout convictions to escape real or imagined religious persecution. They nearly failed for reasons similar to the ones Jared Diamond described in Collapse. That is, they came unprepared and with high expectations. This was not the land of milk and honey and it only took the first winter for them to realize it. They did not come prepared for any failures nor did they take the advice of the natives that may have been offered. The Jamestown and Penobscot communities nearly died off for those reasons.

However much I liked the book I do have a little distaste for what Fagan did not do and that is to credit Mark Kurlansky who is perhaps the leader in this sort of scholarship. I could not appreciate his damning with faint praise, Mark Kurlansky. The writer who has so elegantly provided us with detailed and erudite histories of both Salt and Cod as well as the New England history including the importance of fishing was pretty short shifted. A brief aside reminding us of Kurlansky’s history of the Basques was mentioned at the end of the book. Knowing about his role in the literature of this arena, I think Fagan could use some humility.

At last a new Gardening Post

2010-11-22T15:41:00.000-08:00

Sometime in the last week I picked my last tomato. They were green and pretty small; they looked pretty rugged. I thought that I should give them a chance to be eaten and put them into the perfunctory brown paper bag to enhance their ripening. It is working pretty well. They have withstood frost and so are far from ideal specimens but there is meat on them…only a little to be sure.

There were a lot of them, perhaps 30 though I did not count. I made some enchiladas using several of them the other day. I had a lot of bad parts to cut out and add to the compost but these tomatoes are sort of like bonus fruits. Harvesting a tomato in November here is “buyer beware” though I am an owner rather than a buyer.

I also made a tomato paste and boy did I relish that since it is sort of a tomato relish that is very thick and soon it will be used up in a tomato sauce for an Italian dish of some sort. (A brief aside…as this is written I am listening to Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew. It took me about 38 years to come to appreciate this music. When it came out while I was in college I was seriously disappointed but I have come to understand its relevancy in the history of jazz now. I thought you may want to know).

Yesterday I took about 6 of my most recent tomatoes and added them to a thin broth of fish soup (using Dover Sole). It will be my dinner tonight and sampling it just prior to penning this, I was intrigued (it also included a couple of late jalapenos from the same garden).

So I still have a few of these little tomatoes left; a few are green and a few are orange. Probably this weekend I will be using them for something. I am not sure yet but there is always a use for a tomato.

It was a bad year for my garden. Our summer was extraordinarily hot making me uninterested in going out there. I also was detailed to Washington DC for the summer and was not getting home until late and always arrived exhausted. I needed my weekends to recoup too.

I was a negligent gardener and it showed. Now my off season work includes finishing up the cleanup of the garden mess and preparing for a more productive one next year.

The wonders of American invention

2010-08-23T13:35:00.000-07:00

For years there has been Spam, the Hormel product that helped the nation through the food shortages and rations of World War II. People my own age grew up on Spam. In my own case it was generally sliced and fried. At a certain juncture I moved off to college and made my own dining decisions and Spam wasn’t amongst them. I shunned it because I was a child of the 60s and we shunned the values of our parents and the generation of the 50s. Most of us did not know why exactly, we just wanted a new life and anticipated that it would be of global change and everything would be different because we wanted to be different.

Forty years later we recognize that change is more glacial and slower moving. By the time we reached our mid 30s we recognized the futility of bumper stickers like “US out of El Salvador Now!” We weren’t getting out of El Salvador or any other place because of our long haired protests. We would get out when it was feasible to politicians and economists.

We did not eat Spam and we were not sure why because we did not read the label. We ideologically knew that it was a product of some sort of oppression. Many years have passed and I personally do not eat Spam but I have a couple of new hobbies. One of them is to study foods, their packaging and their ingredients. The other is to seek out bizarre food “products” and to read their labels. Since most of these products are designed to sell quickly they are designed for ALL markets. They can be found in the large scale supermarkets as well as in the inner city Korean run store. I purchase them because they are cheap, canned and usually small. My specimens sit on a shelf in my kitchen and range from Vienna Sausages to Treet® and it is Treet® that I want to discuss in this essay.

Treet® is Armour’s answer to Spam and I have neither the inclination nor time to compare the two. As you can see from the photo, Treet® has Virginia Ham “Taste”, what a wonderful disclaimer. You can also see the image of a sandwich including (I suspect) a sesame bun, lettuce, a sliced of packaged food product gelatin posing as American cheese and some pickles. The Treet® appears to have been grilled. There are some potato chips lingering on the lower left though you may not see them in the picture.
There is not a single human being that has ever prepared such a sandwich. That preparation would take more care than Treet® deserves. In real life Treet® is sliced, fried and gobbled with some eggs or with nothing.

The ingredients are fascinating. We find that it is full of “mechanically separated chicken and pork. We are relieved to know that no human hands are involved with the process. Then we read of all the corn products and sodium nitrate, Virginia Baked Ham flavoring (how did anyone capture that?!) and other standard chemicals. There is an additional warning that this product contains Soy and Wheat and that our satisfaction is guaranteed. That is relieving.

On the back we have the Nutrition Facts which I only assume are factual. It is pretty low in Dietary Fiber (0%) and pretty big on Total Fat (18%). It also has another photograph of a meal that will never be exercised. The photo shows us French fries-the crinkled kind that only come in frozen bags, sliced pickles and a sandwich with pumpernickel bread, sauerkraut and a line of red that I suspect is Treet®. I muse now and ask myself what a Venn Diagram of Treet® users and Pumpernickel Bread users would look like.

Captain Cook on his many oceanic ventures ordered his crew to eat sauerkraut to avert (and successfully I may add) scurvy. In this photo image there is at least a concern for health. Well…probably not, the sauerkraut was there only to make the case for the recipe which is for the Treet® Reuben that no human being will ever make.

Reuben Sandwiches are a food for aficionados. That group would use pastrami, a refined corned beef, and they would savor the sandwich that they purchased or made. No a Treet® Reuben has never been constructed except in the minds of admen for Armour who would only eat a real Reuben from a Deli not far from their office.
There is one last side of the rectangle can to examine. That one informs us that Treet® can be enjoyed hot or cold. That way, if you are riding the rails you can savor the Virginia Baked Ham taste with a spoon rather than setting you car on fire. It has instructions for pan frying because we need them. Alas it can be microwaved or baked as well. It certainly is a versatile food product. Alas, there is another tip as to the usage of Treet® .

You can pretend that it is a burger though you will not. The instructions suggest that you pretend that it is a hamburger patty and that you place a piece of gelatinous pre-packaged American cheese slice on it and pan fry it. Who could have thought of that? What a brilliant idea and yet no one will ever do it. The purchased can of Treet® will only involve getting the product out of the tin, slicing it and frying it if you have the wherewithal to fry it. Otherwise you will scoop it desperately out of the tin with a spoon of your fingers lacking a utensil.

Okay, I have made all these snide references to Treet® . Now I am going to taste a sample of it. Here I go. Well like its competitor, Spam, it tastes good. One of the geniuses of packaged food products and fast food restaurants is that the food actually tastes good. That is how it works. The food product is cheap, packaged, promoted and palatable. It doesn’t taste exactly like the Spam I recall from over 40 years ago but it is an approximate of it. It leaves a salty after taste as should be expected.

When walking through a poor neighborhood or taking public transportation as I do I see a tremendous amount of obese people. It is standard form. They are not overweight from eating too many fillet mignons with sour cream dredged over their potatoes. They are eating chips and Treet® while drinking sodas full of corn syrup. Go to a Target or a K-Mart and check out how many aisles are clogged with gigantic people in electric carts.

Finally I have a question. Since Armour Foods has trademarked the product Treet® , do people of poor education or spelling deficiencies get sued if they misspell Treat?

Garden Talk

2010-06-13T17:27:00.000-07:00

Making a rain barrel is pretty easy and cheap. We have outdoor faucets and hoses that are cheap. Why make a rain barrel? The easy answers have a moral implication-it is better for the earth, we are stewards of the land for the next generation etc. I have no disagreement there but that is not why I have a rain barrel. That is actually part of my thinking but it is not the root of my actions. I just hate having someone else’s moral imperative being the cause for my actions. I am not a bad guy with personally singular motivation. I really care about future generations and despair at what I imagine them to be.

I have a real desire to be as self sufficient as I reasonably can be. No there will not be horses and carriages in my future, I will still drive a car when I need to and I cannot live a comfortable life without the internet. Yet I can still simplify my life and I have developed a sort of motto to guide me and it is simple. Use all things at least twice.

Rain water counts and during the last two growing seasons I have only used about 10 gallons of tap water for the garden. Instead I have used the rain that has come off the roof into a converted garbage can. You can tell that by the photo. I think the plastic can will take 45 gallons but whatever the amount it is pretty much standard.

Making this into a rain barrel is easy enough. You buy the plumbing and caulk; you drill a tight hole so that the tap needs to be forced into the hole. Jam the tap into the hole and secure it with a ring screw which is standard for the faucet or tap. Use lots of caulk and let it dry to ensure no leakage. Since the can is plastic it has a lot of give and motion. In the past I have rendered them into leaky garbage cans instead of rain barrels by being cavalier about their maintenance.

It doesn’t freeze all that much here in Maryland but assuredly it does freeze and leaving the barrel as is, all winter will ensure splitting the plastic. So…when watering the plants is no longer necessary, empty it and turn it upside down. In the spring reinforce the caulking which will prolong the life of the barrel. Currently mine is 3 years old and in the past I never had one last that many seasons. I like to think that I am in a learning process. If that is true I will get several more years of use from this barrel.

If I am wrong, then I will have a new compost barrel but will have to continue revising my rain barrel until it lasts for more years.

I do use a rain barrel to fulfill my notions of re-use. I do want to be one of those shepherds for the next generations. What I really enjoy though is using my ratiocinative skills towards the ends just mentioned. I want to test how good of an engineer I am and to learn from my mistakes; to build a better rain barrel.

There is no need for me to understand my debt to society from a higher authority, I get it all on my own. Rain barrels are not a moral issue but they are fun to make, they work well and hell…they re-use a growingly jeopardized resource.

Mom's birthday reunion

2009-11-22T15:19:00.000-08:00

Cooking With Sisters
We began planning for my mother’s birthday a few months ago, several of us that is. We siblings are separated by time, geography, busy-ness and such; this would be a reunion of sorts for many of us. Actually none of us siblings have gotten together for a long time. So we e-planned for awhile and that essentially worked though I had much unnecessary trepidation.

I (and probably “we”) conjecture as to how our unseen siblings may be and how they will present during the preparation and the event itself. I hear about them from parents and other siblings and they hear about me from the same sources. It becomes like the game whereby a sentence is whispered to one person who shares it with the next and so on. After about ten people have heard the sentence the last one repeats it aloud and it is generally a different sentence than the original. It is a small example of chaos theory at play.

The stories were abound and I probably would have entered my own opinions except that I had none to proffer. So I girded myself and tried to remind myself that we had a mission (make mom happy) and more importantly for me was to not enter this deal without a lot of assumptions. The pre-planning done through emails, was filled with changes and requests for opinions and I am simply loathe to enter into those especially when I am “out of the loop”. The planning went through several permutations but ultimately we divvied up our tasks-who would do what and with whom in order to bring this reunion to fruition.

It came off well. My sister who is my chronologically closest sister (actually I see her more than the others so it is not only chronological), and I were in charge of the entrees. Two of the other sisters took care of finger foods, salads and desserts. They cheated and just bought things rather than prepare them but they were easily forgiven since they came with great food.

The two of us who cook, cooked. We also shopped just for the meal which in my mind makes the prep all the more fun. Anyone who knows me well realizes that imagining a menu, planning it, buying the supplies, preparing/cooking it and enjoying the results with several others is one of my true joys. That is what happened.

We chose to make Lasagna and Pasticcio; two similar dishes one Italian and the other Greek. We did our shopping which is a friendly way to look at and talk about food. The details of the recipes are immaterial and in the end the results excellent (as per the comments the next day). My sister is a chatterer and I become one when in the midst of one. So we talked up a storm. Then her husband came home and joined us. Since his world view and my own are pretty opposed, there was a few seconds of friction but I wasn’t there for political reasons and became amenable. Not that I became agreeable but I could divert the topics to those that we do agree on and there we went. I think he wanted that to happen too.

The next day we all met up at my folk’s home to reune and we all did it well. After several days of rain we had a sunny and mild respite and that helped. Four of us seven living siblings showed and another called to join us by phone. A grandson called and the lap top that allowed us to talk on the VOIP and to see each other was passed around.

There were sons and daughters of my sisters there and their children as well. All told we probably had about 30 people there and it was simply grand.
I re-acquainted myself with two of my sisters (one of whom looks very much like Sarah Palin which raised the teasing level to well…new levels). I got to spend significant time with three nieces/nephews and several children who I am a grand uncle to. I hope they found me to be “Grand” rather than simply old but I’ll never know.

All told we ate too much, laughed, sighed when Michigan State lost and simply enjoyed everyone’s company. It was all worth it and hopefully my sisters and I will stay in more touch than we have during the last decade.

If you are prudent, you can go home again.

This should really be the food and gardening blog

2009-10-31T10:07:00.000-07:00

On October 1st I ended this summer's garden (well I still have some Rosemary, Basil and Cilantro). I have described and photographed that garden several times. I still have ristras all over the house. I have gallons of canned peppers and chipotles. I have given away bags of peppers and I have made sauces that sit frozen in the new freezer I bought. I have ground up pounds of them into seasoning mixes. I have eaten fresh peppers for three months. Yes the peppers were more than a grand success as I have produced several grand of them in numbers.

Tomatoes, not so good. I bought many exotic seeds and probably did not serve them well as a gardener. I did get about 4 quarts that I canned but the larger amount of this year's canning was Farmer Market produce. The same can be said for squashes. Next year I'll only grow a Jalapeno for fresh peppers and maybe one exotic just for looks. I am planning on concentrating more on the tomatoes. The garden itself needs some physical reinforcement and that will be a project for warmer winter days and the spring.

I'll mention again how much I love Farmer's Markets. Since the last update I have found another Market and that would be the Friday Market in Downtown Baltimore on Baltimore Street near the subway station. If I have not mentioned the White Marsh one I also hit that one on a weekday that I took off from work. Last Saturday I saw yet another in Timonium though I did not go to it. I think that it is wonderful that people are interested in getting to know their food better as well as the farmers who grow it. I missed the Ithaca Market because I was busy wrecking my car while avoiding a deer in Pennsylvania on my way there.

I also have reinvigorated my love of canning during the last two years. In the past it was an all day event that included my young daughters and generally on a hot Saturday. It was fun and provided a year's worth of tomatoes but it was not an annual event. As my girls grew, they became less interested in this form of entertainment. This year my canning included many many things and I canned on many many different days. Now I have carrots and mushrooms in addition to the items I already mentioned (did I say anything about peppers?).

Since I now have a separate freezer all of the fresh beans I picked up over the summer are sitting there waiting for me to thaw them into soups and stews. It is already my plan to spend the next season and a half, making soups. I'll keep you posted.

I also have decided to bake bread-bread other than my cornbread specialty (a variation of the recipe found in the Deaf Smith Cookbook). There is nothing like a winter evening with the wafting of baking bread and simmering soup smells to make trials and tribulations go away. The cold months are for a lot of hunkering down with a hunk of bread and a pot of soup.

Labor Day Update

2009-09-07T11:38:00.000-07:00

#1-The garden
The garden essentially has done well. The Herbs in front are thriving and it is simply divine to pluck the basil, rosemary or cilantro that I need to sprinkle onto the cheese that will be grilled between two pieces of bread incorporating it into a special dinner time treat.

I wish that the squash was more productive but I got enough for about a gallon of canning before the vines died. The tomatoes also are disappointing in terms of quantity (the quality is excellent). I have plenty of vine and a dearth of fruit.

My garlic and eggplant were destroyed by rodents early in the growing season. They will be better protected next year.

Peppers...you want some peppers? I have a million of them. They are beautiful in their variety. I have used them fresh in my eggs, salsas and roasted while barbecuing. I have given about 1.5 lbs to Luke at the Cafe Boheme. I have given my neighbor Priya about 45 peppers, I have canned about 2.5 gallons of peppers. I am making ristras to adorn my dining room. In a few weeks I am having guests for a summers end dining fest and peppers will be predominant.

Update #2-Farmers Markets
The Waverly and the Downtown Baltimore Markets remain amongst the best that one can find in this nation. I am so glad that the notion of local Farmer's Markets appeal to a growing number of people all the time.

This year I got to four new ones (so far)and they vary in quality and style. I still have not made it to some of my favorites such as the Oxford, MD one or the Ithaca, NY Market. I'll get to both soon though. The four new ones and my analysis are:

1. Mt. Washington (MD)-far to pretentious and limited. It is located on the parking lot of the Whole Foods store so it draws an unrealistic demographic.

2. Tuesday Market in Downtown West (Baltimore, MD)likewise a disappointment. Too many wilted vegetables on cement slabs unprotected from an east coast sun in the summer. No prepared foods to slake the appetite of noontime visitors such as exists at Towson's Thursday Market.

3. White Marsh Friday Market (MD)-small, practical, friendly. Too small and not a good date to be a great Market. It really fills a small need however and while it will not crack the big time it is an excellent venue for the crowd I saw...young women and children. The more folks that want to buy from their local farmers the better.

4. Industrial Museum Market (SE Baltimore)-another upstart with a niche clientele. Like the White Marsh Market I laud this one for introducing the concept of local produce over the packaged and adulterated crap that our big box grocers offer. It will never compete with Waverly or Downtown but it is a fine venue for people to socialize and to buy products that have not been through layer upon layer of packaging.

I spent this last Saturday (09.05.09)in a food fest that began with a trip to the Waverly Market where I bought a canvas cornucopia of vegetables that were eaten. frozen, canned or made into sauce. It was a splendid way to spend the day.

Now it is off to the garden to pick my 40 peppers.

Early summer addition (canning)

2009-08-02T17:59:00.000-07:00

The garden is coming along fabulously, in fact it is a bit overwhelming but I knew the job was dangerous when I took it. This is what I posted at last time and now it is much more overgrown. We are getting the right amount of heat, sun and rain to make for a lush growth.

Now I am beginning to can peppers from the garden. Prior to this morning I have reaped the benefits of spinach (that one is dying but I have seeds and summer may provide a second season). My Cilantro, Basil and Rosemary give me daily benefit and the varietal pepper do as well.

On the weekends I make myself breakfast omelets using Farmer’s Market free range eggs, some grated local Parmesan and Rosemary and Basil from my own efforts. It takes about 5 minutes of my time is a delight. Buying imported Parmesan is not worth it in terms of personal cost, environmental cost or taste. Buy Local! We are good at it!

Two weeks ago I showed off what my garden looked like. It is pretty similar today though far more lush. I haven’t been able to pick ripe tomatoes yet but that is coming soon. I have not picked squash yet either though I probably can. Last year the squash (zucchini) I canned was so good that I was jealous of myself and resentful that I did not do more. It is time to have a good long talk with self so that we can be on the same page as regards to the garden.

This year’s squash (a variety that confuses me but it apparently is a smaller Acorn) is healthy but not profound in numbers. I am looking forward to doing some canning perhaps next weekend.

The Garlic crop rotted in its bed which of course is a shame, yet the local Markets have much and it is cheap. I will try again for next year (which if you are unfamiliar actually means I will try again this year as Garlic is planted in the fall).

Anyway, the peppers which are abundant and varietal are storming me. My identification scheme seemed so secure in April as I planted seeds, seedlings and ID tags in the garden. The results have been seedlings and live abundant pepper plants. Since the larger numbers of them are exotics, they need nomenclature. My system has failed at that and I did not provide a redundancy plan for specification. So my hugely abundant and very much varietal pepper species can only be named by description.

I simply bought too many exotics and did not plan well enough for climactic/weather events that would destroy my ID tags. So here are my speciation records of my peppers:

I have a whole bunch of really cool (read: hot) peppers and only can ID a few of them.

Better work next year. I do have enough peppers to can about 4 gallons. Today I did my first.

2009 Gardening update

2009-07-15T05:36:00.000-07:00

Gardening, “I almost forgot how I missed it”, I lied to myself. For so many years I grew my vegetables “and enjoyed every minute of it”, I lied to myself. Finally after a five year hiatus I have dived back in. All the joys and strained backs will return.

I bought this house so that I could enjoy the back yard birds and to start a garden. Previous owners have glutted both the front and back with god awful perennials. Individually many of the blooms are very pleasing but cumulatively they create a jungle of undesirables; they function as weeds.

My first year here in 2007 I decided to let everything grow as it normally would. My own garden consisted of large pots with herbs and peppers mainly growing on my southerly exposed front porch. The next year I ventured into the soil just in front of the porch and the flower bed that flanked the front walk. A few experiments with peppers and beans in the back failed mainly because perennials stole the light. I continually select perennials to dig up and discard in order to remove this clutter.

Well you have to have Basil every day and peppers routinely. Some potted tomatoes provide some fresh vitamin C and beta carotene. They even provide a quart or two of canned tomatoes. This was not enough though as a full blown garden was needed.

In my long and narrow back yard I have an elevated spot that more or less gets pretty good sun. The first spring I lived here I went out to investigate it as a potential garden. In fact the soil was terrible. It was full of clay, stone and pebbly shit almost like roofing shingles. I was discouraged as I imagined the effort it would take to make this soil right. So I whined softly to myself and went on to other things.

In the winter that started year 2008 I read an article about used tire gardens. These would be raised gardens with borders of tires cut in half in order to enmesh them into a sturdy barrier. This is the trick I thought. Raised garden allowed for the infusion of new soil that would not be affected by the old and in fact over the years would improve that lower layer dramatically. So getting used tires and re-using them was my new goal. Get lots of them; teach others how to build these gardens. What a great idea except for the government intervention thing. In Maryland one needs a special license in order to recycle tires. What an excellent idea don’t you think? Make the recycling of one of the toughest and most odious eyesores around nearly impossible to get rid of.

So I began calling various State departments and cruising the web to see what was required to get this license, this license to make use of one of America’s worst eye sores. The bureaucratic quagmire was too much for me. There were no links to tell me what to do; there were no department heads to tell me what to do. A law was enacted and there was no one to make it work. Garage owners were afraid to give me tires that were a problem for them because they would be violating the law. What a great country?!?!?!?

Then, as I walked past a place that was having a deck built I saw a pile of scrapped wood and it occurred to me to make a garden of scrap wood. If there are laws restricting me from this I do not know them and deck building companies either do not know or do not care as suddenly I was in contact with far more wood than I would need.

With that a very ugly and very practical garden was born. It is raised as it needs to be. This way there are about 18 inches of topsoil infused with about 100 gallons of mulch that had been brewing for two seasons in a couple of old garbage cans in the back. I also added pine chips. Now there are about 8 tomato plants and about 8 pepper plants and about 1 spinach plant and about 2 Acorn Squash plants all growing in this first year garden. The herbs and a few other peppers are growing out front as they do every year.

Now it is July and I have collected as harvest, lots of spinach, several peppers and routine doses of basil. That is all good. More will come. Most of it will be eaten with a summer barbeque. Some in a salad and the squash probably canned; some of the tomatoes too. I cannot wait to can.

As much as I love summer I sort of look forward to the fall harvest and my canning.

Here is what my garden looked like on July 12.

I'll keep you posted.