Category: Food

Entropy and a speculative theory of health


Basil (with okra in the background) — a negative entropy factory!

Edible order

I have written here before about negative entropy and its relation to life on earth. The post was “The opposite of entropy, and why we’re alive,” from December 2016. The concepts are based on a short but important book by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, What Is Life. Yes, Erwin Schrödinger is the Schrödinger who gave us the thought experiment about Schrödinger’s cat. The book was first published in 1944 and has gone through at least eighteen printings from Cambridge University Press. I need to summarize some fundamentals, but this is a post about food, not physics.

The concept of entropy

The concept of entropy is simple enough, though a great deal of complex physics arises from the concept. It’s that systems always seek a state of equilibrium. This is laid out in the second law of thermodynamics, which explains why your cup of coffee gets cold. Your coffee will seek the same temperature as the room it’s in. As the coffee loses heat to the room, the temperature of the room will rise very slightly from the heat of the coffee. The thermodynamic system — the coffee and the room — seek a state of equilibrium. A state of equilibrium may sound all orderly and pretty, but the opposite is true. When a system is in a state of equilibrium, no work can be done. The engine in your car can do work only because high heat inside its cylinders (from burning gasoline) is much hotter than the surrounding environment. A gasoline engine would lose efficiency inside a hot oven and would eventually stop running as the oven got hotter.

Life

The physicist Roger Penrose extends Schrödinger’s ideas by pointing out that life on earth is possible because of the temperature difference between our very hot sun, which is surrounded by very cold space. A system that can take advantage of that differential (and the absence of temperature equilibrium) can do work. Penrose: “The green plants take advantage of this and use the low-entropy incoming energy [from the sun] to build up their substance, while emitting high-entropy energy [for example, body heat]. We take advantage of the low-entropy energy in the plants, to keep our own entropy down, as we eat plants, or as we eat animals that eat plants. By this means, life on Earth can survive and flourish.”

We can think of entropy as disorder, and negative entropy as order.

Life, then, to a physicist, is a system that can do work, and create order, by exploiting the temperature differential between a star and the cold space that surrounds the star. All life on earth is dependent on photosynthesis. All the work of photosynthesis must be done by green plants exposed to sunlight. Green plants are little factories that do the work of creating all sorts of orderly molecules that are essential to life as we know it. Animal life is possible because animals eat plants. Animals take in the order (or negative entropy) from the plants and excrete disorder. The taking-in and the excretion are equally essential.

Health and disease

First, a disclaimer. To think about health and disease in terms of entropy and negative entropy does not in any way deny, or conflict with, the sciences of nutrition and medicine. Rather, to think about our own life and health in the context of entropy and negative entropy is just a way of trying to keep in mind the most fundamental principles of what it is that keeps us alive and healthy. To be healthy, we want to maximize the order made possible by our hot sun and cooler planet. We can do that only by eating plants.

In my previous post on this subject, I asked a question as a kind of thought experiment: Would it be possible for human beings to live off of compost? I propose that the answer is no — at least, not for long. Though many of the minerals and even molecules necessary for life can be found in compost, the compost, by decomposing, has lost most of its order. Those minerals and molecules degrade into the soil and get recycled back through living plants exposed to the sun, creating order again by using energy from the sun. I would predict that, if we tried to live off of compost, we would sicken and die as the reserves of negative entropy in our bodies became exhausted and disorder set in. I also would predict that that disorder would be expressed as common, well-known ailments and diseases, leading to a common and well-known cause of death.

For example:

Origin of Cancer: An Information, Energy, and Matter Disease. (Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology, 2016.) “We therefore suggest that energy loss (e.g., through impaired mitochondria) or disturbance of information (e.g., through mutations or aneuploidy) or changes in the composition or distribution of matter (e.g., through micro-environmental changes or toxic agents) can irreversibly disturb molecular mechanisms, leading to increased local entropy of cellular functions and structures. In terms of physics, changes to these normally highly ordered reaction probabilities lead to a state that is irreversibly biologically imbalanced, but that is thermodynamically more stable. This primary change—independent of the initiator—now provokes and drives a complex interplay between the availability of energy, the composition, and distribution of matter and increasing information disturbance that is dependent upon reactions that try to overcome or stabilize this intracellular, irreversible disorder described by entropy. Because a return to the original ordered state is not possible for thermodynamic reasons, the cells either die or else they persist in a metastable state. In the latter case, they enter into a self-driven adaptive and evolutionary process that generates a progression of disordered cells and that results in a broad spectrum of progeny with different characteristics. Possibly, one day, one of these cells will show an autonomous and aggressive behavior—it will be a cancer cell.”

Increased temperature and entropy production in cancer: the role of anti-inflammatory drugs. (Inflammopharmacology, 2015.) “Some cancers have been shown to have a higher temperature than surrounding normal tissue. This higher temperature is due to heat generated internally in the cancer. The higher temperature of cancer (compared to surrounding tissue) enables a thermodynamic analysis to be carried out. Here I show that there is increased entropy production in cancer compared with surrounding tissue. This is termed excess entropy production. The excess entropy production is expressed in terms of heat flow from the cancer to surrounding tissue and enzymic reactions in the cancer and surrounding tissue. The excess entropy production in cancer drives it away from the stationary state that is characterised by minimum entropy production.”

The bottom line where our health is involved seems clear enough. Negative entropy and order lead to health. Entropy and disorder lead to disease. What we eat is extremely important for keeping order inside our bodies.

Concepts for better health

“Eat more leaves” is almost a mantra with the food writer Michael Pollan. He is, I think, not thinking about entropy or about physics from physicists such as Roger Penrose or Erwin Schrödinger. The science of nutrition tells us the same thing that physics tells us. Leaves, of course, are the primary source of the negative entropy that supports life on earth. Leaves are healthy things to eat.

Clearly freshness matters. A just-picked squash will turn into compost fairly quickly under certain conditions. Though a just-picked squash and a week-old squash will have identical amounts of some nutrients, clearly the just-picked squash will have more negative entropy, or order, because living things start to decompose as soon as they are cut off from their source of order. With a squash, that happens when you cut the stem between the squash and the leaves of the squash plant. The difference between a fresh squash and a composted squash is entropy. When you eat a squash, you absorb its order. What’s left is compost.

Eat as close to photosynthesis as possible. Chlorophyll itself is very good for us. Could we live on a diet of nothing but meat? Some animals do, obviously, though those animals evolved to be optimized for an all-meat diet (though they get vegetable matter from the entrails of the animals they eat). But human beings are not optimized for an all-meat diet. As Michael Pollan says, eat mostly plants.

Eat preserved foods only if fresh foods are not available. To live in the northern latitudes, it’s necessary to eat preserved foods. But why open a can of vegetables in the summer?

What animals eat matters. It seems reasonable to assume that milk or cheese from cows that ate grass would contain more negative entropy than milk or cheese from cows that ate moldy corn. Honey from bees fed sugar water couldn’t possibly be as good as honey from bees with access to fresh flowers.

Avoid processed foods. Not only do processed foods provide terrible nutrition with an excess of calories, the negative entropy has been processed out. Many processed foods are probably little better than compost, though they may taste better.

Cook sparingly and carefully. Cook with an eye to preserving the order contained in food. For example, be sparing with heat, using no more heat than is necessary to find the sweet spot between deliciousness, digestibility, and maximum order.

Lest this sound like quackery, I should point out that it only boils down to considering health from the perspective of fundamental physics rather than from the higher-level sciences of nutrition and medicine. Those sciences all lead to the same conclusions about what’s healthy and what’s not, though the physics emphasizes one point: Eat as close as possible to the order that plants create from sunlight. That’s another way of saying what nutritionists are saying when they encourage us to eat fresh, whole, unprocessed foods.

Why I have been thinking about this

Having our own garden, or living on a farm, obviously can be beneficial to our health. But even if we don’t have a garden, fresh foods are available in most places (to those who can afford it). I find it ironic that northern Stokes County, where I live, is considered a food desert because of the distance to places that sell fresh food. Many people here buy most of their groceries at places such as Dollar General, where absolutely nothing is fresh and everything is processed. The consequences to people’s health is obvious just from looking at the people in Dollar Generals.

I thought a great deal this spring, as I bucked myself up for a hot summer, about how my garden is my opportunity to maximize my intake, for a full season, of negative entropy from the summer sun. Or, to turn it into a jingle, make order while the sun shines. It’s in summer that negative entropy from the sun is freshest and cheapest. I strongly suspect that, just as we can store food for the winter, our bodies also can store negative entropy for the winter. So, as I see it, we have a kind of duty to take advantage of the sun in summer to benefit our health.

Stars

Stars and life have two interesting things in common. They are the only systems in the universe that can create order out of chaos. Stars actually can create negative entropy inside themselves for their own purposes.1 And stars also supply the radiant energy that makes life possible.

The astronomer Carl Sagan made the famous statement, “We are star stuff.” I would add to that statement: We are star stuff, powered by starlight.

Notes:

1. An Introduction to Modern Astrophysics, Second Edition. Bradley W. Carroll and Dale A. Ostlie. Cambridge University Press, 2017. Page 330.

Extra credit: One way of assessing the consequences of global warming would be estimating its effects on the ability of plant life on earth to create order from the sun. The health of oceans, forests, and tundra obviously is critical. It recently was reported that the Amazon is now a net producer of carbon, rather than a carbon sink. I don’t know of any data on how such things affect the planet’s net ability to create negative entropy. But it can’t be good. Yes, plants need carbon dioxide, as global warming deniers often point out. But carbon dioxide is not the only thing that plants need to flourish. They also need clean water, a suitable environment, and not being killed by human activities.

Fried apple pies

I already had decided that, if the squirrels left me any apples this year, then instead of making a big apple pie that I’d have to eat all by myself, I’d make fried apple pies, with a vow to eat no more than one a day. The squirrels did leave me some apples, I did make fried apple pies today (two of them), and I ate only one.

I’m an old hand at making apple pies. If I’ve ever made fried apple pies, though, I don’t remember doing it. I Googled for some guidance. The recipes are all over the map. To my taste, some of the recipes sounded terrible — for example, the ones that call for canned biscuit dough for the crust. Even homemade biscuit dough sounds terrible, to me, as a crust for fried apple pies. Some recipes call for sheets of store-bought puff pastry. No way. I settled on a Scottish-style hot-water crust, not least because I wanted to practice making hot-water crusts using the pasta machine that I bought a few weeks ago.

I did what I usually do: I consulted a number of recipes to clarify the concept, then I did the job according to my own judgment without really measuring anything. The hot-water crust turned out beautifully, and the pasta machine worked very well for the job. My rolling-pin skills are not the best. The pasta machine, on the other hand, turned out beautiful rectangles of even, sturdy dough that could easily be cut for rectangular fried pies. I minced the apples, added sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, and a little corn starch, and cooked the filling until the corn starch thickened. After frying the pies in about three-quarters of an inch of oil (about 350 degrees) and turning them once, I put them on paper towels for a few minutes and then transferred them to a cooling rack.

Now that I think I’m competent with hot-water crusts, I’m sure there will be lots of savory little main-dish pies this winter. Another virtue of hot-water crust is that it’s frugal with oil or butter (I used a little butter today) and lower in calories, unlike my usual pie crusts, in which I use quite a lot of olive oil.

My next experiment with hot-water crust will be making some little pies to be baked rather than fried.

Squash and cucumber Kung Pao

I think of cucumbers as a vegetable to be eaten raw. But a little Googling reveals that many people use cucumbers in stir fries. Because I’m rich with summer cucumbers from the garden, stir-frying cucumbers had to be tried.

To make Kung Pao dishes too often would risk getting tired of it, and I wouldn’t want that to happen. Kung Pao treatment is one of my favorite ways of saucing stir-fries. I would never claim that cucumbers are the most thrilling ingredient to which I’ve applied the Kung Pao treatment. But they’re not a bit bad. They come out of the wok a little firmer than squash similarly wok’ed, and they blend in nicely with the other ingredients. I certainly wouldn’t buy cucumbers in wintertime to use them in a stir-fry, but when cucumbers are in season, I say bring them on.

As long as we’re talking about Kung Pao, I should mention that I never buy ready-made Asian sauces. They’re easy to make, much less expensive, and healthier if you make them yourself. If you keep in stock certain basic ingredients, you can always cook up a nice sauce in just a few minutes. You want to keep a variety of vinegars, of course. Increasingly often, I reach for the malt vinegar, which is what I used in this Kung Pao sauce. Authenticity is less important to me than good. Malt vinegar imparts a kind of Old World, ale-like, pub-like taste to whatever you use it in. You’ll want soy sauce, of course. Also: pepper paste, Better Than Bouillon (because who keeps stocks on hand?), toasted sesame oil, garlic and garlic powder, and corn starch. Pepper oil is a good thing to have, but I usually reach for pepper paste. Even ketchup or tomato paste sometimes find their way into Asian sauces, and generally the vinegar wants to be offset with sweetener. And, as long as you can avoid snacking on them, one should always have roasted peanuts on hand.

Today I picked the first two tomatoes from the garden. I picked them green and put them in the kitchen windows, but fresh tomatoes, both ripe and green, will soon be on the menu.

Squash puppies

Squash puppies with pesto

While eating squash fritters a few days ago and thinking about other things to do with squash, the idea of squash puppies occurred to my wicked mind. For all I knew, I was the first to think of such a thing as squash puppies. But a little Googling showed that I was late to the game. There are many recipes out there for squash puppies.

If you want to make them, and you come across a recipe that calls for precooking the squash by boiling it or something, move on. I’m sure that you’d prefer a recipe in which raw grated squash is used in the batter. The squash will cook just as quickly as the other ingredients in the batter.

Deep-fat frying is one of my least favorite things to do. But for squash puppies I just had to do it. The squash puppies will cook very fast and will puff up like marshmallows, so watch them carefully. As you cook them in small batches, put the finished squash puppies onto a paper towel on a baking sheet in a warm oven, about 175F. The finished puppies will be very light and soft. They will want a sauce or a dip, whatever your conscience allows.

I made a smallish batch and couldn’t eat them all. Mrs. Possum will have squash puppies tonight.

Squash fritters

When squash is in high season (and it is), squash in every way imaginable is on the table. Squash fritters sound like a lot of fuss, but actually they’re quick and easy.

Coarsely grate the squash (and some onion) in a box grater. Add egg, flour, and seasonings. Drop the mixture into a skillet with enough oil to cover the bottom of the skillet.

Blue Ridge Parkway eateries


Clouds from a summer squall move eastward above a Doughton Park trail head.

In the Blue Ridge foothills, elevation about 1000 feet, the high temperature yesterday was about 91F. Sixty miles away in the Blue Ridge Highlands, elevation about 3,500 feet, the high was about 75F, with a constant cool breeze and rain showers. I should get up there more often in the summer.

There were two primary missions — to meet a friend from Charlotte for a little hiking at Doughton Park, and to have lunch at the newly opened Bluffs Restaurant, which I wrote about previously here.

The Bluffs did not disappoint. It was easy to see from the happy, accommodating staff that the restaurant is doing well and that the people who work there are sharing in the success. We had fried okra with a ranch-style dipping sauce (excellent); hushpuppies with molasses butter (also excellent); side salads; and fried-green-tomato BLTs on sourdough with fries on the side. And iced tea, of course. We ordered too much and ate too much, and lunch came to $25 each. If you’re in the area and are considering visiting the Bluffs, it’s at milepost 241 on the Blue Ridge Parkway, near Laurel Springs in Ashe County, North Carolina. The place is very busy, and they recommend reservations. The number to call (as well as the menus) are on their web site. They’ve set up a large, wedding-style tent with picnic tables in front of the building to accommodate people who’re waiting to go inside. They also serve under the tent. My hiking companion’s dog waited under the tent while we were inside, and kitchen workers and waitresses took the dog snacks and icewater.

Driving along the Blue Ridge Parkway with the windows down (the speed limit is 45 mph), in and out of woods, past lush meadows and the occasional farm, under a busy sky, birds singing, I kept thinking, “I remember this planet. This is the planet I was born on.” The population of the earth has doubled since I was born in 1948. Except for the Appalachian Highlands, I often think that the entire east coast of the U.S. is now one big suburb.

The Blue Ridge Parkway was an economic stimulus project during the Great Depression. Work began under the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration. It’s one of the nicest gifts the American people have ever given themselves, from an era in which the rich paid their fair share and when government was understood to exist for the benefit of the people. The American people desperately need another era like that, now.


A U.S. Park Service version of a kissing gate. There’s no moving gate; it’s just assumed that a cow can’t get around the bend. Split-rail fencing made from locust wood is common in the Appalachian Highlands. Locust is plentiful, resists rot, and splits easily.


Near Cumberland Knob, milepost 217.


The interior of the Bluffs


Fried okra at the Bluffs


Side salad at the Bluffs


I had this humble diner burger at a roadside restaurant at Fancy Gap, Virginia, while driving to the Bluffs

Runaway squash and cucumbers

I had the good sense this year to plant a sparse garden for easier maintenance. Even so, when the garden kicks in, you can’t turn your back on it even for a day. I had skipped a day of harvesting, and this morning I picked five pounds of squash and cucumbers from four squash plants and four cucumber plants. Some of the squash and cucumbers had already gotten a little too big.

Unlike tomatoes, which love to sit and look out the kitchen window, squash and cucumbers start to lose their freshness the instant they’re picked. I pick them in the cool of the morning, wash them in cold water, dry them, and pop them in the fridge.

I’d have fried fresh squash every day in summer if it weren’t for the calories. Curried squash is probably the lowest-calorie way to fix them. When I fry squash, I like to not use egg. I slice the squash and let the slices sit for about 10 minutes. A sticky dew will form. That stickiness helps the flour stick. Roll the slices in seasoned flour. Then roll them in a mixture of flour, seasonings, and water, about the same thickness as you would with an egg mixture. Then roll them in semolina flour and pop them in the skillet.

Pasta is a piece of cake


Homemade tagliatelle with basil-parsley pesto. The basil, parsley, and lettuce came from my garden. The pesto was made with a mortar and pestle.

When I posted last week about working on my Italian cooking (“A summer project: Italian cooking,” June 2), I was not thinking about pasta — honest. I was thinking about how to make the most of the summer vegetables from my garden.

But as I read more and more of Elizabeth David’s Italian Food, I realized that pasta is part of the deal in Italian cuisine. So I needed a pasta plan — including figuring out how not to eat too much of it.

It was easy to see that a pasta machine would be necessary. I am pretty sure that I will never, ever, be able to make pasta with a rolling pin. So, when I was grocery shopping on Tuesday, I stopped by the Williams Sonoma in Winston-Salem and bought an Imperia (made in Italy!) pasta machine, $80. This is a hand-cranked machine. Williams Sonoma also has attachments for KitchenAid mixers. But the attachments are much more expensive than the hand-cranked machine, and I reasoned that a pasta machine driven by such a high-powered motor would be a very high-powered way to make a very big mess.

With the hand-cranked machine, at least, the mess is much less than I feared. I was afraid of a sticky mess. But instead it was a mere floury mess. If you’re used to handling dough, your second batch of pasta will be excellent. I won’t presume to give any instructions here, because I’m just a novice. But there are many videos on YouTube about how to make pasta at home.

Amazon also has the Imperia machine, for less, naturally, than I paid at Williams Sonoma. It’s a heavy little thing. And it’s entirely practical, not at all a use-it-once kitchen gadget.

I do have one warning. Most recipes for pasta will make an outrageous amount of pasta, enough to feed a family of ten, to require a 40-gallon cauldron for boiling, to keep you turning a crank for half a day, and to run out of places to hang pasta. If you’re cooking for an old-fashioned Catholic family, I understand. But since I cook only for myself and for the possum who makes nightly visits to my backyard, even a one-egg batch of pasta is more than twice as much as I can eat. My possum will eat Italian tonight.

A thought that helped me overcome my resistance to making something as high-calorie as pasta is that pasta skills (and a pasta machine) also will assist with egg dumplings, which would make a fine winter comfort food. Also, the method of making Asian noodles can’t be that different from making Italian pasta.

I’m probably the last California-influenced cook to start making pasta. There are two skills involved, I would say: How to make the pasta (easy); and how not to make too much of it (hard). The real technical challenge with homemade pasta, I would say, is making no more of it than you ought to eat.

A summer project: Italian cooking

A friend who lives in the south of France asked me yesterday in email what plans I have for summer. I couldn’t think of a thing, other than trying not to hide too much indoors in a bug-free, air-conditioned house. Then I remembered one thing: That, with the riches I hope to get from the garden, I plan to work on my Italian cooking.

It was about ten days ago, upon observing that though the early garden was 90 percent a failure because of the cold, dry spring, the summer garden looks promising. I will have yellow squash next week. The cucumbers and tomatoes are blooming. The basil and onions are coming along, but slowly. I planted okra from seed today.

Like most Americans, I grew up with spaghetti. Every few years or so I’ve made lasagna at home. I put some effort into improving my pizza skills, especially with crusts. I’ve had a few incredibly good dinners at proper and properly Italian restaurants in North Beach in San Francisco. But I have never made an effort to concentrate on authentic Italian cooking. I realized that I needed a book for that.

Cookbooks are available from Italian cooks with current TV shows, but I wanted something classic. The classic work on Italian cooking for English-speaking cooks was easy to identify. It’s Italian Food, by Elizabeth David. It’s one of the most beautiful cookbooks I’ve ever seen, illustrated with excellent color prints of Italian paintings of food. The book was printed in Verona.

Italian Food. Elizabeth David. Barry & Jenkins, London, 1954, 1987, 1996. 240 pages.

First published in 1954, this book satisfies my curiosity about what any culture’s cuisine was like when the cooks had experience and memories that went back to the 1800’s. What I saw in my grandmother’s kitchen in the Yadkin Valley of North Carolina in 1954 (she was born in 1896) was nothing like what one sees in even the best kitchens today. New developments in cuisine, such as the ideas of an Alice Waters or a Michael Pollan, are very important. But cooking also has roots, and some knowledge of those roots is a must-have for any cuisine.

I ordered this cookbook through Amazon. It was shipped from the United Kingdom. There must be a good many copies in print, because the book is not hard to find. Booksellers don’t usually say what edition they’re selling. Mine is the 1996 edition, in very good condition.

I’ve a lot of good reading ahead of me, but the part about basil convinced me that this is indeed the cookbook I want:

“Nothing can replace the lovely flavour of this herb. If I had to choose just one plant from the whole herb garden I should be content with basil. Norman Douglas, who had a great fondness for this herb, would never allow his cook to chop the leaves or even to cut them with scissors; they had to be gently torn up, he said, or the flavour would be spoilt. I never agreed with him on this point, for the pounding of basil seems, on the contrary, to bring out its flavour.”

By pounding, I assume she means pounding in a mortar and pestle, which is now the only method I will use for making pesto.

Italian cooks, she writes in 1954, go to market twice a day. That’s a beautiful idea, but no American can live that way anymore. Some of us can, however, go to the garden twice a day.

Elizabeth David, who died in 1992, is an important figure in the history of cooking and cookbooks. The Wikipedia article is a good starting place for information about her.


Click here for high-resolution version


Lettuce pesto with lettuce from my garden

Pesto from lettuce?

Lettuce pesto sounds bland and watery. In truth, it is a little bland and a touch watery. But if lettuce is what you’ve got, then lettuce pesto it is. It will be three weeks or so before I can expect any summer basil from the garden. The winter basil from the kitchen window is almost gone, but I had enough of it to season the lettuce a bit.

Peace of mind, and the weather


The basil in the garden is just getting started. This pesto was made from the last of the winter basil, which I grew in the kitchen windows. More about the mortar and pestle below.

Living in the woods as I do — reasonably secure, healthy, and retired — my stress level isn’t very high. I feel for those who are still in the world of work, living in heavily populated places, with heavy responsibilities and heavy demands. For four years with Donald Trump in the White House, peace of mind was tough even in the woods. Now, with Trump gone and on his way to prison, what’s the biggest threat to peace of mind for woods-dwellers? The weather, I would say. (Because it was so easy for me to isolate, Covid-19 never felt very threatening here.)

For several years, the rule for the weather here was warmer and wetter, with occasional and minor deviations. The spring of 2021 broke that pattern. Spring this year was strangely cool and dry, with late and destructive frosts. It hasn’t been raining. Some of the grass is turning brown. The birds are looking for water. They notice within minutes when I start the drip system in the garden and flutter down for a drink. A big part of my disquiet is witnessing the stress of the plants and animals around me. The trees should be fine, though. Only a prolonged drought (which does not seem to be in store for us in my location) is hard on the trees. It’s the smaller things that suffer.

The cold spring was a big setback for the garden. Things that I planted from seed — radishes, lettuces, kales and chards — just never germinated. Water was never a problem, though, because of the reliable streams just down the hill and a neighbor who hauls water up the hill with his tractor for our irrigation systems. Even ten years ago in this area, drip systems for garden irrigation were not the rule. These days, just about everybody with a serious garden has a drip system. I’m water rich, in that two streams come together at the lower end of the abbey’s five acres. One stream is fairly sensitive to recent rainfall, but the other is fed by nearby springs that no one remembers ever going dry.

The forecast is looking a little better. With luck there will be a modest rainy spell here starting in about five days.

Basil and pesto

 
When I was Googling for help on improving my skill with pesto for the 2021 basil season, I came across several articles saying that the old-fashioned way of making pesto — with a mortar and pestle rather than a food processor — makes a big difference. I’m hardly an expert on Italian cooking, but so far I can find no reason to disagree. It’s not just the basil leaves that like to be pounded with marble rather than whizzed with a stainless steel blade. The garlic and nuts also like it. The old-fashioned pesto ends up looking more textured, with the different ingredients more visible. And I do believe that the taste is sassier and somehow more complex. The large granite mortar and pestle (ordered from Amazon) has earned its place in my kitchen. The Cuisinart food processor has been with me for more than 40 years. Unless someone convinces me that hummus should be made with a mortar and pestle, the food processor is in no danger of being donated to a thrift shop.

Trump

 
Though I admit that I am far too preoccupied with politics, I’ve avoided posting about it. Trump is history. He does not deserve our attention except insofar as the law continues the slow process of sending him to prison where he belongs. Though the media have finally started to foreshadow Trump’s trials and imprisonment, they still cater to the Trumpian notion of Trumpian invincibility and the idea that Trump will get away with everything. My view is that Trump & Co. will be held responsible for everything they have done. Let’s not feel guilty about the schadenfreude. The payment, at last, of Trump’s debt to justice (and his dollar debt to Russian oligarchs and oil oligarchs and therefore his final bankruptcy), will be tremendously satisfying and healing to those of us who have had to live with Trump and his insufferable supporters. They are more insufferable than ever, actually, as their gloating has turned into threats, insane denials, and a doubling of their rage.

The weather

 

According to the Climate Prediction Center, the entire western United States is in for a serious drought this year. If the forecast is accurate, the eastern United States will squeak by. Still, summer is now a scary time, as scary as winter must have been for so many of our ancestors.

Making peace with summer

 

Every year, I think about how I might overcome my dread of summer, with summer defined as the hottest parts of July and August in the American South — temperatures well over 90F, high humidity, bugs, weeds, and indoor air conditioning as the only escape. Should I get a canoe for the Dan River? Nah. The cat wouldn’t enjoy canoeing. One idea I had today is to focus on improving my competence with Italian cooking. After all, I’ve got a garden, and if I can keep the garden going against the heat, humidity, the weeds, and the bugs, then I can be as rich with summer produce as anyone in Tuscany. We shall see. Tomatoes, squash, basil and cucumbers do an awful lot to ease the discomforts of summer.