Category: Food

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Good-bye garden stir fry with fried barley

For the longest time, I had been planning to see if fried barley can compete with fried rice. Yes it can.

The chewy texture of barley makes great fried rice. The grains are sturdy and are not at risk of turning to mush when thrown around in the wok. The grains love a thin coating of sauce, but they don’t drink it up the way rice does. You’ll eat less, because barley takes longer to chew.

The stir fry above contains lots of green peppers and green tomatoes given to me by a neighbor. They had picked the last remaining parts of their garden (which was a lot) before the first freeze. Green tomatoes are brilliant in a stir fry or curry.

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Kefir-lovers swear that kefir has even more probiotic virtue than yogurt. I have read that kefir culture persists in our digestive systems but that yogurt culture is transient. I have no idea if that is true. But personally I find that I like kefir better. And kefir is easier to make than yogurt.

Yogurt needs to incubate at a bit higher than room temperature. Hence we use yogurt makers to keep the culture warm. Kefir, on the other hand, works its magic at room temperature. You don’t need anything to make kefir other than a culture to start with, some glass jars, a coarse strainer, and some good milk.

Yogurt is easy to find. Kefir is not as common. Store-bought kefir, though you can buy it plain, is usually heavily sweetened and fruit flavored, increasing the calories by at least 50 percent. If you’re new to kefir, it’s something you drink rather than eat with a spoon. Kefir thickens as it cultures. It looks — and tastes — a lot like buttermilk. But if the information one Googles up can be believed, kefir is a more complex colony of bacteria than buttermilk.

I love the taste of plain kefir. It “sparkles” in the mouth like champagne. The freshly fermented flavor gets up your nose. When you drink fresh kefir, you know it’s alive.

To get started with kefir, you need a starter culture, which is called “kefir grains.” Kefir grains look to me like cottage cheese. You can order them from Amazon. It will take a week or so to re-invigorate kefir grains. They survive being mailed, but they don’t like it. After your kefir grains are healthy and happy and you start your kefir routine, you strain the grains from the finished kefir and put the grains into a new batch of fresh milk. I plan to experiment with vegan kefirs made from coconut milk (which I understand works fine) and almond milk, though I believe kefir is healthiest and happiest in cow’s milk or goat’s milk. You can put your kefir culture on hold — for a while — by putting it into the refrigerator. But like all cultures such as sourdough bread cultures, kefir needs to be periodically fed.

Those of you who were health nuts back in the 1970s will remember the nutritionist Adele Davis. In those days, the emphasis was on vitamins and minerals and protein. As a hippy who also had a copy of Jethro Kloss’ Back to Eden, I realized even then that the mystery of good health was more complicated than just vitamins, minerals, and protein. Since then, we’ve learned a great deal more about the importance of our internal flora. I don’t use a lot of milk. Too much milk causes me to gain weight. But I think that a good policy would be, when one drink’s milk, to drink only a cultured milk such as kefir.

Here’s a hat tip to one of this blog’s readers (she knows who she is) who counseled me on getting started with kefir.

Kefir grains

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Pimento cheese made from fresh roasted green peppers, served with my homemade borscht

I was reflecting today on the history of pimento cheese, which, since my earliest childhood, has been a Southern American favorite. It seemed oddly Mediterranean, because nobody around here has ever grown pimiento peppers, nor does anybody can peppers, as far as I know. Luckily, the story of the history of pimento cheese has already been written, and I came across this article from Southern Living: You Will Not Believe the History of Pimento Cheese.

It turns out that my speculation was right. According to the article, it was back in the 1870s that Spain started sending canned red peppers to the United States. America supplied the cheese. Pimento cheese was born.

When I was a young’un, there was often a little glass jar of pimento peppers in my mother’s cabinets for making pimento cheese. If you make it at home (I’m thinking that nobody ever does anymore), the ingredients would be cream cheese, some cheddar, and some mayonnaise. All groceries stores here have it, though, in plastic tubs. If you read the ingredients, you’ll faint, because store-bought pimento cheese is usually made from cheap, artificial ingredients such as “cheese food.”

Last time I was at Trader Joe’s, I bought too much Wisconsin cheddar, and I’ve been hard pressed to use it all. Pimento cheese seemed like a good idea. Cream cheese is not something I normally buy. But Greek yogurt was a good substitute. And I never run out of mayonnaise.

You could use any kind of pepper, red or green, even mildly hot ones, if you like the idea. I roasted a sweet green pepper on the grill. Let it cool, then peel it and chop it. I marinated my green pepper for an hour or so in some of the marinade from a jar of marinated artichoke hearts. Stir the chopped peppers into the grated cheddar, plus the cream cheese (or Greek yogurt) and a dollop of mayonnaise.

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Update: A vintage can of tinned pimentos that was for sale on eBay.

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And all at once, summer collapsed into fall.” — Oscar Wilde

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One of the things I learned in Scotland this summer is that my culture of origin — Southern American — is not really a soup culture, though maybe it would be more accurate to say that the climate of the American South is not really a soup climate. Not until cool weather arrives do the soup pots come out (if anybody other than me still uses soup pots).

In Scotland, especially in the Highlands and islands, soup is welcome on the table year round. Even in August, a friend who grew up in rural Ireland made some amazingly imaginative vegetarian soups. In these parts, you’d get some funny looks (and, in some households, shot) if you put hot soup on the table in August.

This year, August just wouldn’t go way. Summer persisted until early October with highs in the 90s, and then at last the weather changed. I turned off the cooling system and flung open the windows to let the nip in. While the cat sat in the window and pressed her nose against the screen to eye the birds, I was eyeing a soup pot and checking the contents of the fridge. For the first fall soup, I decided on a simple potato soup with onions, celery, and a whiff of garlic.

The challenge with vegetarian soups is the stock. I almost never buy ready-made soup stocks. Lord knows what’s in them. And the vegetarian versions almost always have some kind of weird, strong flavor that jumps into the foreground. The stock is a soup’s background. It should be savory but subtle. Another problem with store-bought soup stocks is that they’re mostly heavy liquid that weighs down the grocery bags. They’re not worth lugging home. My usual solution is the family of bouillons made by Better Than Bouillon. They’re light in the grocery bag, very concentrated, and they keep forever in the refrigerator. And let’s not forget that water makes a big difference. The water here comes from my own deep well (305 feet, with the lower 270 feet of it solid rock), and the drinking and cooking water goes through a charcoal filter.

There is no milk or cream in this soup. I thickened it by whizzing most of the potatoes in the blender when the soup was almost done. I also added some tahini. (Mix liquid slowly into the tahini to make a smooth sauce before adding it to the soup). Nut butters make great thickeners for soups. Peanut butter goes well in any soup that contains tomatoes. Tahini can stand in for milk or cream. This would have been a vegan soup except that it contained a little butter. I cooked it very slowly for three and a half hours, barely bubbling, covered.

Speaking of soup pots, I’m very happy with my new scheme of using only old-fashioned cookware. For sauces, sautéeing, and reducing, I’m using heavy tin-lined copper pots, vintage, bought on eBay. For frying and baking, I’m using cast iron, including a cast iron wok. For soups and anything that wants to boil, I’m using vintage Corning Visions cookware bought on eBay. Using glass cookware is a bit eccentric, but I like it because glass is so inert and does not affect the flavor of things — a particular problem with things such as soups and stews that cook long and slow.

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⬆︎ Pork roll with Yorkshire pudding, Royal Hotel, Stornaway

Traditional Scottish cooking is strangely difficult to find. Many eateries — especially in places that cater to tourists — offer what I call “international tourist cuisine,” which is mostly Mediterranean and is pretty much the same wherever you go. On this year’s trip to Scotland I found that provincial hotels are the best places to find traditional cooking.

⬆︎ Slow-braised beef and Yorkshire pudding, Royal Hotel, Stornaway. The Royal Hotel at Stornaway definitely was the best dining room I found on this trip. When I sent compliments to the chef, the waiter said that there are three chefs and that all of them are Nepalese. I don’t know where they were trained, but they are very good.

⬆︎ Scotch broth, Royal Hotel, Stornaway

⬆︎ Bread basket, Royal Hotel, Stornaway

⬆︎ Oven-roasted salmon, Harris Hotel, Tarbert

⬆︎ Vegetarian haggis croquettes, Harris Hotel, Tarbert

⬆︎ I spent a day in Oxford on this trip. This is a salad from Quod restaurant in Oxford

⬆︎ Salmon patties, Quod restaurant, Oxford

⬆︎ Ravioli, Quod restaurant, Oxford

⬆︎ Vegetarian breakfast at Côte Brasserie in Oxford

⬆︎ Meat pie from the high street bakery at Dunbar

⬆︎ Vegetable-beef pie from the high street bakery at Dunbar

⬆︎ Vegetarian breakfast with fake sausage, Royal Hotel, Stornaway

⬆︎ Royal Hotel, Stornaway

⬆︎ Shortbread, Skoon art cafe, Geocrab, isle of Harris

⬆︎ Harris Hotel, Tarbert, isle of Harris

⬆︎ This is a home-cooked meal, made on a Coleman stove in a yurt. It’s mashed rutabaga with pork chop and pasta in orange sauce.

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Fried oysters, French fries, and hushpuppies. The hushpuppies are barely visible, underneath the oysters.

If you can’t find any good escape fiction, then how about some escape food instead? Fried oysters should do the trick.

I had to make a miserable trip out yesterday afternoon in 95-degree heat. I could have just gone to a haircut appointment and then scurried back home, but I try to combine errands as much as possible to minimize travel. So I also went to — no kidding — the mall. (The nearest mall is in Winston-Salem. More about Winston-Salem in the update, below.) I needed a travel shirt for my U.K. trip next month, something that wouldn’t have to be ironed that would be suitable for evensong at the cathedral in Oxford, followed by a nice pub dinner somewhere. After that, it was Fresh Market for a few groceries.

It just so happens that Coronet Seafood at Rural Hall opens at 4 p.m., and it just happened to be 4:04 p.m. when I drove past on the way home. I call that serendipity, because I had been thinking about fried oysters for a couple of months, after a friend who used to live in these parts asked me in a text message if fried oysters are still a thing. The answer is yes. I call them fried fish houses. Some are better than others, but, as a rural genre, they thrive.

Are fried oysters a thing everywhere? — at least, everywhere you can get fresh oysters? Certainly, in California we had them. I’ve had them fried at a little oyster house that perches on a pier over Tomales Bay. I’ve bought them fresh from Hog Island Oyster Co., then shucked them and fried them while vacationing at Inverness, on the other side of Tomales Bay.

I was always alert for opportunities to have oysters while in Scotland last year. In Edinburgh, as I recall, the oyster bar we went to had some fried oysters, but they were a delicacy, very expensive, and they were meant more as an accompaniment to an evening of drinking than they were meant for a feast. The excellent little eatery at the Ulva Ferry had oysters, but only raw. Raw oysters are a little much for me.

The fried oysters in the photo above cost $10.95 and included french fries, hush puppies, and slaw. That’s the small platter. There’s also a large oyster platter for $13.95. For getting there early, before 5 p.m., I got an early-bird 10 percent discount.

If you go out for fried fish (or oysters) in these parts, you’ll be reminded how someone like Donald Trump became president and why his approval rating is 44 percent. I was the first to be seated, and as I waited for my oysters to be fried I glanced around as others came in. Everything about them — how they dress, how they move, their homely manners, how they hold their faces, how they talk and what they say — reveals that they are entirely monocultural. The white people don’t even have any awareness of the African-American culture that is all around them. The smallness of their world is suffocating. This is my culture of origin, and yet I feel culture-shocked when I am exposed to it. I can’t help but think that there go I, had I not been born a heretic and a misfit, equipped to think for myself, sassy enough to tell fools what to stick and where to stick it. After years in San Francisco, I sometimes wonder if it was a mistake to come back. And yet, I don’t get out much. Each year, the woods loom a little closer to the house. My real neighbors are the raccoon family that is harassing the chickens and the creatures that come out of the woods to eat the clover. I should travel more, I tell myself. And I have been traveling more.

The truth is, the Trump people don’t possess this place as fully as they think they do. Any place as unspoiled as this county is going to be discovered. The young people leave, but the retired people who move in were employees of the World Bank, or were reporters for the New York Times, or were university professors or airline pilots. Part of my job as a political operative is to find those people, though I also know people who have lived here for their entire life who identify as democratic socialists.

Much of my reading lately has been focused on prehistoric Europe and the origins of our contemporary Western languages. Cultures, of course, come and go. When one culture is displaced by another culture, there are reasons. When a culture with wheels and wagons, horses, bread, butter, ale and cheese came up against the old foraging cultures of western Europe, which culture might you suppose would win? Which languages would spread, and which would die out?

There really is a culture war. White rural culture really is dying, and now they know it. It’s dying because it is worn out, corrupted, insular, ignorant, obsolete in its skills, and unable to adapt. Its politics and its religion grow ever uglier as it panics, pulling it down that much faster. Theirs once was a culture that could spread across America and overwhelm the natives. A few hundred years later, now it’s payback time and their turn to be overwhelmed. We liberals and Democrats are hated because we represent the next wave. It’s been going on for ten thousand years.

There’s an irony here, too. No culture is ever completely forgotten. Some bits of its DNA linger on in folkways whose sources are lost in the remote past. Are there things in white rural culture that deserve to live on? We can only guess. But my guess would be that Appalachian musical styles will be conserved. Some of the cuisine, no doubt, will be conserved. If those bits of DNA do linger on, then the conservation will not get done by monocultural types who were unfit to engage the next wave. It will be done by those who had a foot in at least two cultures, curating and providing a channel for conservation of the old toward the new. Another irony: The coming next wave of culture speaks English. But it’s Spanish or Chinese that scares the rural white people, because they’re too deceived by political propaganda to understand what’s really sweeping over them.

Good-bye, white rural America, though you gave birth to me. And thanks for all the hushpuppies and fish.

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Update 1: While I was writing this, I started getting emails from farflung friends saying that the New York Times has discovered Winston-Salem, which is 25 miles from Acorn Abbey. It happens that I have roots in Winston-Salem. I went to high school there, and my first job was at the Winston-Salem Journal, in 1966. Every retiree needs access to shopping and a medical center. I chose Winston-Salem partly for my roots there, but also because I preferred a second-tier city, with slower growth. Winston-Salem also is an old city, by American standards. The Salem half was on the old colonial Wagon Road from Pennysylvania to Georgia. Because Winston-Salem was settled by technically advanced and well-educated Moravians (from Germany, and they were communists, too) before the American revolution, Winston-Salem also has a leg up culturally compared with the cultural vacuum of Southern cities such as Charlotte or Atlanta. For example, I’d imagine that Winston-Salem has as many excellent church organs per capita as any city in Europe.

From the New York Times:

Why Midsize Cities Struggle to Catch Up to Superstar Cities: For decades, smaller metropolitan areas closed the income gap with bigger, richer ones, but no longer. So places like Winston-Salem, N.C., are trying to lay a new foundation for prosperity.

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Update 2: Fried oysters in Edinburgh with seaweed and iceberg lettuce, August 2018:

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It’s a miracle of nature that the best summer drink of all — homemade lemonade — also is some of the best medicine you can get.

If you do some Googling and reading on the virtues of lemons, you’ll find plenty of people who swear that lemons can cure arthritis. Surely that’s too good to be true. But there can be little doubt that lemons are very good for not only your joints, but for all of the soft tissues of the body.

Consider the symptoms of scurvy, which the British navy famously discovered can be cured by lemons, limes, and oranges. In scurvy, pretty much all the soft tissues of the body start to fall apart and are unable to heal — gums, muscles, joints, skin, even the blood vessels. Fortunately for me, I learned about the virtues of oranges and lemons more than 40 years ago, from Jethro Kloss’ classic back-to-the-earth book on natural healing, Back to Eden. Kloss prescribed up to a dozen oranges a day any time the body has a healing job on its hands.

Though I am past 70, I don’t have any joint problems or even any foreshadowing of arthritis. I want to keep it that way. I’m resolved to have two lemons a day this summer while building myself up for hiking in Scotland. Hiking will do no harm to the muscles, heart, or lungs of an older person who is reasonably fit. It will just make you stronger. It’s the joints that are most at risk, especially with a heavy pack on your back. The stress on one’s joints must not exceed the speed at which joints can heal. Lemon juice, I very much believe, improves the ability of joint tissues to heal and to strengthen. I had a touch of shin splits after returning from Scotland last year. That resolved after about a week, but part of my experiment with lemons this summer is to see if lemons can ward off shin splints. Shin splints, I believe, are caused by micro-tears in leg tissue. It seems reasonable to me that lemons should help.

Wherever the virtue of lemons comes from, I’m convinced that it goes way beyond just vitamin C. When any kind of juice is put up in cartons, most of its virtue is gone, and the juice becomes just another sweet drink with empty calories. It’s almost magical or mystical, as though there is some mysterious life force in living fruit, but there is no substitute for the just-squeezed juice of still-living citrus fruit.

The biggest challenge with lemonade is how to sweeten it. Adding a lot of sugar will counteract the alkalizing effect that lemons have on body chemistry and will reduce lemons’ anti-inflammatory benefits. I use stevia with lemons. It’s hard to believe that anything can be so sweet and also so harmless. But as far as I can tell stevia gives no cause for worry if you don’t overdo it. There is some disagreement about whether stevia lowers blood pressure. Just for the fun of it, I took my blood pressure last night after having lemonade sweetened with a generous 3ml of stevia extract. I got 101 over 63, compared with 112 over 66 the last time I took my blood pressure a couple of months ago. One measurement doesn’t prove anything, of course. But it may well be true that stevia lowers your blood pressure.

You can order stevia extract from Amazon. Trader Joe’s sells a very nice organic stevia extract in 2-ounce bottles. Stevia is made from the leaves of a plant. It has been used as a sweetener in South America, and I believe in Japan as well, for hundreds if not thousands of years.

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iPhone XS photos by JMG

Regular readers know that I have been breathlessly following Burger King’s rollout of the Impossible Whopper. The rollout started in the St. Louis area. After meeting with great success there, and an 18 percent increase in same-store sales, Burger King rolled out the Impossible Whopper in the San Francisco Bay Area.

These photos arrived by text message today from a friend in California. The Burger King was in San Jose. These are his comments:

“I just had the Impossible Whopper at Burger King. It was even better than Beyond Meat burgers…. I really couldn’t tell the difference between it and regular meat…. The only difference is that it has less grease, which is a plus…. A lot less…. I went there while waiting to get my Prius serviced at Stevens Creek Toyota.”

So there you have it, including the surprising revelation that Prius drivers are into Impossible Whoppers.

The headquarters of Impossible Burger is in Redwood City, California, not far from San Jose. Their first manufacturing plant is in Oakland, just across San Francisco Bay from San Francisco. Burger King has said that all Burger Kings will have Impossible Whoppers by the end of the year. I’m breathlessly waiting. Whether Priuses, Impossible Burgers, or compostable plastic, corporate America will give it to us if we demand it.