Category: Food

Outlasting them is the best revenge


Jefferson Griffin, vile fascist pig

Today, at last, a ruling by a federal court put an end to a six-months-long attempt by a swamp-scum Republican, Jefferson Griffin, to steal a seat on the North Carolina Supreme Court. It’s important to understand the absurdity of Griffin’s claims to be able to invoke the appropriate level of disgust for this man. I won’t rehearse the details here — the mainstream media coverage has been good. But adding to the disgust is the fact that Republicans on the North Carolina Supreme Court kept Griffin’s claims alive for months when it was so obvious that Griffin had no legitimate claims and was only trying to subvert yet another election for Republicans.

North Carolina is a purple state. My expectation is that North Carolina will become bluer and bluer between now and the 2028 election, as Republicans show the world that what they are now is fascists. One of North Carolina’s senators, Thom Tillis, is up for re-election in 2026. He seems to understand that he cannot win a statewide election now, so he is one of the few senators market-testing flaccid Republican attempts to stand up to Trump.

My track record on Trump predictions is not good, because I have always been too optimistic that someone would stop him. Again and again, for years and years, the courts have let him skate, and Republicans in Congress blocked impeachments twice. For what it’s worth, I expect the next three and a half years to be a horror. But I still cannot imagine that fascism in America can survive the end of Trump. The fools who voted for Trump deserve all the misery that they are likely to get. Hatred for Trump already has reversed two elections in two other countries, Canada and Australia. Americans are far more stupid and more gullible than the people of Canada and Australia, but I don’t think Americans like fascism any more than Canadians or Australians, once Trump teaches them what fascism and corrupt government are, and they slowly perceive that it was not what they were promised.

Actually, the media have been negligent on one angle of Jefferson Griffin’s attempt to steal an election. I’ve tried to find out who paid for that six months of appeals, which must have cost many hundreds of thousands of dollars. I still don’t know. We need to know who is paying for these Republican attempts to subvert the law, the Constitution, and some of the most important principles of democracy.


2001 Honda Rancher TRX-350, 4-wheel drive, electric shift

I did not need an ATV

For several years I have fantasized about buying an ATV. Everybody has one here in the sticks, whether they can afford it or not. It’s considered essential equipment. I can by no means justify spending much money on an ATV, but I came across a 2001 Honda Rancher 350, well maintained with low mileage. I bought it from the shop that had maintained it. It had been parked for a year. It has new tires and got a thorough servicing including a rebuilt carburetor. It runs perfectly, and, like my 2001 Jeep, I expect it to still be running when I kick the bucket at age 104. It’s a classic.

I like the design of the older Honda ATV’s. The body has soft, curving lines, as opposed to the sharp lines of newer ATV’s. My 2001 model also has a kind — if slightly goofy — face, unlike the aggressive faces of newer ATV’s. I have plenty of woodland trails here to ride it on. I may get a little yard work out of it. And when I’m too lazy to walk the half mile to the mailbox and the half mile back, the ATV will get me there. It will get me outside more. Plus driving it is more of a workout than I would have thought. Steering it is far from effortless, and riding it in hilly woodlands requires a constant shifting of body weight according to the terrain. Maybe it will help keep me young, the better to outlast the fascists.

New glasses

At my age, part of outlasting the fascists is to take care of the brain. We now know how important good vision and good hearing are for keeping the brain healthy and active. It had been almost three years since I got new glasses. I have glasses for reading and glasses for driving, but I particularly notice the improvement with my new reading glasses (which I also use for the computer).

The book is Lower Than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity, by Diarmaid MacCulloch, an Oxford historian. I’ll have more to say about the book when I’ve finished reading it. It’s already pretty familiar terrain to me, though. When I claim that there is nothing on earth more cracker-fed delusional than the church, and when I further claim that there is no subject on which the church is more horsewash whacked than sex, I’m entirely serious. Anyone who doubts it either doesn’t know much about the history of the church or will believe pretty much any old thing as long as they’re told that it came out of the mouth of God.

My eye doctor is in King. That’s where the The Dalton bar and restaurant is, which I’ve written about before. (A Bistro and Bar in Trumptown). As usual, I had the grilled salmon with garlic mashed potatoes and grilled green beans.


I tried to talk the bartender into selling me a half shot of Oban 14, just so I could taste it. But he wouldn’t do it.

Mountain Laurel

Mountain laurel is very common all over the Blue Ridge Mountains. Here in the foothills it is less common, but it is very abundant on the ridges and creek valleys around my house. The ATV gets me to places where I’m more able to appreciate it. Just now the mountain laurel is approaching the end of its blooming season. If I had ever seen mountain laurel bloom before, I don’t recall it.


Scottish pie from the high street bakery in Dunbar. One of these is a meat pie, and the other is a fruit pie.

Scotland calling

Travel is another thing that helps me outlast the fascists. I’ve booked a trip to Scotland in late September — a lovely time of year in Scotland. I’ll be hanging out with Ken, of course, near Edinburgh. But also an old friend from California is making his first visit to Scotland, so I’ll meet up with him and tag along for a few days in Aberdeen and Inverness. I have been to Inverness, but not to Aberdeen.


Scottish pie from the high street bakery in Dunbar

Panisses


Chickpea panisses with a dipping sauce made of Greek yoghurt and a pepper sauce. Click here for high-resolution version.

I have never been to the south of France. But I understand that panisses (singular = panisse) are a popular street food there, particularly in Marseilles. I came across a recipe recently online, and I had to make some.

The recipe is simple, though you’ll need to do some frying. Google for the recipe and you’ll find many online. You’ll need a dipping sauce. Pretty much any dipping sauce will do.

The panisses soak up remarkably little oil, probably because the chickpea polenta is saturated with the cooking water and is not thirsty for oil.

I’m always looking for high-protein, low-carb foods. I wish I’d known about these things sooner.


Click here for high-resolution version.

MSG for roasting


A low-carb, high-protein meal: salmon cakes with roasted Brussels sprouts and leftover slaw. Click here for high-resolution version.

I’ve written in the past about how I think MSG (monosodium glutamate) has gotten a bad rap. Thus I won’t go into that here, other than to say that MSG is not unnatural. It’s found naturally in some foods, and the commercial product is just a refined product of fermentation. When used for sautèeing and roasting, it hastens browning and adds umami.

My favorite way of cooking many vegetables these days is to wrap them in foil (with seasonings and oil), and put them on the gas grill. Turn them halfway through cooking. Total cooking time (at least on my grill) is 15 to 20 minutes. The vegetables get some steaming along with the roasting.

Asparagus is in season. Foil roasting on a gas grill is a great way to cook asparagus, not to mention broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, and even carrots. You don’t need much MSG. A quarter to half a teaspoon will do.


The rhodendrons are blooming, as is the snowball bush in the background. Click here for high-resolution verson.

Winter vegetables


Rutabaga pie

For some reason — is it because of the political disaster? — the winter of 2024-2025 has felt incredibly long. Where I live, we’ve had two miserable intrusions of the polar vortex. I had planned a February visit to Washington, but I had to cancel it because of ugly weather. Maybe I’m being more liberal with the heating system, but I had the highest electric bill in January that I’ve ever had. In February, the wind blew down a tree, and the tree fell on the power line that feeds the road I’m on. That broke a power pole and left about 400 feet of wire on the ground. It took 24 hours for the power company to put in a new pole and haul the fallen wires back up. Fortunately I have a generator and can keep lights, the computer, and the refrigerator running.

Americans don’t eat a lot of rutabagas, though grocery stores where I am usually have them. I suspect that’s because the rutabagas we get here have a very long shelf life. They’re dipped in paraffin wax and keep forever at the grocery store or in the fridge. They’re as hard a ball of marble. Peeling them is downright dangerous. They’ll want a good 40 minutes in the pot to cook up tender. When the battle between a knife and a ball of marble is over, they’re a comfort food. Mashed, with butter, is the default way of fixing them.

I made a very nice rutabaga pie, though. I wasn’t sure whether to call it a pie or a quiche, because the method of making it is something of a cross between pie-making and quiche-making. Think eggs, cheese, milk, and some browned onions to add umami. Don’t forget to add a little nutmeg.

Wikipedia has a nice article on rutabagas. In some northern countries, they’re probably as important as potatoes. In Scotland, where they are called neeps, I’ve cooked neeps on a camp stove in a yurt. Neeps are so plentiful in some places that they’re used as a food for livestock. It amuses me to think that the sheep that provided the wool for my collection of Harris tweed jackets probably ate neeps. Neeps in the wool!

Winter vegetables are a big help in making winters more bearable. I don’t think there is a single winter vegetable that can’t be made into a comfort food.

Flatbreads


Whole-wheat flatbread; spinach, apple, and onion salad with Roquefort-garlic dressing; walnuts. Click here for high-resolution version.

Flatbreads are just as much a comfort food as any other hot bread. Plus they are quick and even healthy with the right flour. Whole-wheat flatbread works great, since whole-wheat breads rise poorly, and flatbreads don’t have to rise.

As for making the flatbreads puff up, I’m not the best at that. But whether they puff or not, they’re just as good.

I am no expert on flatbreads, though I make them fairly often. I’d recommend watching a YouTube video of a South Asian cook making flatbread. The trick is in having the dough moist enough, rolling to just the right thickness, having the pan just hot enough, and flipping at just the right time. My flatbreads puff only about a third of the time, but I’ve stopped worrying about it, even as I try to get better at it.

I use only flour and water in flatbreads. I don’t even add salt. For some reason that I can’t explain, unsalted flatbread has its own somehow special flavor that contrasts with whatever salty food you’re having with it.

Midwinter pottage


Click here for high resolution version

If C.J. Sansome was right in his Shardlake novels set in Tudor England (and I think he was), then pretty much everybody (except for Henry VIII) lived on pottage then. What was in the pottage depended of course on what you had. A good variety of garden vegetables would have made a huge difference. If you had some meat or fish, so much the better. If you could eat your pottage with a dark, hearty bread made from rye, oats, or barley, with some ale, then you were truly rich. And probably healthy as well. Butter and cheese? Princely.

Historians say that medieval peasants burned 4,000 calories a day. That would mean that they worked from dawn until dark. They probably were very thin, because that’s a lot of calories for poor people. Henry VIII weighed almost 400 pounds when he died. Thus I think it’s safe to assume that he wasn’t living off of pottage and that he wasn’t working from dawn until dark.

I’m 98 percent vegetarian. This was the first beef stew I’d made in more than two years. The midwinter gloom made me do it.

The beef, though, is almost like a seasoning. You don’t need much beef. It’s the vegetables that make the stew, the heavenly combination of potatoes, carrots, onions, and peas, in a sauce reddened with tomatoes. The key to good beef stew is the brown flavor, umami, which comes from browning the beef, the onions, and the flour (for thickening) before the other ingredients or any water are added.

When I think of beef stew, I automatically think of cherry pie for dessert. There was no cherry pie today, though. That’s something I’d make only for company.

Sweet potato biscuits

If you can make good biscuits, then you can make good sweet-potato biscuits. Substitute mashed sweet potato for a roughly equal amount of flour. Biscuit dough can easily handle a one-to-two ratio of potato to flour, and probably even one-to-one.

Your biscuits will be very tender.

Many kinds of bread, actually — both quick breads and yeast breads — benefit from some potato. I think of this as German thing, though I have had sweet-potato biscuits in African-American restaurants.

Fresh leaves, while they last


Carrot top pesto with roasted baby carrots and a quiche bought at Trader Joe’s

I am strongly of the view that what keeps us alive is negative entropy. When I bring this up with people who I think might be interested, their eyes glaze over with boredom, and I drop the subject. Entropy = disorder. Negative entropy = order. Life goes on only because life magically resists the natural tendency toward decay and disorder.

Obviously we eat to obtain energy. And obviously we eat to obtain certain nutrients. If we ate no calcium, for example, we would have no bones. We could eat compost and get calcium and calories. But that’s not enough. We would not be able to thrive on compost. We’d develop all sorts of diseases and then die. Why? Because all the order, all the life, is gone from compost. Once bacteria have squeezed the last bit of order out of compost (the bacteria then die and become part of the compost), only plants can use the compost then. Plants can use the compost because they use photosynthesis to create new order, in the form of complex organic molecules, out of the dead raw material.

I have written in more detail about this here. It boils down to a theory of nutrition based on physics rather than on biology. A theory from physics does not in any way negate a theory from biology. Rather, physics just takes us back one level to a more fundamental science of life.

What does this have to do with fresh leaves? It is photosynthesis, using energy from the sun, that is the basis of life on earth. Life has the ability to take dead elements (such as calcium, nitrogen, iron, magnesium, and water) and build the vast variety of complex molecules that are necessary for life. Those dead elements, as in compost, are simple and lifeless. The order, as in the products of plant life, is exceedingly complex — alive. It is photosynthesis that gave them life and order. Chlorophyll is a rich source of order. And chlorophyll is only one of the countless orderly molecules that plants produce and that we need to thrive and to avoid disease.

This, I think, is why people do not thrive on ultraprocessed foods. Ultraprocessed foods are like compost. The energy is there, some of the simple nutrients are there, but the order has been processed out and is mostly gone. Bodies live on, because they’re getting energy (too much of it, really), but the body breaks down, because it’s starved for order. It’s just a hunch, and I can’t offer any evidence. But I suspect that the reason we sometimes eat too much is that our bodies are starved for order, even though we’re overfed on low-order foods.

So then, carrot tops. If you can get your hands on some living leaves fresh out of the sun, eat them! They are a magnificently rich source of order.

My farmer friends Brittany and Richard grew the carrots and harvested them the morning before I made the pesto.


Carrot leaves — fresh chlorophyll!

A bistro and bar in Trumptown


Grilled salmon with green beans and garlic mashed potatoes

I had been waiting for this place to open for months, following their progress on their Facebook page. It’s the first real bistro in the benighted red county I live in. The place is named “The Dalton” (I’ll explain below why its name also is my surname), and it’s in the mean, racist, theocratic little town of King. I love bistros, but I’m also fascinated by the clash of what I might call bistro culture with white Christian theocracy, in a town that normally feeds on wings, barbecue, burgers, and baloney.

The main thing to know about King, North Carolina, is that it’s a white-flight suburb of the nearby (blue-voting and remarkably civilized) city of Winston-Salem. King is an ugly little town that consists mostly of a one-mile strip development with fast food, grocery stores, a tire store, and a “Christian Supplies” store, whatever that is. The town is politically dominated by a large Baptist church with a crew of nasty little Bible-college preachers. (I’ve seen and heard these preachers at county commissioner meetings when something like putting “In God We Trust” on county buildings and county vehicles is on the agenda.)

Baptists, of course, including those who are secretly sinful, don’t want others to have the freedom to buy alcohol. For years, the power of these Baptists was able to keep “liquor by the drink” and ABC stores out of King. In North Carolina, cities and towns can be either “wet” or “dry,” depending on how the town’s voters vote in a referendum. In 2022, proponents of liquor by the drink were at last able to get a referendum on the ballot. In November 2022, it passed, 63 percent to 37 percent. It has taken almost two years for King’s first bar to open.

The best restaurants make most of their money off of alcohol rather than food. So at last a bistro — with a big bar — had a chance to make a go of it in King. They got the best old building in town. For years, King’s high street had been run down and seedy, with only one strong business, a drug store. Several buildings on the high street are being renovated now. If the Dalton restaurant succeeds, it should lift the entire (very short) high street along with it. The high street is named Dalton Road.

The road is named for the old Dalton plantation that was a few miles north. The plantation is historically significant, not least for the wills and other records of the plantation’s owners, David Dalton Sr. (1740-1820) and David Dalton Jr. (1781-1847). The Dalton family papers are in the Z. Smith Reynolds Library of Wake Forest University. I am not descended from the Daltons who owned the plantation. Rather, that branch of the Dalton family and my branch forked in Albemarle County, Virginia, in the early 1700s and migrated south from the Charlottesville area separately. The Daltons arrived in Virginia very early, during the Williamsburg period. Two names come up again and again in the family trees — Timothy, and David. Where you find Daltons, you will find a David.

I have not yet met the owners of the bistro. I’d love to ask them some questions. They have made a huge investment in renovating and equipping the building. I asked my waitress how many people were working that afternoon. Fourteen, she said. That is a huge staff. Most country eateries operate with two to four people. The place is nicely furnished, though not lavish. They have proper heavy white china and good flatware. The prices are reasonable. My waitress said the place has been packed in the evening. It must be a tough calibration for “upscale” menus in downscale locations, where the food has to be good enough to justify higher prices and to satisfy customers with higher expectations, while not being too expensive or so citified that people don’t understand it.

King is sixteen miles to the south of me, so I won’t be tempted to go there very often.

As though to remind me that I was in Trumptown, as I was enjoying my grilled salmon an older couple came in. The man was “open carrying.” He had a pistol in a holster. This is legal in North Carolina unless a business posts a sign at the door forbidding weapons inside. This irked me at first. But the couple were quiet and polite and not out to make a scene. I’d never seen open carry in a restaurant before, but I’ve heard stories about how people who open carry want to make a show of it, like the people who make a show of holding hands and praying before they eat their barbecue and fries.

I have several reasons for wanting to support this place, but I’d do for only one reason — the fact that that ungodly Baptist church up the road didn’t want it there and lost the battle to keep it out.


⬆︎ The vanilla ice cream was only $2! Other dessert choices were $6 and $8.


⬆︎ King’s high street is on the National Register of Historic Places. I believe this was the old bank building.

Lo mein


Tofu and cashew lo mein over baby bok choi

I promise to back off on food photos soon. It’s just that I’m inspired by the attitude toward food and cooking that accompanies the fall change of weather. Instead of dreading heat from cooking in the kitchen, the attitude reverses: Get double service from the heat of cooking by both cooking food and warming the house.

Whole wheat spaghetti makes an entirely agreeable lo mein noodle. My farmer neighbors Brittany and Richard grew the bok choi. A neighbor gave me the sweet red pepper.