Category: Food

The new girls come on line

The easiest time of year to acquire chickens — at least in these parts — comes in the weeks before Easter. That’s when the local mills and Tractor Supply have chicks for sale. Spring chickens can be counted on to start laying in August. The new girls are right on time — maybe even a little early.

The abbey’s chickens are always beautiful and healthy, but 2017 has been a special year, I think. The rain and cooler weather have made for excellent pasturing and foraging. The chickens here have three fenced areas. During the day, when it’s hot, they have full shade in the woods. They love to spend mornings and evenings in the orchard. And when there are no young plants to damage, they have full run of the garden.

The first eggs are slightly smaller than the eggs of the mature chickens, about 52 grams vs. 62 grams. All the girls are laying superb eggs with good shells and golden yolks from all the grass and clover.

Not quite canary

For the past few months, I’ve been rereading Winston Graham’s Poldark novels. I’m now on book 8. I would rate Winston Graham as one of the best novelists of the 20th Century, but that’s a post for another day. This post is about wine — dessert wine in particular.

In the Poldark novels, the poor folk drink gin. Everybody drinks ale. The gentry drink wine. The menfolk drink brandy. The gentry also drink a lot of dessert wines, and not necessarily with dessert — port (Demelza’s favorite drink), and canary.

If I ever knew what canary is, I had forgotten, and I had to look it up. It’s a sweet white (or yellow) wine. It was popular in Elizabethan England and on into the 18th Century. The wine was imported from the Canary Islands, and presumably that’s how it got its name. I would like to think, though, that the wine was a canary yellow. That’s how I visualize it, when they drink it in the novels.

I understand that winemakers in the Canary Islands are trying to have a comeback. But if anything resembling 18th Century canary wine is available today, I wouldn’t know where to get it. But there is sweet yellow dessert wine that is pretty hard to find and that also deserves a comeback — sauternes, which is made in Bordeaux.

I was suprised to see Trader Joe’s selling little bottles of 2011 sauternes. It wasn’t cheap, but the canary color was irresistible.

Some Googling showed that wine reviewers have mentioned sauternes occasionally in the past few years. One such reviewer disparaged the idea of drinking sweet wines with desserts — too much sweet, he said. Rather, he suggested having sauternes with lobster. I’m not likely to be making any lobster dishes any time soon. Maybe banana pudding?

This sauternes is only 13 percent alcohol. It would seem the fermentation is stopped early, when there is still lots of sugar in the wine. As I understand it, the grapes for sauternes are left on the vine for a while, partly to shrivel and dry (making a very concentrated juice) and partly so that bacteria specific to sauternes can grow in the grapes.

Also from Googling, I learned that someone in Scotland makes a scotch whiskey that is aged in sauternes casks. I have to try that.

Why doesn’t it mold?


Month-old commercial bread — no sign of mold

A month ago I bought a loaf of commercial bread for my annual ritual of the year’s first garden-tomato sandwich. Today I found the leftover bread on top of the refrigerator. There is not the slightest sign of mold. The bread label boasts that the bread contains no preservatives — at least no “artificial” preservatives. What is going on?

I found that, if I Googled for “Why doesn’t bread mold?” there were a lot of conflicting and confusing answers. I changed Google’s search parameters to show links less than a year old, thinking that there must surely be something new involved, and then the answers started looking more plausible.

The bread contains an ingredient called “cultured wheat flour.” That, I believe, is the magic ingredient.

It’s not clear how long “cultured wheat flour” has been in use. I suspect that it’s for less than 10 years. Clearly it is effective at preventing bread from molding. It is made from wheat flour that has been fermented with a bacterium called Propionibacterium freudenreichii. According to an article at BakerPedia, this bacterium is found in dairy foods including Swiss cheese, so it has been around forever and can be considered safe. According to the article, it is as effective as chemical preservatives at inhibiting mold. “As a result,” said the article, “it is growing in popularity in all natural and organic products.”

This bread is from a baking company called “Nature’s Own,” which is owned by Flower’s Foods. This bread is sold not only at my nearest Whole Foods in Winston-Salem, it’s also sold into the very bottom of the market — Dollar General stores. Apparently Whole Foods is satisfied that the bread passes muster.

The calcium-containing ingredients near the end of the list, by the way, are leavening agents that fizz when combined and are probably nothing to get terribly excited about.

The question I was trying to answer was whether it would be safe to give the leftover bread to the chickens. I think that the answer is yes. It’s scary, actually, to eat a food that resists being biodegraded. But fermentation is a natural process that does exactly that, and humans have taken advantage of fermentation as a way of preserving food for thousands of years.

Dissenting views? Please comment…

Some speculations on Whole Foods


Whole Foods Winston-Salem, before the lunch rush

It’s interesting how much buzz there has been about Amazon buying Whole Foods. Even people who’ve hardly ever been inside a Whole Foods and who don’t use Amazon (people like my brother) have been talking about it. Everyone seems to suspect that this transaction may be the leading edge of big changes in how all of us shop.

At the Winston-Salem Whole Foods earlier this week, I said to the checkout guy, “What do y’all think of your new owners?”

I got a somewhat testy response that I interpreted to mean that Whole Foods employees have gotten tired of answering questions. No doubt many of the questions are hostile. He responded as though I had asked what’s going to change. Apparently that’s the question most people are asking. Anyway, his testy response was that he has no idea what it all means, that he’s not on the board, doesn’t get to sit in on the meetings, and has no idea what it’s all about. Ouch. Perhaps he also was expressing a bit of nervousness. After all, some of the stories that have been written about Amazon buying Whole Foods have speculated that checkout people will soon be replaced by machines. Note to Amazon PR types who came across this through Google Alerts: You need to communicate with Whole Foods employees and reassure them, if you can. They may be freaking out.

I’ve read a good bit of the commentary on this. Everybody is speculating. The liberal media — for example Salon, or Vox — have a strong dislike for Amazon and seem to assume that Amazon will roboticize Whole Foods stores and squeeze small organic farmers into bankruptcy, to the benefit of Big Organic.

I fear they may be right on the matter of the small organic farmers who farm with a conscience, as opposed to Big Organic, which farms with the intent of taking advantage of a market in which they can get away with charging a lot more for what they sell. On the other hand, if big players can do truly good sustainable farming and grow beautiful and exuberant produce (rather than pale and inferior stuff which just happens to have an organic sticker on it), then how much of a bad thing is that? That’s all about how organic farmers are monitored and the standards they are held to. Amazon will need to be very careful about buying only from honest, well-monitored organic operations. Luckily, Amazon has the resources to do that. They’d better get it right.

However, as for roboticizing Whole Foods stores, I just don’t think that is going to happen. Certainly Amazon has roboticized its warehouses and shipping operations. But that’s all out of sight of the customer. It’s different with Whole Foods. Amazon’s PR people will make it clear to Amazon’s management (though I feel sure that Amazon’s management already gets it) that Whole Foods will now become the brick-and-mortar public face of Amazon and that they’d better make it pretty.

If Amazon wanted impersonal brick-and-mortar operations that lend themselves to mechanization and roboticization, then they’d be competing with low-end stores such as Aldi. Why buy a top-of-the-market operation like Whole Foods just to turn it into Aldi? That would be destroying a large chunk of Whole Foods’ value, the value for which Amazon paid a lot of good money.

One of the wisest commentaries I’ve read suggests that what Amazon wants is a network of delivery centers. Whole Foods has 431 stores in upscale locations. You order online whatever you usually order from Amazon (probably not groceries). And then, the next day, or maybe even later the same day, you drive to your local Whole Foods and pick up your order. While you’re at Whole Foods, you have some ice cream, or some coffee, or a pizza, or lunch. And maybe you even shop for groceries. Whole Foods stores actually devote a considerable percentage of their floor space to food, drink, and reasonably pleasant places to sit down for a while, WIFI included. Bottom line: Amazon has new options for lower-cost and quicker delivery, plus they draw a whole bunch of new customers into Whole Foods stores. Would you want all those new Whole Foods customers to have an Aldi experience? Of course not. Whole Foods stores would now be competing with Starbucks, with every retailer at the mall, with the grocery stores, and even with the local Barnes & Noble, if you’re lucky enough to have one. You can get anything you want there, and you can still paw the lettuce and sniff the canteloupes before you buy them.

It’s devilishly clever.

Would I go there? You darn right I would, if Whole Foods will spiff up and enlarge its stores, keep them teeming with cheerful and contented employees, and sell only the best of what America’s — and here I emphasize America’s — organic farmers can produce. If the new customers that came over from Costco still want a case of canned green beans or half a ton of Pepsi, then sell it to them through the warehouse delivery system, not in the holy space of the Whole Foods store. And since the Pepsi-buyers will be Trump voters who have the manners of Walmart shoppers, please design your stores so that we old Whole Foods customers can avoid the Republicans (and they us). This may be your biggest problem, Amazon. Whole Foods customers and Walmart customers don’t mix. It’s a culture war, you know.

Whole Foods has a bad habit that I’d like to see them quit. I complain about it regularly, both on the corporate web site and at the customer service desk at my nearest store. We all should complain. That’s to stop importing so much stuff. I abhor, for example, the garlic imported from South America. It may be labeled as organic, but it’s also inferior garlic — badly cured, blemished, sometimes moldy. I’d much rather buy healthy-looking garlic from Gilroy, California, that isn’t organic, if it’s obviously better garlic (as it certainly would be if it came from Gilroy).

Maybe my view of what’s up with Amazon and Whole Foods is skewed by the fact that those two companies already get most of the money I spend. If they keep their standards up and make it fun and easy, then they’ll get 96 percent of what I spend. The rest of my spending would go to the local hardware store and to the Tractor Supply where I buy organic chicken feed. One thing that is not efficient at present for Amazon Prime are heavy items that are expensive to ship — 40 pound bags of chicken feed, for example, or even four-pound bags of cat food. Local pickup would change the economics of Amazon Prime.

Ultimately, I wonder if there isn’t something sustainable in a one-stop supply line. All those thousands of retail stores and big box stores (and the driving to and fro) suck up a huge amount of overhead and energy — and time. As long as the delivery system is efficient and sustainable (and involves far fewer cardboard boxes — the bane of Amazon Prime) then maybe it wouldn’t be an all-bad example of creative destruction.

I am cautiously optimistic.

Amazon buys Whole Foods??

This morning we learned that Amazon has bought Whole Foods for $13.7 billion in cash. What’s up? Information on Amazon’s plans for Whole Foods is in short supply at present, except that it’s known that Amazon wants to get into the grocery business, that Amazon was interested in a brick-and-mortar presence, and that Whole Foods was hurting, chiefly because of cheaper competition.

I feel a very strong interest in this, because it happens that Whole Foods and Amazon are the two organizations that get most of the money I spend. Until we learn more, I’m forced to speculate about what’s going to change.

First of all, Whole Foods was starting to show (at least in the Winston-Salem store where I shop) alarming signs of money problems. Staff seemed increasingly spread thin. The coffee bins and bulk bins were sometimes empty and neglected, with no bags. The produce wasn’t as fresh and beautiful as it used to be. Basic perishables such as cream would be out of stock. The decline troubled me so much that I shopped one week at a competitor, Fresh Market, to investigate whether I should switch stores. I decided to stick with Whole Foods and hope for the best.

One of the sad things about Whole Foods is that much of the new competition has been coming from grossly inferior stores — Publix, Aldi, and a new one, Lidl. Aldi, as far as I could tell having only been in one once without buying anything, is what grocery stores would be like in hell. You had to deposit a quarter to get a grocery cart! The produce looked more like compost prewrapped in plastic. How such dreadful stores could give Whole Foods a hard time puzzles me, but apparently that was the case.

So then, Amazon could have seen its grocery future in an Aldi-like store, or even a Publix-like store, stores with a mass-market and warehouse feel to them. Certainly that’s what Amazon Pantry implied. Amazon Pantry sells only mass-market stuff that I would never buy. But instead Amazon chose Whole Foods, with its high-end, high-priced reputation, a chain that everybody knew was starting to get into trouble and that needs some repair to its reputation. Surely this tells us something about Amazon’s intentions for Whole Foods. Until I find out otherwise, I’m going to take the optimistic view: That Amazon will spend heavily to spiff up Whole Foods stores that were starting to show signs of hardship, and that Amazon is aiming at the high end and leaving the low end to a now crowded low-end market. Also, there is bound to be some kind of integration between online grocery shopping and going to the local Whole Foods.

This could be great! For a while, it looked as though bottom-feeder stores like Aldi were going to make life harder for high-end shoppers like me by driving high-end stores like Whole Foods into poverty. Now suddenly the prospects have turned. With Amazon aligned with Whole Foods, we may soon see the bottom-feeder stores starting to look shabby.

Update:

Grocery stocks tank on news that Amazon is buying Whole Foods

What the critters so generously leave behind


Supper

If I had ever really understood how much effort (and defeat) is involved in defending a garden, an orchard, and some chickens against all the hungry mouths that want to eat everything, I might never have had the heart to start. The hungry mouths come from everywhere — out of the woods, down from the sky, and up from the ground. Hawks and raccoons want to eat your chickens. Snakes want to eat your eggs. Squirrels and raccoons will raid the orchard and carry off peaches, apples, and figs just before you were going to pick them. Raccoons and rabbits and voles raid the garden. And we haven’t even started to talk about insects and blights. The abbey, to be sure, is in a worst-case situation — up against the woods in some very fine animal habitat.

No one understands your grief, of course, better than your local agricultural agents. I’ve written in the past about how important it is to befriend them. One of the abbey’s friends is a horticulturist whose help and advice during the past eight years have been invaluable. He’s a very busy guy, and you can’t get him to dinner very often. But this evening he’s coming to dinner, so this afternoon I got my shears and a sack and went out to see what the critters had left me for a home-grown supper.

The squirrels took every last one of the peaches from one of the trees, the tree that bore first. They’ll be after the other trees soon enough. They’ve already stolen some green apples as well. I see the trees shaking and go up to the orchard to ask the squirrels what the heck they think they’re doing. They just glance at me and go on chewing. If I shake a stick at them they’ll run back into the woods with a peach in their mouths. Every now and then I see a chicken peck a squirrel, because the chickens like the fallen peaches. Good work, chickens.

OK, then. I can make chutney from green apples, and maybe I can even get away with putting some unripe peaches in it. A nice red onion would do nicely in the chutney. So far, the snakes seem not to have found a way into Ken’s new chicken house, so there are plenty of eggs. That means omelets with a filling including onions, green tomatoes, day lily buds, and basil. I’m covered up with squash. The squash will get roasted on the grill. There was enough late lettuce for small salads. The first two cucumbers of the season were ready to pick. And there will be a loaf of fresh-baked sourdough bread.

So it promises to be a decent supper for a horticulturist (or a hobbit), though it’s not the sort of supper that can happen every day.

Ken, by the way, is in Alaska, again in a summer job with the Park Service as a backcountry ranger deep in grizzly bear territory where he’s assigned a shotgun. Maybe the squirrels aren’t so bad after all.

When I bring stuff in from the garden, I like to wash it immediately in cold water, wrap it in a muslin towel, and put it in the refrigerator to chill. The lettuce is in a vase of cold water. I’ll pick the lettuce leaves off the stalk right before they go into the salad. When stuff is fresh, a little extra care will keep it that way.


Soon to be chutney

Hoping for a peach crop

The peach trees in the abbey’s orchard are loaded with young peaches this year. Last year, the entire crop was killed by a late frost.

One of our friends who is a retired agricultural extension agent says that, unless you spray, you don’t get peaches. All sorts of insects prey on peaches, including fruit moths and peach borers. Today Ken gave the peach trees their first dose of reasonably organic pesticides — a spray containing a mixture of neem oil and a pyrethrin.

If the peaches survive the insects, then war with the squirrels, possums, and raccoons will be next.

Sourdough rolls

Lately I’ve been making sourdough rolls. They’re almost as quick as yeast rolls, and almost as easy. It occurs to me that those of you who might like to get started with sourdough artisan breads, but who are concerned about the work and risk of “total bread failure” involved, might want to make sourdough rolls as a low-risk way of getting started.

I hope to make a video soon on quick-‘n’-easy sourdough rolls.

Heritage supper

I know I’ve blogged about vegetarian (vegan actually) hot dogs before. Every now and then you’ve got to have one. Last night’s supper on the deck, near the grill, we called “heritage night.” The heritage here, of course, is Southern white trash heritage.

The vegan hot dogs come in a can. They’re made by Loma Linda, a Seventh-day Adventist company. The chili is homemade, using vegan burger that comes in a can, also made by Loma Linda. The hot dog buns are made by a local commercial bakery. The steak fries are from Ore-Ida.

That should take care of the hot dog craving for a couple of months.

Carolina burger

I had lunch today with my brother at Jim’s Grill in Boonville, North Carolina. He ordered a Carolina Burger. The waitress didn’t know what that is, so he defined it for her. A Carolina Burger is a hamburger dressed like a hot dog — slaw, onions, hot dog chili, and mustard. The more usual hamburger treatment in these parts would be lettuce, tomato, mayonnaise and onion.

Jim’s Grill is an old roadside cafe that has been in business at least since the 1950s. Back then, it was a hot spot for teenagers. These days you’ll see no young people. The parking lot was full today with old people who had come for lunch.