Watching a bewildering world from the middle of nowhere
For eleven months of the year, blackberries are terrible neighbors. They come up everywhere. If you get anywhere near them, they reach out and grab you with their briars. Their stems are as tough as Kevlar, and it’s very difficult to cut them back.
But for one month of the year, blackberries pay you back with — blackberries. May was a good growing month, so June promises to be an outstandingly good blackberry month.
There will be pies.
I believe it was four years ago that a gardener friend urged me to go to Tractor Supply and get some of the cherry bushes they were selling. The potted bushes were very small — not more than two quarts, as I recall. I have never known a bush that is so hardy and grows so fast. The bushes have been heavily pruned at least twice, and once again they’re starting to block the path from the garden to the orchard.
As for the fruit, I wouldn’t say that it’s the best fruit in the world. But it has the virtue of being very early and very prolific. The pit-to-fruit ratio is not all that great. But who can turn down fresh cherries in May. Bush cherries would make a fine, fast-growing hedge.
The muffins are whole wheat, sweetened with maple syrup and honey.
Watch out for pits!
The 2016 apple crop is coming along great.
Someone told me recently that the abbey is looking shaggy. Oh well. Better shaggy than barren.
Until today I had never been inside a Publix store. A new store opened last week in Winston-Salem, across the street from Whole Foods. I decided to check it out.
It’s a nice new store and all that. It reminded me of Safeway stores in San Francisco. But it seems to sell pretty much the same generic products that other grocery stores sell, and I couldn’t see any particular reason for shopping there and dealing with the slow-moving, indecisive throngs who also had come to check it out.
So I just left and went to Whole Foods as usual, appreciating Whole Foods’ product line even more.
Apple and cherry bush …
In the 1970s, I just called it gluten globules. These days we call it by a fancier name — seitan. The fancy name makes it sound hard to make, but nothing could be easier. It’s a fantastic and versatile meat substitute.
In the 1970s, I actually isolated the gluten by washing the starch out of a dough made from unbleached flour under running water. That’s for the birds. These days, you just start with gluten flour.
You’ll find recipes for seitan all over the Internet. It’s just a dough made of gluten, cut with other ingredients that tenderize it (such as chickpea flour) and seasonings. Then you shape it and pre-cook it by simmering it in water or steaming it. Then you fry it!
Seitan made from only gluten would be very rubbery. By adding chickpea flour, soy flour, barley flour, or brewer’s yeast (or all or some of those), plus some olive oil, the seitan becomes tender. You can adjust the “bite” of the seitan by varying the proportions. You can season it as a chicken analog, a pork analog, a beef analog, a sausage analog, or no analog at all. Ingredients to consider include tomato paste to redden it, soy sauce to darken it, Worcestershire sauce, barbecue sauce, garlic powder, curry seasonings — let your imagination be your guide. I have found that seitan steams beautifully in the Cuisinart steam oven.
I’ve written here before about my deep suspicion of the anti-gluten movement. Sure, a small percentage of the population truly have a gluten problem. But speaking strictly for myself, my Celtic genetics love gluten, and you’d have to kill me to make me give it up. Seitan is one of the best high-protein, low-carb, earth-friendly proteins I know of.
I’ve been on my low-carb repentance diet for about a week now. Technically, the roasted carrots are a no-no. But I skipped breakfast to earn the carrots. Over a period of three years, I’ve let my ideal weight creep up by five pounds. It’s no carbs for me until the five pounds are gone. But I’m not going hungry. It’s really very true that, on a low-carb diet, you really don’t get very hungry.
Continuing in low-carb mode, the daily question is: How do I use all these eggs that the chickens are laying and also keep carbs down. Frittatas (frittati?) quickly come up on the list.
This frittata is made with artichoke hearts, Trader Joe’s fake sausage, some grated gouda cheese, and a teensy bit of potato. It’s garnished with yard onions snipped on the way back from the chicken house with the eggs.
I think that a well-seasoned iron skillet works best for frittatas. The frittata may be done before the top browns, so be ready to throw on a little extra cheese and hit the top of the frittata with the broiler for a few minutes. Beat a little cream into the eggs to make everything nice and fluffy. Don’t even think of using milk! The frittata should rise a bit in the oven, particularly around the sides of the skillet.
Soon there will be asparagus frittati.
Barley, pea, and chickpea curry with raw walnuts and seared cabbage
The seasons are changing. Spring is scampering in on little rabbit’s feet. Soon the snakes will be stealing eggs again. The apple trees are blooming. The chickens are laying. The birds are singing. It’s time to repent for the sins of winter comfort foods — breads, pot pies, dumplings, and even sweets — and get the carbs down.
For now, at least, I’m going spicy. Walnuts and barley and legumes — or so I’m resolved — need to dominate for a while. Eggs are abundant. So there ought to be omelets. There ought to be eggs for breakfast — but no biscuits! A couple of days ago I had deviled eggs for breakfast, with sliced avocado. That worked.
I figure that my winter sins compel me to lose four or five pounds as penance. I’m hoping that I can do that by forsaking comfort carbs for a while.
For curries, I’ve learned to keep not only curry powder and other curry spices in the kitchen, but also pastes such as Thai red curry paste and harissa paste, which is an African pepper paste. I mix them up until I get the color I want. Spices know no national boundaries. Curries also are perfect for using your coconut oil.
And remember, anything rice can do, barley can do better. It’s amazing that such a satisfying food has such a low glycemic index — 25 or 28. Even risotto is no carb crime if you use barley. I’m not even all that fond of rice. Pearled barley — especially when mixed with good spices, healthy fats, and a legume such as chickpeas — is as meaty as hamburger. The Roman gladiators, after all, were called “barley eaters.” Plus, I suspect that rice is all too often an ecological crime. It can be efficiently grown only where there is naturally lots of water, and California is not that place.
No more carb crimes here until I’ve done my spring penance.
Cold weather came back. As a consolation, and to mark the transition off of winter cooking, I made a pot pie.
Pot pies are not something I commonly make. But I am clear on two things on the theory of pot-pie making. For one, the crust must be generous, meaning that you want both a bottom crust and a top crust. And, for two, the crust soaks up a lot of gravy, so it’s tricky keeping the gravy from coming out too thick. I always seem to err on the thick side.
What really gives a pot pie its savory flavor — at least in my near-vegetarian opinion — is not the chicken or some other poor animal. Rather, it’s the savory vegetables, particularly the celery and peas. You can’t have too much celery.
Still, a vegetable pot pie seems to be missing something. For lack of any better options, I cut a Morning Star hot dog into little rounds, browned them lightly, and added them to the filling.
A small convection oven is really handy for pies, especially a pie with a top crust. You can keep a very close watch on the pie to see how it’s browning. I started this pie with a foil covering to keep it from browning too fast. Then, when I was sure it was done inside, I removed the foil and browned the crust with just a touch of broiler.
And yes, my philosophy is that the filling should ooze ever so slightly through the vents in the top crust. You lose points if there is any leakage where the top crust is sealed to the bottom crust. I lost a point on this pie with a one-drop leak.
I guess I’m just sentimental about how food was served when I was much younger — back before the days in which everything became plastic, disposable, and super-sized. While browsing in a salvage store earlier this week (I love salvage stores — you never know what you might find) I came across a box of new old-stock glasses. The label on the box called them “double bump” glasses, a term that I had never heard.
You’ll remember glasses of this type very well unless, perhaps, you’re of the millennial generation. As I recall, these glasses were used up through the 1970s and even 1980s. You might get a glass of ice water in a glass like this as soon as you sat down in a diner. If you ordered a glass of milk, it might come in a glass like this. I also think I recall that, if you ordered a small Coke at a place like a drug store fountain or the Woolworth’s lunch counter, it might come in a glass like this.
Part of what I like about institutional relics of that era is that, back then, eight ounces was considered a normal serving.
But just look at the classic design of this glass! The bumps, of course, help keep you from dropping it.
I bought only two of these glasses on the grounds that I don’t have cabinet space for more. But something tells me that I’ll probably stop and buy a few more next time I pass that salvage store.