Watching a bewildering world from the middle of nowhere
Waiting for the water to boil
One of the grocery stores in Walnut Cove had some very nice, slender asparagus yesterday for $2.29 a pound. It went really well with mushroom quiche. All three eggs in the quiche were laid today. Tomorrow the hens will be rewarded with the asparagus ends.
I’m amazed how easy it was to give up coffee. I decided that the caffeine couldn’t possibly be doing me any good. And besides, when one no longer has to go to work each morning, the caffeine kick really isn’t necessary. For years I was very San Francisco-ized in my taste in coffee. I drank it only in the morning, but I liked it rich and strong.
I’ve been using a brand of coffee substitute that I got at Whole Foods. It’s made from roasted barley with chicory. When you drink the first cup of it, you certainly know it isn’t coffee. But by the third cup, adaptation happens.
With coffee, color is everything. The color of the Roma coffee substitute, before cream and after, is the same as coffee. I am unable to achieve the proper color with soybean milk (it produces an awful gray color), so I’ve gone back to buying half and half, which gives that wonderful golden brown.
Another wonderful thing about being retired: There is no longer any temptation to eat and drink on the run, or at a desk, or in front of the TV. I always sit down at the table.
Fried apples are a Southern standby. The grocery store apples have been good, and cheap, this winter. When the choices are poor in the produce department, those apples start looking more and more like a winter vegetable, which is not how we usually think of them.
Slice them fairly thin and cook them gently in a tablespoon of butter. Some people prefer them plain. I like them with a little raw sugar and cinnamon.
I wonder why quiche is belittled as a food for wimps. Quiche actually is a very rich food. And, like apple pie and pizza, it’s a pie. But quiche can be a huge fat, cholesterol, and sodium bomb.
Even though my chickens have made me egg rich, I had not made a quiche in ages until today. It’s not so much the eggs I fret about, it’s the milk and cheese. As I’m sure I’ve mentioned before, the milk and cheese that is easily available around here is of very poor quality, from cows pumped full of hormones and antibiotics. I do buy organic butter. I gave up half and half when I quit drinking coffee. And I sometimes buy organic yogurt. But I never buy milk and cheese.
So, how might one make quiche?
Whole Foods carries some imitation cheeses that are based on almonds. The mozzarella version melts, the package promises. And there’s always soy milk. Just be sure to buy the organic soy milk that contains nothing but soybeans and water. The flavored and sweetened soy milk is full of sugar carbs, and of course you wouldn’t want vanilla in a quiche.
I used the same quiche recipe I’ve been using for 30 years. It’s based on 3 eggs and 2 cups of milk. To that I added the grated almond cheese, cooked spinach, and lots of garlic.
I used my trusty old basic crust recipe, which has one and quarter cups of flour, a quarter of a cup of olive oil, and three or four tablespoons of soy milk.
The quiche was delicious.
Let’s compute the cholesterol. Three eggs at 235 milligrams of cholesterol per egg equals 705 milligrams of cholesterol in the quiche. At eight slices, that comes to 88 milligrams a slice. Eat two pieces, and that’s 176 milligrams, well below your daily allowance of 300 milligrams.
That’s a whole clove of chopped garlic on top of the spinach.
Frankly, I’m pretty bad at cooking Chinese food. I often wonder if one doesn’t need to be born Chinese to do it properly. But, if you’ve got a pile of home-grown mung bean sprouts, what are you gonna do?
It’s the noodles that make the chow mein. I have no idea where one might get proper chow mein noodles around here. But whole wheat linguini will do in a pinch. After the linguini has been cooked, brown the noodles lightly in an oiled pan and add some soy sauce, then add the vegetables and stir-fry.
You do make your own sprouts, don’t you?
Mushrooms, onions, garlic, and celery — easy winter vegetables
You know you like ’em fried.
I guess there’s no such thing as truly healthy sweets. But one can at least do what one can to minimize the damage. I did a Google search for “vegan molasses cookies” and modified a recipe I found. The cookies I made this evening were made with olive oil, raw sugar, King Arthur whole wheat flour, and blackstrap molasses. They were very chewy and very good. There was no reason to miss having butter and eggs in the recipe. It took only five minutes to stir them up and get them ready to pop into the oven.
Blackstrap molasses may be hard to find in some places, but not around here. Molasses-making, like making apple butter, was an art often practiced in the Blue Ridge Mountains. They used outdoor vats heated by wood fires.
That English teacup, by the way, came from an antique shop in Walnut Cove. I paid $5 for it. Coffee, it seems to me, is best drunk from a truck driver mug made of heavy china. But tea wants to be drunk from a cup and saucer.
My best layer
December 16: 3 eggs
My four hens have barely slowed down for the winter. I’m still getting three and sometimes four eggs a day, faster than I can give them away, since I try to limit myself to eating four eggs a week.
I have one Golden Comet hen and three Barred Rock hens. I can recognize my Golden Comet hen’s eggs because they’re darker brown. She has not missed a day since she first started laying in August. She’s also the sweetest and most sociable of the chickens.
I am not giving my hens any artificial light or artificial heat. I’ve bought the apparatus to do it if they seem stressed by the cold, but so far they seem fine. These chickens are said to be hardy enough for New England winters. Their little house is snug and filled with hay. I also put hay on the ground underneath the chicken house to help keep their little feet off the cold ground. The chickens do seem to be eating more in cold weather. They always have laying mash available, and I take them some kind of treats every day — vegetable scraps from the kitchen, leftover gravy mixed with cracked wheat, and sometimes sprouted legumes. Nothing goes to waste in the kitchen. Every day I also give them alfalfa pellets that I got at the seed and feed store. The pellets contain nothing but ground, compressed alfalfa and cost $16 for 50 pounds. That was the best winter source of chlorophyll that I was able to come up with. I keep ground oyster shells on hand. I also have a big bag of flax seed. I try to vary their diet as much as possible, not only for their health, but for their entertainment. Treat time is the high spot of their day.
One thing I’ve noticed about my chickens. When they were maturing and approaching laying age, they spatted fairly often. Now I never see one chicken being mean to another chicken. I assume this means that they’ve worked out the pecking order, and now they just enjoy each other’s company. If I take them particularly exciting treats (they love leftover pasta — they probably think it’s worms) one chicken may grab the treat and run, but they don’t spat.
If you’re not already a sprout farmer, and you’ve been thinking about getting started, winter is a good time to start. During the summer produce season, I don’t think much about sprouts. But during the winter, there’s no better and cheaper source of little vegetables.
The best source I’ve found for seeds and such is sproutpeople.com. They’re in San Francisco, and you can order online.
While watching the ABC Evening News (not one of my normal news sources), I saw a commercial for green bean casserole. Once you get something like that in your head, you’ve got to have it.
I wanted to make a high-protein, reasonably low fat, vegan version. I just happened to have some leftover cashew gravy. To the gravy I also added a smooth sauce made from sesame tahini and ground roasted pumpkin seeds. I mixed in some cubed tofu. So the sauce contained nuts, seeds, and legumes. There’s a lot of sautéed onion, of course. The bread crumbs came from the last remaining slice of a loaf of sprouted wheat bread. The green beans were frozen.
If you do a quick survey online of recipes for green bean casserole, what you’ll find is pretty terrifying — heart-stopping mixtures of salt and fat. I’ve never met a traditional dish that couldn’t be greatly improved with good ingredients and some imagination.
Cashew gravy
Gravy is one of my favorite comfort foods, but it’s a sin — all that fat and carb. I’ve rediscovered Rosalie Hurd’s cashew gravy from the Ten Talents cookbook. It’s based on cashew nuts whizzed in a blender with liquid. The cashews thicken the gravy when it starts to boil, just like flour. I use soy milk instead of water to make the gravy richer and boost the protein.
I don’t think this gravy would work very well for something like biscuits and gravy (one of my favorite comfort foods). But it’s great as a sauce for things like basmati rice. Make a lot and use the leftover in casseroles of the type that call for canned cream of mushroom soup.
You can also used blanched almonds. Cashews and almonds, by the way, are the least expensive nuts right now at Whole Foods. The price of walnuts has jumped all of a sudden.