Into the Woods – Page 121 – Watching a bewildering world from the middle of nowhere

Squash: make it a sin

Squash is coming out my ears. I couldn’t bear another bit of it without turning it into something sinful. Solution: pizza.

The sauce is a pesto sauce made from garden basil. The squash is masquerading as pepperoni. It didn’t fool me. There is — no joke — half a cup of garlic in the pesto sauce. At the abbey, garlic is a vegetable, not a seasoning. The crust is homemade, though I have to admit that I have never learnt the knack of making a truly sophisticated pizza crust. I need to study up on that.

Making the most of squash

The abbey garden is cranking out squash faster than the abbey kitchen can handle it. Squash has been on the menu almost every day. Squash can be one of the most boring vegetables in the world, so preparing it is a big challenge.

Everyone’s favorite squash dish, of course, is sliced squash dipped in batter and fried. That’s a great treat, but it’s a bit too high carb and high fat to have too often. Not to mention that it makes a big mess in the kitchen. The healthiest way I know to make good squash is to sear it in a skillet. Done poorly, the squash becomes hopelessly watery. However, if done carefully, the squash can be very appealing. It won’t turn to mush, and browning it adds a lot of flavor.

Use a hot skillet with a little oil. Olive oil can’t take higher heat, so I use sesame oil, sunflower oil, or even grapeseed oil. Salt makes vegetables release their water, so I don’t salt squash while it’s being cooked.

You want the pan to be not quite hot enough to smoke, but hot enough that the squash will brown in only a few minutes. Any water released by the squash (which won’t be much if you give it just a few minutes of high heat) will dry up in the pan.

To make up for the lack of salt, serve the squash with some sort of salty sauce. One of the abbey’s favorite sauces is what I call “cucumber sauce.” That’s a chilled sauce made of about 3/4 sour cream and 1/4 mayonnaise, seasoned with salt and pepper.

Mockingbird nest

The photo was taken with an iPhone.

Thanks for lunch. Gotta run.

They invited themselves to lunch and helped themselves to day lily buds. There were a few left that they’d forgotten to eat during the night.

A tour of Vade Mecum

Most of the readers of this blog are not from Stokes County, or even from North Carolina, so I need to explain what Vade Mecum is and why people in Stokes County are so concerned about it.

A hundred years ago and longer, Stokes County was a tourist destination. People would come into Walnut Cove on a train, then travel by wagon to one of the resorts. The resorts were clustered around what is now Hanging Rock State Park. There are cool-running springs there, particularly on the shady north side of the park. It was a cool place to be in the summer. Most of the old resorts, which were built of wood, are gone. Only one remains: Vade Mecum.

Vade Mecum was never exactly abandoned, but it was a bit of a white elephant, and no one knew quite what to do with it or how to deal with the expense of keeping it up. It belonged to the Sertoma Club for many years, and for that reason it’s often known by another name, Camp Sertoma. In recent years, it has been managed by N.C. State University. However, N.C. State was losing money on the property and abandoned it on short notice last year. The Stokes County commissioners scrambled to figure out what could be done with the property. Interested citizens floated a business plan, but the plan never flew. But at present, the North Carolina General Assembly is considering a budget bill that would include some money for Vade Mecum and attach Vade Mecum to Hanging Rock State Park, which is just a stone’s throw away. It seems likely that the bill will pass and that Vade Mecum will be saved for the people of North Carolina. But people in Stokes County aren’t counting their chickens yet.

Yesterday there was a tour of Vade Mecum. Many people who are very interested in saving the place had never been inside, including me.

The dining room

The kitchen

Just inside the main door

Robin, superintendent of Hanging Rock State Park

Friends of Vade Mecum and leaders of the tour

A bedroom on the third floor

The chapel

The chapel ceiling

The gym, which has a stage at one end…

… and a fireplace at the other

The big porch in front of the gym

A vast swimming pool behind the gym

Some of the cabins

The main building

Tender is the greens

A serious weapon that every kitchen needs, for wielding against hard-to-cook foods, is a pressure cooker. I wouldn’t know how to cook garbanzo beans without one (and we eat a lot of hummus). Lately I have turned the pressure cooker toward the problem of tender mustard greens.

Tender mustard is a desideratum of every gardener. Picking the greens very young might help. But one can’t waste all those mature greens, can one? Twenty-five minutes in the pressure cooker and the greens are perfect.

Mustard greens

A squash bloom

A humble turnip

Lettuce, approaching maturity

A cabbage, which will soon use its one-way ticket to the kitchen

My family heirloom beans

The garden on June 2

The first day lilies, with thousands to follow

A wildflower patch

Lemons

When did lemons get to be so expensive? For years, I rarely bought them, because they just didn’t seem worth the price, and the quality was rarely appealing.

And yet, lemons can be useful. Nothing is better than fresh-made lemonade on a hot day. Trader Joe’s has pretty good prices on lemons, so I’ve been buying them again.

When I was a young’un, growing up in the Yadkin Valley, there was pretty much no such thing as exotic foods, because foods — at least fresh foods — weren’t transported very far then. And yet, as I recall, there were almost always lemons in the refrigerator, almost surely from Florida. Fresh lemonade was not unusual (though iced tea was an everyday thing). I remember a lot of lemon custard pies. I remember cake frostings with lemon peel grated in. My 1942 edition of The Joy of Cooking frequently calls for lemons, as though Irma Rombauer assumed that, even in the 1940s, cooks were likely to have them. Lemons have been shipped around for centuries, I’m sure.

In any caste, I’m resolved to get into the habit of buying lemons in the summer, as long as the price is right.

As for the lemonade, it needs to be sweet. That would require far too much sugar. I’ve been sweetening the lemonade with stevia extract. Stevia extract is not a perfect sweetener (nothing is perfect other than sugar). But the intensity of the lemon taste masks the aftertaste of the stevia.

Normally I use vinegar in hummus. But lemon juice works well too, and it gives the hummus a much brighter taste than vinegar.

Update on Fugue in Ursa Major

I regret that, several times, I’ve made optimistic projections about when Fugue in Ursa Major will be released for sale. Then I keep missing the targets.

My new target date for release is June 20. I am reasonably confident that, even if I miss that target date, I won’t miss it by far.

The novel is now in its third round of revisions. I am really fortunate to have excellent first readers, and I have taken their suggestions very seriously. With each round of revisions, I think the book has gotten much better. Not only do I have the first readers’ markup on the proof copies to work with, there also have been many discussions around the dinner table, or around the fireplace, with significant quantities of wine consumed in the process. Literary labor is hard, hard work. Literary work also sometimes involves damage to an author’s ego. But I think that serious writers roll with the punches from their first readers and then get to work to make the story better. After all, it’s the reader’s experience that matters, not the writer’s. Not that readers call the shots. But it’s OK to argue.

One of the things that became clear was that Fugue in Ursa Major demands a sequel. The second book of a series must knit nicely with the first, so many of the revisions have involved background and setup for the sequel. A lot of work has gone into thinking about the characters, getting to know them, and getting them right.

Every self-published writer is terrified of not selling many books. I am, of course, developing a marketing plan for Fugue in Ursa Major. I’ve also gone to a good deal of trouble to ensure that the book is published with my own imprint — Acorn Abbey Books — rather than the publisher being listed as not my own Acorn Abbey imprint but instead one of the providers of on-demand printing. The book will be available for sale through Amazon, of course. But bookstores, it seems, don’t like to order books from Amazon. Bookstores will, however, order from small publishers as long as the orders go through their usual channels. So a considerable amount of work was involved in setting up the book for on-demand printing from Ingram, from which bookstores and libraries order books. This area of publishing and book distribution is changing rapidly. But I was in the publishing business for much of my life, so I am better prepared to navigate this terrain than many self-published authors. We shall see. Release day approaches.

In any case, I wanted to let blog readers know that I’m working as hard as I can to get the book out in June.

The garden kicks in

The abbey is far from self-sufficient in food, a fact made clear by expenditures at Whole Foods. But each year when the garden kicks in, there begins a time, lasting for several months, in which the abbey is pretty much self-sufficient in produce. Eggs too are an important part of the equation. Eggs from the abbey’s expert hens provide up to 20 percent of our protein year-round.

So the season is beginning in which suppers at the abbey largely consist of food grown here. Yesterday’s supper (above) was omelette, a salad of lettuce and broccoli with homemade garlic-Roquefort dressing, turnip and mustard greens, and a side-dish medley of seared turnips, baby bok choi, and some leftovers. All the produce except the garlic came from the garden — garden to table in about an hour.

On the next trip to Whole Foods, I’ll buy very little produce — a significant savings. Instead, Ken will slave in the garden.

Lettuce, cabbage, and brussels sprouts

A young cabbage

Some of the finest broccoli this year I’ve ever seen

Above, a young tomato. For those not familiar with the Carolina foothills, the soil here is mostly red. Over the past five years, the garden has had literally tons of compost and other organic materials added. Building the soil and feeding the worms is a years-long process, and the process is now well along here. I’ve never seen such rapid growth in the garden. No doubt the insect pests will get worse as the weather gets hotter, but so far the garden has been almost bug free.

Young corn

We have walls and walls of heirloom roses on the garden fence and elsewhere.

A rose on the garden fence

Old-fashioned shrubs

A neighbor has given us some shoots from her old-fashioned shrubs. I’m pretty sure this is English dogwood, also known as “mock orange,” or Philadelphus coronarius. If that indeed is what it is, it’s a native of Southern Europe. A hundred years ago, it was very popular, and it can sometimes be found around old homesteads. It has gone out of fashion. Time for a revival.