Watching a bewildering world from the middle of nowhere
Lily was in stalking position with her nose to the glass, staring down at something just on the other side of the door. I couldn’t see what it was, but I approached quietly with the camera. Lily moved away, and the bird hopped away from the door when it saw me. I think they must have been virtually nose to nose, having a stare-down. From Lily’s perspective, I get it. But what in the world was in it for the bird?
This week, a Sony Reader app for iPad was released. That’s now four major readers available on the iPad that I know of — Apple’s iBooks, Amazon’s Kindle, Sony’s Reader, and Barnes & Noble’s Nook.
Sony did it right and makes it possible to download all the books you’ve previously bought to the new iPad app. I was an early adopter of the Sony Reader (more than five years ago), so I had bought quite a few books. All those books now reside on my iPad.
I’ve not yet tried the Nook app, because I don’t yet have an account at Barnes & Noble. I’ll probably open an account, though, because it’s nice to have as many options as possible when buying books.
Books take up a relatively small amount of storage space, so it’s great to be able to carry so many books around with you. It’s also nice that the books are searchable. If you remember something from a book you’ve previously read that you want to look up, it’s easy.
The process of getting older classics into digital format is continuing. I’m finding that many science fiction classics from the 1980s and older are now showing up in Kindle editions. There are often lots of typos, however. It’s clear that the books were scanned and run through an OCR system with very little proofing. Some classics still haven’t made it to digital, though. A few weeks ago I was unable to find anything at all by Daphne du Maurier.
A Trader Joe’s recently opened in the town where I do most of my shopping — Winston-Salem. It’s in the space where a Borders bookstore used to be, and it’s less than a mile from Whole Foods.
I had not been to a Trader Joe’s since I left California more than four years ago. In California, Trader Joe’s was often criticized by foodies for being the Walmart of the grocery business, and there is some truth to that. I did not have time on my first visit to check out lots of products in the store, but my first impression is that the produce was somewhat better than it used to be, and there may be a greater effort to avoid imports. Most of the produce had a “Product of the U.S.A.” label, but there seemed to be no effort to be more specific than that and list the state of origin.
To me, Trader Joe’s strength is in what I call “semi-perishables” — things like nuts, nut butters, cheese, condiments, wine, and so on. If Trader Joe’s has what you need, it will certainly save you money. I’ll confess that I even do some of my shopping at Walmart, if they have what I want and it saves me money. For example, Walmarts always have King Arthur flour (of which I use a lot), and it’s a dollar a bag less expensive at Walmart. I also buy organic soy milk at Walmart, because it’s cheaper there and they carry the Westsoy brand that isn’t flavored or sweetened.
I’ll continue to go to Whole Foods for some things, but Trader Joe’s is going to save me money.
On a trip to the Virginia mountains a few days ago, I was surprised to see several big fields of unharvested pumpkins. Shouldn’t they be gathered in well before Halloween? I’m wondering if this year’s pumpkin crop exceeded the demand.
River Forest Manor at Belhaven. It’s now closed, and for sale.
I got back last night from a three-day trip to the North Carolina coast. I wish I could say it was a good trip, but mostly it wasn’t. Ocracoke Island was nice and hasn’t changed in any major way since I was last there 25 years ago (just more buildings). But much of the rest of the trip was, in ways, depressing.
For example, I had remembered the little town of Belhaven, near the the Swan Quarter terminal for the 2.5-hour ferry trip to Ocracoke, as charming. But all I saw this trip was squalor and poverty. The old River Forest Manor mansion, which for years served wonderful down-home food and offered nice B&B accommodations, has closed and is up for sale. The town of Belhaven looked shockingly shabby and poor.
Ocracoke Island is mostly national seashore that is protected from development. There are many new buildings and new businesses in the little village of Ocracoke, but they weren’t so bad. Often the new buildings look better than the old ones. Ocracoke also was the only place on the entire trip where anything approaching civilized food was to be had.
Hatteras still had a certain charm, but it has grown tremendously. Seedy development now defines once-charming villages like Rodanthe. Nags Head, Kill Devil Hills, and Kitty Hawk are now merged together into one long, dense, ugly strip development completely lacking in charm.
As a road trip, this one was nothing special. I did get to drive through Chatham County, one of the target areas for fracking in North Carolina. But the Raleigh suburban area, its bypasses, and all the roads from Raleigh east to the coast can only be described as an ugly, strip-developed mess, with much of the rural charm ruined by suburbanization. I had not seen some of these areas for 30 years. I did not like the changes I saw.
I came home on U.S. 58 through southern Virginia, and that’s much nicer, once you get west of the suburban horror of Chesapeake and Suffolk. The road passes through beautiful Virginia farming country as it approaches Danville and Martinsville.
I’m not sure I could ever endure another road trip without making some kind of arrangements to cook my own food along the way. All along these routes through Virginia and North Carolina there is nothing to eat but fast food and trash food. Too much of it would be enough to ruin one’s health. It made me fondly remember road trips when I was much younger and much poorer, when we stopped at roadside picnic tables and cooked on Coleman stoves.
It made me appreciate my Stokes County home that much more. It can’t be easy to find places in this country where honest, unsuburbanized rural landscapes are within shopping distance of a Whole Foods and an Apple store. Stokes is one of those places. It’s mighty nice to be home. Lily, the cat, thinks so too. She slept with me for part of the night, her paws clasped around my neck and her nose in my ear as though she was afraid I’d leave her again.
I’m in no hurry for another road trip. Home is just too nice.
The Ocracoke ferry approaches the Swan Quarter ferry landing.
Looking into the Ocracoke harbor from Pamlico Sound
A ferry leaves Ocracoke bound for the mainland.
The former Coast Guard station on Ocracoke, now some sort of campus
Ocracoke’s harbor
Riding around in golf carts has become the main entertainment on Ocracoke. Golf carts rent for $10 an hour.
Hatteras lighthouse
The Smart car performed beautifully on the road trip. It averaged 54 miles per gallon. It’s comfortable and handles great on the open road and in traffic.
A large solar array under construction near Bath, North Carolina
I wish everyone could get to know just one nice chicken really well. Then we’d stop thinking that chickens are dumb and unfeeling, and we’d give chickens much better lives. All chickens are different. Even when they’re brought up similarly, they have very distinct personalities. The more attention they get, and the more you interact and talk with them, the more they develop, and the sweeter their attitude toward human beings.
In the new generation of hens at Acorn Abbey, Fiona loves human attention the most. Now, one of the first things I explain to all the abbey chickens, as soon as they’re old enough to understand, is the deal we have: They get a nice home, free food and water, a place to roam and scratch, a decent house, a fence to protect them from predators, and a place to retire when they’re old. I get the eggs. None have complained about the deal, other than Patience who got it in her head a couple of summers ago that she was going to keep her eggs and sit on them. I disputed that, and I won. But I don’t think she understood that at that time she had never met a rooster and that she was wasting her time.
Anyway, Fiona quickly figured out where I live and what door I usually emerge from. The first time she stood at the front door and called (at the top of her lungs), I thought she was merely asking for attention. But a few days later, after some repetition of this behavior, I found three eggs under the bench beside the front door. Then I had to reconsider her behavior. I think she was letting me know that she’d left me an egg.
Now, why would Fiona choose not to lay in the chicken house like the other hens? No matter how much new wire I put up to block their escape routes, she and Helen still get over the fence any time they like. Given that Fiona could lay anywhere she chooses inside or outside the fence, why would she come here to lay, and why would she stand at the door, look through the glass, and call at the top of her lungs after laying? I think she’s bringing me a gift, and she wants me to know.
She loves to be picked up, petted, scolded mildly, and put back inside the fence. In our evening chats, when I sit a spell in the orchard with the chickens before they go in for the night, Fiona climbs into my lap. The other hens get jealous.
Spoiled? Nah. It’s the way all chickens ought to live.
Fiona
Nice place! Can I stay?
A gift left under the front porch bench.
Let’s hope it’s not as dry as it looks in this photo. There’s juice down in there.
This is prime pie season — one of the best times of the year for cooking.
My apples this week came from a roadside produce stand on U.S. 601 in Davie County. They said the apples came from Cana, Virginia, which is almost certainly true, because that’s an apple and trucking center. I also bought the pumpkin at the same roadside stand. It probably came from North Carolina, South Carolina, or Georgia on one of the produce trucks that run back and forth from this area to Florida, feeding many of the roadside produce stands.
Don’t even think of using a store-bought pie crust! Pie crusts are easy to make. I have used olive oil for years. You might think that olive oil would have too strong a flavor for pie crust, but I have never tasted olives along with the apples. I find that about 2 and 1/3 cups of unbleached flour makes a generous crust. For that much flour, half a cup of olive oil is not quite enough, and 2/3 cup is too much. I’ve found that it’s definitely possible to use too much oil and not enough water or milk in the crust. The crust will come out powdery rather than flakey. So I usually add half a cup of oil to the flour, then mix and add more until it looks right. One to two tablespoons of water or milk (or soy milk) is about right.
This is prime pumpkin-shopping time. I scorn the bright orange pumpkins with the ugly shapes. I only buy what I call “pink pumpkins,” the segmented pumpkins. Pumpkins are magical, so only a Cinderella fairy-tale pumpkin is proper. Making a pie with canned pumpkin in a store-bought crust is a crime for which you’ll lose your cooking license. It’s all about doing everything from scratch…
Ready for the oven
Guess who’s next…
Heirloom green beans for seed
Though I feel a bit guilty, I did not plant turnips and greens for a late garden this year. I was just too burned out from a summer of gardening and canning.
Today I officially retired the garden. I picked the remaining green peppers. There was about a peck of them. I also picked the last of the green beans, which I had intentionally left on the vine to go to seed. They will be next year’s bean seeds. They are the family heirloom green beans that have been in my family for four or five generations. I’ve put them in the attic to dry before I shell them.
The black walnuts were given to me by a friend. I don’t have a walnut tree — though I’m still looking for one. These days plenty of people have mature walnut trees, but 99.9 percent of the crop lies on the ground and goes to waste because people just aren’t hungry enough anymore to do all the work of hulling them and cracking them. I’m not sure how far I’ll get with that job either, but I at least want to have a go at it.
Now if I only had access to an old, abandoned apple tree. My trees produced a small amount of fruit this year, but I’m still several years away from really having an apple crop.
A peck of peppers
Black walnuts, still in the hulls
Can you espy the chicken in this photo? When I go out to fetch her, she will come up to me, sqat to be petted, then dutifully follow me to the gate.
Onion sandwich on English muffin
During the heat of summer, I slacked off on baking. On a shopping trip to Whole Foods, I broke down and bought some English muffins. They were addictive, so I resolved to start making them when cooler weather returned.
The English muffins from Whole Foods were only marginally decent. They were made largely with white flour. At least the texture was right. I was foolish enough, while feeding my addiction, to try Thomas English muffins from a regular grocery store. They were totally not edible. I should have composted them, but I gave them to the chickens. For one, they contained all kinds of adulterants, including fats and emulsifiers (in the form of mono- and diglycerides) to give the bread that horrible brioche-y, cake-like texture that the hordes of non-coastal America seem to like so much. You know, Wonder bread. Or, in these parts, Bunny bread.
As a matter of fact, when we quote Marie Antoinette as saying, “Let them eat cake,” what she really said, in French, was, “S’ils n’ont pas de pain, qu’ils mange de la brioche!” As pure language, that translates to, “If they don’t have bread, let them eat brioche!” Brioche, of course, is bread — a soft cake-like bread. Culturally, this is probably not translatable, but I strongly suspect that the reference to brioche contained an insult to the type of bread peasants preferred, if they could get it.
Anyway, English muffins take a long time to make, and they’re a pain in the neck. But they have many virtues. For one, because they’re destined for the toaster, they can be put in a bag, popped in the fridge, and kept for days. Fresh from the toaster, you’d never know they were made five days ago. For two, if you make them yourself, the best ones are 100 percent fat free, unlike their competitor for breakfast bread — biscuits.
If you want to make English muffins, I’d recommend starting with this recipe from King Arthur Flour and modifying it to your taste. But notice that even King Arthur brioche-ifies the dough with egg, butter, and sugar. Horrible! I make my dough with nothing but whole wheat flour, water, yeast, and a bit of sugar to feed the yeast. For a proper bread texture, you can’t go wrong with those simple ingredients in your dough.
I think I’ll also make some bagels this fall. It’s been many years since I’ve made bagels, but they’re not much more trouble than English muffins.
