Watching a bewildering world from the middle of nowhere
A couple of weeks ago I mentioned barley as a nice way to thicken soups. An even easier way, because it’s something most of us have in our kitchens, is to use a handful of oatmeal.
The soup in the photo is a cream of onion soup, made with soy milk. I threw in some leftover rice and some leftover peas. With soy milk, rich, creamy soups can have zero cholesterol. The combination of oats and rice makes a nice, hearty soup.
It was not easy to figure out what sort of tables I needed for the main room of my little gothic cottage. Most of the tables one sees in antique stores — at least any table that I stood a chance of affording — were just too spindly and too fancy. I wanted a table with the mass to hold its own in a fairly large room with a 21-foot ceiling, something with a strong Gothic presence. I soon realized that the tables I needed would look more like church furniture than household furniture. Sure enough, in looking online at companies that make furniture for churches, I saw the sort of tables I wanted. They were being sold as altars or offertory tables. They were ungodly expensive, even though most of them seemed to involve veneer and plywood.
Solution: Commission a table from my brother, who also built my kitchen cabinets. No veneer and no plywood, please. The new table is solid cherry. It’s 28 inches wide and four and a half feet long. The legs are three and a half inches square. My brother gave me a steep discount on the cost of the table. But, in a sense, the table is really family property. It went into my brother’s workshop as cherry boards and came out as an heirloom for his grandchildren.
I’m going to commission two more tables. One will have the same dimensions as the first table; the other will be shorter. Two of the tables will sit at the sides of the room normally. But for special occasions the tables will be lined up in the center of the room for a 12-foot feasting table.
Now where the dickens am I going to find suitable chairs?
Another piece arrived unexpected this weekend: a rug. My sister found it at a moving sale. She knows my color scheme here, so she bought it for me. It’s a wool rug from a famous rug maker, and it was a steal. The cat approves.
Round trip — more than 100 miles
I drove to Yadkin County today to visit family. It was good weather for photography, and the leaves were just beginning to turn, so I figured it was a good day to document the route from northern Stokes County, where I live, to the Yadkin Valley, where most of my family live, and where I grew up.
When I made the decision to move to Stokes County from California, it was after much deliberation. I weighed many factors. It’s hard to get to northern Stokes County. The roads are narrow, and crooked. Most people would need a map. It’s not a place where a commuter would want to live. But to me, these were positives, not negatives. I wanted to find a sweet spot between remoteness and access to commercial and medical centers. If I want to shop at Whole Foods, I can get to one (in Winston-Salem) in about an hour. If I needed to get to a major medical center, that’s also about an hour by road, but a few minutes by helicopter. And they do have helicopters.
If I want to visit family in Yadkin County, I have to drive for more than an hour. But what a drive it is. The route crosses two rivers (the Dan and the Yadkin), and runs through the shadows of the Sauratown Mountain range. Stokes County is so isolated that it has its own little isolated mountain range! It’s some of the best scenery to be found in the Yadkin Valley and the Blue Ridge foothills.
So here’s a photographic essay on the trip from my house to my mother’s house in Yadkin County. For the sake of photographic honesty, please be aware that I have focused on the picturesque and the historic. There’s plenty of plainness and a certain amount of rural squalor along the way. But why takes pictures of that?
Leaving home. Now that the house is done, I need to get started on the landscaping, don’t I?
The unpaved road above my house, past a neighbor’s horse pasture
Priddy’s General Store, which appeared in the cult film Cabin Fever
The Dan River at Danbury
The Dan River at Danbury
This building in Danbury was once a church. Now AA meets there, according to the sign out front.
The old Stokes County courthouse
I believe this used to be the Danbury town hall. Now it’s a lawyer’s office.
A historic marker in Danbury
The entrance to Hanging Rock State Park, a few miles from Danbury. Just as in California, state parks are often under-appreciated, and awesome.
Hanging Rock, from Moore’s Spring Road
Hanging Rock, also from Moore’s Spring Road
Approaching Pilot Mountain. Do you know the word “monadnock”? Culturally, the thing to know about Pilot Mountain is that it was called “Mount Pilot” in the Andy Griffith Show. This is Mayberry Country, remember.
Old mill at Pinnacle. Pinnacle was the setting for the indie movie Junebug.
Pilot Mountain, looking over the roof of the Pinnacle post office
A pumpkin patch on the south side of Pilot Mountain
Coming into Siloam
An old storefront in Siloam. If agricultural tourism and the popularity of the Yadkin Valley Wine Region ever reach critical mass, what a great little restaurant this would make.
Across the road from the Siloam storefront. I have no idea what this little building is, but it must have some historical importance, because someone keeps it up.
Siloam will probably forever remain known for the night of Feb. 23, 1975, when an old suspension bridge across the Yadkin River collapsed, killing four people and injuring 16. This is the new bridge.
The Yadkin River at Siloam
The big house at Siloam. Grand farms were not the rule in this area. Small family farms were much more common. But Siloam clearly was once a hot spot. Not only was there fertile land in the river bottom, but there was also a railway line. It clearly was enough to make a few farmers rich.
Pilot Mountain again, when I passed it on my way home
The history of this area — at least the agricultural history — is best read in the remaining outbuildings. Certainly more than a few big barns like this one remain. More modest barns on the old family farms are common, and hundreds if not thousands of old tobacco barns remain. Still, an untold number of fine old outbuildings have fallen down and rotted away.
The south side of Hanging Rock State Park, on my way home
The diameter of this persimmon is a little bigger than a quarter.
Persimmon trees can hide at the edge of the woods during the spring and summer. But in the fall when they’re loaded with fruit, they might as well be flashing with Christmas tree lights. I discovered this persimmon tree on the edge of my woods. I had not noticed it until a couple of weeks ago.
I’m not certain, but I believe that the big, hard, acorn-shaped persimmons that are grown commercially in California are Asian persimmons. Whereas the persimmons that grow wild here in the North Carolina Piedmont and the Blue Ridge foothills are the American persimmon.
What are they good for, you ask. Pudding! I hope to gather enough persimmons to make a pudding before the season is over. If I succeed, I’ll post some photos.
The native persimmons are not fit to eat until they fall from the tree, ripe. Before they are ripe they are unbearably astringent. October frosts can quicken the ripening. But after they fall to the ground, you’ve got to get to them before the wildlife do. There are so many hungry mouths around here.
I still have a little lake of cosmos flowers beside my driveway. They just won’t quit. The bumblebees are working them hard. The perennials I planted in the spring didn’t do much this year. But the cosmos, an annual, went wild. Next year, I will plant even more.
My mother’s mother’s biscuit pan, now a working heirloom
It is strange that, at a time when Americans’ interest in food and culture seems to be reawakening, Gourmet magazine goes out of business. Much has been written about the end of Gourmet, but I very much agree with what many of its readers and former readers have said: Gourmet was much more than a snooty magazine. It always implicitly understood the intimate connection between food and culture.
These days, when even young top-of-the-world Internet whiz kids like Jonah Lehrer can not only write lyrically about home cooking, but also write for Gourmet magazine, it almost feels as though an era has ended when it had barely begun.
Like Jonah Lehrer, I strongly suspect that an interest in cooking often if not always has its roots in childhood. These childhood memories were not only about learning about food and cooking, they also taught us about whatever culture we were born into.
I was a child in the 1950s, living in North Carolina’s Yadkin Valley. My relatives lived mostly in the North Carolina Piedmont and foothills and up into the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. In those days, relatives visited relatives, and often Sunday dinner (which was served right after church) was involved. If one stayed overnight, as sometimes happened, you got not only to sleep in an unheated bedroom under a deep pile of homemade quilts. You also got breakfast.
Whether it was breakfast or dinner, there were always biscuits. As a child, I began to realize that everybody’s made-from-scratch biscuits were very, very different. To this day, if you put a hot time-warp biscuit in front of me on a cool October morning, I believe I would be able to identify the aunt, grandmother, or older cousin who made it.
Let’s hope that the spirit of Gourmet magazine lives on in our blogs, as we learn from each other’s cooking and culture.
Risotto of toasted barley with roasted cauliflower
In the previous post I mentioned a recipe from Gourmet magazine for a risotto made from toasted barley and roasted cauliflower. I decided to make it for supper.
I’d encourage everyone to do a little Googling and read up on the benefits of barley. Not only is it a great base for comfort foods, it’s about 10 percent protein, and it’s an excellent starch for diabetics, with a glycemic index of 25 or so. It’s a nice thickener for soups and broths.
I’ve said this often, but it’s always worth repeating: We should all eat like diabetics even if we’re not. This is especially true in middle age and thereafter, though younger and younger people are being diagnosed with diabetes these days. Plus, a diet suitable for diabetics is just plain healthier, for everyone.
If you try this recipe and you’re not accustomed to cooking barley, cook the living daylights out of the barley, and add as much liquid as you can get the barley to absorb. If that takes an hour, so be it. Substitute whatever is handy. I used a little tomato juice in the water instead of chicken stock, and I used cheddar cheese instead of the parmigiano-reggiano. Frankly I don’t think cauliflower roasts all that well, though. It tends to become a little tough and dry. But any sort of vegetable could work in this recipe.
Toasting the barley before the liquid is added
Roasted cauliflower
The barley is almost done.
Is it soup yet?
Barley is not at all hard to find in the United States, but I don’t think I’ve ever known a traditional cook who uses it. That’s a shame, because not only is barley a fantastic comfort food, its glycemic index is very low — 25. The best soup I ever had was a Scotch broth in a little restaurant in Scotland. It was partly the barley that made the broth so nice and thick (and probably a few sheep bones). Barley can be cooked and served like rice. Or it can be used in risotto instead of rice. In Mediterranean cooking, risotto is a comfort food that probably occupies the same niche as mashed potatoes to us Celtic types.
I bought a bag of barley from the Yadkin Valley General Store, since I knew we’d be getting soup weather before long. I assume the barley came from Pennsylvania, since that’s where this store gets most of its stock. It’s certainly soup weather today: 61 degrees outside with rain and drizzle. I made the season’s first big pot of vegetable soup and included a couple of generous scoops of barley.
I love to have a pot of soup on the stove on cool, rainy days when I have nowhere to go. I’m generous with the garlic. To me, garlic is a vegetable, not just a seasoning. If you crush the cloves lightly but don’t chop them, the garlic flavor won’t overpower the soup.
Soon I want to experiment with some barley risotto. This recipe from Gourmet magazine for roasted cauliflower barley risotto looks inspiring.
Pearled barley
Peeled garlic…
…after a few licks with a cutting board to crush them just a bit
Raw soup with a heap of barley. Yes, that’s a bag of frozen mixed vegetables, but I did use fresh onions, cabbage, celery, etc.
It’s started simmering. Three hours to go.
Some of the 17 arc fault breakers in my main electrical panel
Starting in 2008, the National Electrical Code included a new requirement: new homes must use arc fault circuit breakers. Like most people, I was unaware of this new requirement, nor did I know what purpose these breakers serve until my electrician explained it to me.
Many electrical fires are caused by arcs. Arcs can happen when a wire has been damaged, leaving a gap in the insulation, or when a connection has come loose. Ordinary circuit breakers don’t detect this problem. If enough current arcs for long enough, it will heat up and cause a fire. These new breakers are expensive (at least $45 each). They added more than $600 to the cost of my electrical system.
This added cost has caused many people to complain. In fact the North Carolina Building Code Council (under pressure from developers, as always) recently considered dropping this requirement. But they backed down and kept the requirement after wiser heads put some pressure on them.
If you’ve ever been around a house fire, as I have, you want all the protection you can get. There are 41,000 house fires each year, causing around 360 fire deaths each year and thousands of injuries. Children and the elderly are always at higher risk in house fires (and I’m not getting any younger). I gladly shelled out the money for these breakers. My electrician was able to negotiate a good price for me because my house has much more wiring than most houses this size (I’m a nerd). My 1250-square-foot house has more than 30 circuits.
So how does an arc fault breaker differ from a ground fault breaker? An arc fault breaker is for preventing fires. A ground fault breaker is to protect humans from electrical shock. The code still requires ground fault breakers in kitchens, bathrooms, laundry rooms, basements, etc. Typically the ground fault breakers are in the outlet boxes, so these circuits have both arc fault and ground fault protection.
Banana bread
The autumnal equinox is Tuesday — the first day of fall. At the produce stands, the tomatoes and squash are giving out, and the pumpkins, greens, and apples are coming in. I don’t like to bake during the summer. Not only is the oven a big load on the cooling system, summer foods just don’t crave to be in the oven the way fall foods do. Olive oil and coconut oil are the oils of summer — good for saucing and sautéing. Fall baking likes nut oils and seed soils — even a bit of butter if you dare.
Fruit makes heavy, dark breads far more moist and eatable. Banana bread is a standby. But I plan to make some pumpkin bread as soon as the banana bread is gone. I think I also will experiment with some vegetable breads. Bread made with chopped mustard greens and seasoned with garlic and sage sounds appealing. Mustard and turnip greens are being sold everywhere right now for 99 cents a pound or less.
As always, I try to keep the protein up and the glycemic insult down. This banana bread is made of King Arthur whole wheat flour with plenty of ground flax seed and fresh ground almonds. There are two home-laid eggs. Once again, that’s the vegetarian rule — combine as many types of amino acids as possible to maximize the available protein. This bread contains seeds (flax and wheat), nuts (almonds), legumes (soy milk), and eggs. Don’t get the batter too thick — the flax and almonds soak up a lot of liquid.
I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned very clearly that I almost never use recipes. Creativity and experimentation are half the fun. Experienced cooks just know what it takes to make something turn out according to what they have in mind. When I do want to check a basic recipe, I use my 1942 wartime edition of Erma Rombauer’s Joy of Cooking. It’s a great reference that will tell you how to make all the standards from scratch, and from those basic recipes one improvises. Most of my improvisations are about adapting traditional dishes for a Mediterranean diet and applying what we’ve learned about food and health since 1942 (a great deal). And of course I always cook from scratch.
Ground almonds and ground flax seed, before the whole wheat flour was added
Walnut oil
