Watching a bewildering world from the middle of nowhere
While exploring a bit this morning on the other side of Madison, I came across this unattended self-service tomato stand — weigh them yourself and leave the money in the box. I came away with three pounds of tomatoes and some photos. I wish there were places like this closer to me.
I have been reading Robin Hobb‘s fantasy novel “Assassin’s Apprentice.” In the book, some characters were eating hot apple pastries and remarking on how good they were. I couldn’t get the idea out of my mind, and I just happened to have a few apples.
The problem is: How might I whomp up something that will satisfy the craving for apple pastry while keeping the carb load and the glycemic insult down to the misdemeanor as opposed to the felony level? Crêpes of some sort?
Keeping in mind the vegan’s rule for maximizing the kick from plant proteins (seeds + nuts + legumes), I made the crêpe batter from about one-quarter ground walnuts, one-quarter ground sunflower seeds, one-quarter tofu whizzed in the blender with water, and one-quarter whole wheat flour. The apples were not vegan because I cooked them in butter, with lots of cinnamon and some unrefined sugar.
Cooking and eating interests me for all sorts of reasons, most of them obvious. But it’s interesting to experiment with roughly estimating the glycemic load of a meal. If you ate a big meal, and if you’re hungry again in three hours, then it’s guaranteed that your meal was a glycemic bomb. I’m timing how long Fresh Apple Misdemeanor stays with me.
Walnuts and sunflower seeds ready for the grinder
The chickens’ portion is on the left.
Pieter Bruegel, 1565, during the Little Ice Age
Turf houses in Iceland
It is not commonly understood that the output of the sun goes through cycles. I, nerd that I am, didn’t appreciate this until I got my ham radio license and learned about the 11-year solar cycles that affect the propagation of high-frequency (1.8 Mhz – 30 Mhz) radio signals around the planet. But there are other cycles of the sun, maybe periodic, maybe more random, that have had a huge effect on human history.
The history of northern Europe, not to mention Iceland and Greenland, was greatly affected by climate changes thought to be related to changes in the sun’s output.
A new 11-year solar cycle should have begun by now, but it’s late. There have been 670 days without sunspots through June 2009.
A recent paper by scientists from the National Solar Observatory observes that there have been changes in the sun’s behavior that go back farther than the 11 years of the solar sunspot cycle, at least back to 1992. This is troubling, because if the trend continues, the solar situation would look more and more like the Maunder Minimum, which is blamed for the Little Ice Age in Europe, which lasted for hundreds of years, starting as early as the 13th century.
This is all very complicated, and the data is sketchy, but if you’re a weather watcher, and a climate watcher, as I am, then this is something you’ll want to read up on and keep an eye on.
Life expectancy in the United States is at an all-time high. But like the stock market, it’s starting to look a little toppy. Life expectancy has started to decline in some parts of the United States, particularly rural areas and parts of the South.
According to LifeScience:
“Though the United States has by far the highest level of health care spending per capita in the world, we have one of the lowest life expectancies among developed nations — lower than Italy, Spain and Cuba and just a smidgeon ahead of Chile, Costa Rica and Slovenia, according to the United Nations. China does almost as well as we do. Japan tops the list at 83 years.”
This online medical journal has charts showing how life expectancy is changing area by area. (It’s uncanny how a county-by-county chart of life expectancy looks like a voting-patterns chart.)
This is all very sad, because life expectancy would continue to rise if people took advantage of what we now know about diseases caused by diet and lifestyle.
I got a second egg this morning, so I fried them both for lunch today.
The shells were much thicker and harder than any grocery store egg I’ve ever had. The yolks stood up so nicely that it makes one realize that commercial eggs are never truly fresh. The yolks were that dark gold color that I’ve only ever seen in homemade eggs. I was afraid the yolks would not be properly dark, because the dry summer weather hasn’t left me much fresh grass and clover to feed the chickens. As far as I know, it’s primarily chlorophyll that makes the yolks so rich. But my chickens do get a varied diet that includes a lot of fruit and vegetable scraps, so maybe chlorophyll is not as essential as I thought.
I’ve rounded up some sunflower seeds, flax seeds, and wheat berries to mix with their laying mash. They seem to crave protein and go for protein foods first when I take them treats.
The quality of the eggs, and my hens’ happy dispositions, makes me feel even more sorry for the hens that produce commercial eggs. Obviously commercial hens aren’t fed well.
One of my hens laid the first egg today. The hens are five months old. It’s a smallish egg, not the extra-large I expect from these hens, so I guess the hens aren’t as mature as I thought.
I had promised the hens that when they laid the first egg, I’d clean their house and put fresh straw in their nesting boxes. And so I did. Clearly they understood what the nesting boxes are for, because that’s where I found the first egg — in the middle box of the three nesting boxes.
Vegetarians and vegans have known for a long time that one quick cure for a protein craving is scrambled tofu.
When I started buying tofu back in the 1970s, you could get it only at health food stores. Now even my country supermarket at Walnut Cove has it, organic. I always buy the firmest tofu I can get. Soft tofu has a slimy texture, and frankly I’m not sure what it’s good for. The tofu in the photo is scrambed with coconut oil, turmeric, Vegit seasoning, and a some fresh cayenne (the only thing in my garden that the deer haven’t destroyed). If you read up on turmeric, you’ll find that there seems to be something about it that keeps the aging brain young. Vegit is a general-purpose herb-and-yeast seasoning that is easy to find in Health Food Stores, or at Whole Foods.
Scrambled tofu goes good with chapati bread and Louisiana hot sauce. For dessert, I like a handful of raw walnuts, a spoonful of strawberry preserves, and a swig of soy milk. Combing amino acids from seeds (chapati bread), legumes (tofu and soy milk) and nuts makes for very high quality vegetable protein.
Should I regret having planted thousands of square feet with three varieties of clover? The clover draws varmints like peach peels draw fruit flies. Just this morning I saw one of the resident groundhogs up on its hind feet about 10 feet from a couple of turkeys, trying to get the turkeys to go away. Early yesterday morning I saw a doe curled up asleep about 15 feet from my deck. She comes regularly with her little spotted bambi to eat the clover.
I harass the deer and groundhogs regularly by throwing things at them, or shooting the air rifle at the ground a few feet away from them, but nothing seems to intimidate them. The groundhogs still run from me, but the doe is so brazen that she stands and glares at me for a while before she runs into the woods. I’ve pretty much decided to leave the turkeys alone. I think they mostly eat seeds, but they do eat snakes and insects.
Deer, turkeys, and groundhogs come and go freely during daylight. I’m not sure I want to know what goes on out there after dark. I think my cat knows something about that. I suspect that’s why she’s home and ready to come indoors a few hours before sunset, and that that’s why, before she goes out in the morning, she stops in the doorway, looks around the doorway to the right, and checks that the porch is clear. Her cat ears probably hear a lot that I don’t hear, and when she’s up during the night she patrols the windows.
If you do a Google search for “Virginia Foxx,” you’ll see that every time she has spoken on the House floor recently, she has embarrassed North Carolina’s Fifth District. It’s not just that she is ignorant and therefore almost always wrong. Or even that she repeats the vilest and most thoroughly debunked right-wing propaganda. It’s that she’s mean.
While GOP operatives and hate-radio hosts are dispatching mobs to shout down home-district town halls by Democratic representatives, Rep. Virginia Foxx isn’t even having a town hall. I called her Clemmons office to check her schedule. Sorry, nothing but a “telephone town hall,” which is of course a one-way affair. She talks, we listen. Watauga Watch reports that she’s only got fund-raisers on her summer schedule.
These will be ready to eat tomorrow.
There are a couple of scenes in the BBC series Cranford, which is set in Cheshire around 1840, in which some children get very excited about the fact that their cherry tree has come into season. The children get a big thrill out of helping the new doctor in town knock cherries out of the tree. The BBC series, by the way, is based on the novel Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell, a less well known but witty and competent 19th-century writer.
Children love sweets. In those days, cherries were high in the hierarchy of sweets, something for children to get excited about. These days, what child would pay the slightest attention to a cherry tree, or plain fresh cherries? Even though sugar was common in the 19th century, you could be sure that children in those days got a great deal less of it, especially provincial children. Sugar has, of course, gotten cheaper and cheaper, and the newest innovation in cheap sugar is high fructose corn syrup. Government corn subsidies help make it cheap, no matter how much evidence links high fructose corn syrup to Americans’ health problems.
But we don’t have to eat it. I can testify that if we stop eating processed sweets, we become more like the children in Cranford. A raw peach once again becomes a sweet treat. Watermelon is thrilling (the watermelons here have been inexpensive and very good this summer).
One of my grandmothers was a genius at making pies. I don’t think I can remember there ever not being at least one kind of pie in her pie safe. Usually it was a fruit pie, though she sometimes made custard pies. Still, nobody was fat, because it was home-cooked, and the dinner (which is what they called lunch) and supper tables were loaded with a variety of home-cooked foods including lots of vegetables. Once again, drawing on the insights of Michael Pollan, our grandmothers proved that a little homemade pie won’t hurt you.
You can get the Cranford series on DVD. I understand that the BBC has another season in the works to be shown in Britain this year around Christmastime. I’d expect it to be available in the U.S. next year.
The ladies of Cranford eating sweets
Judi Dench as Miss Matty, Elizabeth Gaskell