Into the Woods – Page 189 – Watching a bewildering world from the middle of nowhere

Garlic harvest

It looks a fright, but there are couple of pounds or more of good garlic in there.

I had been waiting for a cool morning to harvest the garlic. It was a chore. It would be nice if one could just pull it up by the stalk, but the stalks were too dry and weak for that, and the roots too strong. So each bulb had to be excavated with a garden tool.

I planted the garlic in, I believe, late October. I pulled it in mid-July, so that’s almost nine months to grow. I was tempted to wash it and make it look like the Sonoma County fair, but I didn’t think getting it wet would help preserve it.

There will be something very garlicky for supper tonight, using the bulbs that fell apart while I was pulling them.

How the garlic looked in early May

Chapati bread

The dough, kneaded and resting

Those of you who’ve been reading my scribblings here know that two tenets of my theory of cooking and health are that we should all eat like diabetics, even if we’re not; and that the elimination of simple carbs is the key to maintaining body weight.

The problem is, bread is probably my favorite food, and hot homemade bread is something I’d rather not imagine living without. So I’m always thinking about breads that are as easy as possible on the carbs and as low as possible on the glycemic index. That’s a short list of breads. But one such bread is whole-wheat chapati bread. It’s a dense, unraised flatbread. Google for recipes. I make it with King Arthur whole-wheat flour, water, and a bit of coconut oil. That’s right, not even any salt. For years I have noticed that unsalted bread can be much more interesting than bread with salt in it, with an eerily old-fashioned taste. I have no idea why. Anyway, like all wheat breads, the dough must be kneaded. Cook it well-floured on a dry griddle or pan.

Chapati bread goes exceptionally well with the curries of fresh summer vegetables that are my default supper this time of year.

Rolled and ready for griddling

Cook them hot so they blister and brown, but don’t let them smoke.

Chapati bread, curry of squash and peppers, and zingy peanut sauce

Dieticians give their blessing to vegans

A vegan summer supper here in the sticks. The tofu, walnuts, and sesame dipping sauce mix amino acids from legumes, seeds, and nuts to boost the quality of the protein. I’m not a strict vegan, but I eat lots of vegan meals. Tofu is mighty tasty if you dip it in the right stuff.

The American Dietetic Association released a position paper this month on vegetarian and vegan diets. You have to be a member of the association to read the full report, but the abstract is available on their web site:

“It is the position of the American Dietetic Association that appropriately planned vegetarian diets, including total vegetarian or vegan diets, are healthful, nutritionally adequate, and may provide health benefits in the prevention and treatment of certain diseases. Well-planned vegetarian diets are appropriate for individuals during all stages of the life cycle, including pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood, and adolescence, and for athletes. A vegetarian diet is defined as one that does not include meat (including fowl) or seafood, or products containing those foods. This article reviews the current data related to key nutrients for vegetarians including protein, n-3 fatty acids, iron, zinc, iodine, calcium, and vitamins D and B-12. A vegetarian diet can meet current recommendations for all of these nutrients. In some cases, supplements or fortified foods can provide useful amounts of important nutrients. An evidence-based review showed that vegetarian diets can be nutritionally adequate in pregnancy and result in positive maternal and infant health outcomes. The results of an evidence-based review showed that a vegetarian diet is associated with a lower risk of death from ischemic heart disease. Vegetarians also appear to have lower low-density lipoprotein cholesterol levels, lower blood pressure, and lower rates of hypertension and type 2 diabetes than nonvegetarians. Furthermore, vegetarians tend to have a lower body mass index and lower overall cancer rates. Features of a vegetarian diet that may reduce risk of chronic disease include lower intakes of saturated fat and cholesterol and higher intakes of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, nuts, soy products, fiber, and phytochemicals. The variability of dietary practices among vegetarians makes individual assessment of dietary adequacy essential. In addition to assessing dietary adequacy, food and nutrition professionals can also play key roles in educating vegetarians about sources of specific nutrients, food purchase and preparation, and dietary modifications to meet their needs.”

Chicken news

Behind the new defenses

My hens will soon be five months old, so they should start laying before long. I decided to go ahead and switch them to laying mash. Until now, they’ve been eating a Purina starter mash. I was delighted to find out that the roller mill at Walnut Cove, where I buy chicken feed, mixes their own laying mash. It looks like a good mix, because it has a calcium supplement and no animal byproducts.

I found one of my hens dead Saturday morning. She was inside the wire with no broken skin but with clear signs of neck trauma. I’ll never know what happened, but I think she probably was strangled by a raccoon that reached through the wire and caught her by surprise. I spent the day Saturday putting up 1/2-inch hardware cloth. I also doubled the electrical defenses and installed a higher-power, always-on fence charger. Poor chicken. The only good to come of it is that, with four hens, there’s more room in there. Given the quality, and the cost, of the chicken defenses required around here, I don’t think I’ll be able to build them a larger coop any time soon.

The Walnut Cove mill’s homemade layer mash

The Monitor Roller Mill at Walnut Cove. It’s an institution in these parts.

Inside the roller mill

From Time magazine:

Time magazine has a lame piece today on why there is more obesity in the South than in the rest of the country. They’re right about some things, for example the correlation of health and weight to income. But they trot out all the old stereotypes about biscuits, fried chicken, and pie. Southerners have always been poor, but they have not always been fat, as an examination of any collection of old photos will show you.

As a Southerner, a foodie, and a person who takes careful note of what people have in their carts in the grocery store line, I claim the standing to comment knowledgeably on this question.

1. Southerners have stopped cooking from scratch. This is clear from the contents of their grocery carts.

2. Southerners have too little color in their diets. Pretty much everything in their grocery cart will be meat or something white.

3. Southerners consume astonishing quantities of canned and bottled sweet drinks. By weight, sweet drinks are probably the main items in their grocery carts. Few even seem to make fresh iced tea at home anymore.

4. Southerners eat too much meat. They seem to have cut way back on pinto beans, which, in my childhood, you were guaranteed to get at least twice a week.

5. Southerners eat too much cheap white bread and too many chips.

6. Southerners buy very few fresh foods, not even fresh potatoes. It took me a while to realize that people aren’t interested in starting gardens because they aren’t interested in what comes out of gardens.

7. When Southerners eat out, whether at fast food places or not, they eat even more calories than they eat at home. Restaurants compete on price and the size of the portions.

If Southerners could go back to the era of homemade biscuits, all would be well. People made biscuits because it was hard to get white bread, or the white bread cost more. Biscuits come from an era in which everything came from the kitchen, from scratch.

Michael Pollen’s rule of thumb is the best I’ve ever heard: It’s about remembering and honoring what our great-grandmothers cooked. Many Southerners seem to have forgotten.

Critters seeking habitat 9,462; David 1

My new neighbor’s new digs, just up the hill from my side porch

This evening I went out to the deck to dump some supper scraps in the compost bucket. I happened to look up the hill. I saw a groundhog sitting on a newly excavated pile of dirt. I got the camera and went to check it out. He’s made himself quite a nice new home there.

I give myself a score of 1 because, for now at least, I appear to have driven off the five-foot blacksnake that was getting into my chicken house looking for eggs. I didn’t hurt the snake (unless it got zapped by the fence charger after I threw Listerine in its face), but either my fighting back against it, or the rather expensive snake repellant that I put out, or both, seems to have persuaded it to move on.

All the other critters have won: The doe with her little Bambi who completely wiped out my garden beds last night, the swallow with the nest in the basement, the lizard on the porch roof that almost fell on my head when I was screwing down roofing, the wild turkeys, the rabbit (he’s quite welcome, but I’ve only seen him once); the hoppy toad on the front walkway (he’s welcome too), the pigeon that slept on my roof for a week or so before something got him (probably an owl), even the little green snake, which doesn’t scare me and which doesn’t eat eggs. I had seen the groundhog before, closer to the woods on the lower side of the house. Either he’s decided to move up the hill, or this is a groundhog family.

Powering up the radio room

I’ve had very little access to the ham radio bands since I left San Francisco in February 2008. Though I have a VHF/UHF transceiver on the Jeep, and though I had a crummy VHF/UHF antenna installed outside the trailer, VHF and UHF serve only for local line-of-sight communication. For longer-haul communication, one needs longer antennas and the longer wavelength HF bands (1.8 Mhz to 30 Mhz or so, with wavelengths from 160 meters to 10 meters). Now that I have a house, I can bring my radios out of storage and put up longer antennas.

I installed a wire loop antenna of modest length in my attic yesterday (60 feet or so). The length of it makes it good for communications on the HF bands from around 14Mhz up. By golly it works. In no time, I’d made two-way voice contact with CO8TY in Cuba on the 21 Mhz band, YV1JGT in Venezuela on the 14 Mhz band, and LU8EOT in Argentina on the 14 Mhz band. I never use more than 100 watts to transmit. The antenna and its feed line still need some tweaking, but I’m encouraged that attic antennas here are going to work for me. Attic antennas are limited in length, but they aren’t out in the weather, they aren’t exposed to lightning, and no one can see them.

Propagation on the HF bands varies from minute to minute based on time of day, geomagnetic conditions, solar emissions, etc. Clearly propagation was good to South America this evening. I should be able to hear Europe earlier in the day when there’s daylight over Europe. Getting to Europe was tough from California. It should be much easier from here on the East Coast.

There are many who consider radio communications on the HF bands quaint and obsolete. But we’ll see about that if there’s ever a widespread power outage or widespread failure of the Internet pipes.

I installed wiring in my house so that I can power the HF radios, which are on the second floor, from a battery array (probably golf cart batteries) in the basement. But it will be a while before I can spend money on batteries and big chargers.

Hymns in strange places

Frédéric Chopin, nocturne in G minor, Opus 37, No. 11

Some years ago, a friend who is a professional pianist (and not a very nice person), hearing what I was playing at the piano, made the rude comment, “Hymns are the lowest form of music, you know.” Instantly angry, I threw an insult back at him: “No. Jazz is the lowest form of music.”

I was listening to the Chopin nocturnes tonight, partly because, at last, I can. The speakers and stereo amplifier are in a more or less permanent place in the newly painted radio room, and the iMac (and therefore iTunes) is now connected to the sound system.

Again and again in the nocturnes, Chopin gently slips away from the wild rubato rhythm and falls into a strictly timed four-part hymn, or anthem. The four measures above are just one example. If you’d like to find and listen to this example, the hymn starts about three minutes into Claudio Arrau’s seven-minute recording of this nocturne. Adjust the times for whatever recording you may have.

Anyone who thinks hymns are the lowest form of music knows nothing about human voices singing in chorus in four-part harmony. In the nocturnes, I would say that these hymn-like sections were a form of musical contrast for Chopin, a way of anchoring and grounding the wildness of the nocturnes.

Done! (Except for…)

The downstairs bedroom, painting and woodwork finish by yours truly. This is the guest room, so, all of you houseguests to be, this is where you’ll stay.

I got the certificate of occupancy on Monday, which means that I passed the final inspection and, as far as the county is concerned, the house is complete. What remains, though, is quite a lot of painting and finishing of woodwork. That’s a lot of work, on which I got started this week. One room, the downstair bedroom, is done. Next: the radio room upstairs.

I’ve been busy and distracted, and I’m reluctant to post a lot of photos until all the painting and interior finish work is done. I’ll post updates each time I come up for air.

Garden

I was too busy to check the garden for a few days, and suddenly the zucchini were a foot long. I hope they’ve not turned to seed. The oversize cucumbers are great, though. Some of the zucchini will go into a curry for supper.