Into the Woods – Page 180 – Watching a bewildering world from the middle of nowhere

A foodified quandary

A Walmart avocado

When I lived in San Francisco, shopping at Walmart was unthinkable. All big box stores (or book stores) were scorned for a number of reasons, not least for what has happened to small, neighborhood merchants. But it also was easy to not shop at Walmart in San Francisco. I’d have had to drive way out into the suburbs to get to one, and there were so many other alternatives in the city. Heck, one day when I was in line at Borders book store on Union Square in San Francisco, Armistead Maupin was in the checkout line in front of me. It’s a fair question, and I don’t claim to have an answer: How far should we go to support local businesses when a big business has something better, for cheaper?

If we pay more for something when we could have gotten the same thing cheaper at Walmart, we’re basically making a donation to a business. Is that the best form of charity? I have my doubts.

In any case, here in the rural South, everything is different. There aren’t so many choices. And we don’t have big-city incomes to spend in better stores, even if there were lots of better stores. So I don’t know.

This winter I’ve bought avocados at Walmart, for $.99 to $1.08 each. Every one of them has been good and has ripened beautifully. Should I pay $2.39 each for avocados at a grocery store, half of which rot before they ripen or are stringy and dry?

I buy at Walmart only those things that seriously beat the competition. For another example, Walmart has the best deal in organic, unsweetened soy milk. That’s the best accommodation I’ve been able to come up with so far.

A revolution in reading and publishing

And there you have it. Apple’s new iPad is everything we hoped it would be, except that Apple is staying with AT&T for its Internet connection instead of moving to Verizon. All the iPad models will work on local wifi networks, though.

It seems to me that the book publishing industry will now change very quickly. Apple did it right — agreements with a bunch of big publishers, a new iBook application, and support for the ePub format, which democratizes publishing and makes it as easy to make and publish a book as to make a web site.

The biggest surprise was the price. You can get one for as little as $499.

Beet curry

I paced in circles in the kitchen this evening, trying to figure out what I wanted for supper. Something over rice seemed appealing. I knew that I needed a heavy dose of garlic to try to fend off the cold I’m afraid I picked up on a trip to town last night. And I had some fresh beets from Whole Foods that needed to be used. So I made something up: beet curry. I didn’t Google for beet curry until after supper. It’s not unheard of, but I don’t think it’s common. But anything will curry.

I used a whole head of garlic. I blanched some almonds and chopped them a little in the blender so they’d soak up more flavor. I added tomato paste to thicken the sauce and deepen the red. I served it over Uncle Ben’s rice. Now, before you go and say something snobbish about Uncle Ben’s, keep in mind that it may have been Julia Child’s favorite rice. She called it “L’oncle Ben’s.” Uncle Ben’s is just parboiled rice. It also has a lower glycemic index than most rices.

Believe it or not, it was delicious. I already knew that beets like spices, and garlic, and tomatoes. You’d be surprised how good beets are when added to spaghetti sauce. Just dice the beets and add them to your regular spaghetti sauce, and simmer until the beets are tender. I realized while eating the beet curry that beets probably would like roasted peanuts. That will be a future experiment: coming up with something that includes beets, tomato sauce, garlic, and roasted peanuts or peanut butter. Some sort of lasagna, maybe?

From the red splatter in the kitchen you’d think I’d murdered a chicken, indoors. But this was a totally vegan dish.

Beets, almonds, minced garlic

Sautéing the almonds with the curry spices

Solar activity picks up

Today’s two sunspots: spaceweather.com

Much has been written in the last couple of years about how quiet the sun has been. We are just starting to emerge from the low part of the 11-year sunspot cycle. For months, there were no sunspots at all. Today there are two active sunspots. In another five years, this cycle will peak, and it’s during that peak period when, because the sun’s surface is heavily riled, the earth is particularly subject to big geomagnetic storms of the type that disrupt communications and even affect the power grid.

Just how much solar variance affects the earth’s climate is hotly disputed, but we do know that the 11-year sunspot cycles dramatically affect the amount of ionizing radiation (that is, high frequency radiation such as X-rays) that hits the earth’s ionosphere. It’s this process that causes the Northern Lights. The process also causes radio waves of certain frequencies to travel much farther.

Since we had two good sunspots today, I thought it would be a good time to fire up a ham radio and see who can hear me. I made quick and easy contact with EA1ABT in Spain (at 14.19175 Mhz) and CU2CR in the Azores Islands (at 14.198 Mhz).

All it takes is a 100-watt transmitter and a modest wire antenna hidden in the attic.

Priddy's store was hopping today…

Ron Taylor in Priddy’s store with some of his products that Priddy’s sells

Coming home from the post office at Danbury, I stopped at Priddy’s General Store today to pick up a few things. There were a lot of customers, but in between ringing up customers Jane Priddy still found time to talk with me about local issues, as we often do when I’m in the store. We were discussing the local farmers and local products and ways to better connect customers like me with the people who have local produce and products to sell. Jane was telling me about a man in Eastern North Carolina whose business has expanded to help get local products on the market. For example, he produces and cans the sweet potato butter made from the Stokes Purple sweet potatoes.

By the strangest of coincidences, a man in the store who had overheard much of our conversation let us know that he was that very man. He was on a business trip to this part of the state, and he had stopped in to have a look at Priddy’s store, which he had never seen before.

People like Ron Taylor and Jane Priddy are the kind of people who have done much to help rural North Carolina find its way to a new kind of local, sustainable economy. Ron is the president of Taylor Manufacturing, which has made equipment for tobacco farmers for many years but which expanded to make make equipment for winemakers. Ron has also started a vineyard, Lu Mil Vineyard. He served in the state legislature for several years, and he has served on a number of boards having to do with economic development and agricultural tourism.

Ron gave Jane and me bottles of his new muscadine wine. I can’t wait to try it.

On the left is an alcohol-free juice made from the native muscadine grapes. On the right is a new muscadine wine that Ron is now producing.

Priddy’s General Store

Turnip greens

The grocery store in Walnut Cove had turnip greens this week for $1.29 a bunch. As Michael Pollan says, eat more leaves. Especially at a good price.

By the way, what you see on the countertop is what we around here would call a mess of greens. When I was in elementary school, a teacher once derided one of the children for saying “a mess of greens.” The teacher said that that was not proper. How sad. It is perfectly proper, but it does mark one’s dialect as Appalachian English. I have previously written about stigmatized dialects.

The Oxford English Dictionary gives an example of this usage from 1503: “You have very good strawberies at your gardayne in Holberne. I require you let us have a messe of them.”

Mess means a portion of food sufficient to make a dish. As I understood the term growing up, it particularly meant a portion of food brought from the garden. I never heard anyone talk about a mess of bacon.

Here comes the asparagus

Waiting for the water to boil

One of the grocery stores in Walnut Cove had some very nice, slender asparagus yesterday for $2.29 a pound. It went really well with mushroom quiche. All three eggs in the quiche were laid today. Tomorrow the hens will be rewarded with the asparagus ends.

Coffee substitutes

I’m amazed how easy it was to give up coffee. I decided that the caffeine couldn’t possibly be doing me any good. And besides, when one no longer has to go to work each morning, the caffeine kick really isn’t necessary. For years I was very San Francisco-ized in my taste in coffee. I drank it only in the morning, but I liked it rich and strong.

I’ve been using a brand of coffee substitute that I got at Whole Foods. It’s made from roasted barley with chicory. When you drink the first cup of it, you certainly know it isn’t coffee. But by the third cup, adaptation happens.

With coffee, color is everything. The color of the Roma coffee substitute, before cream and after, is the same as coffee. I am unable to achieve the proper color with soybean milk (it produces an awful gray color), so I’ve gone back to buying half and half, which gives that wonderful golden brown.

Another wonderful thing about being retired: There is no longer any temptation to eat and drink on the run, or at a desk, or in front of the TV. I always sit down at the table.

Mid-January: What's green in the woods

Moss

Holly

Another clump of moss

The ferns have lain down in the cold.

How did the squirrels miss the hickory nut?

Ice in the little waterfall

I believe this is wild ginger.

Rhododendron or mountain laurel … I can never tell them apart.

Running cedar. It grows on the ground with long runners.

Honeysuckle. You can’t kill it.

Arbor vitae. I’ve planted a lot of them.

The house is on the side of a steep hill, with woods behind it and below it.

A captive indoor begonia looks longingly toward the woods.

Two recommendments

For your DVD list: Jane Eyre, BBC/Masterpiece Theater, 2006. Perfect. Ruth Wilson, who plays Jane Eyre, is Jane Eyre.

October Sky, 1999. Based on a true story, Jake Gyllenhaal is a nerd boy growing up in the West Virginia mountains who doesn’t want to be a coal miner. Instead, after seeing Sputnik pass overhead in the October sky, he dreams of building rockets.