Into the Woods – Page 187 – Watching a bewildering world from the middle of nowhere

Scrambled tofu

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.

Turkey in high clover

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.

No town halls, Virginia?

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.

Rolling back the clock on sweets

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

Chicken treats

A plate of chicken treats

If one eats well of the summer produce, then one’s backyard chickens can eat well too. Their favorites are corn and watermelon. They like squash well enough after they’ve eaten all the corn and watermelon. They go crazy over nice, ripe tomatoes. They can put away a ton of peach peels. To try to keep the fruit flies down, I keep raw fruit and vegetable scraps in a bowl in the refrigerator until I take them to the chickens.

My favorite produce stand at Germanton has been saving produce for me that’s too rough to sell but good enough for chickens.

Since 1932…

On July 8, 1932, the Dow Jones Industrial Average hit its lowest point of the Great Depression — 41.22

The media, as far as I can tell, almost completely ignored yesterday this story from the Associated Press about federal tax receipts, which have dropped in 2009 at a rate not seen since 1932. For the first six months of the year, individual income tax receipts were down 22 percent from a year ago. Corporate income tax receipts were down 57 percent.

For the month of April, the biggest month for collecting taxes, individual income taxes were down 44 percent, and corporate taxes were down 64 percent.

I wish someone could explain to me how individual income taxes can be down 22 percent if the unemployment rate is 9.5 percent. I also would like to understand how the earnings news can be good on Wall Street if corporate income taxes are down 57 percent.

Honoring the tomato sandwich

Few things make better eatin’ than a tomato sandwich. And you only get them a couple of months a year, when tomatoes are in high season. Last summer, after 17 years in California, I was so starved for a tomato sandwich that I went out and bought some Bunny bread, which, in my opinion, is the best of the country-style white breads available around here.

This year, though, I’ve focused on lower carb alternatives to white-bread tomato sandwiches. Chapati bread, which I wrote about last week, serves very well. Just smear mayonnaise on a piece of the chapati bread and have some tomato, with a fork.

One of the things I’ve taken for granted since childhood is that, in July and August, there should be a row of tomatoes in the window above the kitchen sink, ripening in the sun. Does everyone do this? Or is it just something that ran in my family?

Some old photos

Gladys and me, Winston-Salem, circa 1989. Photo by Gavin. Gladys had a stroke soon after this and completely lost the use of her legs. She slowly recovered, but she limped and dragged one of her hind feet for the rest of her life. She was the crippled collie. Gavin and I both were with her the day she died, in San Francisco, 1993. She is buried near Inverness on the Point Reyes peninsula.

My oldest friend is Gavin Geoffrey Dillard. We go back to 1972 or so. Gavin has been scanning photos from his collection.

Gavin Geoffrey Dillard, Tobaccoville, North Carolina, circa 1984. Photographer uncertain, possibly me.

Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, Los Angeles, circa 1985. Photo by Gavin.

In fact…

In fact, Lily has gotten so at-home in the new house that she is rooting her way into the most important spot in the house — my computer chair. Never mind that I got two identical chairs, one for her and one for me. She wants my chair.

Quoi? Moi?

Evicted and grouchy

Update, 30 minutes later: She moved to her own chair.

Cats and new houses

It has taken time and patience for Lily to accept the new house as home. She’s known this place for a year from her cozy little trailer up the hill, but it’s always been associated with loud noises and strange traffic.

I’ve taken a bit of a vacation after the painters left three weeks ago. I needed the time off, and Lily needed the quiet time in the new house so that she could start seeing it as home. She has adapted, and I do believe she likes it. She’ll like it even better when I bring in the furniture, and more rugs.

But I do still have to paint the bathrooms and finish some woodwork. The floor that Lily is sitting on here, for example, has not yet had the finish applied.