Into the Woods – Page 198 – Watching a bewildering world from the middle of nowhere

Homemade sauerkraut — the first tasting

The sauerkraut was put into the crocks on Oct. 29, and the first tasting was yesterday, Dec. 3, when my mother and brother were here for lunch. At that point the sauerkraut was a little less than five weeks old. I would say that it is good sauerkraut, but not the best I’ve ever tasted. The flavor was a bit too mild, and the cabbage is a bit too tender.

As for the mildness of the flavor, I believe that will take care of itself. The fermentation process will continue, and the flavor should get stronger as the winter progresses. Also, the basement of my unfinished house, where the crocks are, has been pretty cold, so the kraut is probably fermenting fairly slowly.

As for the texture, I need to do more research on this. But at least one sauerkraut article on the Web says that this has to do with the amount of salt used. Salt may inhibit the enzyme that tenderizes the sauerkraut, so there may be a tradeoff between saltiness and crunchiness. If that’s the case, next time I make kraut I will raise the salt content by .001 percent or so and try to see if there’s a just-right balance between not-too-salty and not-too-soft.

Then again, making sauerkraut at home, like making wine, is not a repeatable process. Every vintage will be different. Maybe someday I will say that the sauerkraut of ’08 was delicate and modest, reminiscent of boiled cabbage, with hints of turnip and an aftertaste of applesauce. Whereas the sauerkraut of ’09 was sassy and crisp, with the faintest aroma of wild onion and rutabaga.

Odd, isn’t it, how winemaking and sauerkraut-making are, as domestic arts, close cousins. And yet society sees one as refined and the other as coarse. But who cares what society thinks. One needs to preserve the summer’s harvest and eat and drink during the winter. Let the record also show that both arts — winemaking and sauerkraut-making — were practiced on the family farm on which my mother grew up in Yadkin County. The Yadkin Valley is now a viticultural region, so, with wine, my mother’s family was ahead of its time. As for the sauerkraut, we’ll keep plugging away.

Potato salad revisited

Sweet potato salad. No guilt necessary.

My local grocery store in Walnut Cove has North Carolina sweet potatoes on sale for 29 cents a pound. I bought some last week and baked ’em and mashed ’em with cinnamon. They were so good I went back and bought a bunch more, wondering what to do with them. An idea for an experiment dawned on me: make some sweet potato salad and try it out on my mother and brother, who were coming up for lunch on Wednesday.

Why sweet potato salad? Part of my theory of eating is that, especially at a certain age, we all should eat like diabetics even if we’re not. It’s not surprising that white potatoes are a high-glycemic food, not good for diabetics. It is very surprising, though, that sweet potatoes are a low-glycemic food, good for diabetics. The North Carolina Sweet Potato Commission claims, with good evidence, that the sweet potato is the most nutritious of all vegetables. They’re rich with Vitamins A and E, lycopene and potassium.

Thus the sweet potato is an important staple in the winter for those who, no matter how far from the Mediterranean, want to follow the Mediterranean diet. In fact, says the Washington Post, a low-glycemic diet and the Mediterranean diet are pretty much the same thing.

Now is as good a time as any to try to summarize my theory of diet and health.

1. Read Michael Pollan.

2. Adapt the Mediterranean diet to your location and tastes.

3. Follow a low glycemic diet.

4. Eat in such a way that your blood pH is neutral (you’ll need to do some research on this).

5. Keep your body’s net level of inflammation low with the anti-inflammation diet (you’ll need to do some research on this). Your overall level of inflammation can be measured with the C reactive protein test. Some doctors seem to give this test routinely, but you may have to ask for it.

6. Manage your oil and fat intake and your omega-3 omega-6 balance such that your cholesterols stay at the vein-washing, rather than vein-clogging, levels. Flax seed oil is your friend.

7. Maintain a level of fitness such that your resting pulse is below 75 beats per minute.

8. Maintain a body mass index of 23 or lower.

This is not a quirky diet. It’s not an expensive diet. It’s not a limited diet. These principles are not whims; they’re all backed up by good research. It’s easy to Google for these terms and see why these principles are important. Steps 4 and 5 will make perfectly clear what foods are good for you and what foods are not good for you.

Now, about the sweet potato salad. Make it just the same as you would make regular potato salad, but use sweet potatoes instead of white potatoes. To cook the sweet potatoes, put them whole and unpeeled on a cookie sheet, and bake them at 350 degrees for about an hour. Take them out of the oven and let them cool down. When they’re cool enough to touch, pick the skin off and cut the potatoes into cubes. This is much easier than peeling and boiling the potatoes, and the nutrients don’t get washed away.

What they're eating on Maui

And here are some fruit shots emailed in from Maui, with a couple of cats for a bonus. Above, Mama Maya.

Gandalf the Gray

What they're eating in the south of France #1

A friend in Perpignan sends an email with the subject “The slaughtering of a Pomelo” with three photographs.

“Remark,” she writes, “how great a part of the Pomelo constitutes skin and albedo,” sending me to the dictionary, because I’ve only encountered the term “albedo” in technical discussions of global warming. Note also that, in the south of France, especially when a fruit or vegetable is head-shaped, like a pumpkin or a cabbage, they speak of “slaughtering” it or “killing” it, as some of us do here.

I think I’ve seen pomelos in grocery stores in California, but I have not seen one in North Carolina. As for this poor pomelo that met its death in Perpignan, I believe it was imported from China.

Winterscapes

The winter sky soon after sunrise on Dec. 1. A rainy front from the Gulf of Mexico is being pushed away by cooler, dryer air.

Christmas wreath with woodpile

The woods behind the house

The house, from the woods behind the house

Even though 1.3 inches of rain fell in the last two days, only a tiny trickle of water is flowing in my little stream. This is good, really. The water is clean — no runoff. Most of the rain soaked into the ground. Not until the ground has been saturated, I guess, will the stream start flowing again. The summer of 2008 was not as dry as the summer of 2007, but more rain would be nice.

A stumpscape. This is in an area below the house where I removed old pine trees but left the stumps in place. I’ll let this area return to the wild, as part of the transition from woods to meadow.

Sonnet XXXV

Clearly my ruined garden as it stood
Before the frost came on it I recall —
Stiff marigolds, and what a trunk of wood
The zinnia had, that was the first to fall;
These pale and oozy stalks, these hanging leaves
Nerveless and darkened, dripping in the sun,
Cannot gainsay me, though the spirit grieves
And wrings its hands at what the frost has done.
If in widening silence you should guess
I read the moment with recording eyes,
Taking your love and all your loveliness
Into a listening body hushed of sighs . . .

Though summer’s rife and the warm rose in season,
Rebuke me not: I have a winter reason.

— Edna St. Vincent Millay

Your cauliflower is calling you…

OK, so cauliflower lacks color. But we don’t hold that against taters or chardonnay, do we?

Now that the fresh greens have died out and the garden is in winter mode, we’re back to the winter diet. One of the vegetables that even the country grocery stores have during the winter is cauliflower. Cauliflower is relatively cheap, probably because it keeps well, with a low spoilage rate for shipping and shelving. Cauliflower is nutritionally dense, with all the virtues and anti-cancer properties of its family, Brassicaceae. Here’s the Wikipedia article on cauliflower.

I eat a lot of cauliflower during the winter, but with this cauliflower, I sinned a bit and made a light cheese sauce. It would be tempting to use butter, but I used toasted sesame oil instead. The flavor of all the cabbages — cauliflower, broccoli, cabbage, brussels sprouts — is highly compatible with toasted sesame oil.

If you’re new to cauliflower, boil it until it’s just barely tender and mash it exactly as you would mash taters, with butter and hot milk.

The garlic bed

Now that the turnips and mustard are clear of the raised bed, I’ve planted the garlic. The burlap cover is to keep the cat out. After the garlic has a good start, I’ll remove the burlap. The cat, Lily, ruined a third of the turnip and mustard crop by flinging dirt before the plants were established.

This raised bed has been here only since spring, but this is the third crop to go into it. First it was tomatoes, peppers, etc. Then the mustard and turnips, and now the garlic. Before spring I have to build at least five more of these beds. It’s an incredibly easy and efficient way to garden.

The garlic bulbs came from the Garlic Store. I planted three varieties: California Early (the standard garlic of Gilroy, California); Transylvanian (for teasing vampires); and Stull (which according to the Garlic Store was discovered at a garlic festival in New York). I’m a little late planting the garlic, but I think it will be fine.

The gothic moon

The waning moon, 6:45 a.m., November 23, 2008.

Lesson learnt, turnipwise…

My pitiful turnip crop, 2008. That’s mustard on the right.

I head eaten turnip and mustard greens for weeks and weeks, but last night the poor turnips froze. I wasn’t careful enough. Turnips don’t mind frost, but they sure didn’t like the hard freeze we had last night. According to my outdoor thermometer, the low temperature last night was 17.8 degrees F. That’s unusually cold for this time of year.

I pulled all the turnips and threw away all the frozen turnip greens. The mustard greens didn’t freeze, but they’ve clearly stopped growing, so I pulled all the mustard too. Tomorrow I’ll clean up the plantbed and plant garlic in it.

I must have had 20 or more messes of fresh mustard greens from my small raised bed. I’d have had even more, had the cat not frolicked repeatedly in that pretty black dirt.

The frozen turnips will have to be cooked today instead of stored in the pumphouse for Thanksgiving.

Actually, after I cleaned them up, it appears that the turnips handled the freeze much better than the leaves.

Apple trees

An old-fashioned limbertwig

You’d think that for all the work I did planting apple trees this week that there’d be something more photogenic. But at this point there’s not really much to see. Each tree is four feet tall (with almost a foot of it underground). And each tree is heavily pruned.

I planted nine apple trees and one pear tree. The trees came from Century Farm Orchards, which specializes in old Southern apple trees. I planted nine different varieties of apples. I tried to select varieties that would extend the season from early to late (July to November or so), and apples that store well. For the record, here are the varieties:

Arkansas black (2)

Kinnaird’s choice (1)

Old fashioned limbertwig (1)

Mary Reid (1)

Smokehouse (1)

Summer banana (1)

William’s favorite (1)

Yellow June (1)

Plumblee pear (1)

Though the trees are all old-fashioned varieties, they were grown on MM.111 rootstock, a hardy rootstock.

With luck, I’ll have apples in three to six years.