About that barley risotto…

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Risotto of toasted barley with roasted cauliflower

In the previous post I mentioned a recipe from Gourmet magazine for a risotto made from toasted barley and roasted cauliflower. I decided to make it for supper.

I’d encourage everyone to do a little Googling and read up on the benefits of barley. Not only is it a great base for comfort foods, it’s about 10 percent protein, and it’s an excellent starch for diabetics, with a glycemic index of 25 or so. It’s a nice thickener for soups and broths.

I’ve said this often, but it’s always worth repeating: We should all eat like diabetics even if we’re not. This is especially true in middle age and thereafter, though younger and younger people are being diagnosed with diabetes these days. Plus, a diet suitable for diabetics is just plain healthier, for everyone.

If you try this recipe and you’re not accustomed to cooking barley, cook the living daylights out of the barley, and add as much liquid as you can get the barley to absorb. If that takes an hour, so be it. Substitute whatever is handy. I used a little tomato juice in the water instead of chicken stock, and I used cheddar cheese instead of the parmigiano-reggiano. Frankly I don’t think cauliflower roasts all that well, though. It tends to become a little tough and dry. But any sort of vegetable could work in this recipe.

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Toasting the barley before the liquid is added

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Roasted cauliflower

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The barley is almost done.

Barley season

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Is it soup yet?

Barley is not at all hard to find in the United States, but I don’t think I’ve ever known a traditional cook who uses it. That’s a shame, because not only is barley a fantastic comfort food, its glycemic index is very low — 25. The best soup I ever had was a Scotch broth in a little restaurant in Scotland. It was partly the barley that made the broth so nice and thick (and probably a few sheep bones). Barley can be cooked and served like rice. Or it can be used in risotto instead of rice. In Mediterranean cooking, risotto is a comfort food that probably occupies the same niche as mashed potatoes to us Celtic types.

I bought a bag of barley from the Yadkin Valley General Store, since I knew we’d be getting soup weather before long. I assume the barley came from Pennsylvania, since that’s where this store gets most of its stock. It’s certainly soup weather today: 61 degrees outside with rain and drizzle. I made the season’s first big pot of vegetable soup and included a couple of generous scoops of barley.

I love to have a pot of soup on the stove on cool, rainy days when I have nowhere to go. I’m generous with the garlic. To me, garlic is a vegetable, not just a seasoning. If you crush the cloves lightly but don’t chop them, the garlic flavor won’t overpower the soup.

Soon I want to experiment with some barley risotto. This recipe from Gourmet magazine for roasted cauliflower barley risotto looks inspiring.

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Pearled barley

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Peeled garlic…

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…after a few licks with a cutting board to crush them just a bit

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Raw soup with a heap of barley. Yes, that’s a bag of frozen mixed vegetables, but I did use fresh onions, cabbage, celery, etc.

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It’s started simmering. Three hours to go.

What are arc fault circuit breakers?

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Some of the 17 arc fault breakers in my main electrical panel

Starting in 2008, the National Electrical Code included a new requirement: new homes must use arc fault circuit breakers. Like most people, I was unaware of this new requirement, nor did I know what purpose these breakers serve until my electrician explained it to me.

Many electrical fires are caused by arcs. Arcs can happen when a wire has been damaged, leaving a gap in the insulation, or when a connection has come loose. Ordinary circuit breakers don’t detect this problem. If enough current arcs for long enough, it will heat up and cause a fire. These new breakers are expensive (at least $45 each). They added more than $600 to the cost of my electrical system.

This added cost has caused many people to complain. In fact the North Carolina Building Code Council (under pressure from developers, as always) recently considered dropping this requirement. But they backed down and kept the requirement after wiser heads put some pressure on them.

If you’ve ever been around a house fire, as I have, you want all the protection you can get. There are 41,000 house fires each year, causing around 360 fire deaths each year and thousands of injuries. Children and the elderly are always at higher risk in house fires (and I’m not getting any younger). I gladly shelled out the money for these breakers. My electrician was able to negotiate a good price for me because my house has much more wiring than most houses this size (I’m a nerd). My 1250-square-foot house has more than 30 circuits.

So how does an arc fault breaker differ from a ground fault breaker? An arc fault breaker is for preventing fires. A ground fault breaker is to protect humans from electrical shock. The code still requires ground fault breakers in kitchens, bathrooms, laundry rooms, basements, etc. Typically the ground fault breakers are in the outlet boxes, so these circuits have both arc fault and ground fault protection.

Time to think about fall baking

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Banana bread

The autumnal equinox is Tuesday — the first day of fall. At the produce stands, the tomatoes and squash are giving out, and the pumpkins, greens, and apples are coming in. I don’t like to bake during the summer. Not only is the oven a big load on the cooling system, summer foods just don’t crave to be in the oven the way fall foods do. Olive oil and coconut oil are the oils of summer — good for saucing and sautéing. Fall baking likes nut oils and seed soils — even a bit of butter if you dare.

Fruit makes heavy, dark breads far more moist and eatable. Banana bread is a standby. But I plan to make some pumpkin bread as soon as the banana bread is gone. I think I also will experiment with some vegetable breads. Bread made with chopped mustard greens and seasoned with garlic and sage sounds appealing. Mustard and turnip greens are being sold everywhere right now for 99 cents a pound or less.

As always, I try to keep the protein up and the glycemic insult down. This banana bread is made of King Arthur whole wheat flour with plenty of ground flax seed and fresh ground almonds. There are two home-laid eggs. Once again, that’s the vegetarian rule — combine as many types of amino acids as possible to maximize the available protein. This bread contains seeds (flax and wheat), nuts (almonds), legumes (soy milk), and eggs. Don’t get the batter too thick — the flax and almonds soak up a lot of liquid.

I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned very clearly that I almost never use recipes. Creativity and experimentation are half the fun. Experienced cooks just know what it takes to make something turn out according to what they have in mind. When I do want to check a basic recipe, I use my 1942 wartime edition of Erma Rombauer’s Joy of Cooking. It’s a great reference that will tell you how to make all the standards from scratch, and from those basic recipes one improvises. Most of my improvisations are about adapting traditional dishes for a Mediterranean diet and applying what we’ve learned about food and health since 1942 (a great deal). And of course I always cook from scratch.

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Ground almonds and ground flax seed, before the whole wheat flour was added

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Walnut oil

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Toward more frugal homes

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My new washer

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One of the nice things about new construction is that, largely because of tighter and smarter regulations, new homes and new appliances are more efficient and more frugal. My windows, with a U-factor of .31, are pretty darn snug, though no window is as efficient as a well-insulated wall. Local builders complain that Stokes County’s requirement for ceiling insulation is R-38, the same as in much of Canada, even though surrounding counties require only R-30. My Trane heat pump is far more efficient than heat pumps from the 1980s. Refrigerators have gotten much more efficient. Even my big iMac consumes far less energy than the computer it replaced.

For the month of July, with my cooling system running as needed all day and all night all month with thermostats set to 77 or 78, I used 604 kilowatt hours at a cost of $71.80. For September, with no heating and cooling needed, I’m expecting an electric bill of $35 to $40. My house is not a MacMansion. It’s 1250 square feet. [My electric company, Energy United, which is a rural electric cooperative, charges .0802 cents per kilowatt hour during the summer, meaning that my per-kilowatt charges were $48.44 for July. The rest of the bill is from taxes, fees, and fixed monthly charges.]

It has been fascinating to watch my new LG front-loading washing machine, which is Energy Star compliant. It’s astonishing how little water it uses. It’s very quiet. It spins at a very high speed to reduce dryer costs. Its behavior is very complex, controlled by a computer. Older washers with mechanical controllers were much more limited in how their wash cycles were set up.

The New York Times has a piece today on the patterns of energy consumption in the home and how they are changing.

A post for the nerds: Radioteletype

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The radio is tuned to 14.08128 megahertz. This is in the 20 meter ham radio band in a frequency range normally reserved for radioteletype stations. Signals on the 20 meter band, by the way, travel farthest when the sun is overhead. During the day the earth’s ionosphere is energized by solar radiation, making the ionosphere reflective to 20-meter signals. The signals go up 200 miles or so, then bounce back down to earth, far from the point of origin.

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This photo was taken during a radioteletype transmission. The meter is saying that 30 watts of power is being sent to the antenna (left needle on 30). Because the antenna is tuned for this frequency, the antenna is not rejecting and thus reflecting any of the transmitter’s power (right needle on 0). In other words, there is no standing wave on the antenna feed line. The standing wave ratio (SWR) is 1:1.

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Instead of mechanical teletype machines, computers are now used to encode and decode radioteletype signals. This is a program for Macintosh named CocoaModem.

A few days ago I posted an item about Teletype machines and a mode of communications called radioteletype. Radioteletype is obsolete commercially, but it remains an excellent means of communication on the high-frequency (short wave) radio bands. When I posted last week, I had not yet got around to setting up radioteletype on my apparatus at home. As of today, it’s working.

Digital (as opposed to voice) signals were booming in from Europe today during the afternoon, when the sun was over both Europe and the United States. I was still working on setting things up and adjusting things, but I did talk with two stations in Cuba — CO8LY and CO2NO. I talked with CO2NO using 20 watts of power on a new digital mode that is a relative of radioteletype — PSK31. I talked with CO8LY via radioteletype using 30 watts of transmitter power.

You might wonder how 20 or 30 watts of transmitter power could travel from North Carolina to Cuba. Two reasons, basically. For one, the power is focused into a narrow beam of bandwidth, far too narrow to carry the human voice, but enough for a relatively slow digital signal such as radioteletype. For two, the earth’s atmosphere is very transparent to radio waves. Or, to say it a little differently: It would be more difficult to talk with someone in Cuba using a microphone and voice communications. “Narrow” digital modes such as radioteletype and Morse code carry less information per second, but the power used travels much farther.

I never use more than 100 watts.

The lost word?

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Wikipedia photos

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Once upon a time many years ago, while looking up a word in an unabridged dictionary, I came across a word on a nearby page that jumped out at me, because it was a beautiful word that described a picturesque phenomenon. I resolved to remember the word, and I promptly forgot it. I do recall the definition. It was a word (or words?) describing something very particular: a beam of light, through an aperture, falling on mist.

For years and year I tried to refind this word, and I failed. Once upon a time, research tools were incredibly primitive — things such as Thesauruses and indexes in the backs of books. Now we have the Internet.

My frustrated attempts to photograph my gothic window, using only a camera with a bad lens that refuses to let its exposure be manually adjusted, made me realize that I’d never gone looking for this word on the Internet.

It was a quick and easy search. There is a scientific name for the phenomenon, the Tyndall Effect, used to describe the scattering of light when it falls on colloidal particles in suspension. A more common description is the two-word term “crepuscular rays,” which even has a Wikipedia entry.

It is possible that, at that early age, I had never encountered the word “crepuscular” before and so was impressed by the word. It is, certainly, a beautiful word. It comes from the Latin word for twilight, crepusculum.

People generally say that cats are nocturnal. I think it is more accurate to say that cats are crepuscular. My cat sleeps at night. But she goes wild at crepusculum, both morning and evening.

What would we do without the Internet? I plan a post soon on yet another unbelievable Internet resource: Google Books.

If “crepuscular ray” is the lost word(s), then here is what I would have seen that day long ago in the Miriam-Webster unabridged dictionary:

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Cooking for the cat

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I guess it was inevitable that I’d eventually try making some homemade cat food to see if my cat, Lily, likes it. With some minor adjustments, I used this recipe from veterinarian Michael W. Fox. It’s a thick stew that sets up when it cools. It’s all meat (don’t ask) except for some mashed chickpeas and mashed yellow squash.

I put the cat food into Pyrex dishes that come with tight-fitting covers. I’ll freeze it. Dr. Fox recommends feeding it to the cat three times a week in addition to the cat’s regular rations.

If Lily doesn’t like it, I guess I’ll take it somewhere far from the house and dump it so that the varmints can have a feast.