Month: February 2010

Rehabilitating potatoes

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I’ve written previously about how sweet potatoes have a lower glycemic index than white potatoes and are all around healthier than white potatoes. But lately I’ve become aware that there are things we can do to lower the glycemic insult of white potatoes.

If you Google around, you’ll find a number of sources that say that red potatoes are slightly less of a glycemic insult than white potatoes. But even better, when potatoes are cooked and then chilled in the refrigerator for 24 hours, the glycemic index goes down substantially. Boiled red potatoes, chilled and then eaten the next day, can have a glycemic reading as low as 56.

As I understand it, this is not simply because the potatoes are cold. It’s that, as the starch is chilled, the starch chemistry changes its structure so that it’s slower to digest. I believe this change persists even if the potatoes are reheated.

I keep seeing references to new types of low-glycemic potatoes developed by agricultural universities. But so far I have not been able to find a source of these potatoes, either as produce or as seed potatoes for planting.

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Carolina church supper potato salad

Popovers

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The best popovers, to be sure, are made with white flour. They’re light, buttery, and crisp around the edges. But it’s possible to make perfectly decent whole wheat popovers. I use the austere popover recipe from the 1943 wartime edition of Irma Rombauer’s Joy of Cooking. Rombauer includes several variations on popovers in this edition, including the standard light and poppy version. The whole-wheat wartime recipe uses one egg, a cup of flour, and a cup of milk. Soy milk works fine. Yep, they’ll rise, if you beat the egg well enough. When they’re done, be sure to prick them with a knife or fork to let the steam out.

Whole-wheat sweet-potato gnocci

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Gnocci with toasted walnuts, tempeh, and mushrooms. This is a very meaty dish … hard to believe that it’s vegan.

For those days in which you walk in circles in the kitchen trying to think of something a little different to cook, consider gnocci.

Gnocci, I believe, are considered tricky to make. I don’t think so. Any cook who is experienced working with dough will understand making gnocci. If you Google, you’ll find lots of tips and recipes from the experts, which I am not. However, I do strongly believe that you don’t need egg in the dough. Just two ingredients — potato and flour — work fine.

Gnocci are usually boiled. They also can be browned in oil, which is how I made gnocci today. Sweet potato gnocci particularly like to be browned in oil, I think, because the sugar in the potatoes gives the gnocci skins a nice, chewy texture.

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The dough: nothing but sweet potatoes and whole wheat flour

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Sliced and forked

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Sizzlin’

The family cow

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My grandmother Mary Lillian Bowman Dalton with one of her cows, c. 1925, Laurel Fork, Virginia

Yesterday while walking back from the mailbox, I was admiring one of my neighbors’ pastures. It has a good fence and a thick stand of grass ready to turn lush as soon as spring arrives. I realized that, in rural areas like this with a history of family farms, it would be relatively easy to bring back the family cow.

Consider how quickly backyard chickens have come back into fashion. There is even a new bimonthly magazine for backyard chickens. Chickens, of course, require far less infrastructure, less space, and less labor than a cow. But if the day ever comes when we see severe unemployment (meaning that people find themselves at home most of the time) combined with inflation in food prices, I suspect that some hardy rural people who have the pastureland will go back to keeping a cow.

In talking with Ken Ilgunas last weekend about my oath to measure my success here by how effectively I can turn back the clock to 1935, I mentioned how I was the last generation to witness, and, in a child’s way at least, to participate in the operation of family farms. Neither the economics nor the infrastructure of the family farm is mysterious to me. Almost all of my relatives lived on small farms, and some of those farms were in operation before 1900. I have gathered the eggs, seen cows milked, seen butter churned, seen mules pulling plows, unloaded hay, fed and watered the horse, helped with the tobacco crop, and seen the wood cookstoves blazing and steaming while Sunday dinner was cooked. Apart from the land and the infrastructure required for a small farm, it’s a matter of labor. Somebody has to be home all day. A few strong young’uns are an indispensable asset.

Would I like to have a cow? No. I don’t have the pasture space. I’m also content with soybean milk, which I could make for myself if I had to. But cows have an amazing capability that ensures them of a niche in a relocalized economy — they can turn grass into milk.

There’s a lot of material on the Internet about family cows. This is a good place to start.

Thank goodness I'm out of style

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Approved house style: New York Times

I can think of a hundred ways to psychoanalyze the people who set themselves up as lords of style and look down on the rest of us. But I’d rather try to be nice and think of it as a serious question: Why is there such a thriving industry and subculture of style?

The best answer I can come up with is that the style industry is an arm of consumerism. It’s to teach us to disdain and devalue what we have so that we’ll buy something new. It’s to teach us that if we don’t buy the new styles, people will make fun of us.

Invariably, the houses that newspapers feature in their architecture columns are boxes. The box in the photo above was certain to be featured in the New York Times, because, not only is it a box, it’s a crooked box that cost $1.4 million. There’s this quote from the owner of the house: “If we just produced another thatched cottage, we might as well still be living in caves.”

The plaid outfit speaks (loudly) for itself.

As for the cabbage, the food writer for Salon informs us that people used to eat cabbage, but cabbage fell into disrepute and something ruined its reputation. I never knew. The way to redeem cabbage’s reputation and make it fit to eat again, he tells us, is to give it a “ripping sear in smoking-hot oil.” Maybe later.

I live in a cottage, my best outfits are from L.L. Bean, and I eat cabbage the old-fashioned way. With the capital I save from not being stylish, I might be able to afford an out-of-style landscape, and a garden.

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Approved style of dressing: New York Times

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Approved style of eating cabbage: Salon

Remember when people thought Apple was dead?

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Vintage 1997: The Power Macintosh 5500

It’s amazing how much abuse Macintoshes used to take from people who thought that Microsoft should, and would, rule the world. I put up with this for virtually my entire career in newspaper publishing. But without, I hope, being too boastful, I think the entire world now sees what we technology heretics saw decades ago.

I offer as evidence a piece I wrote in the San Francisco Examiner on Jan. 12, 1997. Because the Examiner closed in 2000 and its staff merged with the staff of the San Francisco Chronicle, this piece is now in the archive of the San Francisco Chronicle. The article’s headline is: “Next Up for Apple: Saved by Unix?”

What had happened then was that, in December 1996, Apple acquired NeXT, the company Steve Jobs had started after he was ousted from Apple in 1985. In July 1997, Jobs returned to Apple as CEO and started Apple’s Renaissance, including the development of the current Mac OS X operating system.

My article in the Examiner was published on a Sunday. Apple’s stock price the Friday before was $17.62 a share. As of today the share price is about $196, more than 11 times higher. In this piece, I argued that Apple was now on the right track, technically. However, I took no position on whether Apple’s technical strategy would succeed in the market, because the market is so fickle and Microsoft was so predatory.

That article, by the way, was noticed by investors and was widely cited. I, however, didn’t have the good sense to buy Apple stock.

I might also mention that, in my role as editorial systems director for the Examiner, I had the opportunity to talk with Gil Amelio when he came in to meet with the Examiner’s editorial board. This was during Amelio’s last months as Apple CEO, just before Steve Jobs returned as CEO. Amelio, in my opinion, deserves far more credit for Apple’s turnaround than he is generally given. I also had the opportunity to participate in a workshop with Apple’s human interfaces design team when they were designing and testing the look and feel of Mac OS X.

Remember when NASA used to thrill us with space age technology? No more. These days, who does, other than Apple? To build the beautiful human interface of Mac OS X on top of a Unix (FreeBSD) was an amazing feat.

Still, to my mind, the greatest computer operating system ever developed is Sun’s Solaris, a true Unix. Oracle bought Sun Microsystems last month. I hope Oracle respects what they now own.

From the good old days…

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My cherished Selectric III from the San Francisco Examiner

If I had the space and the money, I could happily fill a warehouse with a collection of vintage technology. Typewriter technology, after steady development for at least 150 years, reached its apex in the 1970s with the IBM Correcting Selectric III. I own one of these. I salvaged it from a basement junk pile at the San Francisco Examiner. During the 1970s, newspaper newsrooms were filled with IBM Selectrics. Reporters and editors used them, and the typed pages were sent to the composing room, where the text was scanned from the pages. In those days, computers were too big and too expensive for the desktop, so typewriters still ruled.

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The San Francisco Examiner copy desk, c. 1978.

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My Selectric still has its Typewritorium sticker. The Typewritorium was made famous by Herb Caen, the columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, because that’s where Caen’s “Loyal Royal” was sent when it needed repairs. Caen’s Loyal Royal is still on display in the Chronicle’s lobby.