And remember, anything MacDonald’s can do, you can do better. And cheaper. And not have to eat off of paper.
This is a homemade sausage biscuit with Morning Star vegetarian sausage.
Month: January 2016
Lunch on the road …
Probably many of the people who eat at Jim’s Grill in Yadkinville remember when it was a hot spot in the 1950s — curb service, window trays, juke box, the works. It’s on U.S. 601, which runs north to south across most of North and South Carolina and which used to be part of a major route from points north to Florida.
I’ve had a sentimental weakness for roadside eateries for as long as I can remember. Some of them still remain along the old secondary roads. The sad thing, though, is that every time I’m in Jim’s Grill (I make pretty regular trips to Yadkin County), I never see any young people there. Younger people, I suppose, are sentimental about MacDonald’s rather than the old roadside restaurants.
One of the great things about old-fashioned fast food is that there is no waste paper, cardboard, or plastic to throw away. It’s a pity, though, that (as far as I know) they’re all using plastic dinnerware rather than the heavy diner china that they used to use.
And they lived happily ever after
Note: This post contains no spoilers if you have watched the series through Season 6, episode 3.
Those in the U.K. have already said goodbye to Downtown Abbey. Here in the U.S., we have five more episodes to go. I never gave up on Downton Abbey the way some did. Sure, it’s a soap opera. But it’s a good soap opera. It’s also a fantastic period piece, a marvel of language and accents, and a visual spectacle. The characters are superb and now feel like family. Season 6 is when we get to have our long goodbye with all these characters — and, I’m pretty well convinced, see almost all of them happy.
Downton Abbey has always relied on honest, classic storytelling. I’ve started watching lots of series but stopped, usually because the screenwriters (especially in series set in the here and now, which I almost never like) tried to overcome our jadedness and boredom by shocking us, or by being quirky.
Classic, honest storytelling means that, in the end, the wicked are punished and the deserving get their heart’s desire. And this — rightly so — is clearly where the last season of Downtown Abbey is going to leave us.
For the most part, the wicked have already been punished. Some characters who served as villains for a while transformed and redeemed themselves and now should have their reward.
Let the happiness roll:
In episode 3, Mr. Carson and Mrs. Hughes get married. Now that their legal troubles are over, it appears that John and Anna Bates will have a child at last (though there will be a bit of trouble first). Tom Branson realizes who his true family is and comes home from Boston, grandchildren and all. Lady Edith clearly has found a new beau and perhaps a husband. Daisy will better herself through education and see Mr. Mason settled in a new home. Mr. Molesley will probably find that he’s a true scholar after all, not just a scholar wannabe. Robert and Cora Crawley will land on their feet and nobly carry on, even if it’s in reduced circumstances. Lady Mary will probably end up alone, but isn’t that probably what’s best for her? Even Thomas Barrow, who has been repeatedly rejected and humiliated, seems likely to end up happy, with the boyfriend he has never had.
We’ll remember these characters for many years, and the DVDs that we bought are DVDs that we will watch again.
Who’s eating whose lunch?
Update: As of 7 p.m. on Jan. 23, the Sanders video had had 1,890,434 views on YouTube after two days and was rising fast. The Trump video had had 28,828 views after five days.
It’s fascinating to watch the political propaganda that comes out in election years. The propaganda is a kind of mirror that reflects either what we are as a country in 2016 — or what those who want our political support think we are. The contrast between this Bernie Sanders ad and the Donald Trump ad is striking. One is inclusive and hopeful. The other is fearful and includes images of dark-skinned scapegoats.
White working people who support Trump are right about one thing: Someone is eating their lunch, and their lives are getting harder.
Their incomes have been stuck for decades, and they are hanging on by their fingernails. While mortality is declining in other rich countries and among most demographics, white working-class people are dying younger, mostly because of suicide and the use of drugs and alcohol. Their divorce rates have risen dramatically, while for more educated people divorce rates are declining. Never have white working-class people (though they can’t quite admit it) been more in need of — and more reliant upon — the social safety net. That includes unemployment insurance, help paying for medical care, disability benefits, Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare.
The Trump ad reveals how desperate the right wing has become in trying to maintain the fiction that it’s poor people on welfare and people with dark skin who are eating the lunch of struggling white people. It’s the fiction that we’re running out of money and that undeserving poor people (rather than rich people) are sucking up all the money. It’s a propaganda that has to lie to people and stoke fear to get their support. It’s stunning that the man in the ad is a billionaire and that the targets of this ad seem to believe that a narcissistic billionaire is going to help them.
Notice how the Sanders ad is targeted at younger millennials and at a broad and much more hopeful demographic of Americans. These people have better sources of information. They know about the alarming rise in inequality and where our wealth and income are really going. It’s an everyday America that we know and love. It’s propaganda that doesn’t require deception. And though it’s sentimental, it only aims at inspiring people to vote and to get involved in a movement.
As propaganda, the Sanders ad is vastly superior, because it’s 100 percent inoffensive and gives no ammunition to the opposition. Whereas the Trump ad is repulsive to everyone but his supporters. I feel sorry for Trump’s ad agency. There is no way to package the man that doesn’t make the skin crawl on 68 percent of the population.
I have no idea whether Bernie Sanders can win this election. But at the moment, he is winning the heck out of the propaganda wars.
Note: The YouTube video below apparently has been deleted by the Trump campaign.
100% stone-ground whole-wheat biscuits: You can do it
I love the taste of organic stone-ground whole-wheat. It tastes like wheat, and I love wheat. I also make no apologies to anti-gluten partisans, because I think that good wheat breads baked at home from good organic flour are not at all the same thing as commercial baked goods. I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to Google for the difference between stone-ground flour and ordinary whole-wheat flour and how they are milled. But there is an easily detectable difference in taste. Ordinary whole-wheat flour often has a bitterness, or what country folks disdain as having a “whang” about it. Stone-ground whole wheat flour has no whang. It tastes like honest wheat, which is what it is.
But the problem with stone-ground whole-wheat flour is that it is very hard to work with. The bran is rough and dry. Unless you use baking techniques optimized for stone-ground flour, your baked items are likely to end up hard and dry. The easy and fast method is to combine the stone-ground flour with whatever portion of unbleached flour your conscience will permit.
Artisan bakers of yeast and sourdough breads who work with stone-ground flour insist on soaking the flour before using it. That softens the bran, encourages some beneficial chemical processes, and makes a tastier, better-rising bread. You also need to get as much moisture into the bread as possible. Surely, I thought, the same concepts can be applied to quick-breads like biscuits.
As usual, I apologize for not usually giving specific recipes here. Part of the reason is that I rarely use exact recipes for things that I make frequently. Another reason is that this is about a concept — the concept of making quick-bread with stone-ground flour. I’m assuming that you’re already an experienced biscuit-maker and that you already have a method or a recipe.
The night before you make the biscuits, mix your stone-ground whole-wheat flour with milk (or buttermilk). We’re going to add more liquid in the morning, so use only enough milk to satisfy the thirst of the flour while keeping the mixture fairly stiff. Also add a teaspoon to a tablespoon of apple cider vinegar, depending on how large a batch of biscuits you’re making. Put this in the refrigerator, covered, overnight.
The usual method of mixing biscuits completely falls apart if you’re starting with wet flour. I suppose you could mix your shortening into the flour before the soak, but I don’t. Take your flour mixture out of the refrigerator early to let it come to room temperature. Cut your shortening into small pieces (I use butter) and use your hand to mix the shortening into the flour mixture. This will take some patience, but small lumps are OK.
Now the objective is to get a bit more liquid mixed into the dough, along with the salt and baking powder. Cutting the dough into pieces (leave it in the bowl) might help here. Add the baking powder and salt. Add more buttermilk if you used buttermilk, or heavy cream if you used milk the night before. The thickness of the buttermilk or cream helps get more moisture into the dough. You should end up with a moist biscuit dough. Shape the dough into biscuits as you usually would.
I bake the biscuits at 450 degrees using the bread function of the Cuisinart oven, which injects steam into the oven for the first seven minutes of baking. This helps keep moisture in the biscuits and improves oven spring. If you don’t have a steam oven, flinging a little water into the oven or having a shallow pan of water in the oven during pre-heating can’t hurt.
Biscuits made this way are some of the tastiest, most tender biscuits I’ve ever made, no lie.
By the way: Over the years, when I’ve discussed biscuit-making with inexperienced or casual bakers, I’m surprised how many people are completely unclear on the concept of what “self-rising” flour is. Some people think that there is something magical or special about self-rising flour and that it’s the only kind of flour from which biscuits can be made. But self-rising flour is just flour to which leavening agents such as soda and baking powder already have been added. Any biscuit recipe that starts with “plain” flour will tell you how much soda or baking powder to use per cup of flour. King Arthur makes an unbleached self-rising flour, but I have never used that, or any, self-rising flour. Self-rising flour seems like a useless convenience, as far as I’m concerned, especially since I use potassium-based, no-sodium baking powder like the baking powder sold by Hain.
Book review: a biography of Theodore Parker
American Heretic: Theodore Parker and Transcendentalism, by Dean Grodzins. University of North Carolina Press, 2002, 656 pages.
It’s surprising that Theodore Parker isn’t better known than he is. Parker (1810-1860), a transcendentalist, was a friend of Emerson. He inspired Thoreau. He was in the thick of things in the Boston-Concord area during his era. Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. picked up some famous rhetoric from Parker. For example, Parker’s words, talking about slavery, were:
I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.
This inspired Martin Luther King’s famous words:
The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.
In his Gettysburg address, Lincoln was paraphrasing words that Parker used in a speech in 1850: “A democracy — of all the people, by all the people, for all the people.”
Parker was a Unitarian. The Unitarians had more room for Parker than, say, the Methodists and the Presbyterians, but even some of Parker’s Unitarian friends shunned Parker as Parker became increasingly heretical.
What were some of Parker’s heresies? For one, Parker pretty much threw the entire Old Testament under the bus as primitive and unbelievable (not to mention lousy even as metaphor) and dominated by a cruel and immoral God. The question of miracles, and whether miracles were important or not, apparently was a big theological issue in Parker’s time. Parker came to believe that New Testament miracles were of no importance and probably didn’t really happen, that a revelation stood or fell on its own merit. Parker believed that some of the teachings of Jesus — not to mention the apostles — was wrong and morally flawed. Parker also rocked the boat. He became an outspoken abolitionist. Even Boston churchmen during this era who disapproved of slavery were careful not to preach too vehemently against slavery, because it got people too excited. Abolitionists were expected to be discreet in genteel society.
In many ways, this book is a theological history as much as a biography of Theodore Parker. These guys weren’t just preaching sermons to their congregations. They also were carrying on a theological debate with each other, a debate that also reached into the newspapers and the many church journals that were printed at the time.
I think it would be fair to say that Parker’s heresy boiled down to this: That ultimately, conscience, not scripture, is the only reliable guide. Note that in his statement about justice, it is conscience that allows Parker to divine the arc of the moral universe. I think it also would be fair to say (nor does Dean Grodzins say such a thing in this biography) that Parker left theology behind and became a moral philosopher instead. I think it also would be fair to say the same of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who actually gave up the ministry because it held him back. As for moral philosophy, Parker certainly was influenced by Kant. Parker also read in twenty languages, and he was particularly interested in German philosophy of that era. On a year-long trip to Europe, Parker tried to visit Goethe’s widow, but she was out.
It’s a shame to lose the thoughts of people like Theodore Parker who were so far ahead of their time. It’s amazing, really, how much progress was made in the 19th Century by the intellectual elite, though very little of that filtered down to incurious common folk. The white Protestant churches preach the same old fundamentalist, know-nothing stuff today, as though Emancipation and Civil Rights and all that thought and progress never happened. One of Parker’s complaints about social injustice, actually, was that working people had to work too hard and had little time for reading and study and bettering themselves intellectually. I wonder what Parker would think of television. Congregations at the time — at least Unitarian congregations — actually followed these debates and got intellectually involved. As Parker’s fame grew, people packed large halls in Boston to hear him speak. Who buys tickets to lecture series today? Are there even any lecture series to buy tickets to?
This biography ends around 1846, about 14 years before Parker’s death in 1860. Is Grodzins planning a second volume? Or was it that Grodzins was primarily interested in tracing the development of Parker’s heresy, and that was a done deal by 1846?
Snowy Sunday morning
I’m sure that everyone who lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains and the foothills are very glad that the winter’s first snow fell on a Sunday morning. There’s no excuse for leaving home.
4 eggs down, 2 dozen to go
I had not made ice cream in well over a year. But the chickens have been laying well lately, so I start thinking about how to spend some eggs. Ice cream was a start. If you want to make ice cream, you have to crack some eggs. Proper ice cream has egg yolks in it.
Here’s a basic recipe for vanilla ice cream with a whiff of lemon. You could add whatever you like to this recipe to make different flavors.
Rich, old-fashioned ice cream
4 egg yolks 1/2 cup sugar 1 cup whipping cream 1 cup milk 2 teaspoons vanilla extract 1/4 teaspoon lemon extract
In a double-boiler, whisk everything together except for the extracts. While whisking over steam, heat the mixture to about 175 degrees. Then pour the mixture into an ovenproof glass bowl, cover it, and chill it to refrigerator temperature. This will take several hours, or overnight.
When you’re ready to make the ice cream, add the extracts (or other flavorings) and pour the mixture into your ice cream freezer.
I don’t waste the egg whites. When I have leftover egg whites, if I can’t think of anything else to do with them, then I cook them and feed them back to the chickens. Chickens certainly should not eat chicken, but eggs are good for them if you cook the eggs and mix them with other scraps so that the chickens don’t know what it is.
Leftover grits
As long as you’re making grits, make too much. Bring the leftovers back the next day as fried grits.
Grits and polenta are notoriously hard to brown. But if you shape the grits into patties before they cool, wrap the patties in a paper towel to help remove excess moisture, and put them in the refrigerator until the next day, they’ll brown reasonably well.
As long as you’re firing up the grill to roast a winter tomato, why not grill everything but the egg? The grits above were grilled, as was the fake Morningstar sausage.
It’s actually kind of nice being out on the deck in January weather, cooking over a hot grill. It’s particularly nice to have a breakfast with a campfire flavor.
Putting up with pale: Winter tomatoes and winter eggs
The tomatoes above were grilled on a gas grill. The sausage is Morning Star fake sausage.
Those winter tomatoes almost look real in the grocery store, don’t they? Then you get them home, and they’re tasteless and mealy. They’re barely fit for salads. I know of only one way to get some taste into them — grill them.
Yesterday I broiled the tomatoes in the oven, with some parmesan. This morning I grilled them, with nothing but salt and pepper. The grilled tomatoes, by far, were tastier. Luckily, the grill is on the deck just outside the kitchen door, so getting to the grill is convenient for small jobs like grilling tomatoes for breakfast.
It’s sad to see the eggs go pale in winter. It’s the grass and green things the chickens eat that make the yolks so deeply colored. It’s not that there isn’t some grass in the orchard in the winter. Rather, it’s that the turf is very vulnerable to damage in the winter if the chickens scratch too much. So in the winter the chickens stay mostly in the bare garden, where they can do no harm. Getting orchard time is a treat for the chickens during fine winter weather.
About those grits. I feel like a salesman because I’m always promoting the Cuisinart CSO-300 steam oven. But it’s the best way of cooking grits I’ve ever seen, by far. Just put the grits in an uncovered ovenproof bowl, 3 parts water to 1 part grits. Cook them on “super steam” at 300 degrees for 30 minutes. Then let the grits sit, covered, for about 10 minutes before serving. The grits come out perfectly cooked without any need for stirring and dealing with grit splatter.
These tomatoes were broiled in the oven, with parmesan
One food that is not pale in January: the New Year collards. December was warm and wet, perfect for collards. I got these collards at a local grocery store. They were grown in South Carolina.