Month: January 2017

Cooking from the bottom of the kitchen

One of my sayings is that I can always squeeze one more meal out of an empty kitchen. Today is a squeeze day.

It’s Tuesday morning. Starting Friday evening, snow started falling. By Saturday morning, it looked like a blizzard, with 10 to 12 inches of snow on the ground. That night, the low temperature was about 8 degrees F. On Sunday night, the low was about 5 degrees F. The kitchen was prepared for being snowed in, though fresh food was started to run low. I had not been to Whole Foods in more than two weeks. Nor am I going to Whole Foods today. The Smart car is still very much snowed in and is not going anywhere for a while. Even though the Jeep would get out perfectly well, I’d rather cook from the bottom of the kitchen than clean the snow off the Jeep and drive it on salty roads.

I call this “cooking from the bottom of the kitchen.” In the refrigerator, there are eggs, milk, plenty of wine and ale, lots of butter, and all sorts of sauces and such. In the cabinets, there is no shortage of flour or oil or things that come in cans. It’s fresh food that is always the problem. I just took an inventory. I have half an onion, a lot of celery, and a winter squash. There are lots of sweet potatoes (I had bought a bushel of sweet potatoes a few weeks ago). We are nowhere close to starving. But the objective, of course, is not to avoid starving but to make something good out of a kitchen in which supplies are dwindling. Cooking from the bottom of the kitchen is a good exercise in frugality. It gets you to use up things you’ve been ignoring but that need to be used. The beets that I had been ignoring got eaten last night.

So then, for supper I’m thinking butternut squash soup (with lots of celery), a whole wheat flatbread, and tuna salad (with lots of celery).

After supper, I’ll clean the refrigerator to get it ready to be filled up again. And tomorrow I’ll go grocery shopping.

Simple Saturdays (and other days, too)

Ken and I had said that we would pull up the drawbridge this winter and limit our exposure to the outside world, partly for our mental health and partly to get more literary labor done. Neither of us was very successful.

As the next step, we’re experimenting with “Simple Saturdays.” On Simple Saturdays, the Internet will be turned off. Though we decided that there was no particular reason to punish ourselves with excessive austerity, nevertheless it seemed like a good chance to practice being less dependent on things like electricity. I have take not taken any vow not to use the stove or ovens on Simple Saturdays. But I do enjoy cooking over fire, and I would like to do more of it.

We installed a grill out back of the type you find beside picnic tables in national parks. Ken chopped a bunch of wood for it. We used it for the first time tonight. That’s salmon cakes in the skillet. They were good!

Ken says I probably will get the delirium tremens when I try to go without news on Saturday.

Another bright spot in North Carolina


Michael Morgan at our county convention last April

Michael R. Morgan, a Democrat, was sworn in today as associate justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court. In the November election, Morgan ousted a Republican incumbent on the court, which means that Democrats now have a 4-3 majority on the state supreme court. After the November election, North Carolina now has a Democratic governor and a Democratic state attorney general as well. Right-wing Republicans still hold a “super majority” in the state legislature, but Democrats are now in an unexpectedly strong position to resist the right-wing ruin of the once progressive Southern state of North Carolina.

Morgan’s election was amusing, really. The election for the state supreme court is non-partisan, so there is no (R) or (D) party indicator beside the candidates’ names. Racist Republicans simply failed to get the word out that Morgan is both black and a Democrat. But we Democrats got the word out.

Courts have stepped in again and again to block the radical and unconstitutional actions of North Carolina’s radical legislature. The only reason Republicans can hold a super majority in the legislature is because of shameless (and racist) gerrymandering of the legislative districts. A court has ordered redistricting and a new election this year. That ruling has been challenged, but Democrats are preparing for the election and salivating at the opportunity to throw still more of the right-wing radicals out of office.

One bright spot in the political gloom

Another small reward for my political work here in the sticks was an invitation to the inauguration of Roy Cooper, the new governor of North Carolina.

Those of you outside the U.S. may not know that, one bright spot during the catastrophic November election was that North Carolina voters, by a narrow margin, threw out the Republican governor and elected a Democrat.

For six years now, North Carolina has been afflicted with a radical right-wing legislature. Clearly the people of North Carolina had become sick of right-wing overreach, and they took it out on Pat McCrory, who served only one term. I think it would be a reasonably safe prediction that American voters will become similarly sick of right-wing overreach at the national level and that the Republican Party will lose the U.S. Senate if not the House of Representatives in the 2018 election. As for Donald Trump, it’s impossible to imagine him getting a second term. In fact, impeachment seems much more likely.

Woods


[Click on image for higher resolution]

As much as I’d like at times to live in a real wilderness, I can’t. The abbey is in driving distance of a Whole Foods, after all. But I do love the woods.

It’s strange, but when you want to look through the woods, winter is the time to do it. Looking through woods in winter is like looking through clear water.

On the other hand, if you want to look down on the woods, that’s best done in summer, when the trees are green. Previous satellite photos I’ve seen of the abbey have been taken in winter, but today on Google Earth I noticed that the satellite photo was taken in high summer. Trees! The abbey is in the clearing at the top center.


[Click on image for higher resolution]